Readings

Identity Management: Multiple Presentations of Self in Facebook

This article examines how various groups of Facebook users manage their online profile in the context of work life. It classes the users into three groups: “Reliving the College Days,” “Dressed to Impress,” and “Living in the Business World.” The first group "Reliving the College Days" uses Facebook primarily for connecting with friends outside of work. What I don't entirely understand is why they aren't worried about their employer and co-workers seeing "many photos of (them) drinking alcohol" or other similar information that could be viewed as a reflection of bad character. Personally I wouldn't want some aspects of my social life recorded and retrievable in the future as I could see it being possibly damaging, but the majority Facebook users researched in this article were not worried. The next group "Dressed to Impress" is considered to be more aware that people other than their friends may see the information they upload. They are described as "actively presenting themselves as professionals and view Facebook as a place (for) both non-professional and professional networking". I agree with this view and try to limit what personal facts I release on Facebook. The last group "Living in the Business World" have very little information about themselves and are relatively new to Facebook, this article expects them to become more active users and share more information, but for those that don't I can see not having enough information as damaging as having too much. When I see a profile that has very little information with few friends, I think that they are shy, un-confident people who aren't comfortable with trying new things. This can also reflect badly in business, especially when they deal with the public.

Readings

Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

This article goes over the differences between professional, author and user created metadata. Each having flaws it closely examines the strengths and weaknesses of user created categorisation called folksonomies. Even though the system is highly scalable it hinges on the vocabulary and methodology of users and the tags applied to the information can often inaccurate or only relevant in the context of a specific user. On the opposite side of the spectrum professional created metadata and classification is very precise but extremely costly.

A system that combined the different metadata creation methods into one could provide better categorisation and/or classification and be scalable for the vast amounts of information on the web. Maybe something similar to wikis where 'zealots' clean out irrelevent, incorrect and ambiguous tags and combine similar ones like 'flower' and 'flowers' in reward for reputation in the community would encourage finer controlled tagging.

Creating a separation between public and personal tags for users would prevent irrelevant categorisation by eliminating tags only relevant to the user from the public space, ie: 'me'. These are some ways that tags could be filtered and more exact categorisation and classification could be brought to folksonomies.

Activity - Playing Around

Here's my attempt at creating a derivative work:

Original image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/1614997917/

Readings

Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship

The most interesting idea expressed in this article is the term 'social network service' instead of 'social networking service', (both abbreviated SNS), for defining and classing online tools like Facebook and MySpace. It presents the fact that social networks are used for maintaining existing connections, unlike social networking that create new ones.

In the public and media 'social networking' is loosely used to describe Facebook, MySpace, etc; this inspires that they are a way to meet new people, but as stated the majority of users don't interact with people they haven't met elsewhere. Further proof that these SNSs rely on existing connections is the segregation of the various providers between countries, regions, race and social class. Surely if users were more interested in making new connections the popularity of different SNSs between these groupings would be less visible. Maybe it is because users rather connect within a certain scope of themselves?