interaction

Chicago's Museum of Science & Industry ("MSI") had a great idea last year: let someone from outside the institution literally "live" there for a month, and let the public see the place through her or his eyes. Sour grapes alert: I applied for the job, but found myself among a few thousand others who lost out to a plucky twentysomething who went on to be utterly boring and forgettable.

Guest Post by: Dhiren (Market Sentinel)

This year’s London Fashion Week was the most interactive yet. Bloggers gained prominent seats at the event, the official website hosted video highlights, attendees tweeted using hash tags, and designers used their own Facebook pages to communicate with their fans.

A "media" model composed of paid, owned and earned efforts is nothing new—however it’s useful to think about this landscape in tandem with the different ways we interact and engage which are enabled through technology. There are essentially three forms of digital engagement which can often overlap (engagement in a single initiative can include all three types) but each form can tend to dominate the experience. It’s important to remember that the type of engagement is contextual to what a participant wants to accomplish.

I’ve been following ChatRoulette for a while now but haven’t been comfortable talking about it publicly. For one, it’s a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online. And I hate having the role of respondent to public uproar. (I know I know…)

Sarita Yardi has been doing a lot of thinking about ChatRoulette these days and I wanted to share a short essay she wrote to explain ChatRoulette to the uninitiated. I think that this is a fantastic introduction for those who aren’t familiar with the site. (And I’ll follow up with my own thoughts in the next post.)

I’ve been continuing to analyze the data I collected about friendships on Last.fm. Last week I presented a paper at Internet Research 10.0 in Milwaukee co-authored with Kiley Larson, Andrew Ledbetter, Michelle McCudden and Ryan Milner in which we combined quantitative analysis of motivations people had for friending with qualitative answers to questions about what they get out of friending.

You may or may not have heard that Best Buy, when recently announcing they were hiring a director of emerging media listed a requirement that qualified applicants have a minimum of 250 + followers on Twitter. This launched a flurry of debate specific to this one issue, but the bigger issue as we've discussed here before is that organizations are increasingly looking for individuals who can not only fit into their corporate culture—but also poses a DEEP knowledge in all things related to social business.

It's been called micro-blogging, micro-sharing and a variety of other phrases including the word ambient. But there's a significant attribute that's been less discussed and is critical to both business and social implications regarding how we live and work. Technology allows us to signal our every movement, thought, action and status in real time. It's pretty powerful stuff and why millions of people are addicted to telling their own social sytems what they are doing whether it be a status update on Facebook or a tweet.

How Important Is It For Social Media Leads To Eat Their Own Dogfood?

by: David Armano

This morning a couple of things came together for me. The first, was that I unfollowed a company/individual on Twitter because the volume they were producing felt automated and not human even if there were college interns manually updating it (or maybe just a script). It just didn't feel right. The second was reviewing a deck where it talked about the need for "being human" on the social web.