Comments on: Social Connectors, Polymeme, Media Cloud, Liberian Communication, and Tracking the Flow of Information

By: Gilad

Gilad — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:38:25 +0000

looking back now at last week’s events – I wonder how and why Susan Boyle’s video spread so quickly across the web. Was it twitter? Certainly not only the tech-geek circles.
Events like that baffle me.

I do give props to the Reality Show Editors, who have it down by now. The whole clip was staged and edited in a way that people would be touched.
But still, there are so many similar clips broadcast and uploaded every hour. Why was that one picked up?? Surely if I edited an extremely emotional video of Israeli’s and Palestinians it would never receive such attention.

… pondering over the million dollar question…

Gilad

By: kaythegardener

kaythegardener — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:17:38 +0000

Citation analysis (correlation of cited footnotes in the premier science paper, for which topics or research applications were then picked up or elaborated by later science papers), has been around since the 1960s…
More elaborate analysis also factors in the caliber of the scientific reputation or output of the researchers as well, not just the number of citations…
Now it sounds like something similar has spread to link the Internet bloggers, with mainstream media writers…

By: oso

oso — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:33:49 +0000

Miquel,

I think that everyone involved in Global Voices is a social connector. We are the types drawn to the project. Elia’s bridge between Francophone Africa and the Anglophone Africans and Africanists shows the varying levels of mainstreamism too. If you ask anyone interested in African blogging then (s)he was aware of the meme. But if I asked any of my friends from college if they had heard about it, I’m sure they’d all say no despite the fact that many of them are web 2.0 ninjas.

And it depends where those dreadlocks are.

Glenna,

I’ll make a note in the post pointing to your comment to clarify. I certainly wasn’t trying to imply that you’re restating blog posts. And I have a feeling that the hyperlink will become a part of credible journalism within the next 3 – 5 years. It better.

OK, let’s see what flag I get with my comment.

By: Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:36:46 +0000

Also, as a follow up, the IP addresses in Liberia are so weird! Sometimes Israel, sometimes Lebanon. My laptop in Monrovia, Liberia, may be the place where they are most likely to coexist.

By: Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:35:22 +0000

Just to clarify, I often find links to things I wouldn’t otherwise read by reading blogs. Or a blogger will write about something I don’t know about and I’ll look into it further. I just don’t want it to seem as if I’m making my career by restating blogs, because that’s far from the truth. If I could report with hyperlinks, I would

By: Miquel

Miquel — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:38:02 +0000

Don’t forget about the cross-lingual aspect as well. The whole “Why I blog about Africa” meme was only running around the Francophone version of the internet (I hear it’s sexier with better health care) until Elia wrote the GV post that brought it in to the Anglophone line of sight. I assume that you’d just classify her part in that as being a social connector as it is still “above water” yet in a different body of water as it were.

Hope you shake the jetlag. Just say “Pray the Devil back to Hell” tonight. Liberia should be interesting. I look forward to hearing more.

-miquel

PS – Nice tie-in with the “anal bleaching”. I will just leave you with one phrase to try and shake some of my sloppy traffic your way: “caucasian dreadlocks”.