The accidental online society

Anil Dash’s blog post last week on The Facebook Reckoning includes this terrific summary of what’s at stake for us in inventing our new, social media-ted society: But what if I weren’t my own boss? What if my family couldn’t accept parts of my...

Keep your Facebook friends from revealing your secrets

The T-List has a very readable, useful and detailed post, Are Your Facebook Friends Revealing Secrets? The post points out that when you leave a post on a friend’s Facebook wall, their privacy settings (whether they allow their wall posts to be viewed only by...

5 life problems created by Facebook — and 1 solution

The launch of Facebook Places, which lets people “check in” to geographic locations the way they can with FourSquare, Yelp or Gowalla, has provoked a fresh round of reflection on how Facebook affects our lives and relationships. Here are 5 problems that...

Patrolling the boundaries in social networking

Rob Jewitt, a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Sunderland, writes about the university’s recently introduced social networking site for students. Embedded in his description of the site’s features are some interesting reflections on the kinds...

The virtues of losing touch

Google Buzz got slammed for prepopulating its users’ friends lists based on their most frequent email correspondents. Facebook has taken heat for privacy settings that default to a high level of sharing. So what’s the big deal about sharing stuff with...

5 solutions for coping with social media

Read Gillian Shaw’s story about my social media methodology in the Vancouver Sun. Is social media something you have to cope with? Or is social media something that can help you cope? In my talk today at the Northern Voice blogging conference, I made my best...

Do social networks make birthdays better?

Today is my 39th birthday. Among other things this means I’ve now spent 2/3 of my life online, since we got our first computer when I was 13. (Apparently it also means that a year from now I’ll be forty, which all my forty something women friends tell me...

The meaning of friendship, on- and offline

This weekend was the first time I found myself on the receiving end of Facebook’s new and  more nuanced privacy settings. An old friend popped up in the Facebook sidebar, which rotates an assortment of different people in your friend list. On a whim, I clicked...