Techization

A report published I read this week really surprised me, or did it?!  When I think about Internet privacy I imagine my parents who are too afraid to use Facebook or do heavy amounts of online banking or shopping.  They don’t have any kind of presence on the Internet, and they want to keep it that way.  However, some new research has led to some intriguing results.

Mary Madden and Aaron Smith of Pew Internet and American Life Project published a very interesting report, Reputation Management and Social Media, that really put my mind into a spin.

• 44% of young adult Internet users say they take steps to limit the amount of information available about them, compared to 33% of users ages 30 to 49 and 25% of those ages 50 to 64.
• 71% of younger social networking site users actively change their privacy settings to limit what they share with others online, compared to 55% of those 50 to 64.
• 41% have removed their names from photos of them posted by others, compared to just 18% of those 50 to 64.

So what does this say about the state of privacy?  I believe the younger generation is more willing to share their life online and engage in socialmedia.  However, they want to know their in control of the information.  They want the say in what is streamed out, and what is not.  Rightfully so I might add.  A larger portion of the younger generation have an online presence because it truly is “norm” for them.  So even the privacy conscious feel compelled to be on these social platforms; however they really take note of their privacy trying their best to lock it down tight.

Older generations are either with it, or they are completely against it.  If they feel okay with having their information online, they are generally very “open” type people.  They have nothing to hide and don’t fear what others may know about them.  These types of people are much less likely to be overly concerned about privacy.  They don’t change privacy settings and they don’t un-tag photos of themselves.  Those in the older generation didn’t grow up with it so they could take it or leave it, it’s not viewed as a “necessity”, like it is to some of our younger generation.  In essence, the adopters of technology in the old generation are truly comfortable with having their indentity online.

These reasons are why Mary and Aaron received the results they did.  I wouldn’t call them overly surprising, but more so highlighting the generational divide in technology adoption and the varying principles between the two.

British Airways is in the midst of a strike by its crew members causing major havoc for the major airline .  Just in case you are still in the dark, here is a short passage from the Sydney Morning Herald on the current situation.

British Airways cabin crew enter the final stage of a three-day strike Monday, in a dispute over planned changes to pay and conditions that has caused travel misery for thousands of passengers.

After a weekend marked by fierce disagreement over the strike’s effects between the airline and the Unite union, which represents its 12,000 cabin crew, the workers staged a final day of industrial action.

And unless a solution is found to the standoff over attempts by loss-making BA to downgrade its employees’ pay and perks packages, among the most lucrative in the industry, the staff will walk out again for four days from March 27.

Now the chief executive of British Airways, Willie Walsh, came out on YouTube expressing his stance on the strike.  Now what made this move such a great one for British Airways?  Let me explain…

People have great bull sh** detectors built-in.  We as people are not stupid and can read people and situations quite well.  Genuine thoughts and feelings come through and people can sense that.  British Airways could have just issued an official statement and left it at that .  Howver, it would have been carefully crafted by the BA public relations office and consumers would have just ignored it after the first sentence or two, and not given one thought to British Airways stance.  People would have said,”Well they must be doing something unfair to their employees, they are scared to even address head on?!”

Instead of this approach BA came out with a YouTube video showing chief executive Willie Walsh standing in a casual office setting.  No script, no carefully worded sentences.  The video showed Willie’s stance and what the companies feelings are towards the situation.  People want to interact and feel personally connected with their brands.  This is a great example of British Airways personally connecting with their consumers and critics during a rough time.

Great move British Airways,  great move.

I’m working on a presnetation on ambient awareness.  It has been a research area of mine during my years at UW-Stout.  Now I’m pulling together data, white papers and other research to present an overall idea and analysis.  Do you feel closer to your network because of digital ambient awareness.  Does using tools like Facebook, Twiter, Friend Feed etc. lead to more information crossing our networks?  Let me know your thoughts by commenting!

A research report from eMarketer proves 2009 to be the year that Baby Boomers jumped on the social media train.  2009 saw an explosion of growth with the older folks and consistent and steady growth for us young guns.   Check out the graphs below.

You can read a bit more on this newly release report  at Mahable.

I know it has been awhile everyone!  I have been super busy here at UW-Stout with classes and work.  Here is a nice in-depth entry I prepared for UW-Stout administrators on the use of Facebook in their crisis management plan.  Enjoy!

Facebook Overview

Facebook is the Internet’s phone book.  It is way to connect with friends, find old classmates and stay in touch with loved ones who live far away.  Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg at the age of 19 while attending Harvard University.  It was originally founded to be used at Harvard by students only. Facebook spread like wildfire on-campus and soon Zuckerberg and his co-founders distributed the service to forty-five schools and had hundreds of thousands of users within 6 months.   They were onto something.  It was at this point Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to pursue Facebook as a full-time venture in the summer of 2004.  Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook to this day and has a net worth of over 2 billion.  Facebook has been estimated at a staggering $15 billion dollars by Microsoft Corp.  (Wikipedia, 2009)  In 2008, more than 93% of UW-Stout students had an active Facebook account.  (Kaskavitch, 2009)

Facebook User Count:  Over 310 million active users

Facebook Behavior during Crises

Virginia Tech, I35 bridge collapse, US Airways 1549 all have one thing in common.  Each event spurred dozens if not hundreds of Facebook groups often within an hour of the actual even occurring.  These groups on the network provided an open platform to share information at a very fast pace.  Facebook groups were setup during the Virginia Tech tragedy within 15 minutes of the news breaking on what was occurring.  News and information spreads faster than ever before.  So fast sometimes it can cause information overload.  A study published in New Scientist magazine in 2008 found that social network sites like Facebook, instant messengers, blogs and micro-blogging sites like Twitter spread warnings and information more efficiently than traditional communication channels.  (Catone, 2008)

How to utilize Facebook for crisis management

The big question:  How does UW-Stout utilize this tool in its campus crisis management planning?

The answer to this question is by creating “dark groups” on Facebook.  Dark groups are groups that are only visible to the creator and those whom the creator selects to invite, these are known as “secret” on Facebook.  These dark groups can then be pre-loaded with crisis plans and content that students, faculty and staff will need to know in the event of a campus crisis.

These groups will need to be altered and information about the actual incident will need to be added to the group description because of the fluidity of emergencies, but that should only be a paragraph or two.

Once a crisis occurs, you simply make the group public and invite the first ten or fifteen students.  With that small starting cluster of users, the group should grow exponentially will little administration effort.  It would also be worthwhile to put it on the UW-Stout home page to align it with other official channels of communication like news releases, blogs and messages from Chancellor Sorensen.  The power of viral spread via Facebook was demonstrated when students organized the Westboro Baptist Church counter-protest in under 36 hours.  All this organization and information exchange was done with a simple Facebook event.

You will need to consider a few things before considering yourself prepared to use Facebook as a platform in crisis management

• Will you include photos and videos in the group?  If so, will only administrators be allowed to upload media or will everyone be allowed to contribute?
• Do you want to enable the ‘wall’ to allow open conversation?
• Do you want the discussion board enabled?
• Who will manage it in the event of a crisis?

Organizations want very tight control on the messages being delivered and content being passed between users, especially during something as serious as a campus emergency.  Locking down the group and making it a billboard inside a walled-garden is not effective.  You have to be willing to open up and let information flow across the channel in an unfiltered manner.  The speed at which is can go back and forth across this medium could be incredibly useful during an emergency.  You want your message to get out, and you should want feedback from your receiving audience as well.

Creating dark groups on Facebook will not stop other groups from forming.  Having the official group will bolster much more credibility than groups created by students.  You will not be able to censor these groups and the information exchanged on them.  Having the official group and positioning/advertising it as an official channel of communication will make it more relevant and more likely ‘the place to be’ for your target audience to gather and exchange information.  You will be able to:

• Censor information (only if absolutely necessary)
• Direct message all members of your group instantly.
• Control the message and information presented within the group.

All these become possible only if you have administrator privileges in the group.  You would not be able to do the above points if you simply joined a student’s group and tried to calm the flames or correct information as a regular member.

There is one ‘issue’ with pre-creating these groups ahead of time.  You will need to name them right away and you cannot change them later on.  Therefore, you won’t be able to put actual situation specific information in the group name.  Some advocate practice setting up these groups, know the setting’s you want and have the information ready to paste into the group.  You would actually create the group once the emergency or crisis occurs allowing for a detailed group name.

New technologies and communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook connect large clusters of students like never before.  Information is exchanged at light speed and exchanged more efficiently than more traditional channels of communication.

I was browsing my Facebook photo albums yesterday and was stunned!  I had over 30 photo albums and nearly all the photos in them I had not saved the original digital photos.  This blog is a bridge to a another recent blog of mine entitled ‘Is Media Becoming Too Disposable?’.  I knew I needed to act to back-up all these memories from the last four years.  You could go one-by-one and save each photo individually.  That would take forever!  I found a great Firefox plug-in that saves entire Facebook photo albums to your hard drive in one easy click.

The plug-in is called FacePad.  FacePad is a simple Firefox plug-in that allows you to right-click a Facebook photo album and download all photos inside very quickly.  An album of 60 photos takes about five seconds to download on a 10 meg connection and places the photos where you specify within Firefox preferences.

What could be a ‘Facebook creeper’ use of this plug-in?  You could begin archiving Facebook photo albums from friends and random people on Facebook, then place them into software that is now available with face recognition technology.  Tag people for the software to recognize then cross-check to see if their face appears in any photos you have archived.  Your talking about cross-referencing possibly thousands and thousands of photographs.  There’s a new way to keep tabs on someone!

Get It now!  Click below!

Tragic news broke Thursday afternoon as Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Jackson left many fans heart broken across the globe as he took a great deal of talent and mystery to the grave.  He almost took something else with him as well, the Internet.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

Analysis showing number of hourly tweets using #IranElection hashtag 

Tweets per hour including the word ‘Iran’

Note the trend dips and peaks between the mention of ‘Iran’ on Twitter and the use of the #IranElection hashtag to consolidate the onversation over the last two days.

The use of the word ‘Iran’ per-day is radpily falling, will it finally be knocked down off the #1 trending position soon?

These numbers are simply mind numbing and showcase the power of social media and the Internet.  (01:02 p.m. CDT  6/18/09: UPDATED)

With all the violence and government censorship taking place in Iran, international journalists from the United States and elsewhere are having lots of trouble.  Iran doesn’t want any information getting to the outside world about the extent of the revolution and violence taking place. 

“Following a massive opposition rally Monday, authorities restricted journalists — including Iranians working for foreign media — from reporting on the streets. They could effectively only work from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state TV.” – Associated Free Press

Some journalists having been forced to leave because the Iranian government would not renew their Visa which they received to cover the election. 

Iran has also begun censoring communication online as well.  They are throttling bandwidth within their country and blocking popular communication platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to name a few.   All of these efforts by Iran to censor information have been rather futile.  Social media and tech savvy geeks in Iran and around the world have shown that trying to completely shut down communication is tough to do.  The only way to really crush communication would be to pull the plug on critical network infrastructure and backbones, however that would leave government entities out of luck as well.  Corporate media who cannot have large six-figure cameras on the street have turned to citizen journalist tools to tell the story from the front lines. 

I watched a reporter on CNN who was walking near a rally in which Iranians were being beaten record his story on a cell phone while walking down the street, he nervously looked around while talking knowing at any time they could become a target of Iranian police.  Truthfully, this could have been anyone using a simple cell phone to record a video describing what they were witnessing.  The only difference being this reporter had the backing of a major news network.  The Iranian election has shown that you don’t need that support to get your message out to thousands.

Pictures (like this) spread on TwitPic(a website for sharing photos on Twitter) of a rally with an estimated 100,000 protesters collected over 60,000 views in less than 24 hours.  This YouTube video shows unarmed Iranian’s being shot at by Basiji forces in the streets of Tehran. These are the kind of images Iran wants to keep under wraps as they try and down play the size of protests.   Iran has now stated as of Wednesday evening that those who engage in ‘incitement’ by using Twitter and other blocked websites to communicate to other countries could face execution.  Yes, I said execution.

Iran will continue to try and keep things up wraps, but tech geeks world wide who are aiding and embedding Iranian protesters in online ‘bunkers’ by offering proxies and encrypted VPN’s will continue to prevail.  The real question is where is all this heading?  #IranElection continues to stay atop Twitter trends though trends showing it may be leveling off with 27,000 tweets using the #IranElection hashtag on June 15th, 2009 and just 19,000 tweets on June 17th.