I just read through Jack Vinson’s post on email, writing and expertise location (written largely in response to Luis Suarez’s ongoing quest to dump email) — and I think Jack’s right on the money with his observations. With any system, there is the inevitable volume question — how do we derive the quality information from [...]

CBC News (for all you non-Canadians, CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has an interesting story about how FaceBook regularly breaches Canadian privacy laws, according to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. From the article: Facebook shares personal information with developers who create games and quizzes in a way that breaches Canadian privacy law, the office [...]

OK, I admit it. I don’t like FaceBook. I know it’s hard to believe that there’s someone who actually doesn’t enjoy using the incredibly popular social networking tool — but I don’t. It’s not that FaceBook isn’t useful or doesn’t allow me to keep up with people — it’s actually been quite useful for that. I’ve [...]

Since I’ve talking about social networking so much lately, I thought I’d point you to an interesting post that Luis Suarez wrote about the business value of social networking (which includes a presentation by David Tebbutt about the same subject). David’s presentation mentions as caveats that hierarchies get flattened and silos get breached — yet [...]

This from The Tech Herald: “Lady Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, claims that social networking could lead to users characterised by ‘short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise, and a shaky sense of identity.’. There’s also a longer article in the Daily Mail that allows for discussion. While I [...]

I came across a post over at ClappingTrees this morning that pointed out the rise in content creation among young people on the web, as well as an increase in their use of social networking tools. The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey (in .pdf) found that 93% of teens use the internet, and [...]

Michael Clark has written up some fascinating ideas about the need for more open social networks. While I agree that this an extremely important area, I’m a little more concerned by the fact that social networking sites don’t have much incentive to share. I’m reminded of the fact that it took (in the web world [...]

I was speaking to a good friend of mine a few days ago, who was busy trying to juggle demands from a few people who wanted an organizational chart completed of their entire organization. We’re not talking about a small company — it’s a mid- to large-sized multinational company. Taken to the next level, there [...]

One of the endless information science/knowledge management debates is on the value of connection versus collection. For anyone unfamiliar with this debate, it’s basically this: is collecting information all in one place better than providing connectors among the people who share that information (or knowledge, if you like that word better). Or vice versa? Obviously, [...]