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Google Wave, a new type of communication tool, was unveiled at the Google IO conference yesterday. A combination of email, instant messaging, and many other collaborative features, this new application will be available to the public later this year. Additionally, Google plans to make the application Open Source. PCWorld asks Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and TechCrunch provides a detailed review of the new tool with plenty of screenshots. Below is the keynote from yesterday’s conference in which the application in fully demonstrated.
If you aren’t sure whether you want to start a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group for your organization, you’ll want to check out the latest post from Howard Greenstein at Mashable. Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? takes a look at the value of creating each of these by analyzing several factors including:
Sue Waters at Edublogger publishes the first in a series of posts called What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part I. This initial article provides an overview of what podcasting is and will be followed by entries detailing how to host podcasts on your blog and how to create both audio and video podcasts.
The Wired Campus points to a new study titled How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences presented at this year’s EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper surveys academics at five recent conferences to determine the usefulness of Twitter as a communication “back channel” at these events.
“Microblogging at conferences seems to be an additional way of discussing presented topics and exchanging additional information. It is not limited to the face-to-face audience or the location of the conference. Microblogging rather allows virtually anyone to actively participate in the thematic debates. Our research shows that several conference speakers and attendees are using Twitter for various purposes. Communicating and sharing resources seem to be one of the most interesting and relevant ways in which one microblogs.”
New York Magazine discusses the problem of attention in Sam Anderson’s In Defense of Distraction. The article discusses information overload, the limitations of attention, modern multi-tasking, and the advantages of a “new techno-cognitive nomadism”.
“As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”
Hongkiat.com comes up with a guide to 20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know. This useful article offers instructions for some pretty obscure FB features and hacks such as removing advertisements by utilizing a Greasemonkey script. Here are the first five tips and tricks, be sure to check out the full article for more:
According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Federal Government has debuted a website resource which provides free public access to raw data sets called Data.gov. Users can download the data in several formats to perform research, conduct analysis, or build applications.
Mashable presents a guide to How To Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds. This useful article includes excellent examples of Twitter background designs along with 7 helpful Twitter background resources.
Dan Schawbel, bestselling author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, writes for Mashable about How To Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter. This helpful guide offers on-point tips in the form of six steps to developing an effective Twitter image. I found the idea of forming Twitter knowledge groups especially appealing and can’t wait to try out GroupTweet.
Alyssa Gregory at SitePoint presents a guide to Online Reputation Management. Those interested in keeping track of what people are saying about you online will want to check out this post divided into the following sections:
Scribd, a document-sharing community of over 60 million readers, now offers the ability for users to upload and sell their written works through the website. The new Scribd Store offers e-books, research reports, how-to manuals, and even sheet music for sale by its users.
According to coverage by Brad Stone of the New York Times:
“In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.”
Lance Eaton, visiting lecturer of history, English, and interdisciplinary studies at Massachusetts-area colleges and universities, writes for Library Journal about Books Born Digital: The emerging phenomenon of books published first in digital format.
“It used to be that a book was published first as a hardcover, then as a lower-cost paperback. With increasingly tech-savvy consumers demanding instantaneous access to content in various formats, that publishing protocol has in the last decade changed to one in which the book in codex form often remains the focus, but digital “extras” like audio excerpts and e-chapters act as enticements toward the purchase of the hard copy. More recently, a new phenomenon has emerged, one in which a title comes first in digital form and then—if at all—in physical form.”
Ben Parr of Mashable posts a guide to hashtags - one of Twitters more advanced features. Hashtags, or topics with a hash (#) symbol in front of them are used by Twitterers to take part in conversations on a particular subject, or around a specific event and organize all of those associated tweets. To find out more, check out the post which covers the following:
The new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha launched on Friday amid a flurry of media attention. Searchers using this engine can enter a question or a calculation, and rather than return relevant results, Wolfram Alpha uses its algorithms to digest the query and compute the answer based on its collection of data. Try it out by searching for the next solar eclipse, the GDP of Norway, or the Nobel Prize winners from France. Scientists, researchers and techies alike will be interested in this new computational search engine which is running on R Smarr, the world’s 44th largest supercomputer, created by launch partners, R Systems.
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