The Consequences of Counting

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)

Every social media des­tin­a­tion has some sort of scoring mechanism:

Twitter fol­lowers Linked-​​​​In contacts Facebook friends Blog subscribers/​​comments

Those are the four I per­son­ally use most con­sist­ently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s hap­pening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result

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Foucault – the lot of you

The Foucault post yes­terday seemed to go down well, so I thought I’d chance my arm and respond to a couple of cri­ti­cisms in a new post rather than the comment thread. Sorry, purists.

My erstwhile-​​​​friend Roger from Content & Motion launched the first counter-​​​​offensive. ;-) His main point is about the decent­ral­isa­tion of power in

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Surrender! Foucault and Twitter

Some of my early hopes for social media, that it rep­res­ented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renais­sance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.

There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media con­cerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-​​​​Michéle Ross. The first

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Re-​​Reading Web 2.0 Infographics

We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twit­tering classes? These inform­a­tion graphics, or data visu­al­isa­tions. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on com­plic­ated graphs that half-​​​​explain them­selves and suggest trans­par­ency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination.

Because these images are machine-​​​​generated, there’s a tempta­tion to believe

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Eatin’s Cheatin’ : The Backtype Plugin

I’ve recently installed a rel­at­ively new WordPress plug-​​​​in from the good folk at Backtype.

This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in

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