PBS Documentary shows the inadequacy of using number of friends as a measure of influence

PBS recently aired a Frontline Special named "Growing up Online" which looks at how the Internet is affecting youth and transforming the experience of childhood. You can watch the full program here.

The part that I found particularly interesting in light of our discussion of influencers and how to identify them, concerns a segment where they have three teenage girls talk about how befriending someone in a social network has evolved into a game that no longer testifies to the quality of the relationship. You can watch the one minute clip from the Frontline Special below:



I think this discussion shows some of the problems associated with relying on the number of friends or contacts as a metric of social media influence. Although I uderstand that Edelman is moving toward a new metric, their old model, the Social Media Index, derived a person's web influence at least partly from the size of that person's social network.

Lance Armstrong Foundation announces social media endeavor

I'm assuming many of you are familiar with the Austin-based Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) and some of you may have even interned there. The LAF made social media news yesterday by announcing plans to partner up with Demand Media, a new media company run by Richard Rosenblatt, the former head of MySpace.com in order to create a for-profit social media/networking site centered around personal wellness and fitness.

Here is the news release along with some stories that ran in the Austin and Houston press today:

• The official Demand Media Announcement (I find it interesting that as a social media company they chose to make this announcement via a traditional release instead of a social media news release)
• Austin American Statesman article
• Houston Chronicle story

RSS as a research tool: Using RSS to subscribe to news and web search feeds

After our last class, some of you expressed an interest in using RSS and del.icio.us to help you with your research. Here are some ways to do so:

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of a news search using GoogleNews (see slides below)


• Subscribe to the RSS feed of a web search using GoogleAlerts (see slides below)


• Subscribe to a particular tag on del.icio.us by entering the following URL into your feed aggregator: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/NameoftheTag

I've put together a brief tutorial to show you how to do the first two. Click on each slide to navigate to the next.