Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.

[...]

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

Maciej Ceglowski — The Social Graph is Neither

Half the comments I get on Twitter are part of a “media strategy.”

Which means someone read a book that said if you want to achieve success you have to “engage” with people.

I bet Klout has something to do with it. If they get a reply from me, that counts as a certain number of points toward their score. Which theoretically I guess gets them consulting business, working on other people’s “media strategies.”

So they ask questions a machine could come up with. I recommend an author. They ask if they should read one of his or her books. I don’t know.

People must realize, don’t they, that this is all pointless. It’s a bubble on a bubble on a bubble on a bubble. When you dilute things that much, is there really anything left?

Dave Winer — The idiocracy of social media

As someone with Franzendentalist roots and Epiphinator tendencies, who consumes too many hours of social media, I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side — “Why would you love that thing instead of me?” They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it’s not like that. I don’t think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we’re still hungry for endings.

Paul Ford — Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?

This Week in Rebooting the Ecosystem for Reinventing J school

Writer’s note (because there ain’t no editor): In all seriousness, the three of us love, like serious humanly love, This Week in Tech, Rebooting the News, and all people, podcasts, and/or cities we tease at in this episode. It’s only out of love that we jest. We have better technical difficulties too.

To frame the solutions to the problem, we begin by establishing some of the ways in which J school is a broken model for the 21st century. In most other fields, Joey Baker points out, academia is the research space. If that’s not the case, then it’s the military. The news industry is the only one where the industry leads and academia is behind.

Greg Linch points out another issue in that J schools, as institutions, are really slow to change. They have a critical inability to adapt quickly. This is a bigger issue in the 21st century because some of the tools journalists need to know how to use are changing at an exponential rate. As both Joey Baker and I point out, many of the tools taught in a four year undergraduate program are obsolete or nearing such a stage by graduation. J schools aren’t going to get back ahead by teaching “social media.” The problem isn’t with what they’re teaching, but rather how they’re teaching it. Another fundamental that needs to change.

A third issue is that the core curriculum is one size fits all. The class structure and material of 200-level courses is generally designed for the perceived average of 200 hundred students. As such, it doesn’t match any of them well and at least some of them are in the extreme ends of the bell curve where the class is completely worthless.

The grading system is broken because there’s no system of rewards for those who try experiments and learn from their failures. The list goes on.

It’s not the end of the world for journalism schools, the university system, or newspapers. There are just fundamental ways in which each need to change.

On a related note, I thought of two more parallels between J school and newspapers in the past 24 hours. One: all of the university lectures around the world are pretty much rewrites of the same thing. Two: students have very little say in the content of what they get from the professor.

The solutions aren’t unique and won’t be easy to implement, but all of the ideas we discussed would make us excited to be back in school (bootcamps, barcamps, testing out of classes, and experiential education ftw).

Our picks of the week are:

• Tynt Tracer, from Joey – If you turn off the annoying “feature” where it adds a link to the end of the bit of text you’ve copied, then it’s a tool that offers really cool analytics on what people are copy and pasting from your website including word clouds and all that jazz.
• Kaltura Community Edition, from Greg – open source video server you can host yourself.
• Skitch, from Daniel – Wickedly simple and fast way to communicate visually (Mac only).

Enjoy the podcast. It’s worth skipping the first nine minutes and then listening to the rest all of the way through. Greg has a brilliant point that we actually had to create an addendum for at the end.

Later: In my rush to get this post out, I missed two really great sets of ideas from earlier this year: “Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts” from March and “Bring-a-Professor chat wrap-up” at CollegeJourn in February. Absorb those as well.

Twitter wasn’t effective at all, as it only sent less than 1% of their overall numbers. In the comments, I mention that his assessment is almost there. Twitter is a really valuable tool, but that value only applies if you can reach your community on it. The Whitman campus isn’t there yet in terms of adoption, and might never be, but there is the possibility that it will become more effective for discussion in the near future. The Pioneer leading the charge, pardon the pun, by actively advertising discussion like this might be one way to increase the number of users, or that number might grow once the campus learns the value of Twitter via SMS for finding the best parties on Friday night. I wouldn’t discount entirely, it’s just a matter of engaging in conversation where your community is.

At Whitman, the email list servs and Facebook are the best method of reaching the rest of the student body. Andrew’s emails drove 10% of the traffic, and Facebook organically drove 2%. Considering the amount of time most college students spend on Facebook, there is a lot of room for growth in this medium. Facebook recently released an update to their Pages application, giving brands and organizations a presence that looks and works more like a normal Facebook profile. One critical component to this announcement is the fact that updates you post to your Page will now show up in the News Feed of your Fans. This wasn’t possible before, and it now lends an excellent opportunity for your content to spread “virally.” I, for instance, watched a video from the NY Times about the recession the other day simply because the News Feed is how it came to my attention.

When they land on the site, I also think there is room for improvement on how the discussion is fostered by using a forum and a wiki. As I mentioned in my comment, blog posts are a great way to synthesize and distribute content. I wouldn’t necessarily try to have all of the conversation in the comments, however. For a controversial topic like this, II might post several of the broad questions raised in the administration’s decision to cut funding to the team with the intent of having them either write or video record a response. This would offer a venue for people to weigh in with that they think the answer should be. The daily blog posts would then be useful for synthesizing the discussion had in the forum, as well as bringing in the additional facts and context your reporters are finding. A wiki dedicated specifically to this topic, much like the topical wiki I’ve described before, could provide the background information necessary to bring people up to speed, including how many people are on the ski team, what percentage of the overall athletic budget the administration is talking about, and how this decision fits into the greater scheme of things.

With these critiques being said, I think the Pioneer team did a stellar job breaking out of a weekly print mindset and adopting web tools to enhance conversation.

ColaLife is a “campaign to try and leverage the distribution muscle of a multi-national corporate institution to get life saving medicines to children in developing countries.” In short, to convince the Coca-Cola Corporation that it is worthwhile to distribute rehydration salts through their robust and well-developed delivery network, apparently a weakness of most non-governmental organizations. Those spearheading the ColaLife campaign, to my understanding, have focused their advocacy efforts largely online, using a Flickr Group, a Facebook Group, and a Twitter account to raise awareness, organize people, and spread the word. Coverage in traditional media is also a goal, obviously, but it’s interesting for me to watch, among with other reasons, because I think this “social internet” now has the critical mass necessary to be used as catalyst for a singular goal. ColaLife, in my opinion, could be a ground breaking test case.

As a plus, I’ve finally found a good cause for a random series of images I took while in Peru last summer. Sweet, huh?