Just for Fun

A friend of mine linked me this commentary on the current New Media phenomena:

http://i39.tinypic.com/24w7ed0.jpg

Google pulls the plug on products

I’m reading Jeff Jarvis’s new book “What Would Google Do?” in an attempt to immerse myself in a culture with which I’m largely unfamiliar. Apparently the New York Times is trying to help its readers also better understand that culture with this brief inside look at “How Google decides to pull the plug.” It’s a good read and will broaden your knowledge of new language (not just new media.) Here’s an example … “dog-fooding.”    Kathy B.

Some new numbers on social network usage

There are some new social media usage numbers from compete.com online at this site:
http://tinyurl.com/czsls9

I try to stay on top of current trends, but I’ll admit that I’ve visited only about 2/3 of these listed. Even of the ones I have visited, I’d say I’m not a repeat visitor of most.
Any thoughts or analysis on the trends shown here and how these stats might influence our new media efforts?

-Timothy Allen

Suggestion

I think we need a What’s Cool at Langley platform. Perhaps putting the word out on @LaRC for folks to use the New Media to tell everyone what kind of neat stuff they are working on that is suitable for public distribution.

Someone would need to agree to work with whoever stepped forward, so it could be a time sink. But right now we’re not doing anything here and I think we could get a number of things going that would generate interest:

NASA Story Corps – collect stories from long time LaRC personnel before they leave/retire/pass on

What’s Cool – Past and Present. Lots of great civilian applications came out of work done here.

Where are they now? Don’t you wonder where your favorite colleague has gotten to? Why not find out and write a feature?

I’m sure there’s a lot of human interest and scientific bling we can bring in, without too much work.

The sound of Crickets

Chirp? . . . .

It could soon become official

Govenment agencies may soon officially be able to use youtube, Facebook and other social media sites. Once it becomes official … hope we don’t lose that revolutionary spirit that led our fearless leader, Mike Finneran, to blaze the trail and embrace these channels ahead of the pack. Here’s the latest on negotiations.    Kathy B.

NASA outstripped by luddite folk musicians

I got friended by a singer this morning, she’s connected to a bunch of others in the traditional music community, including the incomparable and intensely sociable Switched At Birth With An Irish Kid Myron B.  I was somewhat surprised to see just how many friends he’d accumulated and it got me thinking.

This one guy has over 400 friends and he hasn’t been on Facebook all that long. 

In the last six months it was my high school class that poured onto Facebook in all its 40-something glory.  Now I’m seeing the folks from the trad. Celtic music scene in there, folks who swore adamantly they’d never use email, what a lot of “bollocks.”  Who’s to say how long they’ve been there, but I’m only seeing them now.  It’s actually very exciting, but what it says to me is that New Media have actually “arrived.”

Are our new efforts already obsolete?

The joys of dipping our toes into the swamp of social media/networking (whatever you want to call it) come with  built-in pitfalls … are we already behind … too little, too late … on our way to extinction like the dinosaur … or are we right on time … riding the wave to success? Here’s an article that looks at that conundrum.    Kathy B.

Something new, something old

Not very long ago the notion that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools might have a useful function at work was, well … something you didn’t talk about maybe? Because (a) you didn’t know what it was, and (b) it sounded like something that could get you in trouble?

Here’s a thought along those lines from Devora Rogers of the Emerging Media Lab:

It wasn’t long ago that employers were trying to figure out how to forbid staff from accessing their social networking profiles while at work. Just three years ago, when I worked as a producer for a reality TV production company, the HR Director released a note to all staff: Use of IM during the workday is grounds for termination. Period. Wow, I thought then.

Now, observes Rogers, “It’s becoming a legitimate way to do business.”

We’ve come a long way baby – and it makes me realize how we should have been here long before this, and how far we still have to go.

Today we have both internal and external social media activities at LaRC: NASA Langley, Technology Gateway and Yuri’s Night Twitters, 40th anniversary of Apollo Facebook and Yuri’s Night accounts, openLangley and an affiliated FB group, an upcoming LaRC Facebook, and internal blogs like this one and TeXpo and The world is flat, and a bunch of people Yammering …

We’ve got Baby Boomers in the office signing up to personal social networking accounts … it’s gone mainstream. Earlier this week I convinced the 60-something vice president of the International Association of Sheet Metal Workers to join Facebook and become a NASA friend. And our own Duncan Mciver has an Langley Alumni Association FB account.

What is next?

- M. Finneran

Can New Media help/bypass Cultural Problems?

Some of the New Media brought this distressing post on Stifling Dissent to my attention today. It made me wonder if the twitter/yammer/Facebook/insert-new-medium-of-your-choice options we all have for communicating now will have an impact on the whole issue of people not speaking up.

While anonymity is not really possible on twitter or yammer, this wordpress blog allows comments to be posted, and there’s no requirement that anyone signing up for the level of service that lets you comment has to put in a Real Legal TraceableOMGyourbossisgoingtokillyou Name, the mere fact that it is possible to not be immediately identifiable when making a comment should be a brake release at least for some people.