Interesting figures with some eye openers about mobile complexity Slideshare Presentation by Volker @Hirsch, @Scoreloop presented at the University of Oxford ‘Future Technologies Conference‘ 15 October 2010

The $ Dilemma (Carrier Model)

Mobile apps and Social Media:
What is Social?
Social refers to the interaction of organisms
with other organisms
and to their collective co-existence [..]

more of Volker Hirsch on: Volker on Mobile (blog)

There are several ideas and updates in this Mashable posting on how social media can be used in seeking jobs and hires. For this guy, social media is the first stop in recruiting hires:

Jason Mitchell, owner of Movement Strategy, a digital marketing agency that helps brands such as the New York Knicks and Whole Foods with their social media strategies, explains how social media is his first stop when trying to recruit:

“We have everyone in the company post on their Facebook and Twitter accounts that we are hiring. Pretty much every time we do this there are multiple friends or a friend of a friend who sees the post and is very interested in the position, or who knows someone that would be a great fit.

“We always prefer to hire people that are somehow connected to our personal networks, because they tend to be more reliably good employees than people who we find on job posting websites. Often this is because they had one of our friends vouch for them or they are one of their friends and so they want to prove themselves or not make their friend look bad.”

A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education provides a look at the remarkable new steps being made in education into the open networking future of its learning content. Content interaction is facilitated with input from class into textbooks; it has always been the other way around. In these three brief paragraphs from the report network emergent content is glimpsed: incorporating class content in e-textbooks; integration; open learning, and user-generated content.

“Students place a high degree of value in the content the instructor offers—what’s being presented in class, that’s what’s going to be on the exam,” said Michael Berger, senior director of marketing for Tegrity. He added that the publisher now realizes the value of that content and wants to be able to better incorporate it in its e-textbooks.

“Mary Skafidas, a spokesperson for McGraw-Hill, said the decision to buy Tegrity was made, in part, on the popularity of the integration in McGraw-Hill Connect, based on surveys of students and professors.”

“A fact sheet on Tegrity’s Web site explained the decision this way: “Tegrity and McGraw-Hill do share a vision for a future digital-learning platform that supports open learning, and is powered in part by user-generated content.”

O’Reilly radar tells us that the app BirdsEye demos next steps into the smart mob future.

This iPhone-only birding application — a co-creation of Pete Myers and Todd Koym — blends crowdsourcing, database access, and location awareness. Unlike that book in your pocket or that static app on your phone, BirdsEye adapts on the fly.

The homepage of BirdsEye sketches how this app uses the actions of mobs of birds and observers to take your mobile’s bird savvy to new heights:

BirdsEye is the newest location technology built for bird watching in North America. This is not another field guide for indentification. Rather, BirdsEye is the world’s only mobile application that GUIDES YOU TO THE BIRDS. Using current observations being submitted by thousands of ‘citizen scientists’ in the United States and Canada, BirdsEye shows you what birds are being seen nearby, leads you to great places to see birds, and helps you grow your birding life list with birds you’ve never seen.

What does the buzzing, fast-paced, world of social media look like to marginalized communities who overcome the digital divide? This is the question Vancouver filmmakers Jon Ornoy and Andrew Lavigne explored in their feature-length documentary “With Glowing Hearts.” The film is set at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and tells four intertwining tales about how Canada’s poorest communities used social media to self-organize, access information, and make their voices heard. And in order to distribute this powerful story of leveraging the virtual world for real-world transformation, Ornoy and Lavigne or going to the world from whence they drew their inspiration. Specifically, they’re waging a crowdfunding effort whereby, in return for contributing $2 via PayPal, we join their team and become co-producers. Not only that, but our names appear in the credits and on the website (and of course, in the spirit of tag clouds, the more we contribute, the larger our names will appear). “In becoming a producer you’re not only supporting the completion of this film, but also our efforts to make concrete positive contributions to a community which has been so generous to us,” Ornoy writes. Check out the trailer, and visit the site to get involved.

In Yahoo! today Holly Bailey asks a very interesting question:

Can Lady Gaga succeed where gay rights activists in Washington so far have failed?

Everybody’s favorite hangar-steak-wearing pop queen is pushing her more than 6.3 million Twitter followers to lobby the Senate ahead of a planned vote this Tuesday on repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy,  which bans gay members of the military from serving openly.

On Tuesday, Gaga, via Twitter, encouraged her “lil monsters” — as she refers to her legion of fans — to call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to schedule the vote. Reid promptly did and subsequently announced this in a Twitter message to Gaga herself. “Anyone qualified to serve this country should be allowed to do so,” Reid wrote.

Is there something smart mobby about what Lady Gaga is doing, or is she just using her extensive list of fans to urge them to act politically? As American politics goes into higher and higher gear, the roll of old fashioned lists versus smart mobs will be one of the most fascinating phenomena to watch.

It seems to me that the 6.3 “lil monsters” are unlikely to act much as a mob, either a smart or dumb one. They are — at least in the instance described above — receiving a request from the person at the top about whom they are gaga. She hopes they will individually call their representatives in Washington.

Things get more smart mobby and more exciting when action is stirred up from the bottom and there are lateral networking connections. An example of that would be a cluster of Tea Party folk at a rally exchanging each other’s contact information so they can keep on interacting in the future.Certainly Twittering is a mighty powerful lateral communication tool which will bring smart mobbing more and more into the political arena. Lady Gaga has only scratched the surface by sending a top down message to all her “lil” monsters.

Golf.com Truth & Rumors thinks maybe he is:”Maybe Tiger Woods read those Q Scores earlier this week about being one of America’s six most-hated athletes and decided to work on his image.”

The report includes these comments from Sean Martin of golfweek.com:

It was an unprecedented use of social media for the world No. 1. Many athletes use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to give fans a behind-the-scenes look at their lives.

Most of the questions during Woods’ Wednesday ‘Twitterview’ focused on equipment. The answers weren’t incredibly detailed, but that had as much to do with Twitter’s 140-character limit as Woods’ propensity to disclose little.

OpenStudy is an e-Learning startup which invites students to “join the world’s largest study group.” An animated introductory video shows little owls flying about beyond their library computer stations to settle on a question about what x+y=?

The OpenStudy blog cuts to the chase on a question that has haunted open online learning for years: does it cause and facilitate cheating? The OpenStudy post titled “The Definition of Cheating?” looks at the rampant practices of many students considered to be cheating, and concludes:

Fortunately, the ones who work the hardest, learn the most, and give back by teaching the material will win. Why? The hardest workers and most inquisitive users will get the most out of this new resource and that, my friend, is awesome.

Is it true that the increasingly smartmobby world is gaining integrity over, for example, the kid who sneaks a look to copy an answer from the student’s text paper on the desk next to him? What does new understanding of the principles set out in The Wisdom of the Crowds and Cognitive Surplus tell us about the level of integrity open online study groups will engender?

Is it possible that the nanny role of the academy will be diminished when students study together in the open internet instead of at a table in the student lounge?

The caption from the Houston Zoo for the above picture reads: Living together in groups of 2 to 50, which are referred to as either “gangs” or “mobs,” meerkats’ survival is dependent upon their successful cooperation.

There are apparently deep instincts underlying the formation and actions of mobs. Here are some observations that resonate with behavior of human smart mobs, from Houston on how meercats mob:

But when you are the size of a football, dancing around the hot African savannah while hawks and foxes drool at your every move, focusing all attention on food can be risky business. So what does a mobber do? Well, he mobs, of course!

When confronted by a predator, the self-ordained sentinel, or “watch-kat,” of the group alerts the other members of the mob by barking in an alarmed manner. In the event of a potential attack from above, meerkats dive into their burrows for safety and cover any young, vulnerable pups. For some ground predators, however, such as venomous snakes, meerkats literally “gang-up” on the serpent and form a circle around it, snarling and hissing while trying to look big and menacing.

And while most animals, including humans, have been found to have an innate sense of self preservation above the preservation of others (with the exception of one’s own young, or course), meerkats cooperate and sacrifice for one another with little concern for personal reward.

Twitter breaks story on Discovery Channel gunman James Lee is the headline in the Washington Post about twitter’s lead in how the mob (crowd, whatever) jumped on a major news story last week. The article has interesting analysis and background, more tweeted stuff, and this summary:

The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.