Ashleigh Lawson

This blog is an outlet to post various musings and reviews throughout the course of Working with Social Media. Hopefully the content shared here will be of some interest to you.

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Week 6: Social Graphs

What are the implications of the integration of social Graph technology in Facebook and other sites for your own personal data? As a post to your blog, labelled ‘Week 6 Social Graph’, discuss these issues. Using readings from this week and other items you may have researched for yourself about ‘Social Graphs’, discuss the pros and cons of this kind of personal data interlinking.

The term social graph was first coined in 2007 by Facebook and essentially refers to the way that online data is linked (Rouse 2010). To gain a better understanding of this concept is to focus specifically on the website that revolutionised the term: Facebook. Their particular social graph is called the Open Graph. Facebook’s (2016) Graph API article easily defines the three components that social graphs consist of:

Nodes - basically "things"

Edges - the connections between those "things"

Fields - info about those "things"

The following figure produced by Dickinson (2012) helps to visualise a social graph.

Figure 1: Social graph visualisation Source: Business Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com.au/explainer-what-exactly-is-the-social-graph-2012-3) Date Accessed: 1 September 2016

As for the implications of such data linking, there are both positives and negatives. The positives are that these connections are made primarily to help users by connecting them to their interests (Sporny 2012). Often the social aspect of social media is forgotten. These graphs seek to connect users that share similar interests and relationships. Of course, there is an aspect of data tracking and linking that relates to advertising. This use of data could be perceived as both positive and negative. However, some users may view this as a privacy invasion. Often the user intentionally hides the information that is traced. When Facebook users like, comment or share an item, it’s unlikely that they are considering the wider ramifications of such an action. Online behaviour does not exist within a vacuum, though this concept is foreign to many users who still (somewhat naïvely) regard privacy highly. The reality of the situation is that all online actions are tracked and linked. Whilst many of the outcomes enhance the online user experience, the false sense of security succeeds in worrying some users. Overall, I view social graphs as a necessary element of contemporary social media.

References

Dickinson, B 2012, So what the heck is the 'social graph' Facebook keeps talking about?, Business Insider, viewed 1 September 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com.au/explainer-what-exactly-is-the-social-graph-2012-3

Facebook 2016, Overview – graph API, viewed 1 September 2016, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview

Rouse, M 2010, What is social graph?, viewed 1 September 2016, http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-graph

Sporny, M 2012, What is linked data?, video, 16 June, viewed 1 September 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_xzT5eF5Q

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Week 5: Google Maps

Research and find out some information on what the Google Maps API is and then explain this in your blog post (referencing your sources by linking to them). Create and publish a blog post showing a site of significance to you via Google Maps. Do not publish your home address. If you are adventurous you could even document a trail of some sort. Embed the map in your blog or a post a link to a Google map for your week 5 blog post. There is information on how to do this in the week 5 tutorial instructions.

To understand the Google Maps API, it’s necessary to first define every element of the term. Firstly, Google Maps is – quite obviously – a navigation service that allows users to view maps, find businesses, and obtain directions (Google 2016). An API, or application programming interface, can be thought of as “windows to the code” (Proffitt 2013). They define how applications interact with each other. The Google Maps API basically allows other applications to “piggyback” on their services, through something like an embedded map (Proffitt 2013).

The address I have elected to embed using Google Maps is the Whitsunday Marine Club. My sister was recently married at this venue so I have a lot of fond memories about it. The Whitsundays are a beautiful area just two hours from Mackay so it felt right to showcase the region for this activity. 

References

Google 2016, About – Google Maps, viewed 31 August 2016, https://www.google.com.au/maps/about/

Proffitt, B 2013, What APIs are and why they’re important, ReadWrite, viewed 31 August 2016, http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined/

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Week 4: Innovation and collective creativity

Referring either to one of Aaron Koblin’s projects from exercise 4.1 above, the “one frame of fame” website linked below, or another you know of that employs crowdsourcing, briefly discuss whether or not you think it is innovative in terms of social media, produsage and crowdsourcing. Refer to concepts introduced this week in the textbook, the lecture and course resources. Be sure to provide a link to the site you are writing about in your blog. Also make use of an image if possible. With screen captures, make sure you note the URL where you sourced the image and, the date viewed, as part of your caption.

As opposed to selecting one of Aaron Koblin’s many intriguing projects, I have elected to review another website that employs crowdsourcing: 99designs. In an earlier activity, I reviewed DesignCrowd and commented on how innovative and interesting I found the project. This was the first website that came to mind when I thought about crowdsourcing, but it turns out that DesignCrowd is not unique. There are several design-based crowdsourcing projects, with 99designs being the first and – to many users – the best.

Figure 1: 99designs about page Source: 99designs (https://99designs.com.au/about) Date Accessed: 25 August 2016

Founded officially in 2008, 99designs led the trend of crowdsourcing designs. Being the first recognisable brand in an ever-growing industry obviously speaks highly of the innovation behind 99designs. The website also provides access to a larger group of designers than its competitors, boasting over 1,128,000 designers (99designs 2016). This makes the process of crowdsourcing a design significantly easier, whilst also producing overall better designs (Soriano 2015).

The central theme of crowdsourcing is innovation, specifically the utilisation of content produced by communities (Holmes 2014). In terms of participators rewards, the designers of 99designs are not always guaranteed a monetary reward. While only a winning design is paid for, the unlucky designers who don’t emerge victorious are rewarded with something unquantifiable: exposure. As indicated by Holmes (2014) designers can benefit from reputation, notoriety, and the opportunity to enrich their portfolio.

Figure 2: 99designs utilises crowdsourcing with millions of designers Source: 99designs (https://99designs.com.au/) Date Accessed: 25 August 2016

Another key element of innovative crowdsourcing is produsage. The term, favoured by Bruns (2009), is defined by four main traits: community, role fluidity, iterative results, and merit. 99designs succeeds in achieving the first characteristic simply by virtue of being a crowdsourcing website that hosts over a million producers. These participants’ roles are inherently fluid on 99designs, as designers are not exclusive to any category or skill set. For example, a university-level design student can design logos, websites, and illustrations interchangeably. As for continually evolving products, 99designs satisfies this criterion too through client feedback. This also ensures that clients receive designs that they are truly pleased with. As has been shown, 99designs achieves all of Bruns’ (2009) standards for produsage.

Overall, 99designs has been found to be an extremely innovative and creative crowdsourcing platform for designers and clients alike. This has been shown through an analysis of the site, crowdsourcing, innovation, and produsage.

References

99designs 2016, About | 99designs, viewed 25 August 2016, https://99designs.com.au/about  

Bruns, A 2009, Social media: tools for user-generated content social drivers behind growing consumer participation in user-led content generation - volume 2: user engagement strategies, Smart Services CRC, viewed 25 August 2016, http://snurb.info/files/Social%20Media%20Report%20Volume%202%20-%20User%20Engagement%20Strategies.pdf

Holmes, A 2014, Week 4 lecture: Innovation and collective creativity, course notes, DGTL12002: Working with Social Media, CQUniversity e-courses, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au

Soriano, J 2015, Crowdsourcing: 99designs vs crowdSPRING vs DesignCrowd, viewed 25 August 2016, http://launchastartup.com/crowdsourcing-99designs-vs-crowdspring-vs-designcrowd/

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Week 3: Interactivity

In 2009 CumminsNitro, a Brisbane-based advertising agency, won multiple awards across the international media landscape for their groundbreaking campaign for Tourism Queensland: Best Job in the World. The campaign was unique in the way it harnessed traditional media advertising (positions vacant advertising) and linked this with various kinds of social media interactivity. Through inviting video applications the campaign utilised what Bruns calls “produsage” and others have called “crowdsourcing”. It also made sophisticated use of the viral connectivity that can result from online social networking. Then, once the social media success became newsworthy, the campaign also benefitted from the traditional current affairs media attention, amplifying the overall impact and effect.

This campaign formula was so successful that it has been expanded recently to include other states, each with their own tourism ‘caretaker’.   

Write a review analysing the types of interactivity that the campaign engaged.

CumminsNitro’s 2009 social media “Best Job in the World” marketing campaign might not seem particularly unique in contemporary society, though it once stood at the peak of innovation (Hayes 2011). No other campaign had successfully harnessed the power and “virality” of social media in such a way as CumminsNitro did. In the formative stages of Internet video, CumminsNitro encouraged participants of the “Best Job in the World” to send in video applications in lieu of traditional résumés. This type of interactivity had never been seen before, and it has rarely been surpassed since. Understanding the seemingly magic or genius concept can be somewhat difficult. A pivotal step of this research is to utilise expert’s methodology to determine the varying types of interaction. 

According the Sally McMillan (2002), there are three key types of interactivity. The “Best Job in the World” campaign utilises user-to-system interactivity best. As mentioned, new media was not as prolific as it is today, so harnessing interaction “between people and the computer” was revolutionary. 

Jennifer Stromer-Galley (2004) further categorises interactivity into two main sections in interactivity-as-process and interactivity-as-product. Subsets of these sections include interaction between people, between people and consumers, and between computers. Once again, the CumminsNitro campaign successfully utilised interactivity-as-product when connecting people and computers. 

Finally, Adrian Chan (2006) defines the key focus of interaction to be “handling the dramatic character of social performances as participants, including such psychological features as personal comfort levels, insecurities, dispositions, attention-sharing, and more.” By leveraging online video and social media, participants were clearly encouraged to perform dramatically.

Overall, engaging participants through a somewhat unfamiliar medium turned out to the leading success of the CumminsNitro campaign.

References

Chan, A 2006, Social interaction design - examples of social navigation, report, viewed 3 August 2016, http://www.gravity7.com/G7_Soc_Int_Design_3-27.pdf

Hayes, A 2011, ‘The best job in the world & beyond in a brave new marketing world’, Campaign, 7 September, viewed 3 August 2016, http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/1089697/

McMillan, S 2002, ‘Exploring models of interactivity from multiple research traditions: users, documents, and systems’ in LA Lievrouw, & S Livingstone (eds), Handbook of new media: social shaping and consequences of ICTs, Sage Publications, London. 

Stromer-Galley, J 2003, ‘Interactivity-as-product and interactivity-as-process’, The Information Society, November-December, p. 391-394, viewed 3 August 2016, http://tinyurl.com/h9fkv5a

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Week 2: Social networks online

Choose at least two out of the six of the following terms of reference to make further comments about the site you have been reviewing and the services it offers:

Trustworthiness of the site

Reputations of members

Ownership of content

Moderation of risks

Management of content

User interface and customisation.

Once again use screen captures and your own words to document and interpret what you see. Note that if you do copy statements or policies from a web site these must be in quotation marks and the source URL referenced.

With screen captures, make sure you note the URL where you sourced the image and, the date viewed, as part of your caption.  Greater marks will be awarded for appropriately using and referencing the textbook.

For this exercise, I decided to revert back to my Tumblr review as I believe it is a more established and well rounded website, and thus offers a lot more content to examine. While Medium is definitely an interesting SNS, its minimalist style of operation makes it somewhat difficult to analyse on a deeper level. The terms that I have elected to discuss are Management of content, and User interface and customisation.

In terms of content management, I believe Tumblr offers a lot of opportunities. Blossom (2009) describes this as enabling users to tell their own story.  On the New Post screen there are several publishing options available, including:

Post now

Add to queue

Save as draft

Post privately

Schedule

These options can be seen in the below screenshot. 

Figure 1: Posting options on Tumblr Source: Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/new/text) Date Accessed: 20 July 2016

The first option is quite obvious as it immediately publishes a post. The Add to queue and Schedule options both divert back to the Queue page – an element of content management that I believe many SNSs are lacking. According to Tumblr (2016), the queue “lets you stagger posts over a period of hours or days. It's an easy way to keep your blog active and consistent.” The Queue page can be seen in the below screenshot. 

Figure 2: Tumblr's queue features Source: Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/queue) Date Accessed: 20 July 2016

Utilising the Save as draft option simply means sending your posts to the Draft page – a concept seen on many SNSs. Post privately refers to a post that is technically on your blog, though it can only be seen by the author via the permalink page or on the Post overview page. In addition to these, Tumblr also utilises a Likes page that stores every post a user has “liked”. Tumblr’s impressive range of content management options sets it apart from many SNSs and truly showcases its flexibility.

In regards to user interface and customisation, Tumblr once again distinguishes itself from its competitors. Whilst many contemporary SNSs feature a stock standard profile page, Tumblr allows customisation through the use of Themes. Users have the option to select a theme from either the Tumblr-approved Theme Garden, independent custom theme creators, or to indeed code their own using Tumblr’s Custom Theme documentation. Again, I believe this speaks to Tumblr’s diversity and willingness to allow their users to properly build a brand or showcase their personality.

Overall, the analysis of these two elements highlights how Tumblr has filled a marketplace void and created a somewhat unique SNS experience for its significant user base.

References

Blossom, J 2009, Content nation: surviving and thriving as social media changes our work, our lives, and our future, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana. 

Tumblr 2016, Tumblr queue, viewed 20 July 2016, https://www.tumblr.com/queue

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Week 1: Introduction to social media

Choose a social media site that you are a member of and say why you engage with it and what you get out of it. If you are not a member of any site, choose one to observe and answer the same question regarding the activities that you observe – or, you may choose to say why you do not normally engage with social media. You are encouraged to use your answers to exercise 1.3 to frame your response.

The social media site that I have elected to discuss is the microblogging platform Tumblr. Tumblr boasts over 305.2 million users with approximately 136.8 billion posts (Tumblr 2016). Tumblr offers a range of post types including Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, and Video posts. In terms of direct communication; Tumblr features Asks, Replies, and Messaging. Hinton and Hjorth (2013) state that these features are a part of the way that blogs allow users to create much more freely than ever before.

Figure 1: Tumblr statistics Source: Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/about) Date Accessed: 18 July 2016

I’ve been using Tumblr on a consistent basis for around five years. I engage with the website on many levels such as casual and professional. I believe I’m in the main demographic of Tumblr users, as 11% of internet-using women are on Tumblr along with 20% of internet users aged 18-29 (Pew Research Center 2015). Pew Research Center (2015) also found that high percentages of people of colour (POC) are regular Tumblr users. This ties into the site’s reputation as a social justice website as a significant focus of many users is social justice issues. Some of the regularly discussed topics are feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, class warfare, and POC liberation. However, Tumblr is not restricted to social justice issues. There are various ‘fandoms’ on Tumblr that explore different television shows, films, actors, artists, and musicians - among many other things. Personally, I incorporate a lot of different post styles into my Tumblr experience. From aesthetically pleasing pastel images, inspirational quotes, comedic text posts, and insightful social justice articles - I utilise my blog as a true outlet of my interests. 

One of the draws of Tumblr is the ability to create custom themes. This is where my professional interest is introduced. For around four years, I have published free themes and pages for other users to install. In recent years, I have devoted more time to this pursuit and have accrued over 13,000 followers on my theme blog. I utilise it as an outlet for my design interests where I posts interesting tutorials, resources, and recommendations of other Tumblr themes. This is an example of the affordances that Tumblr allows its users (Holmes 2014). 

Overall, I really enjoy Tumblr and believe it to be an incredibly functional website that allows its users to express themselves in innumerable ways. 

References Hinton, S & Hjorth, L 2013, Understanding social media, Sage Publications, London.

Holmes, A 2014, Week 1 lecture: social media - topical introduction, course notes, DGTL12002: Working with Social Media, CQUniversity e-courses, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au

Pew Research Center 2015, Demographics of Tumblr | Pew Research Center, viewed 18 July 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/mobile-messaging-and-social-media-2015/2015-08-19_social-media-update_05/

Tumblr 2016, About | Tumblr, viewed 18 July 2016, https://www.tumblr.com/about