Today I discovered Breaking Tweets. I like the format: an introduction at the top of the pieces summarizing the topic followed by a list of related tweets. The tweets link to the posters’ twitter pages, allowing you to follow up in more detail, but also provide an easy to follow overview of personal perspectives.

It won’t replace TweetDeck‘s ability to follow specific topics of interest nor will it replace local news tweets ... but it does provide a new angle to international news that you might not otherwise stumble across in Twitter. 

According to Recession Psychology 101* in today’s Dallas News, psychology blames the media: bad news = feeling bad = spending less.

The media defends itself ("Thing is, Friday’s job report number really was awful. We’re not trying to ruin your weekend") and blames the Internet ("It’s the Internet – not necessarily journalists – that’s allowed bad economic news to ricochet around the world faster than ever before, Steele said.")

This seems pretty standard to me. Back in December the Pew Research Center released the Psychology Of Bad Times survey report suggesting just this psychological cycle of worry leading to cutbacks leading to further economic troubles. The effects tradition in the social sciences has concentrated on what media does to people, and new media is afraid of old media. Nothing new here.

The article concludes with a psychologist who suggests turning off the evening news so we don’t need to worry about what doesn’t affect our daily lives. But in this cycle of economic woes (I’m going with the flow here) won’t that lead advertisers to stop buying spots on the evening news to cut costs because no one is watching any more, thus leading to less funding for news shows and causing the collapse of news media?

As oddly amusing as all of this circling is, we can’t blame (only) the media for the culture of fear we all participate in and create. Our society looks at faults and problems. The media looks at faults and problems. It goes far deeper than than the media, but then how could things change if something that was “really awful” was not the most important fact to tell the world?

*The headline has been edited to: Barrage of bad news can get in your head, affect judgment

Another way to share information is Google’s knol, now in beta. In this knowledge scenario authors have their names out there associated with the work but with more of an srticle-style knowledge-share rather than an encyclopedic entry. Like wikipedia, you can access revisions (history) to see changes—but being from Google, you also have statistics in the sidebar of every article including author information, article activity, user ratings of the content, similar articles or sites, licensing information, and links to other articles by the author.

In knol the author sets the level of editing allowed by other logged-in Google users—from open editing where anyone can participate in the changes, moderated collaboration for suggestions to be sent to the author for approval, or closed collaboration which only allows co-authors to make changes. This feature alone makes knol a more friendly place for a variety of users. Whereas wikipedia’s default is open editing to all and Britannica’s default is closed until approved—authors from both camps can publish their work in knol, and even authors who want nothing to do with participatory editing can offer up their knowledge to the public.

Interested in sharing something you know? Knol is hosting a knol for Dummies contest through March accepting “how to” articles.

In one of the archived presentations by Dana Boyd that I watched, she said the MySpace users she interacts with had a completely different reaction to advertising: It was a sign of stability. They were more confident that sponsored sites/tools/tech would stick around while the free and ad-free offerings were somewhat shunned for fear that they would disappear.

JPG Magazine all but disappeared. It has a bit of a torrid past, drama among the owners and a flood of user loss in response. But overall the concept of an online community contributing and rough editing the content of a print publication is a great one. Which is why, despite the drama and changes already past, I was happy to hear the magazine would be bought out instead of folding. The active community was credited with saving the magazine due to all of the hype generated after the closure was announced.

And today when I went to the site and saw an ad about how to lose 2 pounds of your stomach fat ... that first twinge of disgust reminded me of the potential for stability ... 

In Sarason’s overview he mentions that having close friends scattered throughout the country or world can make one feel even more acutely that a (local) sense of community is lacking. Written in 1974—before access to email, blogs, photo and video sharing, etc—I have to think that the disconnect today would be different.

Most of my friends and family are scattered throughout the world. I take this as a great opportunity to travel and visit, while keeping in touch through media between visits. We have kept in touch with email, phone calls, text messages, digital photos, blogs, mailed and posted movies, art, online web chats with audio and video … My family and friends being thousands of miles away didn’t make me feel a lack of community in the area I lived. If anything, they became a part of where I lived through our mediated connections, and I was equally aware of what was going on in their physical communities. Yet we also had private and public communities where we could interact that were not limited to the places we lived. If the connections to remote communities replaced interactions in the local community, I suppose that could be a cause for feeling that the local community was lacking. However, in many ways distributed communities can incite local involvement.

Overall Sarason’s insight into the field of community psychology was engaging, informative, and thought provoking. Especially hard-hitting for me was the conviction he expressed about community psychology needing to draw upon other fields, especially other social sciences, to gain an accurate understanding of community. This is something I believe to be equally important for media psychology. To understand what community (or media) is and how it changes, we need to understand what Sarason called background factors. Innovation will only come from a multifaceted understanding of the topics.

I’d like to read this book again, but my stack of other books I need to read just keeps growing ... so I’ll keep it on my used book watch list to add to my library for later. 

I started reading this in bed thinking that it would aid me in nodding off. Far from it, I was awake until 2am reading and then for at least another hour thinking with the lights off as I tried to sleep.

Now that I’ve finished it, I think that anyone who has read or is considering reading Putnam’s Bowling Alone should pair it with this very respectfully challenging and insightful critique.

My only complaint is that in all of Arneil’s urging for new forms of community to be considered, she fails to touch on the idea of mediated communities.

With so many terms to choose from (according to Wikipedia: bliki, wikiLog, wog, wikiWeblog, wikiblog, or bloki), how do you pick just one? If the percentage of the word originating from blog or wiki should represent the percent of the content that follows that format, bloki is closest for my Braddock section because it is more blog than wiki. In actuality though, I am writing a blogi ... but that’s not an accepted term yet. (This section, on the other hand, is pure blog.)

When I started writing Braddock Journey, my intention was always to piece the posts by topics rather than blogging about experiences in a purely chronological manner. In that vein, I’ve been updating the posts when new information can be added, especially to the list of contractors. The only thing I’m missing is the archive of changes, which isn’t an available tool since I use blog software. I’ve heard that wordpress is releasing bliki software soon, but for now I don’t see anything that integrates here.

It’s interesting that we need new words for every new use or twist to what is done online. Terminology of online services, features, and functions seems to be a stumbling stone for many researchers. So many focus on the brand names instead of the general format, which to me seems limited in the application while also promotional for the companies. But then maybe it’s because those brand names are solid concepts in a more traditional sense rather than malleable compilations that haven’t taken root yet. Bliki, for instance, was coined in 2003—and though I’ve been bloki-ing for nearly six months I just learned the terms last night.