Social News Sites and their impact on the Internet

bwalker — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:07:18 -0500

There are so many social news sites available on the web today how do you know which ones are good? We can't possibly try them all out so we must rely on word of mouth and here is mine. I regularly use both Digg and Reddit and sometimes use SEOslap which has a combination of both and some others. They will have some of the same popular stories but for the most part they are unique. They are all user voted content meaning that if something is on their popular page, it is probably pretty good.

These types of communities typically have "regulars" who spend hours a day on them. I am not one of those people, instead I spend my hours on the web everyday researching website development tutorials and javascript techniques. I do however spend a couple hours every week observing what types of stories are typically made popular. You would be surprised at how much anti-bush stories make the top.

It will be interesting to see if these sites that have major followings of hundreds of thousands of people could join together to vote on something to persuade an ideal. One site Reddit.com was heavily promoting the impeachment of Bush. The story gained momentum then I heard nothing more of it.

The involvement in political discussions in these social news sites is the reason many people participate and because these sites typically host to a younger generation than what currently runs the government their is typically a large gap in ideals. I would love to see a couple of the top sites join together on a single purpose and have their audiences vote to accomplish something versus just talking about it. Due to the massive sizes of some of these loyal audiences to their respective social news site, I am surprised that none of them have installed ecommerce development to sell to their audience. My guess is it's only a matter of time. They are already capitalizing on the plain exposure to their audience generating millions is Ad revenue, why not take it a step further and make more?

One thing is for sure, these social news sites are only increasing their piece of the internet pie and it doesn't look like it is slowing anytime soon.

Survey of IT Student Worker Pay - 2007

AJKelton — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:07:15 -0600

David Stack (UW–Milwaukee) and I invite folks to complete a survey designed to compare student wages paid by central IT services with those paid by IT units in distributed schools, colleges and divisions.

Those who respond do not have to identify themselves or their institution. Summary statistics will be posted to the EDUCAUSE DTS Constituent Group Wiki and here in my blog. There is a place in the survey for optional self-identification and aggregate survey responses will be sent directly to those to provide this optional information.

For more information, please see the contact information below.

The survey can be found at
https://surveys.montclair.edu/survey/entry.jsp?id=1167448360496

Information on AJ Kelton can be found at:
Email - keltona@mail.montclair.edu
website - http://www.montclair.edu/~keltona

Information on David Stack can be found at:
Email - david@uwm.edu
website - http://www.uwm.edu/~david/

I have posted this information to my blog (in addition to the wiki) so that those who are interested in doing so can comment and/or continue the conversation. David and I encourage your participation.

EDUCAUSE | Student Technology Assistants

Social News Sites and their impact on the Internet

Survey of IT Student Worker Pay - 2007