Using social media for social change

By SUSAN MERNIT Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society — how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect. What’s tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, […]

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Digital fluency and social change, at any age

An update on Social Citizens By ALLISON FINE Social Citizens BETA is a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation in early 2008 to help bring attention to the ways that young people are using new, social media to affect social change. The notion of young people as “Social Citizens” comes from the intersection of several […]

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Newspapers fall out of orbit

Late last year William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews, announced he had identified the problem behind years of steep decline in the news industry. “It’s a good old fashioned economic recession,” Singleton said. In the absence of motion, sooner or later the problem will be recession. Download the report (PDF)

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Content in the creative commons. Who profits?

There’s a story going around that touts the Internet as a perpetual money machine. It goes something like this: many pieces of old content on the digital-now network have aggregate residual value that, over time, exceed present value of fresh content, which spikes and subsides quickly. The story is called the Long Tail. It is […]

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We Media 2010 Fellows

Amazing class of We Media Miami ’10 Fellows includes: Donna Choi, Phil Daquila, Martha Diaz, Roshani Kithari, Suzanne McBride, Michael Stoll, Josh Wilson, Samantha Beinhacker, Heidi Boisvert and Ely Bonder.

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The sausage factory: Why advertisers and ad agencies are failing customers

By MARK WALSH Have you noticed how much time, money and intelligence is allocated to identify the demographic, psychographic, emotional and purchasing-intent characteristics of today’s Internet users (or consumers?)? Isn’t it amazing how great companies like Tacoda, Revenue Science, Ad.com and all the ad-networks are touting their ability to find the needle in the haystack? […]

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We Media Thinking Papers

The following papers are available for download in pdf form. Call it CrowdvertisingThe sausage factory: Why advertisers and ad agencies are failing customers Content in the creative commons. Who profits?The artist, the Long Tail and the clash over rights The news, the muse, the economy and other mythsNewspapers fall out of orbit as an innovation […]

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Digital Nation: What it means to be human

Near the end of PBS’s Digital Nation, we’re taken to a military facility in the desert an hour outside of Las Vegas where a soldier sits in a cushy chair and pilots an unmanned drone over Afghanistan. The drone’s cameras send images from a war zone to a screen at the soldier’s work station. As […]

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Ashton Kutcher punked: We are a virus.

If Ashton Kutcher’s 4.5 million Twitter followers make you feel inadequate, I’ve got good news: scientists investigating social networks have punked the “influentials” theory that drives celebrities to the top of the charts. Aplusk, who boasts that he’s bigger than CNN, is apparently overrated. A new study finds that the importance of most influential spreaders […]

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Raising Voices: Amra Tareen at We Media

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding. How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media Miami […]

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