Social Networking Study

Jenny : Thanks, Steve, this is *very* interesting. A brilliant experiment and prime example of what a colleague of mine has dubbed “Facebook journalism.”

Who is this source, this “I” who writes?  The proliferation of isolated “facts” is, imho, precisely why we now hear about so many failures to “connect the dots.”

Steve wrote: to the lady (and all others) who are doing a social networking study, here is an interesting story.

about 2 years ago i wanted to see how far i can go via web 2.0 into society. i setup a twitter account, and a web site, both hidden behind proxies, both aggregated news from various sources and cleaned them up and posted them. within 3 months the latimes was citing me (not me but the twitter account and the “reporters” on the web site) for some stories. then the nyt did the same, a few months later (that crashed my server, i wasn’t setup for the traffic), and msnbc, wsj, cnn, and fox tv did the same live on the air. to this day they all follow me on twitter and via the web and anything i state is taken as gods word. however one of the reasons is that i never posted a personal opinion, never posted a rumor, only facts, way before the news media found out about it i knew it and posted it.

so there you go. do not trust web 2.0 always, it might just be the kid from brooklyn testing the waters.

disclaimer, i have not posted anything in months yet i still get on lots of #ff lists on a weekly basis, go figure..