Tag Archives: Research

Permanent job loss

Virginia Postrel has a piece in the NYT Magazine A Prettier Jobs Picture? in which she suggests that the death of work is much exaggerated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are flawed, she says, because the hide all the new jobs (explosive growth in finishing granite countertops and giving manicures) within “boring” categories of […]
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On Not Scraping Orkut

Liz on Many2Many posts a pointer to this geomapping of orkutsters. I spoke to my class Monday night about the ethical dimensions of getting at that data. The minute I first signed on to Orkut, I realized that it would be a great source of info to mine for looking at several social sciency questions, […]
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I am not (as) alone

Couple of recent papers are intriguing in that they fall squarely into areas of particular interest for me. The first is a paper that will be appearing in the proceedings for CHI 04 called Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. Since my dissertation (“pdf”:https://alex.halavais.net/research/diss.pdf) dealt a little bit with the […]
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Unbound whuffie

Steve Gillmor “writes”:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1516928,00.asp in this issue of _eweek_ about the place of social software, quoting Ross Mayfield’s “suggestion”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/25/why_orkut_doesnt_work.php that these systems are “frictionless wuffie[1] fun.” He talks a bit about wikis and the question of incentivizing information sharing, which he terms “enterprise whuffie.” I wonder if this isn’t an oxymoron. That is to say, bureaucratic […]
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