Government | Make Money Online

Data Mining and Social Media

March 2, 2010 No comments

We give out way too much information online. You know it, I know it, but it’s fun and we so push the fear out of our minds and continue to chat about our kids, our friends, how annoying so-and-so is at work on Facebook, Twitter and more. But we’ve been conditioned to share, and it’s not a recent evolution.

Supermarket ‘clubs’, like those in place at CVS, Safeway, Publix, and virtually every chain supermarket, save Walmart, already share your data with telemarketers and email marketers. The swipe saves us a few bucks so we agree… Upromise, by Sallie Mae, has already gotten into big trouble with not disclosing the truckloads of data they collect from their toolbar to their users. Still college students add that toolbar and hope for the best. WE SHARE TOO MUCH!

A Mashable post on Data Mining in Social Media digs a little deeper, but still not deep enough. They don’t even mention the new iPhone app that’s being called a ’stalker’s dream’ nor the freaky 123People that lets you check the government documents that other people have filed (or had filed against them).

I’m big on social media, I love it, but this trend toward over-sharing, both purposefully and unintentionally, frightens me.

Social Bookmarking

Source:
Data Mining and Social Media

Citizentube: Watching video change our world

June 16, 2009 No comments

As you might have noticed, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a new technology platform for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?

These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you’ve followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn’t fast enough — so now we’re blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.

Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose ‘08 platform and the CNN/YouTube Debates in 2007. Since then we’ve expanded our programming to the fields of government, activism, and news & information. On the blog, we’ll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what’s happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.

So be sure to check out www.citizentube.com and subscribe to our RSS feed (we’re on Twitter, too: @citizentube). With more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, our blog helps provide you with a filter that you can use to see the way that video is changing our world.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics