Special to Flip The Media from David Evans Ph.D.
Last week it was announced that Classmates.com, once among the best known brands on the web, has been retired. Type it into a browser and you will be redirected to MemoryLane.com, a new brand.

The site is dead. Long live the site.

Some thoughts, without my usual degree of research and annotation…as a social psychologist who learned a lot about how social media should and should not work during my two fascinating years there.

I remember sitting next to participants in usability interviews as they found their city, school, and friends’ names. Their emotion was real when they said, “Wow they’re in here?” referring to either a person or school that had once meant a lot to them. That emotion is critical to the success of an online venture. It’s similar to what game developers have to see in their playtests; what they call “fiero” the Italian word for fist-pumping triumph. For Classmates, it was the flush of time travel, the rush of memories activated. Without that emotion, no social media or gaming venture can succeed. Read more…

This is the second blog post of a three part series about my experiences as a presenter with fellow MCDM student Katherine Turner during the 2011 American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  See the first post from Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011 “Hurry Up and Wait.”

Episode II, A New Hope

After waiting in line for nearly 40 minutes and salivating for a traditional  bocadillo I had to settle for avena or oatmeal. I was not able to upload the video for the conference to YouTube or Vimeo as the uploading time kept getting longer and longer. The panaderia was a ghost town as the morning rush had come and gone. Things were looking bleak.

Finally, I was able to send the video via a drop box service to the film festival producer — and the crisis was averted!

The day of the film festival we made our way back from Culebra to the mainland via an hour and a half ferry ride at the break of dawn. The whole point of coming to Puerto Rico early was to have plenty of time to fine-tune our ASLO Conference presentations.

Oh, hindsight. Why you are always two days late and a dollar short?

Sunday morning from Fajardo to El Condado was just 35 minutes and the same route in the afternoon is an hour and a half. Since check-in time was not until later in the afternoon we had to take refuge at the only familiar place we knew our kind was always welcomed. A place that inspires and nurture the human spirit – one person, one coffee cup and one neighborhood at a time. That’s right – Starbucks.

The line at the Starbucks in El Condado seemed to be one self-generating infinite loop. The irony of the situation was not lost on us. We come all the way to Puerto Rico and were now seeking settling in comfortably at a Starbucks. (In case you are wondering the only difference on the menu is Café Con Leche is listed under local favorites.) Here the tourists outnumber the locals 3 to 1.

The baristas were somewhat bilingual but not to fear I speke the Spanish.  Thirty minutes later it’s my turn and I blank on how to say quad espresso. We edge our way to a table, plug in our laptops to one of four electrical outlets in the store and boot up to get online. But …

Read more…

This is the first blog post of a three part series about my experiences as a presenter with fellow MCDM student Katherine Turner during the 2011 American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Part two Easy Like Sunday Morning

The Road Less Traveled

Last week was the second time I had been home in the last twenty years. Pick any excuse and I will tell you that’s the reason it’s been so long since I’ve been back to Puerto Rico. Truth be told it’s because I’ve been go! go! go! ever since I left developing a career as a visual journalist. I have documented small-town politics, the immigration debate in our nation’s capitol, the effects of the war in local communities, hurricane Katrina, the fall of Enron, and ground-breaking research being conducted by university faculty and students in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve photographed four U.S. presidents… but I haven’t been home.

Read more…

A feature in this year’s conference is a panel on “Information, Values and the Justice System”. The workshop, which takes place on Tuesday the 8th, is organized by members of the Technology Committee of the Access to Justice Board, of which I am the current committee Chair.  The panel will examine the role that technology plays in assisting access to the resources of the Washington State court system. Technology and access are key components in how citizens can make effective use of government services.  The policy implications of how government agencies can provide technological access to services across geographical, cultural, social and economic areas are immense.

Philip Howard directs the NSF-funded World Information Access Project (wiaproject.org), and in September 2010 Oxford University Press published his book, The Internet and Islam: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.

We’re all pressed for time, with demands of work, friends, family and school. Think of this as a cheat sheet of blogs that will help you “think different” about the world of digital media. You won’t find the usual suspects (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc) and I don’t consider this a “best of” kinda post. Instead, it’s a reach-out-beyond your current thinking set of resources.
Read more…

If I asked you to tell me which professions have the deepest Rolodex, I bet you wouldn’t start out with computer programming or accounting. I’m guessing you’d list marketing, sales, HR (recruiters, anyway) and PR. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that marketing and human resources/recruiting were the most “social jobs” on the just-released NetProspex Social Index (NPSI), which is based on a database of “crowdsourced business contacts” (tip: TechFlash). The NPSI is a function of three things:

• Social Connectedness: how many people had more than one social media profile (according to the website, these are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn)
• Social Friendliness and Reach: the average number of connections per person across major social networks
• Social Activity is based entirely on Twitter stats: number of tweets, number of followers, and number of people followed

Read more…

Forget about slides. In today’s hyperlink world, a classic presentation feels like being inside of a corridor without the option to enter any of the side doors.

If you’re still stuck on PowerPoint presentations, it may be time to try out more dynamic alternatives, like Prezi, which has the financial and advisory back of TED and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

TechCrunch contributor Robin Wauters called Prezi “the coolest online presentation tool I’ve ever seen.” And Garr Reynolds, who coined the phrase ‘Presentation Zen,’ earlier this year declared Prezi a presentation tool more suitable for the digital natives than its competitors.

Read more…