Commonwealth Expert Team on social media use during presidential election

The Final Report on 2010 Presidential Election in Sri Lanka by the Commonwealth Expert Team issued on 15th February 2010 interrogates briefly the use of social media during the campaign, This election campaign saw the two main candidates and their supporters make wide use of social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, as […]

Facebook for Good

“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” That may or may not be Facebook’s mission. But at 200 million users, there’s no denying that the social network has some appeal. The new Facebook for Good page asks users of the network to share their […]

Poll: Can social networks change the world?

Yes, they can, in the words of Barack Obama’s election campaign. That campaign itself provided evidence that the tools of “Web 2.0″ – the community-driven web – can really make a difference, delegates at the Terra future conference in London heard this week. From New Scientist comes a short article that explores whether social networks can […]

Pissu Poona: The new face of activism on the web in Sri Lanka?

Facebook’s appeal as a platform for political activism in the Middle East is well known. Far fewer people access it in Sri Lanka, even amongst the handful in the country who are connected to the web and Internet. And yet, I received an invitation yesterday from Pissu Poona, an anonymous identity I befriended whose only […]

Behavioral patterns on Facebook: We are still intimate beings

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends: Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall Messages or chats with 4 friends The average female Facebook user with 120 friends: Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall Messages or chats with 6 friends The average male Facebook user with 500 […]

Media Literacy and Web 2.0

Robin Good’s website features an interesting article on the democratic potential of Web 2.0. If we agree that Web 2.0 for the purposes of this article refers to a slew of new services and tools on the web that encourage peer to peer communications as well as social networking via the web, the resulting discussion […]

Spoofing politicians on Facebook no more?

A while ago Indi had this hilarious post on Mahinda and Mervyn on Facebook. Clearly satirical, the profiles and whoever who set them up were interrogating the behaviour of two prominent political figures in Sri Lanka. And it was very nicely done. I can’t find the profiles anymore and perhaps just as well. If the […]

The pitfalls and future of social networking

An  article in The Economist highlights the pitfalls of social networking platforms and technologies today and their possible evolution in the future. “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, […]

Enemies on Facebook – Anti-social behaviour in social networks

Image from Enemybook “People have always been mean and petty and now, with the culture of putting everything online and the reality shows that thrive on voting people off the island or telling people you’re fired, it’s not surprising that people want to blast their enemies to the world,” said Patrice Oppliger, assistant professor of […]

FrontlineSMS on Facebook

Ken Banks, whose life and work I admire a great deal, recently emailed me about joining the FrontlineSMS Supporters Group on Facebook. I am yet to be convinced that Facebook is, beyond the hype, truly capable as a serious collaboration and socio-political activist site, but I along with others have had to ditch initial scepticism […]