I’ll be in NC next week collecting interview data for my dissertation. If you live in the Raleigh/Durham or Lexington/Winston-Salem areas and want to participate, let me know.

I’m looking to talk to most any working adult, regardless of industry, job, position, etc… I’m particularly interested in talking to you if you consider yourself always on, as well as if you’re not always on, for whatever reason, especially if you’ve made a specific decision to not be always on. So let me know if you want to be interviewed.

I realize I’ve been very bad with posting regularly the past two weeks. It’s been nice outside and I’ve been otherwise engaged. But I have been keeping up with my Twitter updates pretty well. It sometimes just seems easier to post 140 characters than it does to come up with an entire well-written, original, full-length blog post (well, full-length to be sure; you can argue with the well-written and original parts).

I don’t see Twitter as a replacement for my blog; they each serve different functions. But I do see Twitter as providing a very important service that my blog doesn’t really provide, and that’s the sharing of links. There are tons of sites I come across every day that I want to share with people, but don’t want to write an entire blog post about. I generally bookmark these sites in del.icio.us, but I don’t think many people subscribe to my del.icio.us feed. I use del.icio.us more to file things away for my own future use. But Twitter is a great place to share links with others. And I’ve found that I learn about lots of new things from reading others’ feeds.

I know I’m not the first person to talk about Twitter in this way (there goes this post’s originality), but after talking to some non-Twittering friends yesterday, I think this is a very important use of Twitter. These friends, all of whom use MySpace or Facebook and Flickr, don’t really get Twitter. Which is fine; I didn’t get Twitter when I started using it. It’s hard to see its usefulness if people in your network don’t use it.

Anyway, I’m going to keep thinking and blogging about this issue (and posting more regularly), but in the meantime, please check my Twitter feed - http://twitter.com/jennmonroe.

I know I haven’t posted in a few days, but we’ve had such beautiful weather this week that I’ve been spending lots of time outside.  A few of the places I like to go when it’s nice - ones I’d recommend to readers in the Austin area - are:

St. Edwards Park - Just a few minutes from our house, and not far from most places in west, north or central Austin, this park feels like it’s in the middle of the country.  It’s nestled in the hills, there aren’t a lot of people around, the water in the creek is clear and inviting, and it’s just wonderful.

Old Settlers Park - This park is huge and about half an hour from Austin (in Round Rock), but has a really great disc golf course.  It’s hard (some 1000 feet par 5 holes), but it’s also beautiful and professionally maintained.  It takes a couple hours to finish, but it’s totally worth the drive.

The Draught House Pub - If you’d rather enjoy the outdoors with a tasty adult beverage in your hand, then this is the place.  Hands down my favorite bar in Austin, I love the Draught House because they have an awesome beer selection and I can sit in a camping chair in the parking lot and enjoy that beer.

Anyway, it’s spring and it’s gorgeous, so I’m going to take advantage of the weather and spend more time outside in it.  You should, too.

I learned some interesting things with the informal poll I conducted with 50 of my undergraduate students today.

First, all of them have cell phones. Duh. But what is more interesting is that more than half of them have web-enabled cell phones, and many of those are Blackberries, iPhones and other PDAs/smartphones.

Second, they almost all use Facebook. More than 90% of the students in class today have Facebook accounts. Almost half are also on MySpace (and none of them were only on MySpace). A couple are on Xanga and Friendster, as well. Almost half have YouTube accounts (though I don’t know how often they actually upload videos).

In terms of network fatigue, this group really doesn’t seem to be affected. They just aren’t using that many of these sites. Several students don’t have accounts on any social sites at all. And only a couple students were on more than Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. A few have Flickr accounts. Only one student said he has accounts on more than four sites.

We didn’t have time for much discussion or elaboration on these topics in class today, but I am looking forward to learning more about how my students use these tools. In fact, if any of those students are reading this now, I invite them to comment with their perspectives.

It’s time to conduct interviews for my dissertation. Everything’s been approved by the IRB, so I’m ready to go.

So, if you’re interested in talking about the ways you use communication technologies (cell phones and smartphones, laptops, instant messaging, email, the web, PDAs, etc…) to be connected, I would love to interview you!

I’m specifically looking for people in the Austin, San Francisco and Raleigh/Durham areas. Let me know if you’re interested!

A recurring theme at SXSWi this year was network fatigue. As in, a person is on so many social sites - Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Dopplr, Yelp, and so on - that she can’t keep up with all of them. She’s overloaded, and definitely not communicating and connecting efficiently.

So in response to this problem, some smart folks have come up with some clever solutions - FriendFeed and Socialthing! two of hottest. Just in time, too, because I was about to be buried under my growing pile of network connections. The idea behind FriendFeed, Socialthing! and other services like them is that you can get one account to track all your other accounts. So on your FriendFeed site, you are notified whenever a friend posts something to one of the various social sites; instead of having to log into potentially dozens of other sites, you can log into one.

I do think this is a good idea. Probably an inevitable one, too. For the past four or five years, more and more of these social sites have been popping up, each offering an interesting angle or different community. But the more we sign up for, the harder it gets to manage. Imagine having 15 different cell phones - one for each set of people you want to talk to or topic you want to talk about. I’d have one phone to talk about photography, another to talk about work stuff, another to talk to people I knew in high school, plus a dozen more. That would be a mess! So it’s great to have one cell phone, one central space to manage all the others.

Or is it? How many people actually suffer from this network fatigue? Facebook has approximately 68 million users. There are somewhere between 6 and 7 billion people in the world. Which means somewhere around 0.1% of the world uses Facebook. Of course this is a silly argument - there are billions of people who don’t or can’t use even the internet, let alone a social networking site - but it provides a little perspective. And of course, any business would be happy to have 68 million customers; that is still a ridiculously huge number of people. But how many of those 68 million people have accounts on multiple other social sites?

At South by Southwest, it would appear that everyone does. They also all have iPhones and MacBooks. The people who attend the interactive conference are a very specific group, and they do use multiple social sites. They use them a lot. But when I leave the wonderful little bubble of SXSW, I don’t see as many people using all of these sites. In fact, I see most people using only a couple.  Almost everyone has a Facebook or MySpace account and then one or two others (usually LinkedIn, Flickr or Yelp). And these are middle class, well-educated Americans in their 20s and early 30s - one of the main demographics for social networking sites. If these people aren’t using much more than Facebook and MySpace, why do they need FriendFeed? And if they don’t, who does? Besides the group of early-adopting super-users who frequent conferences like SXSW, of course.

I’m going to do an experiment. I teach a class of 60 undergraduates. Tomorrow I’m going to find out which sites they use, which sites they’ve heard of, and how they feel about network fatigue. Because I do think sites like Socialthing! and FriendFeed are very interesting, and will personally help me manage my networks. But I just wonder how prevalent this network fatigue actually is.

An update on this experiment soon…

At a recent kickball (yep, kickball) game with some fellow grad students, the topic of academic transparency came up. We’ve been talking for a while about the benefits of sharing information about our successes and failures with each other, specifically as they relate to the publication and grant processes. It is incredibly valuable to learn from others’ experiences with what works (and what doesn’t) in getting articles published in highly respected academic journals, for example. However, as expected, several people expressed concerned with issues of privacy, theft, and reputation.

Academics are notoriously protective of their ideas; in an industry where publishing lots of good ideas on a regular basis means job security and the esteem of your peers, of course you’re going to protect your best ideas. You don’t want someone else publishing your ideas before you can. However, I think there’s an important distinction between keeping your ideas quiet and keeping your process quiet.

We can learn a great deal from talking to others about their experiences. With the publishing example in particular, if I couldn’t talk to other students and faculty who had submitted articles before, I would have no idea where to start or what to do. And part of that means sharing failures and mistakes, not just successes.

But this is where many people resist. No one wants to talk about their failures. Even though we live in a culture that is relatively accepting of failure, we’re still quite tight lipped about our personal failures. People are often reluctant to share these experiences.  Why is this?  Are we afraid of looking bad in front of others?  Stupid?  Naive?  Less competitive? Maybe we’re worried that one day this information will come back to us in some unfortunate way, that it may damage us professionally.

But will being open about our failures actually hurt us?  It seems to me that everyone fails at some point in their lives, many of us do it all the time!  Maybe being open and discussing these failures with others will help us learn from our mistakes and feel better about ourselves, a sort of failure therapy. And in the process, others will learn from these mistakes and not have to experience them themselves. It seems win-win.  So why are we so reluctant to participate in these kinds of conversations?

Over the next few days, as I’m recovering from SXSW Interactive and making sense out of all that I saw, heard and experienced, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts on what I learned. But for now, here are some of the ideas I noticed cropping up again and again throughout the conference.

1. Life streaming
   1. Individual public image, brand, identity, reputation, publicity
   2. Internet famous
   3. Credibility, authority
   4. Authenticity, honesty, transparency
   5. Consumption vs. creation
2. Community
   1. Collective intelligence
   2. Smart mobs, the power of the many
   3. Building audience/community
3. Constant connection and communication
   1. Portable technology
   2. Efficiency
   3. Real-time, all about the now
   4. Interactivity and social
   5. Emerging/emergent
   6. Types of friends
   7. Control
4. Hyper-locality
5. Organizations
   1. Failure vs. small success vs. big success
   2. Organizational culture
   3. Work-life, lifestyle
   4. Coworking
6. Addiction and overload

This is a big list of big ideas, many of them core to the “social ecosystem” in which we currently find ourselves (another big idea).  And all of these relate to the social side of SXSW content (I’ve heard from Hayes that there were quite a few interesting technical discussions, but I’ll leave that to those of you who are qualified to talk about the technical). As I further digest what I learned, I’ll post more on these ideas individually.  But I can summarize SXSW in two words: intellectually stimulating.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly, met some bright and creative people, and am definitely motivated to continue thinking about and researching these interesting and important ideas.

I’m just getting home from the last party after the last panels of SXSWi 2008. It was a great conference where I met a number of very interesting people. I’ll be posting more on what I learned over the next few days. Also, I really am updating this site over the next few days as well. So, travel safely my new friends, and I’ll be talking to you soon!

I’m in the process of moving my blog and other content to this new site. Welcome to www.deeringdavis.com! Things may look a little rough over the next few days, but it’ll be finished soon. You can be looking forward to much more than a blog by the time I’m done, I can promise you that.