Social Aspects of the Internet; The Social Web

This page:
Internet News and Culture | The Social Web (Web 2.0) | Internet Demographics | Personal Effects (Life Hacks) | Cyberliberties | History | Future of the 'Net | Hoaxes | Scams and Spam

Internet News and Culture

• Ars Technica
• CNet - Tech guides
• CNet News.com - Tech news
• Cybergrrl Webstation - Dedicated to getting women and girls online
• First Monday - Published the first Monday of every month, this peer-reviewed journal covers social aspects of the Internet, often with a library emphasis
• Internet.com - News and advice
• Know Your Meme - Stuff that's going around the social web
• Mashable
• NetFuture: Technology and Human Responsibility - A newsletter that looks at the big questions every four weeks
• Red Rock Eater - A guide to 'Net events, politics, and literature by Phil Agre
• Howard Rheingold - Author of Virtual Community (Find it in a library)
• Slashdot - Their motto is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." A communal Blog for coders, hackers, et al
• TechCrunch
• Wired
• Webgrrls International
• Yahoo Tech

The Social Web / Web 2.0

Many of these sites fall into the amorphous category known as Web 2.0 — sites that allow more user interactivity, commenting, tagging, networking, collaboration, etc.

Web 2.0 Directories:

• Most Comprehensive Web 2.0 List - It's hard to argue with the title of this page
• Cybrarian's Web (books by Cheryl Anne Peltier-Davis):
• Tools and Links from Cybrarian's Web
• Tools and Links from Cybrarian's Web 2
• Go 2 Web 2.0 - Large directory
• Web 2.0 - A large directory with many categories (Shambles.net)

Identity / Presence / Personal Brand on the Web:

These sites encourage users to create a central web presence and link to all of their social media personae in a single place

• About.me
• Flavors.me
• Icon.me

Social Networking:

See also

• Custom Alert Services
• Discussion Groups
• Blogs
• URL Shorteners

Web sites that allow teenagers fun-loving people of all ages to waste inordinate amounts of time meet and network. (Some of these sites are actually aimed at serious professionals.)

• Facebook - One of the largest countries in the world, in a way
• Google + - Google's social network
• LinkedIn - Professional networking
• Pinterest - Find common interests through pictures; seems like a mashup of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and social bookmarking
• Twitter - Tell everyone what you're doing — multiple times a day — in 140 280 characters
• Classmates.com - Find your fellow high school alumni
• Foursquare - Let your friends know where you are.
• FriendFeed - Can aggregate feeds from other social networking sites
• Friendster - One of the first such sites. Did you ever use it? Me neither
• Meetup - Use this site to take your virtual community into the real world
• MySpace - Once more popular than Google, so they say
• Ning - Create your own social network
• Orkut - Google's (first) social networking site
• Plaxo - Maintain contact lists. Plaxo Pulse lets you update friends with what you're doing on other social Web sites
• Ryze - Business networking
• Tribe - Tribes are based on interests and locations

Social Networking Tools

• IFTTT: If This Then That - Set up all kinds of "recipes," so that when an event happens on one web site (or app or social network), something will automatically happen on another. Works with more than 80 "channels." See some shared recipes to get the idea.
• Buffer - Schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, App.net
• Hootsuite - Dashboard for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare, WordPress, and other accounts
• TwitRSS.me - Get a Twitter user's feed as RSS

Social Bookmarking Sites:

See also

• Read-It-Later Services, below
• Collaborative News Sites

Save your bookmarks on the Web (so you can use them from any computer), tag them, share them with others, find the bookmarked sites of others with similar tastes to yours. Very similar are Collaborative News Sites, where users post links to news stories

• Diigo - This bookmarking site allows you to annotate and blog your links easily
• Faves - Follow and be followed by users with similar interests
• Google Bookmarks
• Historious - Free up to 300 bookmarks
• Netvouz
• Paper.li - Publishes your news links as an online newspaper
• Pinboard - Known as "antisocial bookmarking," because it lets you keep your bookmarks private. Has an annual fee. For an additional fee, you can archive web pages.
• RawSugar - Create a directory on a topic and make all tagged sites searchable
• Scoop.it - "Content curation" or "social curation" in specific topics
• StumbleUpon - Recommend Web sites, people, videos; as you do, the site "learns what you like" and gives you recommendations
• Xmarks - Store your bookmarks in the cloud, sync them with browsers on different computers
• Zootool

Web Directories of Social Bookmarking Tools

• 10 Alternatives to Delicious Bookmarking (SearchEngineLand)
• 28 Delicious Alternatives to Delicious (Phil Bradley)
• Free Bookmark Managers

Tips

• Nine Notable Uses for Social Bookmarking

Read-it-Later Services:

See also

• Social Bookmarking, above
• Bibliography: Citing and Organizing Sources

Similar to social bookmarking sites, these services let you save whole pages and read them later. Some of the social bookmarking sites above let you archive pages for a fee.

• CiteULike - Save and tag links to academic papers
• Evernote - For capturing all kinds of things, including links and pages
• Instapaper - Aimed at users who want to save web pages for reading later
• Pocket [GetPocket.com]
• Readability - "Turns any web page into a clean view for reading now or later on your computer, smartphone, or tablet."

Wikis and Other Content Management Systems:

See also

• Collaborating in the Cloud
• Library Wikis

Wiki software allows a group to work on a Web site collaboratively. And users don't have to know HTML

• Wiki Software (Wikipedia)

Wiki Hosts:

These sites provide wiki software and server space (often free). Work on an existing wiki or start your own

• Wetpaint
• Wikia
• Wikispaces

Examples of Wikis:

• Wiki Wiki Web - The original wiki; about computer programming
• Wikipedia - The most famous wiki, Wikipedia is a self-styled encyclopedia built by users. More about Wikipedia

Directory of Wikis:

• WikiIndex - "A wiki of wikis, wiki people and wiki ideas"

Other Content Management Systems (CMS):

• Drupal
• Joomla

Internet Demographics

• Internet World Stats
• Pew Research Internet Project - Source of some interesting survey data on Internet use
• ClickZ Stats - Statistics for online marketing

Personal Effects

Life Hacks:

See also

• How-To
• Personal Home Pages for sites that let you bring together all your favorite widgets, feeds, etc.
• Personal Calendars (Online)

Fast-spreading meme inspired by the book Getting Things Done by David Allen (Find it in a library) and the 2004 conference presentation on Life Hacks by Danny O'Brien. Some of the tips found on these sites have to do with using the Internet to make life easier and more productive, some of them don't

• Dumb Little Man: Tips for Life
• LifeHack.org - "Daily digest and pointer on productivity, getting things done and lifehacks"
• Lifehacker - "Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live."
• Lunch and Learn: Getting Things Done - by librarian Steve Lawson, Colorado College

Online To-Do Lists:

See also

• Data Storage / Data Sharing in the Cloud
• Online Notes
• Personal Calendars (Online)

These are available as apps, too, naturally.

• Any.do
• HabitRPG - "A free habit building app that treats your life like a game"
• Remember the Milk - Keep your to-do list online
• ToDoist
• Wunderlist

 

Internet Addiction:

• Internet Addiction Guide by John M. Grohol, Psy.D
• Netaholics Anonymous - A less-serious look at the subject

Cyberliberties

Cyberliberties include freedom of expression, the right to get information (including fair use), and privacy. The following pages deal with one or more of these issues

• Anonymity and Privacy on the Internet
• American Civil Liberties Union's Privacy & Technology page
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School)
• GrepLaw - Slashdot-style news on cyberlaw
• Center for Democracy and Technology
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse - News about threats to free speech on the Internet
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - "Defending freedom in the digital world"
• Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
• NetCoalition - A group of major Internet companies, they are for continuing the free flow of information that has made the Internet what it is. They track policy developments, particularly related to privacy and databases
• Privacy.net - Find out what can be known about you when you use the Internet
• Tech Law Journal - Covering many aspects of Internet law, including current legislation

History

• The Internet Archive - Storing an archive of the Internet (Web and Usenet) going back to 1996
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine - See Web pages as they were then. Here are some versions of my home page, 1999-2001
• "As We May Think" - In this 1945 essay, Vannevar Bush's hypothetical "memex" prefigures hypertext and the Web — must reading for librarians and Net workers (The Atlantic)
• All About the Internet: History of the Internet - Links to Internet histories, including some written by the participants (Internet Society)
• CERN's Greatest Achievement: the World Wide Web - From the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Geneva, Switzerland: Where the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline - From the 1950s to the present
• Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Net - Full text of one of the first books on Internet culture (Find it in a library)
• W3C: World Wide Web Consortium - The people who make Web standards

Future of the 'Net

• Final Exam: The Future of Computing - Not really a prediction, just some good issues to chew on
• Internet 2 - The academic network

Internet Hoaxes

• Snopes.com - Urban Legends Reference Pages
• April Fools on the Net
• Computer Virus Myths home page (no longer updated) [vmyths.com]
• Don't Spread That Hoax!
• Kaycee Nicole (Swenson) FAQ - The dying student who turned out to be fictional
• Symantec List of Hoaxes
• Vonnegut Commencement Speech That Wasn't Also, The Cyber-Saga of the 'Sunscreen' Song, a Washington Post article on the Vonnegut and Denny Reikert hoaxes

Internet Scams and Spam

The anti-social Web.

• Pyramid schemes like "Make Cash Fast" are illegal
• Campaign Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE)
• Fight Spam on the Internet
• Internet ScamBusters
• Spam News - Everything you wanted to know about spam developments, including where to complain
• The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference

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