Today is Blog Action Day, where each year a topic is chosen and bloggers and activists worldwide write about that topic in their blogs or post about it on Twitter and Facebook using the tags #FOOD and #BAD11. This year's topic is Food, and this year many of my students of my BGIedu class Using the Social Web for Social Change are using the day to help k […]

With Google+ almost two weeks into its test phase, conversation about this new social network service seems to be going in circles. Literally. That’s because Circles is the Google+ feature that users are generating the most buzz about. It’s Google’s answer to the problem of organizing your social graph online. If you’re not familiar with a social graph it’s […]

One of the common practices in the independent movie industry is to share favors to keep production costs low. I loan you use of a camera and you later do some editing for me on the cheap. Of course, it is often actually less direct then that: I loan you the camera, the community knows that I am generous, and when I need some editing time on the cheap, my so […]

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year's Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is sponsored yearly by Change.org. I wish I had known...

[intro skipped] One tool that I've used to manage these odd-sized groups in the past is what I call “The Braid”. It is derived from a group process called the Café Method, of which The World Café and Conversation Café are excellent examples. In The Café Method, people meet in smaller groups around tables, and then flow from table to table sharing ideas, […]

Passwords are very important for maintaining your online identity, because they ensure that no one else can access your accounts and do things that you wouldn't do. As such, you should make sure that your online passwords are as strong...

[brief summary of longer post] The average native English language speaker uses in the realm of 12,000 to 20,000 words, whereas a college graduate would use 20-25,000 words…Every time a new group of people meet together — whether in a team, in a marketplace, or in a community — one of the first activities they must do together is create a shared language…The […]

Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of "Using the Social Web for Social Change". [post continues with details...]

ast year I participated in a survey followed up by a focus group on the topic of Noncommercial Use, in particular around the context that about 2/3rds of the Creative Commons licenses extant use the NC attribute, such as in CC-BY-NC. (post continues with details and commentary...)

In my first article in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I discussed only offers up the most rudimentary explanation of the dynamics, and that is because typically not all of the members of a group are equally involved. In order to better define who constitutes the […]

Meet Ben Paul, a real person with whom I spoke this past month.  At that time he had not yet landed his new job.  However, I knew he would get a job offer based on his story of how he was conducting his job search.  He’s every career coach’s dream.  He did everything correctly in [...]

I had a lengthy discussion with someone that was trying to decide whether to take a position that would pay significantly less than her target salary range. She has been unemployed for over a year, and her financial situation had become dire. She recognizes the need to get an income, however, is torn about taking a [...]

Imagine you’ve been on the job market for about six months. You are paying your mortgage on your credit cards at this point. Your unemployment benefits are about to run out and your job prospects remain dismal, no matter what you seem to do. Finally, you land a killer opportunity, pass the phone screen and show [...]