Quite a bit, actually. Psychologists gathered students to take various personality tests, and then had a separate group of people rate their Facebook personalities against the same dimensions and found that there was a strong correlation between the two.
I wonder what my facebook profile says about me?
Read: Student Facebook Profiles Are a Match - US News and World Report
I’m sure you know what Twitter is by now, if you don’t, it’s myspace on crack - instantly update everyone on everything you’re doing every moment of every day. Enter twittervision - it shows you on a global scale using Google Maps who’s doing what in real time. It’s strangely fascinating (okay, actually I’m completely and utterly bored by it already and waiting for the next version).
In the new digital age, nerds are the new bullies. In the wake of Kathy Sierra’s death threats, this is an interesting study.
Preliminary results from the research show so-called computer geeks are becoming the new schoolyard bullies. Final results of the study, which will be completed in June, are expected to be published in the autumn.
“Traditional bullying is a power differential,” Mishna said in an interview.
“The power before could have been age, size, smartness, popularity, ability. Now it’s the perceived anonymous nature. We’d like to find out how anonymous it really is. The power now is you can put it all over (the place).”
The focus groups also revealed victims refuse to tell an adult about the abuse because they fear they will be punished in order to be protected.
“They’re scared that their parents will take away their computer privileges,” Mishna said.
Read: Schoolgirls bullied into stripping online - Yahoo! News
This is really cool. Similar to How Happiness is Reflected in Blogs, this website creates a map of human feelings from blogs. It can be sorted by age group, gender, geographic region & weather on that day. And the UI is cute too, though I wish it were more useful. Check out the Findings.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
Read: We Feel Fine
This is a cool article about how LiveJournal bloggers, who can tag their posts with various moods, are happier at some times of day & on some days of the week than others. Happiest time? 9pm. Happiest day of the week? Saturday.
Read: Google Operating System: How Happiness Is Reflected in Blogs
I read a Seth Godin piece recently that challenged advertisers to behave more ethically - advertising as a whole isn’t always something to be proud of, and let’s face it, the core tenets of advertising haven’t really changed much since people realized that brand comfort (I think I just invented that term) was the most important factor - being exposed to a brand enough that you feel comfortable picking it up in the store. So advertising has become lots of flashy ads that do silly things & then show the product.
By listening to the consumers they tell you that only 2% of women are prepared to call themselves beautiful, you can become a force for social change and produce memorable, meaningful, and perhaps even important ads.
After all, the Dove campaign for real beauty is a great example of marketing that works with contemporary culture, not against it. Dove was prepared to capture the tremendous energy coming off a trend that many brands just looked through or tried to work around. In point of fact, ideas of femaleness had been “under review” and deeply contested in our society at least since the ideas of Susan B. Anthony. The tide had come and gone several times by 2003 and now it appeared to be prepared to transform our culture’s most fundamental ideas of what beauty is.
Read: This Blog Sits at the: 7 Branding lessons from the Dove campaign
This is a really cool idea - umbrella vending machines. Put them near mall entrances, by subway stations and so on and they could be a (seasonal) cash cow. Maybe they could also (ironically) sell bottles of water for when the weather is hot & sunny.
…we’re surprised umbrella vending isn’t yet a universal feature at shopping malls and other high foot-traffic areas around the world. Which is why we were happy to spot Uport in Singapore. Uport currently operates six vending machines in Singapore, with more on the way. For SGD 6 (USD 3.90 / EUR 3), customers get a good quality umbrella dispensed in a can.
I think Edward Tufte would have a heart attack if he saw this map of major trends for 2007 and beyond.
Given it’s festive season now, it’s probably time for a bit of fun. Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have collaborated in producing a map of major trends for 2007 and beyond, across ten segments: society & culture, government & politics, work & business, media & communications, science & technology, food & drink, medicine & well-being, financial services, retail & leisure, and transport & automotive.
Read: Future Exploration Blog: Trend map for 2007 and beyond