Photos on Facebook lead to controversy and death threats

I just recently found out about a situation where some students at Penn State dressed as victims of the VA Tech shootings for Halloween. Apparently these costumes were meant to be part of an outrageous costume party among 10, we hope, close friends. However, when what happens so often, someone took a picture of the costumes, and they ended up on Facebook. What was just a little party, has now turned in to a nationwide story and reported death threats. It’s just another reminder that once something goes online, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.

Google Search Results 

From Penn State’s Student Paper:

Letter: Students should not make fun of tragedies

Letter: PSU shouldn’t have responded to pictures

Letter: Students don’t bring honor to PSU’s name

Letter: Students must think before making choices

Letter: Students should think of families at Va. Tech

Letter: Costumes shouldn’t be placed in the limelight

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Over 50s invading social networking sites?

If you think that social networking sites like myspace and facebook are only for today’s youth, think again. According to a Slashdot post, which links to the full article, the poorly dubbed “Silver Surfers” are utilizing social networking sites to plan trips and keep in touch with friends. Sound familiar? From /.

“The Telegraph newspaper reports that over-50s are invading sites like Facebook and MySpace in massive numbers. A recent study showed that nearly one third of Facebook users are aged between 35 and 54, and that this group also made up 41 percent of MySpace users. “Because the mind of an over-50 is likely superior to that of a drink-addled undergrad, at first there was uncertainty about whether older users would find the Facebook-led social-networking phenomena attractive.” Looks like dad just turned up to the party.”

Campaign 2.0

This year we’ve seen a lot of push from candidates to incorporate social networking into their campaigns, either to appear hip, or to truly connect with the web 2.0 folks. The big problem seen by the youtube and similar debates is the filtering of user submitted questions by journalists. According to an article on wired today, all of that is about to change.

 ”A new effort aims to change all that. Launched Wednesday, 10 Questions is soliciting video questions on four of the most popular video-sharing sites and placing them in a Digg-like tool that lets the public vote them up or down. Ultimately the 10 highest-ranking videos will be submitted unedited to each of the presidential candidates, who can then produce a video response.”

I took a quick look at 10 questions, it appears to  be an interesting concept. Beyond it’s obvious goal, I wonder if it might also be an opportunity for people new to politics to get an idea of what society is feeling about the campaign and the world in an environment they are comfortable with.

What do you think?

Quality of information not dependent on user type says researchers.

Researchers at Dartmouth College “examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.” and found that the quality of the contributions was not negatively impacted by what they call “Good Samaritans,” or people who just made a one-time edit to correct a mistake.

The concept of a user editable encyclopedia is interesting to me. On one hand I find it extremely useful for looking for information about things that might not be covered in an ordinary encyclopedia. I’ve been known to look for information on things ranging in topic from RAID configurations to how many episodes of the Thundercats have ever been produced. 130 22min episodes for those of you keeping track at home. . .

On the other hand, one has to be careful to consider the source and it’s reliability when citing from, or taking knowledge from it. Lord forbid you happened to grab some info from a vandalized article prior to it’s correction.

I’m interested in hearing from the community what their experience with the online encyclopedia has been. What do you use it for? Do you use it as a primary source or a secondary source of information?