Tuesday 13 January 2009

Power of social networking....

I started this blog a few months ago. Quite rapidly I started learning so much that it was hard to keep documenting my progress. So I find, like all reflective journals, that it is hard to keep it up. But sometimes something happens that really shows the progress you have made so I thought I would tell you a little story about some interactions in the last few hours.



Earlier I was looking at the Health Foundation's webpage. I saved it to my delicious and noticed that someone else had saved it too. The other person had lots of bookmarks interesting to me but no webpage or email address saved. I have been lamenting before about how it is hard to find people on delicious sometimes, but this person had actually twittered about their delicious account so their twitter ID showed up on this page when I googled their delicious ID. Yay! I had found @jranck!



Earlier I had noticed that jranck had bookmarked a blog about developing a communications network using old mobile phones, in a primary health care project in Malawi. The latest post describes analysis of the content of the text messages sent and also included the text of the messages. Somewhere in the last few months I also learned about wordle, and I thought this could do with one so I pasted the text and created a wordle:
Wordle: Mobiles In Malawi- what everyone is texting about
I was then able to share my wordle with @jranck and @joshnesbit (the Mobiles in Malawi site creator) through twitter. Within an hour or so my wordle was being bookmarked by other people because of their tweets.

So that is my snapshot of the power of social networking as I see it today:)

2 comments:

  1. I've got lots of stories like that too. And I just can't understand why people don't 'get it'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, you could say that I have just documented a waste of time. Did my wordle really add anything to the original analysis?

    ReplyDelete

I am reintroducing word verification to cut back on spam posts. I'm sorry if you find it frustrating,