alex de carvalho

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Announcement – 4:58 pm

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Soaring

corcovado
Originally uploaded by alexdecarvalho

One of the advantages of traveling on a major holiday is that no one else does, and so my flight to Rio was empty as my calendar turned its page to 2010 at 30,000 feet.

Corcovado (the Christ the Redeemer statue) is an inspiration to many for religious reasons. Standing high above the city with arms outstretched, it evokes feelings of protection, benevolence, compassion, charity, and friendship.

Have you seen videos of wingsuit flyers? What if Corcovado was also reminding us to soar in our daily lives?

Chris Brogan just blogged his 3 keywords for 2010. I’ll draw inspiration this year from Corcovado as a visual metaphor for soaring.

“Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.” -A.W. Tozer

Wishing you good fortune in the new year.

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Tagged: guidance, inspiration, key words, soar, soaring, Travel

Published:

Friday, January 1st, 2010 – 6:22 pm

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Travel

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CNJ595: Social Media – Communication, Community, and Literacy

University of Miami – School of Communication
CNJ595: Web 2.0: Social Media: Communication, Community, and Literacy
Spring Semester 2010

SYLLABUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE:

In a few short years, social media has profoundly changed the online communication landscape. With the advent of new tools and platforms, more and more people are publishing and participating in conversations online. Mass adoption of social computing technologies has led to new types of mediated interaction as people maintain more relationships than any time prior.

As former members of the audience become the creators of content, corporations and media organizations lose control of their marketing message and individuals face new challenges in terms of privacy, identity, and the maintenance of virtual relationships.

After an overview of how we got here, this course explores these opportunities and challenges across a number of disciplines and technologies.

This course is grounded in practice, and you will be required to participate in social networks, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. Class discussions, presentations by students, readings, and examples of emerging technologies and media will bring us greater understanding of the issues, evolution, and practice of social media. We will also learn from case studies, invited speakers, and our own learning journals, new effective strategies and applications of these platforms.

The class is highly participatory both offline and online. Between the weekly scheduled class meetings, this course’s discussion continues in a variety of online and virtual environments. Those who complete this course will know how to use social media productively, and have a framework for understanding and evaluating new tools and platforms.

ASSIGNMENTS/COURSEWORK:

We will be using a shared wiki, individual blogs, a bookmarking service, and individual twitter accounts as the web platforms for this course.

The wiki functions as the central space for collaboration, where assignments and readings will be posted and discussions will be held. The wiki will also have the required reading list, which may change during the course according to our progress.

The online requirements serve both to familiarize you with new web communication technologies and to continue the discussion beyond the confines of the campus.

Wiki – 5% of final grade. The first requirement is to use the wiki as directed in the class assignments or to add to the discussion or common pages.

Blog – 25% of final grade. The second is to publish a minimum of two blog posts each week on topics relevant to the class discussion, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. Each blog post should link to relevant resources on the web. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class, the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Each blog post must include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

Microblog – 10% of final grade. The third will involve maintaining a Twitter account active with at minimum one posting every 24hrs. Twitter is a free micro-blogging service and community where a post is 140 characters or less. Twitter posts will be evaluated on the cultivation of community through friending, retweets (and being retweeted), and general engagement through @replies.

Social Bookmarking – 5% of final grade. The fourth is to bookmark websites that are of interest to the course, using the free service delicious ( http://del.icio.us/ or http://delicious.com ). Students will be expected to complete 40 bookmarks relevant to class topics throughout the semester, at least 20 of which should be done by mid-term. Each bookmark must also include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

Topical Presentation and Discussion – 25% of final grade. You will be expected to deliver a presentation during the course.You may choose to research and present an existing relational technology (a social network or a social media tool), covering the following aspects: what is the history of the technology or platform? What are the relational aspects and functionalities? How is identity developed? What types of activities created digital traces? How are relationships created and displayed? How are communities formed and managed? How does the social discovery of information, news, and events occur? How does the platform or technology integrate with external web services?
Alternatively, you may choose to interview a recognized thought-leader or entrepreneur in social media, including: how did they get started with social media? What is their field of expertise or strength in social media? What were the milestones in their own online development? What do they consider to be historical milestones in social media (case studies, new technologies, etc.)? What challenges have they faced and what battles have they fought along the way (anecdotes are important)? What is the future of social media?Presentations should be 20 minutes in length with accompanying visuals.

Participation – 20% of final grade. Class participation is required. Students are expected to do all the required readings for the course, to attend classes regularly, to have completed the reading in advance of classes, and to participate actively in class discussion. Students will facilitate discussion, together with one other student, on selected syllabus readings. Each reading will be presented by this team of two students, who will coordinate among themselves and come to class prepared to summarize the material, develop additional themes for further discussion and facilitate broad discussion, working from questions submitted by students. Students will be graded on the clarity of presentation and the level of understanding of the readings under discussion.

Final Exam – 10% of final grade. The final exam will evaluate your familiarity with social media concepts, case studies, and vocabulary.

COURSE TOPICS OUTLINE

Session 1 January 20, 2010 – Meet the social web

Class introductions: who are we and what are our interests; what do we expect and want out of this class?

Instructor and students introduce themselves, instructor explains objectives, assignments and expectations.

Course introduction: what has changed online, how and why we got here:

* Overview of social media and Web 2.0

* Differences between traditional media and social media

* Introduction to wikis, including PBwiki and MediaWiki

Session 2 January 27, 2010 – Blogging concepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques

* Blogging culture: authenticity, transparency, authority, influence, ethics, and credibility

* Writing for the web: how do people read and browse online?

* Newspapers text vs. online text: similarities and contrasts

* Corporate blogging

* Hosting your own blog vs. using hosted blog platforms

* Creation of a web site using Wordpress content management system

* Basics of HTML and CSS to get you out of a jam

* Trackbacks, links, tags, sidebars, blogrolls, widgets, and feeds

* Principal search engines for blogs

Session 3 February 3, 2010 – RSS feeds and feedreaders: techniques in distribution, productivity, and monitoring.

All you wanted to know about RSS but were afraid to ask:

* Feed readers: manage your information overload and save time.

* Google Reader and Feedly

* Google Shared Items

* Publishing and distributing your media online; syndicating your media and content to your communities through RSS

* Monitoring your reputation, your brands and your keywords

* Setting up feeds and alerts for the information that matters to you

* Feedburner

* Facebook feeds, Tumblr, Jaiku, FriendFeed and SocialThing

* Blog and social network widgets

Session 4 February 10, 2010 – Social networks, identity, and your brand

* Your life online: considerations when setting up an account

* Your online CV: business networking with LinkedIn

* Social Graph: 6 degrees of separation, in theory and practice

* Online communities and social networks: becoming an active member and participating

* Rapid cognition online

* Social networking for promoting people, products, and services

* How does social network design and architecture affect participation? What else affects participation?

Invited guest: Facebook app expert

* Comparing the platforms: LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, and more

* Facebook apps and Open Social

* Whose data is it? Closed gardens and network data portability

Session 5 February 17, 2010 – Additional concepts, platforms, and techniques

* It’s all social. How people connect: framework for understanding and analysis

* Social object: friend-based sociality and object-centered sociality

* The social media starfish

* OpenID

* Photography on the web: what’s Flickr and how does it fit in?

* Copyright and Creative Commons

* Harnessing collective intelligence: social bookmarks, folksonomies, collaborative and active filtering

* Google and Google News search hacks

Invited speaker: web analytics and SEO expert

* How online robots and spiders index and crawl through your content

* Metrics, measurement and analytics

* Search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, and social media optimization (SMO)

Session 6 February 24, 2010 – Video and audio distribution and sharing

* Mediasnacks. Filming, editing, and publishing a short video online

* Recording an audio interview, editing, and uploading it

* Use of images, graphs, and maps to illustrate texts

* Creating Soundslides with photos and audio

* Using Bittorrent for uploading and downloading large files

* Conversational video: Seesmic is to YouTube what Twitter is to Blogger

Session 7 March 3, 2010 – Your identity online and offline.

Behavior affects credibility, authority, and influence.

What about privacy, security, and ethics?

Special guests: local bloggers are invited to class for a roundtable discussion on their experiences, over pizza and soft drinks

Session 8 March 10, 2010 – Virtual worlds, Second Life, and World of Warcraft

Virtual worlds exist in many forms, and many more are sure to be created. We first look at World of Warcraft, and then explore SecondLife, the immersive virtual world. We’ll look at ways to bridge the virtual and physical world in SecondLife.

Session 9 March 17, 2010 – SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION

Required Readings: please consult the course wiki

Session 10 March 24, 2010 – Getting things done online, collective action, and sharing economies

What can be done alone? What can be done collectively? How do individuals build up social capital? How can self-interest be leveraged to create public goods? How do people organize online into groups for cooperation, collaboration, and collective action? What are the relationships between collective action, community, and democracy? What mechanisms facilitate collective action and community? Do social networks allow for new forms of production (ie., “non-market peer production”)?

Session 11 March 31, 2010 – Cloud computing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards

Overview of open source culture and software. What factors lead to success? What motivates contributors?

Does most of your data reside on your hard drive, or in the cloud? Which data is where? Why? Which factors lead to greater migration of data online?

Does the desktop matter anymore? How does the browser continue to change, and why? What about new desktop (and mobile) clients? Also, we take a look at browser extensions.

Overview of software as a service providers and platforms, for private, personal business, and corporate use. What are the business models?

Session 12 April 7, 2010 – The changing role of PR and marketing

How has online participation in social media affected brand, positioning, advertising, and public relations? What role for community?

We explore case studies of successes and failure in social media communications by brands. Are companies having a hard time adjusting, and if so, why?

Guest speaker: PR 2.0 guru / expert

Session 13 April 14, 2010 – Citizen journalism

What are the models for journalism online? How do they leverage the community? What are the elements of citizen journalism sites? How is the information structured? In which ways do readers and the community participate? How to maintain relevance and quality? If you could build a citizen journalism site, what would it look like?

Session 14 April 21, 2010 – Citizen journalism, part II

Possible guest speaker: director of a citizen journalism website

Session 15 April 28, 2010 – Social media and real life

How do our online social activities affect our lives personally and professionally? What control do we maintain, and what have we given up? What further changes might we expect?

How might this course work better?

Session 16 May 5, 2010 – FINAL EXAM

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Tagged: cnj595, communication, course, journalism, new media, pr 2.0, s10cnj595, social media, syllabus, um, university of miami

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Monday, November 16th, 2009 – 3:53 pm

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Social media

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Retrospective of South Florida’s startup community

As I drove home last night from Craig Agranoff’s “Pizza Tweetup“, I took a stroll down memory lane and thought of how far we’d come along as a community in three and a half years.

When I moved back to Miami, there were no new media meetups to speak of. I missed the Stormhoek geek dinner in May 2006, which was a one-off, and judging from the pictures, it looks like more jet-setters made it to the party than geeks.

Miami’s bloggers, web developers, designers and startup community in general mostly kept to themselves. Soon after I moved back, I lamented (April 2006):

“The South Florida blogging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beaching and boating … and perhaps a more conservative, “Southern” lifestyle. Relative to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of”

As I look back now, that single blog post set off a chain of events in my life which led to the creation of four main meetup groups and the development of our vibrant community of new media professionals (see Craig’s post: “South Florida has no tech community?“). These include RefreshMiami, BarCamp Miami, Mobile Monday Miami, and Social Media Club South Florida.

An hour or so after I lamented on my blog back then, Lori Leach Forster — a web designer I have not met and who has subsequently moved to Georgia — commented on my post and introduced me online to Brian Breslin, with whom I co-organize RefreshMiami. I wanted to set up a regular event and Brian spoke of creating a local chapter of Refreshing Cities. Although I hadn’t heard of Refresh, having lived in Paris and London for the past decade, it sounded like a good fit.

After a few months and many long threads on Google Groups, five of us showed up for our first meetup at a Starbuck’s on South Beach; we should have known better than to schedule a meetup in Miami at noon on a sunny Spring Saturday! From that inauspicious beginning, Brian and I grew the organization to its current membership of over 1,500 South Florida web professionals and startups. Our monthly events gather 130 participants, on average, and have become a hub to meet new people, create friendships, and find job opportunities. RefreshMiami is held on the last Wednesday of the month. If you’re in town, you’re welcome to attend.

Five months later, I set the wheels in motion to develop Miami’s first BarCamp. I had met Chris Messina at the first BarCamp in Paris and loved the experience and the concept of a “user-generated conference,” where participants create their own learning experience. Professor Kim Grinfeder of the University of Miami School of Communication helped secure space and sponsorship, and we held the event in February 2007. About 60 people attended, 5 companies sponsored, 15 participants presented, and The Miami Herald wrote up a nice article about it (archived). I have since organized two more BarCamps, one in February 2008, with 300 people, 15 sponsors and 35 presentations, and this year’s event, which counted 600 participants, 38 sponsors and 70 presentations. The community has embraced the BarCampMiami concept and similar events have recently been held or are in the works, including LaidOffCamp Miami and REBarCamp Miami (Real Estate).

After last year’s BarCamp, I started up a local chapter of Mobile Monday Miami and invited Jeff Sass and Florian Seroussi to the board. Why Mobile Monday? I had worked for a number of years in mobile content distribution and had enjoyed attending MoMo meetups in Paris. Although our first meetup in Miami was about as well attended as the first RefreshMiami meetup, we held three more club meetings that year, including an excellent evening at Nokia Latin America’s Headquarters organized by Michael Tangeman. Michael and I fired up the club again this year and legitimized it by formally signing with the international organization. We’ve had some great events this year and club membership is growing. MoMoMiami meetups attendance averages about 45 people. Starting in August, MoMo Miami will be held on the first Monday of the month, unless we schedule a meetup adjacent to a local mobile conference. We are still discovering our mobile ecosystem and are eager to meet you at one of our events.

Over the last few years, I had been talking to and exchanging emails with Chris Heuer, Founder of the national organization of Social Media Club, about founding a local chapter in South Florida. There had been two previous attempts to set up a Social Media Club locally, but they had not panned out. I was working at Scrapblog at the time and would run into Chris at various web conferences, including Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and BlogOrlando. We shared an obvious passion for social media technologies and implications for business.

In the Fall of 2008, I founded the local chapter of the Social Media Club of South Florida and we started holding our monthly meetups, which have grown from an average of 30 people per event in the beginning to over 100 people recently.

Nearly a year later, the Social Media Club of South Florida is a dynamic community of professionals from all types of businesses who meet monthly to learn about social media best practices and case studies. Club meetups are scheduled for the second Tuesdays of the month and we’d love to see you there.

All of my work was social media related and I could see working professionals trying to understand the subject. For example, Scrapblog shared office space with one of the top 5 global public relations firms; I could see the PR professionals’ long-term progression in understanding social media, from initial dismissal to grudging acceptance to implementing social media initiatives for clients. I saw the same thing at the university, where I taught one of the first full-semester courses on the subject in the nation, to University of Miami School of Communication students majoring in journalism and in public relations (and workshops for professors). I had also co-founded a startup with Brian Breslin, StartPR, which provides an online hosted service for social media tracking and blogger relations.

As I stroll down memory lane, my thoughts are on:

Serendipity – How a single blog post changed the course of my life and opened up a whole universe of possibility and opportunity.

Community – The unique sense of belonging that only comes from creating opportunities for others.

Transformation – Not only in terms of personal growth, but in particular I’m thinking about the transformation of the community into a more welcoming region for technologists and startups. We’re not there yet, but it’s a far cry from three years ago.

Gratitutde -For the innumerable people and resources that came into place at the right time to make these initiatives possible.

The future – We’ve only just started building a viable technology future for the region; there are many more challenges on the way as we vie for the attention of our local media, of the city, and of investors.

One step at a time.

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Tagged: barcamp, barcamp miami, barcampmiami, conference, event, group, meetup, mobile monday miami, momo, momomiami, refresh miami, refreshmiami, smcsf, social media club, social media club south florida, South Florida, startup, technology

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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 – 6:20 am

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Events

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In memoriam, Kashmir, 1998-2009

You brought joy to those you touched. You had an irresistible charm borne of innocent mischief. You saw yourself as more human than cat, and made your presence felt despite not speaking much. You participated in everything and your curiosity knew no bounds. You were a peacemaker and a soother. You ruled the house and you welcomed all into your sphere. You feared naught. You lived to eat and you ate everything — we understood this as a show of affection, of belonging, of participating in the daily family rituals. You lived a full life, and you gave more than you took.

So long, my steadfast companion. Thank you for the memories; you graced our lives. You are my friend and I miss you much. May you rest in peace.

The Best Thing in the World

What’s the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you’re loved again.
What’s the best thing in the world?
–Something out of it, I think.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

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Tagged: cat, Dying of the Light, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, kashmir, love, Personal

Published:

Friday, May 15th, 2009 – 8:08 am

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Personal

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