SheGeeks

This is a guest post by Meghan Asha. Meghan was raised in the ‘Bubble’ with “Geek” as one of her chromosomes. You can catch her weekly on Fox Business News talking technology stocks and gadgets or subscribe to her tumblelog.
        

Could you imagine if everyone decided to broadcast their immediate thoughts and feelings to the world? This option is now available to the masses and some people have promptly decided to jump on the bandwagon. It’s a phenomenon of voyeurism and exhibitionism at its most grossly exaggerated stage - but the truth is, we’re ALL a part of it. Mass communication like Twitter, social networks like Facebook, and personal blogs are becoming increasingly commonplace. Since the early days of the Internet, people like Josh Harris (‘We Live in Public’) created an environment with cameras that broadcast his every move (including a toilet camera - yikes!) exposing every aspect of their lives on the Internet. What does this do to the subject psychologically? What does the observer gain from watching others? Why is it so compelling?
     

Mimicry and Progression

Actually - it’s not surprising reason reality television is insanely popular, people are biologically programmed to watch others as a way to gain information on survival. When we’re young, we watch our parents and mimic their experiences as examples. I’m not saying that we’re mimicking the choices of Flavor Flav (from VH1’s Flavor of Love) or subjects from Justin TV, but we are gaining some insight into human behavior. We’re able to communicate at a speed and distance that was inconceivable to our parents - of course, with this comes a massive decrease in intimacy. The breadth in our relationships comes at a cost - we now lack depth. Our solace is in posting a status update on Twitter or writing about our personal opinions in a public forum. It’s a way to communicate and be seen, thus fueling the sense that we are special and alive.
   

Accessing the Knowledge of Relations

The truth is, I’m fascinated by this social experiment. I have written posts trying its significance: how will this new access to knowledge about our fellow human beings affect the way we relate to one another? I struggle with the question personally, as my blog mixes with technology and pieces of my personal life. Earlier this year, a reporter asked Julia Allison, Mary Rambin and me which one of us is the most risk averse to exposing their lives via the net? Julia and Mary turned and pointed to me. Of course! Sometimes I just want to be coddled in a Volvo of privacy when riding the Internet’s Overexposure Superhighway, damnit! So this is where I am at right now - absolutely undecided. I can’t say I know how this experiment will end, but that’s the best part. With lifecasting in real time, you never know what will happen. ;)

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This is a guest post by the awesomesauce Sarah Perez of Sarahintampa. Sarah is an expert in the field of social media, IT, and web apps. She is also a writer for ReadWriteWeb, and co-founder member of the Grand Effect Network. You can subscribe to Sarahintampa here.

The new social web is an evolution from the Web 2.0 revolution, so shouldn’t we give it a new name?

The web, once just a repository for data, has transformed over the years to become a tool for connecting people. The tools that are the basic components to our everyday existence – email, IM, photo-sharing, blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – have not succeeded solely because they’re easy to use. They’ve succeeded because they tap into our basic human need for establishing connections with other people. They are the tools of today’s social web.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting for the next evolution of web, something dubbed by pundits as “Web 3.0,” but it seems like that’s still far off in the distant future. Where Web 3.0 may bring us artificial intelligence and semantic search engines, it’s clear we’re not there yet. Instead, we’re firmly ensconced in the social web of Web 2.0.

Except maybe it’s time we upgrade it to Web 2.5.

The original Web 2.0 was a revolution that brought about rich user experiences, social networking, user participation, and introduced new types of communities and services, like wikis, blogs, and social networks. However, today, we’re growing these basic principles and new trends are started to emerge. Now, we want new tools to help us with our online Web 2.0 world. We want aggregation, data portability, and filtering systems.

These concepts are helping to define the next generation of the web, and while it looks nothing like the Web 3.0 that we once dreamed of, it is certainly an evolution from what Web 2.0 once was. The companies who are introducing these types of tools are already becoming wildly successful.

There’s a reason why the early adopters can’t stop talking about FriendFeed and its lifestreaming service. Where before all of our activities and those of our friends took place in separate areas throughout the web – social as they may be, there was no one tool that pulled them all together like FriendFeed does. This “lifestream” aggregates all your activities and then allows for more socializing to take place around those activities, something that is even turning the once king of the social web, Twitter, into an inbox of sorts for receiving messages about your shared content.

Across the social networks, another type of new Web 2.5 activity is also starting to take place – data portability. The concept is that your friends are your friends no matter what service you’re on, so there should be an easier way to add them than having to scour through your address book every time you sign up somewhere. The OpenSocial movement developed by Google is a set of common APIs built to provide a means of transporting your friend graph from social network to social network. Unfortunately, at this stage in the game, all the major networks are battling to become the winner here, each one wanting to be the default method you use to move your friends around the social web, so we have MySpace’s Data Availability vs. Facebook Connect vs. the OpenSocial-powered Google Friend Connect, all battling it out with no clear winner yet.

Finally, in Web 2.5, there’s the need more more filtering to come into play. Since we’ve now managed to aggregate our content, we’re also starting to become deluded by the flood. Systems that help the best or the most popular content rise up to the top are in demand. These filters can be something as simple as FriendFeed’s “best of” feature or a full-on filtering system, like AideRSS’s feed reader filter. There are sure to be more tools to emerge even later.

In all, these aggregation, data portability, and filtering systems are mapping out the next version of our web, a greatly improved version of Web 2.0 that makes the socializing aspect more useful, while also moving it to become the core of interactivity on the web. Being social is what today’s web is all about, but in Web 2.5, new tools make the social web a true layer to everything we do, not just an isolated activity.

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This is a guest post by Amanda Congdon of Amanda Congdon Central and Amanda on ABC. Amanda is an uber she geek: President of Oxmour Entertainment, co-creator of AC on ABC, Amanda Across America, Rocketboom, and Starring Amanda Congdon. Video blogger, writer, actress, and producer head over to Amanda Congdon Central to find out more about where you can stalk her. ;)

Photo of my father, James Congdon, in the movie, The 4D Man

This week starting off with Father’s Day really got me thinking about my family– and how I can stay better connected to them. My parents live on the east coast and until recently I experimented with a bicoastal lifestyle, living three weeks in Cali and one week in Connecticut each month. It was great because I got to see my parents a ton, but it was hard on me physically.

      
What can I say? I’m a person who loves traveling, but I don’t ship well. I usually arrive at my location tired and damaged– this from a simple cross-country trip. Yes! I’ve tried eye masks, refreshing facial mists and Bose noise canceling headphones. Nothing really helps me to feel like, well, me. I’m always ‘Zombie Amanda’ by the end of the journey.

     
With oil prices soaring and all signs pointing to things getting even crazier this summer, I’ve started to reorganize my life. I’ve always strived to live as green as I can, but I’ve never truly considered slowing down on travel. Last weekend I moved into a new studio three blocks away from my CA pad. I can walk to work. My lease is up in July on my space on the east coast, and I won’t be renewing it. My trips back east will be fewer and further between.
     

So how will I maintain my relationship with my family?

Like many people’s parents, I would imagine, my parents are not early adopters of technology. So however I choose to communicate with them needs to be pretty simple– or it’s just not going to happen. Besides the obvious emails and phone calls, here are the top five ways I plan to keep in touch:

       
1. The new 3G iPhone (http://www.apple.com/iphone/) - Now that the iPhone is going to be within a reasonable price range, it’s time for me to buy two for my parents.  My mom is going to love text messaging and browsing the internet– the iPhone will be her first smart phone.  She never got into texting with the traditional nine button phone– she’s probably up to this point sent 10 text messages in her life. My dad (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0174607/), well, it’s more of an experiment giving him one of these devices altogether. His fingers have got to be too big to hit just one of the floating keys at a time… so we’ll just see how he does and track his progress.

2. Ping.fm (http://ping.fm/) - Finally! A reliable service updates my status all across the internet. Whether my mom checks my Twitter or my Myspace, she’ll know what’s up. They’re in beta right now but I found an invite code pretty quickly. I used to use Twittersync, which was spotty at best and certainly didn’t connect to the wide range of services ping.fm does.

3. Google reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) - I still haven’t found the right words to use to explain RSS to my parents… but they understand that the tabs on the top of their gmail inbox leads to news stories I’ve shared with them.

4. Kyte.tv (http://www.kyte.tv/home/index.html) - I don’t have as much time to video chat on skype as I’d like to, so my parents catch my spontaneous lifecasts via email alerts. Over at Sometimesdaily beta I’ve had the opportunity to check out a lot of lifecasting services such as Bambuser, Qik, Ustream, and Kyte. Kyte seems to have the most functionality so far (and the most funding). Believe me, no one will watch your lifecasts more thoroughly than your parents. Be prepared for them to quote something you don’t remember saying each time they speak with you on the phone.

5. Of course, I share photos on Flickr (http://flickr.com/) with the fam as well– but who doesn’t.

How do you stay in touch with your family? Or do you at all? Some people get freaked out when they find their mom reads their Twitter messages. Do you? I’m personally glad she cares enough to go to the trouble.

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