5 for Friday

Helping to catch up on somethings I found this week, here is a 5 for Friday round up

1 - Can't get to SOBCON09 in Chicago? Consider getting to Cambridge, MA.

At NML's May 2nd conference, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include "The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP," "Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries," "Using Wikipedia in the Classroom" and many others. Henry Jenkins' closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.

Additional info on Henry Jenkins' page here

2 - Social networking's biggest effect may be from the future looking back.

While most of the discussion around social networking sites revolves around privacy, the transparency of social networking sites could play a role for historians. This came to mind while reading about Classical Greek philosophers. Figuring out who, when and where events happened, let alone why, are often based on a few historical documents or the writing of others which often are either unreliable, conflicting or both. The openness and transparency that comes with Blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter could be used to recreate a picture of an event that historians aren't clear on or be used to figure out the life events of people who weren't recognized for their talents until after their passing.

Food for thought on this full posting here

3 - While some folks are all a-twitter about when Twitter will be profitable, others are too busy just using it. Like writing a book. Posting it live. In tweets.

So what’s a Twitter-book you may be asking? It’s a book written using Twitter as platform and distribution channel. Social Media Marketing GPS #smgps is the first business book to experiment with this format.

This Twitter-book is structured as a “real” business book and includes: a foreword, introduction and chapters. Each chapter will have a 1 question interview with people knowledgeable about the topic. All posts will be hash-tagged #smgps.

read more on Nancy White's blog here

4 - Twitpoem is also a project underway this April.

Here are the guidelines that I’ll be using for my Twitter poems. You can write a poem on Twitter any way you like. But I’m using this method as a means of efficiency and so that there is consistency throughout the month. Whenever you see a Twitter poem it will look like this:

• Every line will end with /
• Stanzas will end with a double / - just like this //
• Poems will appear as one line with the above symbols to represent line and stanza breaks
• At the end of each poem you’ll see #twitpoem

Read the full posting here

You may be aware of my own April daily sherku effort. I started tweeting in this format this morning.

5 - and finally continuing the Twitter theme we kind of walked ourselves into this morning, a explanation of hashtags

Readers of ReadWriteWeb no doubt appreciated the hashtag refresher contained in Sarah Perez’ post, “What Does that Hashtag Mean? Tagalus Tells You.” As growth in Twitter has exploded, conversations, interest and confusion over #hashtags have spiked as well. How could they not? The problem is that for all of those new users, the # signs inserted into Tweets make no sense. David Pogue helped a lot of them when he tweeted a link to hashtag.org, where hashtags are defined as “a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. Tagalus, the service Perez blogged about in her hashtag post, is a Web service that defines hashtags. Think of it as a hashtag dictionary.

Read the full link-rich posting here