Author
Lev Lafayette (ARCS)
Abstract
Social Network services build online communities of people with shared interests. Weblog ("blog") sites provide a regular commentary or online journal by individuals and communities. The former tends to attract large numbers of individuals but lack sophisticated methods of commentary due to poor journaling tools; the latter provides sophisticated commentary, but typically lacks the ability to network large numbers of people due to a lack of aggregation tools.
If combined the two technological orientations could prove to be extremely useful for Australian researchers, providing the opportunity for disparate community to establish communities and make connections of their own violition and interest. A review of most existing services (such as Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, Twitter for social networking and Wordpress, Blogger, Vox for weblogs) indicates deficiencies in the capacity to unite the two necessary streams.
An alternative, Livejournal, with additional technological enhancements from Dreamwidth, does however provide both strong social networking tools and journaling capacity through a subscriber system, community generation and reading aggregation. Providing individual esearchers the ability to create accounts and communities without pseudonyms will promote a high quality of discussion, collaboration and enchance research networks.
About the speaker
Lev Lafayette is an honours graduate of Murdoch University in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology and has spent a number of years as a doctoral candidate in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne writing a thesis on "A Social Theory of the Internet". He is also enrolled in a Graduate Diploma of Management (Technology Management) at Chifley. He has worked for the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party as a database administrator and systems trainer, Timor Leste's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as their senior systems administrator, and is currently employed by the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, with time seconded to Australian Research Collaboration Service.