A Social Networking Thinker You Should Know

I've been sick with the flu the last couple of days and, as a result, have had an opportunity to catch up with a number of my favorite bloggers. Jim McGee, over at McGee’s Musings wrote an excellent post yesterday titled Thinkers you should know - danah boyd. Danah is a Ph.D. candidate at the Berkeley School of Information and her research focuses on understanding social networks and their interplay with youth culture. In a 14 minute interview with Discover Magazine, she discusses how kids use technology, where mobile phones are going and the Facebook versus MySpace "smackdown".

Here's a link to the video at Discover Magazine <- click here to watch.

The interview is excellent and highly recommended. Here's how Jim finishes his post: her insights are worth factoring into your thinking about Enterprise 2.0. If nothing else, she’ll help you understand your future work force. I'll take it a step further and say she'll help you understand your children, your grandchildren...... and, if you are faculty, your current and future students,

Jevon MacDonald, who blogs at http://socialwrite.com, wrote an interesting reply to Jim's post on the FASTForwardBlog: Danah’s work has been incredibly important. Anyone wanting to really understand the social underpinnings of Enterprise 2.0 (social computing in general) should spend a week just reading everything Danah has written.

Danah blogs at http://www.danah.org - watch the video and take some time (maybe not a week but an hour or so) to take a look at her work if you get a chance.

Thanks Jim for your post. Oh yes - I'll be getting to the technical follow-up piece on Internet Traffic Shaping as soon as I feel better!