Brian Payst on June 3rd, 2008

Techcrunch has an interesting post about an apparently upcoming iPhone social network app. I agree with much of what he is saying, but I think the real killer app here will be someone combining the rich connected experience of the iPhone with the user capital of facebook, myspace, etc. Although people seem to be willing to [...]

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Brian Payst on May 1st, 2008

Not really a huge surprise, but it seems that Facebook applications are not very well contained by their security model. Given the history of Facebook and data privacy (see news feed, beacon) I don’t think there is anything really surprising here. There has always been a certain amount of naiveté on the part of the Facebook management [...]

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Brian Payst on March 28th, 2008

This solid article in the NY Times really does a nice job of encapsulating a lot of the challenges coming for higher ed. We constantly seem to be struggling with communicating with our students. Mass e-mail is fairly ineffective, at UNC we really have no functional portal (and in the age of search, I’m not truly convinced [...]

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Brian Payst on February 22nd, 2008

Stats in the UK and the

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Brian Payst on January 8th, 2008

This post at read Write Web is aimed at business objections to social networks, but substitute educational institution for business and the lessons still apply. I don’t particularly like thinking of students as customers (I hope the relationship is deeper and more complex than that), but the ideas apply.
These 2 in particular are really appropriate [...]

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Brian Payst on July 12th, 2007

I’m not really one to follow beauty pagents, but Miss New Jersey appears to have gotten herself into a bit of a situation because of photos that were on her facebook profile.
Polumbo described many of the photos as they were shown. Of the shot of her boyfriend appearing to bite her breast through [...]

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Brian Payst on May 25th, 2007

Rory Cellan-Jones over at the BBC website rather nicely illustrates something I have seen quite a lot of, especially on campus. The gap between students and staff / faculty when it comes to technology just seems to be widening at an ever increasing pace. The social networking buzz combined with the seemingly almost unending [...]

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Brian Payst on May 22nd, 2007

One of the things I noticed in a recent Division-wide meeting was that staff were discovering things about each other during formal and informal discussions. Not things like how many kids they have (although that is certainly interesting), but skills and interests that were really relevant to their job and were the groundwork for collaboration. [...]

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