Filtering Network Friends (and others)

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

So, I get an email that "Jack" at MIT's Alumni Community Service has posted a comment on the NCTE Ning site to me. He probably posted it to everyone he "knows" in the group. Of course, we don't really know each other at all. I am registered in way-too-many networks, but on this particular one, I have only two "friends" - and I actually know (I have met them face to face and they work nearby) both of them.

Jack wants me to know that he is an MIT alum trying to make SAT prep as "fun and free as possible through the power of user-generated content and peer-to-peer learning." And his group is running a couple of nationwide contests (funded by Salesforce with support from MIT and SchoolTube). MIT's interest seems to be in building a free resource to help kids learn SAT/ACT using user-generated images and video.

Jack is using the social network to promote, and as long as the project is a good one, that is a positive use of Web 2.0.

The NCTE site has the URL ncte2008.ning.com and the 2008 comes from its original purpose which was around the 2008 conference. It is still around and advertising their 2009 conference, so it must have succeeded in some ways for them.

Here are the 3 newest topics on the main page: Does Reading Literature Prepare Students for the "real world"?, How will you celebrate the National Day on Writing? and Dogs in the Classroom (live or fictional)

What members of many networks need is a way to aggregate all those posts, comments and links. Right now, I just use the email notifications that many sites (Facebook, Ning etc.) offer. It is annoying when you get a dozen mails in a row telling you that someone else also commented on a friend's photo, but useful when the email tells me that someone posted a link to my presentation. It's nice to know that it is Adam's birthday, but not mission-critical.

Filters. That's what we continue to need in this too-much information age. It is part of what turns off newbies to social networks - information overload. Twitter is a perfect example. Do you really want to "follow" a few thousand people?

I'm curious to hear what filters you use to sift the information available to you, particularly in social networks.


Visit NCTE Ning

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