Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: July 18, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
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SAN FRANCISCO--The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.
Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.
"I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors," Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.
"Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace'd or Facebook'ed you," she said.
To be sure, much has been written about the demise of e-mail, given the annoyance of spam and the rise of tools like instant messaging, voice over IP and text messaging. But e-mail has hung on to its utility in office environments and at home, even if it's given up some ground to new challengers. It may be that social networks are the most potent new rival to e-mail, one of the Internet's oldest forms of communication. With tens of millions of members on their respective networks, MySpace and Facebook can wield great influence over a generation living online, either through the cell phone or the Internet.
"I don't know any teen who doesn't have a phone with them all the time."
--Catherine Cook, president,
MyYearbook.com
And if you're among those who believe teens are the future, then e-mail could be knocked down a rung. For example, Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online, a virtual world for teens and college kid
Library blogs are found across the country. One that has received many accolades from librarians and patrons is out of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.
Their blog entitled PaperCuts (click here and take a look yourself: http://papercuts.tscpl.org/ ) has fresh postings daily on a wide variety of topics that library patrons find useful.
The Topeka library also has a blog devoted to teens entitled Graffiti (click here for a look: http://graffiti.tscpl.org/ ).
Please take a look at these two very well managed blogs.
Let us know via a comment how we are doing here at LPL!
Lester Public Library has increased its Web presence by utilizing what is known as ‘social software.’
Social software as defined by Wikipedia (a fine example of social software in and of itself!):
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication. Many advocates of using these tools believe (and actively argue or assume) that these create actual community, and have adopted the term "online communities" to describe the social structures that they claim result. They are used inside organizations or by communities of practice/interest The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems and is usually narrowly applied to software that enables work functions. Distinctions between usage of the terms "social" and "collaborative" is in the applications not the tools, although there are some tools that are only rarely used for work collaboration. Our direct links to these tools include:
These tools listed above are only the tip of the iceberg! Some others that may be familiar to you include:
Categories: Blogging,
Social Software,
Internet
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