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Social Media Research Blog

Education, Employment and ImmigrationAugust 23 2009

Techcrunch has a great article talking about the decline of foriegn students in US universities.

"U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the world’s economic growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper and in many cases competitive academically, and then there’s the H-1B issue. If America won’t allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the student loans to begin with?"

Having recently graduated from a US university and having seen the gradual decline in students, this article comes as no surprise. I have some personal experience with this and can say a few words about the process:

1. The economy in India is doing much bette

CFP: 1st International Workshop on Mining Social MediaAugust 22 2009

via José Carlos Cortizo Pérez

CALL FOR PAPERS

1st International Workshop on Mining Social Media
http://www.socialgamingplatform.com/msm09/
Workshop at CAEPIA 2009 (http://www.lsi.us.es/caepia09)
November 9, 2009, Sevilla, Spain
Submission deadline: July 31, 2009

OVERVIEW

Social Media are technological tools that allow users sharing and discuss information. Most Social Media are Internet based applications that manage textual information, as blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter, Pownce), wikis (Wikipedia), forums, or Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). But there also exist other Social Media Internet applications where users share more than text, as photo sharing tools (Flickr, Picasa), video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo), livecasting (Ustream), or audio and music sharing (last.fm, ccMixter, FreeSound). More recent Social Media includes virtual worlds (Second Life), online gaming (World of Warcraft, WarHammer Online), game sharing (Miniclip.com) and Mobile Social Media like Nomad Social Networks where users share their current position in the Real World.

Social Media have been able to shift the way information is generated and consumed. At first, information was generated by one person and “consumed” by many people, but now the information is ge

Geolocation and Twitter: Realtime meets LocalAugust 22 2009

Recently, twitter announced that it was going to add support for geo annotations for tweets. The original announcement is on twitter blog.

One fascinating thing about Twitter is how the community is involved in shaping the way the product itself evolves. There are several examples of how this happens:

• For conversations, the community evolved method of @ replies.
• Retweets have become a great way to pass information along and attribute it to the person who provided this information.
• Hashtags are becoming even more popular, with almost a handful of hashtags landing up on the twitter homepage everyday.
• Location is'nt new either. Many users already provide the location information in their profiles. In addition several formats have evolved where L: is the most popular method for indicating the current location of a user. This was partly popularized by the Twittervision application.

By standardizing the support for geolocation in twitter, the service provides developers with several opportunities to build applications that are geographically relevant. One possibility for twitter is to capitalize on the wealth of user generated geodata:

1. Think realtime meets local: It

An XKCD Inspired SketchAugust 4 2009

Hit me on twitterApril 18 2009

A shout out to Mistah F.A.B for the new single "Hit me on Twitter"! ROTFL..

Interesting tweetweek with Oprah, Ashton and @CNNbrk making sure that everyone is partying on twitter!