By ARIELLE LEVIN BECKER
Hartford Courant Staff Writer

May 30, 2008

Ruling in a case that addresses broad questions of the boundaries of free speech in the Internet age, a federal appeals court on Thursday effectively ended a Burlington student's effort to serve as a class officer and speak at graduation.

In keeping with Jermaine Coleman's campaign promise to leverage technology in an effort to increase communications among student members and leaders, the NEA Student Program now hosts a social network that allows members to share pictures, videos, and music as well as create sub-Networks (Groups) for private group conversations. Members can also host chats, create forums and post news items.

Since its creation one month ago, the Network hosts over 100 student members from across the country and 7 state chapter groups: Nevada, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Washington, Nebraska and Wyoming.

Visit the NEA Student Program Network

Gone are the days of culling an organization's value from a single Web site. Savvy digital natives measure the “Net” worth of any potential organizational relationship by the capacity with which a specific organization provides one or more authentic forums for identifying, connecting, mingling and sounding off. Blogs, microblogs, social networks are all examples of authentic forums.

So how is NEA doing these days with regard to hosting authentic forums for its members to identify, connect, mingle and sound off?

Technically and culturally we have a long way to go. But we’re getting our feet wet. Below are a few examples of early forays into helping our members find themselves and support their efforts to feel like they're among the 3.2 million members ensuring great public schools for every student.

If we give them a voice, what will they say?

Who want's to keep up with what we're saying?

If we ask, will they come?

Who are they?

Facebook: NEA Fan Page statistics. 69% of participants are between the ages of 18 and 44 years old and 73% of all activity is generated by females...

Twitter

So you’re in D.C. on business. After a long day of meetings, you’d like to go somewhere like the corner café back home. So you pull out your BlackBerry, fire up an application called CitySense, and bingo, it points you to the perfect little hip coffeehouse.

Citysense is an innovative mobile application for real-time nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, "Where is everybody going right now?"

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

College students say social networking makes them more narcissistic, a national survey reports today — and they also believe their generation is the most narcissistic of all.

That's what a majority of 1,068 college students said when asked about narcissism in a poll on social networking sites in June by Ypulse.

NEA enters fall season with just under 3,000 Facebook fans, double the number of fans from just 6 months ago.

Followers on Twitter just as encouraging:

online @ http://www.cnn.com

Lindsay Spencer was two years out of college and facing one of the biggest decisions of her young life: what to do with those Facebook friend requests from people she met through her job.

"There's nothing on my personal page that's horrible," says the 24-year-old communications coordinator for the National Peanut Board in Atlanta, Georgia. "It's just that there are some things that are not work-appropriate."

Advertiser: Samsung
Ad Agency: Viral Factory

Why it works: One cunning way to get people talking about and sharing your video is to make them wonder how you shot it in the first place. Samsung went to great lengths to protect the “trick” in the video for their new HD camera phone, which got tech geeks riled up to try solving the puzzle. Geeks happen to be the audience most likely to buy the HD new camera phone, which is why this video makes our Top 10.

Here's the solution:

Before or during your morning coffee do you feel an overwhelming urge to check/update your page? How about on your way to bed?

The latest Retrevo Gadgetology study asked social media users questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like FaceBook and Twitter.

When asked whether they check their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts during the night or as soon as they wake up, 48% said "YES."

"We have different criteria and try to separate out a fad from something that has cultural significance. But every single day it comes down to confidence and, to a certain extent, you have a gut instinct about something, and on some level that instinct is driven by experience. So you have to be in it and play the game to find those diamonds in the rough."

[read more]

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.