From an Article:

Top Defense Department officials, noting the importance social networking has played in detailing events surrounding Iran’s disputed elections, acknowledge that the Pentagon needs to take a closer look at social media technologies.

This department, I think, is way behind the power curve in this; it’s an area where I think we have a lot of room for improvement,” said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, speaking to reporters at a Pentagon news conference last week.

See Also: Read about NASA’s New “Spacebook” Social Network

See Also: Learn About Intellipedia

See Also: DOD: Be wary of social media’s ‘loose lips’ (via FCW)

Source: GCN

From the Blog Post:

Someday, when you ask your Twitter followers to recommend the most comfortable running shoe or the best digital camera, you might be able to go one step further and buy the product on the Twitter site.

E-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter, said Todd Chaffee, a Twitter board observer and general partner at Institutional Venture Partners, which has invested in Twitter. That gives us one more hint about how Twitter will make money.

Mr. Chaffee said that we can also expect Twitter to offer filters and feeds to sort tweets by whom they are from and what they are about.

NOTE: A social network named Aarvark is already offering these types of features.

Source: NY Times (Bits Blog)

From an Article:

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a homegrown social-networking application that provides all NASA employees with the types of features found in Facebook but in a secure environment.

Spacebook, which offers user profiles, group collaboration tools and social bookmarking, is available through NASA’s intranet, according to Linda Cureton, Goddard’s chief information officer, who announced the launch, appropriately enough, on her blog.

Source: GCN

From the Article:

Real-time search is among the hottest, or most hyped, trends in the Internet industry today. At technology conferences, the term is repeated like a mantra, although the idea is still nascent and its definition fuzzy.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

This paper by Yasar Tonta was presented at the International Conference on Libraries and Their Clients: Free or Fee Services Supporting Social Communication in the Digital Era, Krakow Poland at the beginning of June, 2009.

From the Abstract:

Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are among the most heavily visited web sites. They are used not only for social networking and entertainment but also for access to information, for learning and for carrying out professional work. Social networks commonly have Web 2.0 features, offer personalized services and allow users to incorporate their own content easily and describe, organize and share it with others, thereby enriching users’ experience. Some users tend to “live” on those social networks and expect information providing organizations to offer similar services. They want libraries to be as accessible, flexible, open to collaboration and sharing as that of social networks and heighten the expectations from such institutions. The future of libraries is closely associated with how successfully they meet the demands of digital users. Otherwise, the “net generation” or the “digital natives” grown up with the Web, Google and Facebook would see libraries as outdated institutions and “take their business elsewhere” to satisfy their information needs. In this paper, the impact of the technological convergence on information providing organizations are reviewed.

Direct to Full Text (5 pages; PDF)

Source: E-LIS

From the News Post:

The Library of Congress intends to compile all tweets about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor during the confirmation process.

The LOC announcement was made—where else?—in a tweet today on Twitter, reports the Hill’s Twitter Room.

Source: ABA Journal

See Also: Original Twitter Announcement About Compilation

From an Article:

In an earlier era, “loose lips sink ships” was the military’s warning not to let even small details about military movements and operations slip in casual conversation. In contrast, social media Web sites today thrive on loose lips, making it even tougher to maintain operational security.

The problem is not so much people twittering away secrets as letting slip many smaller pieces of information that an adversary can piece together.

“There’s a tendency to think that if information is not classified, it’s OK to share,” said Jack Kiesler, chief of cyber counter intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, in a presentation last month in Orlando, Fla., at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference for intelligence information systems professionals.

Source: Government Computing News

See Also: Read About NASA’s New Social Networking Service, Spacebook

From an Article:

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a homegrown social-networking application that provides all NASA employees with the types of features found in Facebook but in a secure environment.

Spacebook, which offers user profiles, group collaboration tools and social bookmarking, is available through NASA’s intranet, according to Linda Cureton, Goddard’s chief information officer, who announced the launch, appropriately enough, on her blog.

Source: Federal Computer Week

You can follow SAA happenings via Twitter by heading to: http://twitter.com/archivists_org. The SAA also has a Facebook page. You can “friend them” here.

From a Search Engine Land Blog post by Greg Sterling:

This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company.

The bog post goes on to offer an in-depth overview of both services.

Direct to Collecta

Direct to Crowd Eye

Source: Search Engine Land

From an Article:

The State Department is using Facebook to connect to the world, and it appears the world is responding.

The department is using live multimedia Web chats to link audiences around the world with U.S. experts — both inside and outside government — in a variety of fields. State officials say the goal is to gain mutual understanding on a range of important topics.

The department hosts weekly chats on a range of topics on the CO.NX Facebook page. Topics so far have included issues such as international piracy, relations with Indonesia, the economic downturn and its impact on journalism worldwide, and, most recently, a chat with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, hosted by the U.S. embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria

Source: Federal Computer Week

From an Article:

The tradition-bound Senate, historically slow to adjust to trends like popular elections and civil rights, is lumbering toward updating its approach to a less weighty issue: Facebook.

After months of review and talks with site operators, the Senate Rules Committee hopes in coming weeks to announce updated guidelines for how members can use the popular social networking site and other third-party Web sites, Senate aides said.

Source: Next Gov

See Also: U.S. Army Gives Soldiers Access to Twitter, Facebook

See Also: Coming Soon to U.S. Government Agencies: More Social Media Tools

From the Announcement:

Thomson Reuters today announced significant upgrades to its OpenCalais service. The update adds new ‘Social Tags’ – story descriptors in simple, everyday language – and support for Spanish language content to OpenCalais’ core capabilities. It also adds a new ‘Recession Pack’ of facts and events that OpenCalais can extract from news about company actions related to a down economy.

OpenCalais helps publishers compete. Found at OpenCalais.com, the free service makes it easy to automate content operations, enhance the value of content, improve the reader experience and extend distribution to new search engines, news aggregators and social media applications.

See Also: Thomson Reuters OpenCalais Service Adopted by the Huffington Post, DailyMe and Associated Newspapers’ Mail Online

Source: OpenCalais

From a Summary:

Social media and how Web 2.0 technologies are impacting education are the main themes of the new JISC Inform published this week.

Ewan McIntosh, digital media manager with Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public (4iP) shares his thoughts on the issues he thinks will resonate for the future of educational and public-funded technologies and Sir David Melville, Chair of the Committee of Inquiry behind the ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ report writes about its key findings.

The details of JISC’s digitisation programme are highlighted by Michelle Pauli, who gives an overview on how over £22 million has been spent to digitise over 6.5 million items for teaching, learning and research.

Opening up resources continues with a summary of JISC’s most successful annual conference – Opening Digital Doors and a review by David Flanders, a self-proclaimed ‘alpha geek’ working for JISC as a programme manager, on the organisation’s first developer happiness day.

Direct to Complete Issue

Source: JISC

From a Blog Post:.

…a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source and crowd-sourced wiki project that lists every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor’s race.

The project, dubbed RaceTracker, was coordinated by the folks at the Swing State Project as they completed a nationwide survey of the candidates in each race. As we move into the 2010 congressional races, the site will use crowd-sourced participation to keep it current.

Direct to RaceTracker

Source: Swing State Project (via Sunlight Foundation)