The bubble in the housing market (and the attendant mortgage-backed securities, etc. that pumped up the bubble) is largely blamed for the rise in debt among American consumers. The fear of, and calling in, of that debt led to the collapse in credit in the early fall of 2008 that sparked the recession. Though economists […]
Facebook Is Changing Business, Advertising, Language…
We wind up our week-long survey of Facebook with a look at how it can be used as a business tool, and how people are using it as such. Even if you do not yet have a Facebook site, the impact of the technology on our language is unmistakable: ‘Friend’ has become a verb. The […]
#HowTo: Setting Up Various Facebook Pages – Know The Types!
By the summer of 2009, Facebook came with a few new profiles: personal pages, community pages, and public profiles. The three are distinct, and even within the public profiles, one has a number of choices about the kind of public profile one wishes to establish. There were some issues (surprise!) when the features were first […]
The Keyword is “Social” – The Medium is Just the Means
We continue our week-long series on Facebook with a brief look at what ‘social media’ means. We make no claims of thoroughness in but one blog post. Indeed, some have taken entire academic semesters to explore the field. What we hope to present here are some common sense approaches to envisioning and contextualizing the social-media […]
For The Week: Social Media Focus On Facebook
A purely alpha-betic writing established itself in the eastern Mediterranean about 3300 years ago, which marked a seminal shift away from ‘pre-history’ and towards documentation, institutional memory, and social media. We will not be tracing the evolution of writing from proto-Sinaic carvings or Phoenician tablets to Adobe’s Creative Suite 5, but we would like to […]
As National Recipe Changes, So Should Marketing of Housing
The metaphor of the American melting pot has been around since the foundation of the republic, though the great breadth of peoples coming to the US did not really expand until the end of the nineteenth century. But along with the melting pot have come vociferous and sometimes violent resistance to immigrants – especially toward […]
The Asia Foundation Discusses Major Fundraising Via Facebook
The social impact of Facebook is beyond doubt. Almost 57 million Americans used it as of March 2009, and that number has since doubled. Facebook itself claims that over half its members are engaged with their 100-plus friends at any given moment of the day. The largest growth is seen among women over forty, and […]
President Obama’s New AIDS Initiative Posted On WhiteHouse.gov
Yesterday, President Barack Obama shifted emphasis from his predecessor on yet another issue, as he announced the administration’s launch of the “Natinal HIV/AIDS Community Discussions” to be hosted by the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP). “HIV remains an serious challenge to the American people and I am committed to developing an effective […]