Saw an interesting story on the Technology section of the BBC News site titled Pull down the walled gardens. Professor of Internet law Michael Geist highlights the problem of  interoperability between different social networking sites.  Not exactly a revelation, but he also highlights the fact that certain social networking sites are more popular in certain countries. This leads to networks that are primarily local rather than global. 

It is interesting to see which sites are popular where: 

MySpace (United States, Australia, Mexico, and Italy)

Bebo (Ireland and New Zealand)

Cyworld (South Korea)

Friendster (Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore)

Fotolog (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay)

Hi5 (Colombia, Ecuador, and Thailand)

Mixi (Japan)

Orkut (Brazil, India, and Paraguay)

Skyblog (France, Belgium, Senegal)

Studiverzeichnis (Germany, Austria)

Vkontakte (Russia)

Reasons for this may be language differences and the geographical location of the creators/owners, but why is Bebo so popular in Ireland and New Zealand, and what has made Friendster so big in Asia?

Myself and a colleague are involved in the Emerge project and are interested in exploring, with other members, issues and difficulties experienced by non-technical academic staff in developing increasingly imaginative and purposeful learning objects.

We would be interested in exploring the availability of learning object content creators within applications which are already available in the public domain and are increasingly being used by students. The seamless transition of learning objects between social and educational environments and the role of user-owned learning objects as part of portfolio development would also be of interest.

Currently my favourite site is Wikipedia and has been for some time. I feel it is a fantastic resource and I'm interested in the varied response it creates from different members and areas of the educational community. Google was the bad guy prior to the emergence of Wikipedia and it seems many peoples attitude seems to be 'if it can't be catalogued and controlled then it isn't valid'. I recognise peoples fears over the legitimacy of information that is available in places such as Wikipedia but the reality is that it is there, people know it's there, therefore they can, and will, tap into it.  Rather than reaching for the holy water we should be focusing on advising and guiding users in the use of these resources and technologies.