Keynote--Kyle Ford

Woo-hoo! He did the Xfiles site. I loved the Xfiles. Now he's at Ning. Yay for ning :-)

What is Social Networking?
A set of online tools that allows for content creation and community building. (his def)

tools of sn
forum, video, photos, music, etc.

Even ebay or amazon are social networks.

AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy in the 90's. Then came along Netscape.
Publishing 2.0 in the early 2000's:
Blogger, TypePad, WordPress able to self-publish

Now...2008:
Facebook, myspace, youtube, linkedin you're joining THEIR world --facebooks world.

Ning gives the people the freedom to create your own social networks for anything. Co-creator of ning was also co-creator of precursor to Netscape. Then he sold Netscape to AOL.

Ning means "peace" in chinese.

He's giving us a quick and dirty on how to create your ning network in one minute.

UPDATE 1:00 PM

Showing us examples of ning sites: NKOTB, 50cent, TI, HighEdWeb, Ask a Ninja

can use social networks for language immersion, video conferencing, social notes.

One class can't take paper notes, must use a wiki=social note taking.

Social networking is a 2 way street.

used to be i think therefore i am
now it's we participate therefore we are

likens social networks to calculators. when it comes along it levels the playing field. it would be silly to not use the tools.

Kyle says we should build better soldiers. They learn to use the tools and process the info.