« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »

March 24, 2008

Psychology of Facebook - a special course at Stanford

I'm looking forward to teaching a new course: The Psychology of Facebook.

The goal is to make students experts in this topic, especially as it relates to persuasion in social networks.

I've created a Facebook group (what else?) to share more info: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22841903424

If you're not a Stanford student, you can still join this group to stay connected to what we're doing. We'll likely involve people outside the class.

Students need to join the group and register on Axess. Below is the info.

Spring 2008
SYMBSYS 230
Thursdays, 1:15 - 2:45
2 units

Posted by BJ Fogg at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2008

NPR covers captology (Science Friday)

Last week NPR's Science Friday interviewed MIT's Stephen Intille and me about persuasive technology. The show host, Ira Flatow, got a lot of content out of us in 45 minutes.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87984362

--BJ Fogg

Posted by BJ Fogg at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Slides from our Facebook presentation last week

We spoke last week at the Graphing Social Patterns event in San Diego (created & hosted by my co-teacher Dave McClure).

The slides aren't pretty, but they convey some aspects from last fall's course on Facebook.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dcqn4jpj_126dz2zr3hc

Sharing the stage with me: Rob Fan and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg.

--BJ Fogg

Posted by BJ Fogg at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2008

Digital Curators

In a compelling post by Steve Rubel, he argues that digital curators are the future of online content. With never-ending information flow and entertainment overload, demand will never scale to match the supply of content. Curators are selfless experts that guide us to the most relevant information unlike memetrackers and social news sites like Digg. Curators are NOT editors according to Rubel because "the notion of editor implies that space is finite. Online it's not. Curators don't need to necessarily be trained in cutting, but in knowing where and how to unearth those special high-quality "finds" and to make them presentable." How do we identify the best "curators" on sites like del.icio.us and what behavioral patterns or characteristics do they share?

--Enrique Allen

Posted by Enrique at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)