New and Noteworthy for 4/28/09

By Ben Gross
in

Putting a Price on Social Connections: Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek writes about the results of a recent collaboration between IBM Research and the MIT Sloan School of Management that analyzes IT workers with billable hours across their careers. The study looks at email networks in particular. The resulting paper is titled “Value of Social Network—A Large-Scale Analysis on Network Structure Impact to Financial Revenue of Information Technology Consultants” and is freely available online.

‘80 Mbytes of storage for under $12K!’ And other ad favorites through the years: A delightful Honeywell ad titled “What the heck is Electronic Mail?” from the November 16, 1981 of Computerworld. I recently came across this undated ad in a BoingBoing Gadgets post and then tracked down the original to an ad retrospective in Computerworld from a few years ago.

Social Networking’s New Global Footprint: a post on the Nielsen Company blog summarizes the results from a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places” that describes the growth of social networking through 2008. Major finding include the increase of overall time spent on social networks, the mainstreaming of social networks to include much older audiences and the increase of mobile use of social networks.

Published April 28, 2009