By 
jenstan (1228847091|%a, %b %e at %I:%M%p)
For my term project for BIT330, I researched the Social Networking Industry. My Wikidot site gives insight to an analyst in the industry on about how to go about finding information on social networking.
Background
The whatissocialnetworking gives a brief background of social networking. Due the nature of my topic and the fact that it is such a new industry, there is not much background information on it. Therefore, this page does not contain as much writing as some of the other topics’ background pages.
Search Tools
My main sources are all on one page and sorted by tabs under each search tool type. For most of the different Search Tools, I didn't evaluate many different ones under them. This is not because I didn't spend a large amount of time looking into others, its just that my topic was not very easy to find information on. A lot of the search tools were hard to navigate through to just find technological information.
It was impossible to weed out all of the aspects of social networking that were not business and technological related. For example, some of the things I looked for were new updates and applications added to social networking websites, as well as new social networking websites. Many of the searches also included criminal reports and news stories such as "Facebook Group Creator detained by Croatian Police" or "Court Rejects appeal over student-teacher drunk MySpace Pics." I could include in the search query to not include some key words (which I did in some cases such as [-friends] and [-romance]), but there is no way to predict everything. For example, one day when I checked my RSS feed there was about 20 results related to a priest being prosecuted for something on MySpace. I never thought to put [-priest] in any of my queries.
Blogroll
My blogroll contains a variety of resources, including websites on social networking, which I found to be the most useful. However, there aren't many sites just devoted to just social networking. Therefore, I had to use some with broader topics such as social software, which were still a lot of times more useful than other searches. Also, the news searches under each of the main players is a Yahoo Pipe of a combination of news searches.
Current Events
I focused on the three main players, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, for the timeline of current events. Under each individual page is events that pertain just to that site, and then I pooled all of these together for the Cumulative Timeline. I figured this would be most useful, especially to compare who is coming out with new technologies and staying on top of the industry.
If I had more time…
I would’ve liked to make my wiki look prettier. The layout was very basic and transparent, which was good because it made it easy to navigate. However, I would’ve liked to learn to use other modules and tools to make the layout more advanced and impressive.