This next fall I’m moving back to the US. Starting August I’ll be a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, I’m going to the School of Information and Library Sciences for the PhD in Information Sciences, and I’ll be working with Gary Marchionini on the subject of Social Media.
I expect to be posting in English a lot more during that period, stay tuned.

Eduardo Graells, student at Universidad de Chile’s DCC (where I work) is creating a social software plugin for WordPress. Called El Aleph, it will allow us to mark our favorite posts, normalize our friends list and more… I think it’s extremely neat :-)

meteorite buy test

Hey y’all. It’s been very long since I last posted on my English blog, but this news is just too funny not to share the word:

Last Wednesday, a 12 year old girl invited her “closest friends” (60 of them) to a party at her new house in Las Condes (uptown area of Santiago), and she was extremely enthusiastic in her invitation, freely translated as:

Maasive parteeey, Wendesday December 26th. BRING YOUR BOOZE, the place is giant and has a pool. Party all night long, starting at 10 - 10:30 pm. Pass it along to all your friends, OPEN INVITATION, pass it on, even if you’re not comming, please. Come all!

Naturally, her friends were very obedient at passing the invitation on, and so a total of about 500 kids ranging from 10 to 20 filled the usually quiet plaza in front of the house, and sure they did bring their own booze. Three police stations and police’s special forces were called in to tame the crowd and send them to their homes. Finally, the girl’s mother got a fine for disturbing peace and unpleasant noises, the girl had to sweep the boardwalks in the block, and the story made the cover of the tabloid today:

I’m sure there’s nothing funny in this story for those who were involved, but I’m just amazed by how strongly the news was spread over email. There’s been lots of stories this year about teenagers using and abusing the Internet, as they don’t know the subtleties of life at defining what’s appropriate or not. Earlier this year there was a huge buzz over a video of a schoolgirl doing a BJ to her friend on a plaza, the video was recorded on a cameraphone and was distributed by email, later to be posted on Youtube, the name of this video was the most popular search query for 2007 in Chile according to a blog hub.

Best wishes for 2008!!

Yesterday we celebrated the Third AIChile Information Architecture Seminar in the auditorium of Biblioteca de Santiago, in Santiago de Chile. We had five presentations with a nice variety of topics, although some of them were a bit weak, unsubstantial.

Nevertherelss, it is greatly exciting to see how the community I’ve been working on is strongly growing, we have an engaged an loyal crowd.

The auditorium had a capacity of 250 people, and it was completely maxed out, people were sitting on the stairs, myself included!

I was the last one to speak at 2:20 pm with a presentation on social media, an overview of the state of the art, including Concepts, Research, and Design Challenges. I leave you the slides, since although I spoke in Spanish, mots of them are diagrams and screenshots anyway.