By now you're probably convinced that you need to ask potential jurors if they're writing on line. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Richard Sankovitz is. He put the question in the pretrial juror questionnaire in the Thomas lead paint trial he's presiding over, and sure enough, a potential juror was a blogger. The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel's law blog Proof and Hearsay tells the story of how the courtroomful of lawyers turned to their laptops to find not only the juror's edgy blog, but also his stream of Twitter posts from the courtroom. "Still sitting for jury duty crap. Hating it immensely. Plz don't pick me. Plz don't pick me," he'd been saying. They didn't pick him.
So the question isn't whether to ask, it's how -- and like any question, it's easier if you have some idea of what you're asking about. Florida lawyer Robert Kelley (in a post about a startling juror blogger) says, "Any lawyer who does not inquire during jury selection about a juror’s Internet presence — whether it be a Web site, a blog, an account on MySpace or an account on Match.com — hasn’t done their job." There are nearly countless ways a juror could be writing on line. You need some sense of the landscape to ask about them, or you'll get partial answers or answers you don't understand.
If words like "Tweet" and "wiki" pop up often in your vocabulary, you don't need this post. But in case this stuff is new to you, here's the first installment of Deliberations' short guide to the world of social networking. These are roughly grouped according to the main feature of the site, but most have overlapping features and functions.
Basic social networking sites
Social networking 101 starts with the basic players. Members each have a personal page where they post thoughts, pictures, music (often a song starts playing as soon as you click on the page), and videos. Then friends chime in with their own thoughts, and links to their pages, and out it spreads from there. Within the community there are usually blogs (thousands), forums, groups, and dating searches, but the basic unit is the individual page. Examples:
- My Space, "a place for friends"
- Orkut, "We hope to put you on the path to social bliss soon."
- Zude!, "Feel free."
- Gather, "a place where you can share the things that are important to you with the people who are important to you, too."
Ethnic and special-interest communities
A company called Community Connect has social networking sites aimed at specific groups. They work like My Space and the rest, but members look more alike -- or worship more alike, or love people more like them. The five sites in October 2007:
- AsianAve.com
- BlackPlanet.com, "the world is yours"
- MiGente.com, "the power of Latinos"
- Glee.com, "Gay. Lesbian. And everyone else."
- FaithBase.com
These sites are big enough that Barack Obama has a page on each of them except Faithbase, all matching this sample from BlackPlanet. ("Sex: male. Age: 46. Primary job: government and policy.")
Blogs
A blog looks, well, like this. It's a page where you write separate posts that are organized by date. The format works well for a personal journal as well as a sort of on-line newsletter like this one. Individual blogs are typically supported by blogging platforms such as TypePad (the one I use), Blogger, WordPress, and (for law blogs) LexBlog, but you don't have to hop from site to site to search them. Several search engines search all blogs at once, or at least lots of them. Examples:
"Microblogs"
As instant messages are to essays, microblogs are to blogs. Twitter, the leader here, calls itself "a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" Typical "Tweets" tell the world that the author is heading out for pizza, or bored at work, or listening to music, or going to the bathroom.
People read this stuff, you ask? Yes, thousands, to the point where marketing gurus like Seth Godin have joined up and are sending out their wisdom in Tweets. Microblog search engines are starting to appear, too. Examples of microblog sites:
- Twitter, "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?"
- Rabble, designed to be used from mobile phones
- Jaiku
- Pownce, "Send stuff to your friends"
- Yappd, "Let your friends see what you're up to!"
Blog/social network hybrids
These are on-line communities where the user's "home base" is a blog with date-stamped entries, rather than a page with posted information. These sites have the same functions the social networking sites do -- friends, groups, posted images and videos, etc -- but they're organized around blogs.
Part II, coming later, will continue the list.
(Image by Leigh Blackall at http://www.flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/64955397/; license details there.)
