I attended the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) in Boulder, CO this week. It was a great conference presenting insights and research on the blogosphere and social media in general. If you like scatter plots, power law charts, text scraping, summations, summarizations and graph charts then this was the place to be!

Of particular note was a presentation by Sam Gosling, the lone psychologist amid the gaggle of computer scientists. Sam’s presentation “Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles” was a highly entertaining and fascinating look at how people who participate in social media express personality traits via their profiles. This work is related to another paper he authored “A Room With a Cue: Personality Judgments Based on Offices and Bedrooms.” . In this paper he looks at the cues observers can get about a subject’s personality by looking at the personal environments people create, such as in their bedrooms or offices. This particular paper was referenced in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. In chapter one Malcolm talks about “The Theory of Thin Slices” which is the ability of an observer to identify traits of a person’s personality by picking up on simple clues from observing them for a very short amount of time. The whole theory of “Thin Slicing” is fascinating to me and now that we are moving some of our “space” to the internet via Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife and other social media outlets it will be interesting to see how much of ourselves can truly be “Thin Sliced” online.

Tags: Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), Mass Media/Culture //