After a greeting from @David Spinks and updating our previous episodes about Huffington Post comments and Facebook reach, Scott and Marc speak with Alexy Khrabrov from By The Bay (http://bythebay.io) introducing the Scala programming language for large social datasets.

Transcript is available at socialmediaclarity.net.

Scott and Marc speak with Lee Rainie from Pew Internet Research about the new report Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters and how its findings can be used to better understand and grow online communities.

Transcript available at Social Media Clarity.net

Your hosts - Scott, Randy, and Marc discuss recent very public changes to Facebook reach as an indicator that companies may be looking in all the wrong places to connect with their community. Or is it audience and what's the difference anyway?

See SocialMediaClarity.net for a full transcript of this episode.

Bryce Glass returns to the show to join Scott and Randy interviewing Matt Leacock: A mild mannered UX designer by day ... but after hours he uses his super-powers to design award-winning boardgames. You may have played one of his most popular games; Pandemic!, Roll Through the Ages, or Forbidden Island...

Matt talks about how he takes the lessons and techniques from each discipline to improve the other.

Marc, Scott, and Randy discuss LinkIn's so-called SWAM (Site Wide Automatic Moderation) policy and Scott provides some tips on moderation system design...

[There is no news this week in order to dig a little deeper into the nature of moderating the commons (aka groups).]

Additional Links:

Transcript is available at SocialMediaClarity.net

Thriving Online with Howard Rheingold - Episode 13

Marc, Scott, and Randy interview Howard Rheingold - critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.

Links and transcript are available at http://socialmediaclarity.net

In this, our first Q&A episode, we answer a question from Ryan Crowe @doctorcrowe of Twilio, who asked us about what resources we use to keep up with our social media related areas of expertise.

Randy, Scott, and Marc provide some tips, tricks, and a brief resource list.

Transcript available at http://socialmediaclarity.net

Scott and Randy interview danah boyd about her book It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens, coming out February 25th and available for preorder now.

Marc, Randy and Scott discuss the inherent weaknesses of social sharing on the internet, and how recent NSA revelations have pushed privacy issues into the mainstream.

We take a short, but deep, dive with Dr. Paul Resnick - a leading researcher (papers) in incentive based design, recommender, and reputation systems. For our tip, Scott describes concrete steps for effectively using his book Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, which is a MUST READ for all online social product designers.