Tessa Horehled | Strategic Marketer, Community Manager, Brand Strategist, Digital Communications Specialist | ATL / NYC

Mobile: Ethnography In Your Bag

If I were to go back to school, I would study ethnography in a heart beat.

As Wikipedia so kindly allows me to cite:

Ethnography is a qualitative research method often used in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology and in sociology. It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies/cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, an ethnos) through writing.

Research agency Everyday Lives has launched an ethnographic research iPhone app and has a Blackberry version in the works. Very, very tempting but $12 for an application? I haven’t been able to commit to it yet despite good reviews.

Give it a peek of your own: EverydayLives application

Brightkite iPhone Application

Finally!  A Brightkite application for the iPhone:

Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.

I use it often via text message or mobile browser but this will be greatly helpful moving forward and likely increase my usage of the site due to it’s ease. I also use Brightkite to update my Twitter profile‘s location. One thing I like about Brightkite over similar services is the ability to upload photos and notes in correlation with the most location you have checked in to. You are also able to set up your Brightkite profile to post all of your posts to your Twitter profile and have filtering options to determine which types of posts to push.