Abstract:

In the last five years there has been remarkable take-up of social computing, that is, applications for blogging, podcasting, collaborative content (e.g. Wikipedia), social networks (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), multimedia sharing (e.g. Flickr, YouTube), and social gaming (e.g. Second Life).
Such applications have deeply penetrated people’s personal lives, and are slowly starting to transform working and learning patterns, by empowering users to produce, publish, share, edit, and improve existing online content from anywhere and anytime.
The leading international organizations in social and economic issues have thrown themselves into the 2.0 stream. For instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is on Twitter and Facebook. It has a factblog in which the newest results and data are easily delivered. There is an OECD channel on Youtube with the videos of the main speeches from OECD professionals. And furthermore, the OECD Factbook is available as an iPhone Application with free access to the 100 top socio-economic indicators. The World Bank is also in the same line with more and more social content online.
In this context, the aim of this paper is to review the social computing applications of some of the main international organizations in the socio-economic field (OECD, World Bank, and International Labour Organization, among others).
Once this done, we will suggest some activities to do in class with undergraduate students in Economics and Sociology in order to take advantage of all these online applications.

Keywords:

Internet 2.0, blogs, wikis, international organizations.