If You Printed Twitter It Would Cover 350 Million Sheets of Paper

Posted by Celia Walter | 28 Jan, 2010

If You Printed Twitter It Would Cover 350 Million Sheets of Paper

The folks at Creative Cloud have come up with some interesting stats about the popular microblogging application, Twitter. Here are a couple highlights:

  • If you printed Twitter it would cover 350 million sheets of paper, which is 37 times the number of pages used in bills introduced in the United States Congress since 1955.
  • If you printed Twitter and laid the pages end to end, they would stretch 60,763 miles or two and a half times around the earth.

via Mashable and iLibrarian

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The Internet 2009, A Collection of Stats

Posted by Celia Walter | 28 Jan, 2010

Numbers Galore: The Internet 2009 ...

Pingdom, a company that offers services to measure server uptime and performance monitoring along with letting the webmaster (in many cases that the server is down, has done one impressive job compiling a large amount of stats from a variety of sources (they’re provided at the bottom of the post) about the Internet in 2009.

Here’s a sample. The post itself has MANY more categories and numbers.

E-Mail
+ 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
+ 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
+ 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites
+ 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Internet users
+ 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
+ 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year

Social media
+ 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
+ 350 million – People on Facebook.
+ 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.

Video
+ 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
+ 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
+ 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).

Again, more numbers and categories in the complete post.

Source: Royal Pingdom via The Resourceshelf

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Mathematics of Online Search [iTunes]

Posted by Celia Walter | 28 Jan, 2010
Google's Kevin McCurley on the Mathematics of Online Search [iTunes]

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) sponsors a slew of terrific talks and events each year, and recently they have begun to place digital versions of these online. This particular talk features observations from Google research scientist Kevin McCurley. In this talk from November 2009, McCurley focuses his presentation on the mathematics used to generate good search results and the more difficult task of coming up with "similar" results. Visitors to this site can read a brief description of the talk, and then listen to the complete lecture. Along the way, McCurley uses some illustrative examples, including discussing the results of a Google search on "mathematics". The site is rounded out by an interview with McCurley conducted by Ivars Peterson. [KMG] Sout Report http://maa.org/news/120309mccurley.html

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Library of Congress ebooks

Posted by Celia Walter | 13 Jan, 2010

This site forms part of the Internet Archive. It provides free access to over 60,000 full text electronic books which were scanned from the holdings of the libraries of the Library of Congress. They cover all subject areas from the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences and include many historical out of print items. Strengths include historic American government publications, books on the economic, social and political and legal history of the United States and the American civil war. It is possible to search the website or browse. Copyright and technical information is displayed. It is possible to set up an RSS feed of new items added to the online collection.From Intute.ac.uk

http://www.archive.org/details/library_of_congress

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'things that are used but not cited' a brief note

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2010
In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given.  The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it.

So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts:

MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61, 1-12 DOI: 10.1002/asi.21228

The article provides great examples from the field of biogeography (the distribution of plants and animals over an area - they tell me). It is typical for researchers in this field, when writing articles in peer-reviewed journals, to not cite their data sources.  Some of the data sources are flora  - "a list of plant species known to occur within a region of interest." The flora might be books, government reports, notes in journals or some other sort of gray literature... [more] 

From Christina's LIS Rant blog

From Celia: The comments are interesting as well. Thanks to Ingrid Thomson, a colleague, who sent me this posting.

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NotesLogExp 2009 and Advanced SystemCare Free 3.4.2. From Scout Report

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2010
NotesLogExp 2009

http://computclub.110mb.com/

With its very basic design, NotesLogExp 2009 can help computer neophytes organize any type of information. The simple entry fields include forms for "Description", "Date", "Comment", "Address", and so on. Adding information to these fields can help users locate and categorize information as they see fit. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer. [KMG]



Advanced SystemCare Free 3.4.2

http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download

In this New Year, it may be time for a computer cleanup. Advanced System Care offers a path to better overall system performance, and its user interface is only populated with several buttons. The application includes spyware removal, registry cleaning, junk file deletion, and disk defragmentation. You can't schedule scans with this free version, so users will have to do this manually each time. This version is compatible with systems running Windows 2000 and newer. [KMG]

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The DIRT on research

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2010

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively.  Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

Types of Tools

 

I want to...

 

Background Information

 

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E-learning Conferences Worldwide

Posted by Celia Walter | 6 Jan, 2010

Upcoming events in internet-based education, educational technology and related fields

http://www.conferencealerts.com/elearning.htm

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Open Access Journals indexed by Web of Science

Posted by Celia Walter | 6 Jan, 2010

Web of Science, covers the contents of 494 peer-reviewed open access journals. That amounts to 4.5% of the roughly 11,000 journals covered by the service, also known by its subsets -- Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index.

Link to list of these titles:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/scholcom/accessdenied/206168.html


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Cornell University Library ebooks

Posted by Celia Walter | 6 Jan, 2010

This site forms part of the Internet Archive. It provides free access to over 70,000 full text electronic books which were scanned from the holdings of the libraries of Cornell University by Microsoft Corporation. They cover all subject areas from the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences and include many historical out of print items. Other strengths include historic American government publications, books on the economic, social and political and legal history of the United States. It is possible to search the website or browse. Copyright and technical information is displayed.

http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=cornell

 From Intute.ac.uk

 

 

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Critical Theory Institute, UC, Irvine

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Jan, 2010
The Critical Theory Institute at University of California, Irvine is an interdisciplinary research unit comprised of members "from various departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences" who collaborate on research projects in critical theory "that are addressed for three to four year periods through organized discussions of pertinent theoretical work and specific events such as the Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory series". The Institute also sponsors the Wellek Library Lecture Series and bibliographies prepared for lecture series speakers can be accesed from the site. There is publication and event information and links to the Institute's online resources which includes a catalogue of audio and video recordings and the Jacques Derrida Papers. http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/
From Intute.ac.uk

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ipl2: Information You Can Trust,

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Jan, 2010

 

 

... "is a merger of ... two respected virtual collections [LII.ORG and IPL], and is housed at Drexel University's iSchool, and involving a consortium of colleges and universities with information science programs, ipl2 will have more of a 2.0 flavor than its ancestors, with an emphasis on its social networking presence--on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube.

The new site [is] structurally different, but much of the familiar content will live on.  My own personal favorite features of both directories will remain--the IPL Pathfinders (check out newspapers and magazines and Special Collections, for instance) and the LII Newsletter, which will resurrect as a blog (although I suggested Diigo might work nicely as a bookmark-sharing platform.)"...

From NeverEnding Search blog posted by  Joyce Vakenza Ph.D

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

 

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Reframing Google's search options

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Jan, 2010

Over the past couple of years, those brilliant Google engineers designed stunning search options, moving Google search way, way beyond an effective, but relatively unflexible vertical search.

...

The problem is--so many of the very best search options are buried in the vast Google wilderness of labs, or in the wonderful pulldowns of more and even more--places where few but our most intrepid students and teachers dare to go.

So I've been playing with a prototype search page that unearths some of those beautiful buried tools.  (I will be working with some of my GTA buddies with serious design talents to make this page more attractive and usable, but I thought I'd share the first proof of concept.)

From NeverEndingSearch blog Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on December 27, 2009

From Celia: I haven't managed to include a picture  of the prototype search page, but it's worth looking at.

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User-Generated Content in Academic Contexts

Posted by Celia Walter | 4 Jan, 2010

As this year’s Intute Advent Calendar posts have shown, the applications of Web 2.0 technology are many and various. But user-generated content is still often viewed with suspicion in academic circles.

Its greatest strength – the huge pool of potential contributors – can also be its biggest weakness, as it’s not always obvious where the information comes from or how reliable it is. Many educators are increasingly aware that it’s therefore vital for students to receive training on how to distinguish good Web content from bad. A few suggestions are given below.

Five positive habits to encourage

  1. Checking the author’s credentials – Some contributors will give a significant amount of information about themselves (see, for example, the Wikipedia user-page of the author of an earlier post in the Intute Advent Calendar). Others prefer to remain anonymous – and while that doesn’t automatically mean the content is poor, it does mean students will need to find other reasons to believe it trustworthy.
  2. Selecting the right tool for the job – For example, a discussion forum might be a great place to discover a range of views on a controversial topic, but probably isn’t the place to look for more formal arguments, developed at greater length.
  3. Looking beyond the main body text – If the site is a wiki, the history and discussion pages may include useful information. When a topic has provoked heated debate and numerous revisions, there’s additional need to be careful that the current version of the page offers the key information. With blog posts, it’s worth looking at the comments, as these may highlight alternative perspectives.
  4. Seeing what other people say about the site – A Google Advanced Search allows you to see who links to it, and to check whether the resource has received positive or negative comments elsewhere on the Web – or if it’s been reviewed by a site like Intute.
  5. Cross referencing – The Web makes it easy to compare a number of information sources to see if they agree – which can help to confirm facts (or flag up mistaken information), and to give a range of views for more controversial topics.
...[More]
From Intute blog

 

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