altmetrics

Posted by Celia Walter | 30 Jan, 2012

the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship.

altmetrics.org/
   Our vision is summarized in:J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Alt-metrics: A manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto.You can follow the ongoing discussion on Twitter via the #altmetrics tag or via the respective groups on Mendeley or FriendFeed. [See also: Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Resources
altmetrics on Mendeley
altmetrics on FriendFeed
altmetrics on LinkedIn

Tools

Total-Impact
ReaderMeter
Altmetric.com
Altmetrics crawler
CitedIn
ScienceCard
PeerEvaluation.org

 
Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton: “Evaluating online evidence of research impact” [Keynote speech ataltmetrics11: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web, Koblenz (Germany), 14-15 June 2011  An ACM Web Science Conference 2011 Workshop]
 
Thanks to my colleague, Ingrid Thomson, for bringing this to my attention.

Post in Citation metrics | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

SAGE Research Methods Online (SRMO)

Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Jan, 2012
SAGE Research Methods Online (SRMO): "the essential tool for researchers". UCT access is active at http://srmo.sagepub.com/ . A link has been added to the resource from the Library's Databases list. Access via EZProxy has been set up. SRMO has been activated on SFX which means that the content should be findable via Primo within a couple of days.

SAGE Research Methods Online (SRMO) is an award-winning tool designed to help you create research projects and understand the methods behind them.  SRMO's taxonomy of over 1,400 methods terms links to authoritative content, including:

  - Over 600 books
  - Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks
  - The entire "Little Green Book" and "Little Blue Book" series
  - Two major works collating a selection of journal articles
  - Newly commissioned videos

Post in Research, Social Sciences | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Threats to Digital Lending By Carrie Russell

Posted by Celia Walter | 25 Jan, 2012

Does the durability of ebooks pose a digital danger to libraries?

... the uncertainty about ownership of ebook content. What is ownership, after all? Perpetual access under certain conditions defined in the contract? True ownership, where the library can sell or discard its digital copy?

[More]

CARRIE RUSSELL is the director of the Program on Public Access to Information of the Office for Information Policy at ALA’s Washington Office.

From American Libraries magazine...

Post in E-books and e-readers | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

World’s leading think tanks. Global Go-To Think Tank Index

Posted by Celia Walter | 24 Jan, 2012

The Think Tanks and Civil Society Program (TTCSP) produces the annual Global Go-To Think Tank Index that ranks world’s leading think tanks with the help of a panel of over 1500 peer institutions and experts from the print and electronic media, academia, public and private donor institutions and policymakers. From Docubase

+ Link to full report (PDF; 2.19 MB)

Post in Think Tanks | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Internet 2011 in Numbers

Posted by Celia Walter | 23 Jan, 2012

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011. From Royal Pingdom



From Celia: a few figures that caught my attention

Email

 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.

 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).

 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.

Internet users

  

  2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.

 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.

Post in Internet, Statistics | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Google Search Plus - thumbs down reviews

Posted by Celia Walter | 19 Jan, 2012

Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search...  Google explains it like this: "We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships." So the idea here is clear - Google is going to become a search engine that is about social, not about the web. This is an absolute change in the way that Google works; it is going to pay less attention to web pages and web sites, and more attention to the people that you know and follow. This is something that I've been talking about for some time now, so it's unsurprising to see Google doing it, but what is surprising, although it shouldn't be, is the inept way that they have done it... see Phil Bradley's weblog for full post

 

The new Search Plus Your World feature will cause Google a lot of pain

This week Google started rolling outGoogle Search Plus Your World, which — besides being the worst case of bad branding in a long time — will cause Google a lot of problems. Searchers will go elsewhere and governments will complain. Here is why.

Google has presented personalized search results for a long time, using data from your Google GMail account (if you have one) and your web history. Google has been using these data to build you a kind of personality or interest profile, making it easier for them to deliver search results that are of interest to you personally...

Google has also tried to enrich search results with real time data frome the social web. For at time it did, for instance, include twitter messages (tweets), which devlivered information about what is happening right now. This was definitely a good idea.

+World is an attempt to combine the two and add personalized social data to the search engine results. That should be a recipe for success. Instead we believe Google is facing a PR disaster. You see, the implementation of +World is bad, very bad... see Pandia Search and Social for full post

 

Post in Google, GMail and other Google products | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age, a model

Posted by Celia Walter | 18 Jan, 2012
Alison J. Head on Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age [AUDIO]

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head — lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington’s Information School — presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources.

MP3

OGG audio format!

More info on this event here (includes video clip)

Harvard University. Berkman Center for Internet & Society Podcast

Post in Information Literacy | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wikipedia Will Shut Down on Wednesday 18th January 2012

Posted by Celia Walter | 17 Jan, 2012

Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours Wednesday to protest the [US] Stop Online Piracy Act, founder Jimmy Wales announced on Monday.

In doing so, Wikipedia joins a long list of web companies such as Reddit and Mozilla that are taking similar measures against the proposed legislation...BTW. comScore estimates the English Wikipedia’s web traffic at 25 million daily visitors worldwide.

Post in Wikipedia and other wiki encyclopedias | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies. MIT World video

Posted by Celia Walter | 17 Jan, 2012

...Thomas Pettitt makes the deliberately provocative case for a Gutenberg “Parenthesis” -- a period marked by the reign of the printing press and isolated from the largely oral culture that came before, and the digitally shaped culture emerging today. Pettitt, who finds an upside in society’s return to “something that resembles the past...

He finds “fundamental similarities between human kind’s oldest and pervasive media condition” (that of oral tradition), and the post-Gutenberg phenomenon of digital texts (not to mention sound and image). The entire history of media, Pettitt suggests, has been merely “interrupted by the age of print.”...

Responses from: Peter Donaldson and James Paradis

Link to video:  http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/775  Run time: 1 hour 55 minutes and 10 seconds

Post in Information Technology | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Infographics

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2012

...Infographics (information graphics) and data visualisation are current communications buzzwords that apply to using pictures to convey, quickly and effectively, the facts and ideas in a report. Others have different definitions or preferred terminology, but I tend to think of infographics as using common illustrations or graphic metaphors to tell a story that may involve data. I think of data visualisation as encompassing more analytical techniques that enable the viewer to understand rich data from multiple perspectives. Neither replaces tables-and-text analytical reports; rather, they can serve as introductions to a report’s content...

Flowing Data, a website about data visualisation, provides a sampler of visualisations in its Best of 2011 list. Owni.eu has its own list, 20 Great Visualizations of 2011. If you are intrigued and want to delve a bit deeper, check out some of these web posts:


Still sceptical? See the recent blog post 2012: The Year for Visual Content? from the Australian company Curated Content:

Once people view data through one of these [visualisation] prisms, they’ll never want to look at a table of data again, which is another reason why we’re expecting impressive growth throughout 2012 in this space …

We don’t think for a New York Minute that the growth of visual content comes at the expense of written content, but what we are seeing increasingly is the need for a content strategy that incorporates a number of different formats. Some formats do the job better than others, and the trick is knowing which format will best tell the story you want told...

FreePint post by Peggy Garvin, Senior Contributing Editor, DocuTicker

Post in Infographics | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)