It’s Now Probably Time To Ditch Flash

From 2001-2005 UKOLN and the AHDS provided the Technical Advisory Service for the NOF-digitise programme.  Our initial task was to summarise the open standards which funded projects should be using in order to ensure interoperability and  to support the long-term preservation of the digitised resources.

The technical standards (which are no longer available on the People’s Network Web site) provided information on various open standards including standards which had been developed by the W3C, including SMIL and SVG.  However, as I’ve described previously, these standards failed to achieve significant acceptance in the market place and so, in order to ensure that the projects could deliver engaging services, the requirement to make use of open standards was relaxed, with such proprietary formats being acceptable provided documentation was provided on the reasons for the use  of proprietary solutions.

That was the position around 2001-2002. But now, as we’ve heard in a TechCrunch post on Scribd’s Decision To Dump Flash Pays Off, User Engagement Triples, there is a growing believe that Flash is on its way out with HTML5 providing a more effective standards-based solution.

You may think that the lesson is that open standards are better than proprietary ones – but I would suggest that this example shows the danger of mandating use of open standards at too early a stage and that alternative open standards may eventually emerge as winners.

The difficulty will be in learning from such lessons and avoiding requiring use of open standards if this will eventually be seen to be a mistaken decision.  Perhaps the lesson from the open alternatives to Flash is that it can take over 5 years before such alternatives are mature enough for wide-scale deployment?

Web Accessibility – Code of Practice (BS 8878:2010)

Over the past six years I have worked with a group of accessibility researchers and practitioners in the UK and, in the past couple of years in Australia, in writing papers for a number of peer-reviewed journals which have described the limitations of traditional approaches to Web accessibility, which is based on an uncritical acceptance of the WAI approach to Web accessibility and the emphasis placed on WCAG guidelines.

In our paper on “Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” (see HTML or PDF version) presented at the ADDW08 conference myself and David Sloan reviewed the ideas we had described up to 2008.  The paper described the holistic approach to e-learning accessibility which myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift described in our initial paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” (see HTML or PDF version) published in 2004. The paper then described the stakeholder model of accessibility which was developed by Jane Seale and featured in our paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” (see HTML or PDF version). As can be gathered from the title of that paper, we also highlighted the importance of policies covering the approaches taken to Web accessibility within organisations.

Having been involved in this work over the years I was very interested to see the recent draft version of the BS 8878:2010 Code of Practice on Web Accessibility.  I have to admit I was very pleased to read the approaches taken in this document. It was good to see the emphasis on documentation and the escape mechanism given in the second bullet point below which allows for deviations from requirements described in the document if, for example, technological developments supercede the requirements stated in the document:

Organizations wishing to claim conformity with BS 8878 should:

• address all of the provisions of this British Standard
• be able to justify any course of action that deviates from this British Standard’s recommendations; and
• document their decision processes (in hard copy or electronic media) to provide evidence of following the recommendations and guidance in this British Standard

It is good to see, at last, a document about Web accessibility explicitly acknowledging the need to address the resource implications in providing accessible services:

Where organizations do not choose the option which would result in a product which is the most accessible it can be, organizations should be able to justify their decisions for choosing a lesser option based on the reasonableness of this decision, defined as a cost-benefits balance between:

• the reasonableness of the cost: the financial or time costs of choosing more accessible options, balanced against whether the organization has the resources to meet those costs
• the reasonableness of the benefit: the number of disabled and elderly users who would benefit from those more accessible options, and the size of the impact on each of these users if the web product excluded them

The document also recognises the importance of context and personalisation and explicitly addresses a learning context in the following example:

Educational establishments, eLearning websites, staff intranets, and any website where users become a member by creating a login (such as social networking sites) are more likely to regard their users as individuals that they have entered into a relationship with. This might set up an expectation of an individualized user experience in the mind of their users. These user expectations, once set up, might extend beyond general personalization facilities like rating or the creation of member pages, to include an individualized approach to dealing with their accessibility needs.

The document recognises that organisations may legitimately address the requirements of individuals or groups:

The organization should choose whether they will aim to regard their users as:

• individuals; or
• user groups, each with a set of common needs.

EXAMPLES

• More traditional public internet sites are more likely to consider their users as user groups, and not raise user expectations beyond this lower level.

This choice, which should be documented in the product’s accessibility policy, will fundamentally impact the approach to accessibility for the web product (see 4.4.9).

The document is quite long and may disappoint those who may have been hoping for a simple description of a code of practice for Web accessibility.  However I feel that the Code of Practice correctly acknowledges the complexities in seeking to enhance accessibility of Web products for people with disabilities.  It was also good to see the references to ‘inclusive design’ rather than the ‘universal design’ which, I feel, leads people to believe that a single universal solution is possible or, indeed desirable.

Many thanks to the people who have produced this document which gets my support.

Evidence, Even If Flawed, For Blog Metrics

I recently co-facilitated a one-day workshop on “Engagement, Impact, Value” which was organised jointly with Mimas.  The day explored ways in which JISC Services and projects could seek to engage with their users in order to maximise the impact of their services and demonstrate their value.

The Government’s announcements of cuts across the public sector, including the news about the forthcoming withdrawal of funding for Becta, provided a sombre tone to the day’s presentations and discussions, with a clear understanding that the issues addressed during the day will probably also of significance across the HE sector.

During the day we heard about the need to provide evidence of value. We also heard that, despite the many limitations related to metrics for networked services, we should be gathering such evidence in any case. And hearing today’s news that the Government [is] to scrap three quarters of its websites to save £100million I’m more convinced than ever of the need to be able to provide evidence to cost-cutters – even if the limitations are self-evident to techies.

What evidence, therefore, can be provided which demonstrates the value of a blog?  And, perhaps equally important, what evidence can be obtained with minimal effort?

The Technorati service has information on over one million blog (note that since 2009 Technorati has been analysing English language blogs only).  Technorati provides information for a blog’s  authority which is described as a “measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere”. In addition Technorati also provides information on a blogs’ ‘Rank’ which is “a site’s rank among the Technorati Authority of all sites. 1 is the highest rank“.

A search for blogs with the keyword ‘jisc’ provides the results which are shown below.

The MASHe blog is to be commended with its high profile in this search :-)  And it would appear that the first two blogs are in the top 1% of all blogs Technorati has indexed with the next two blogs in the top 5%.

Back in November 2006 I described how I had registered this blog in Technorati.  I would suggest that other blog authors do this as it provides a simple way of getting statistics. I would advice claiming the blog shortly after it has been launched although if you have an existing blog it can be claimed although you will need to create a post containing a Technorati code in order to validate that you own the blog (the post can be deleted afterwards).

Yes, Technorati’s approach will be flawed but if the government moves on from Government Web sites and threatens the survival of Web sites across the educational sector I will have some evidence why this blog should be spared.  And I’d like other blogs in the sector to be able to make use of similar evidence themselves.

One Minute Madness: Twitter: An Essential Tool for the Information Professional!

Recently I described the One-Minute Madness session which will be held at Evidence, Value and Impact: the LIS Research Landscape in 2010. I have now decided on the title of my talk for the conference: in 60 seconds I will argue that Twitter is An Essential Tool for the Information Professional.

Here’s what I intend to say:

Twitter is now an essential tool for today’s information professional. The evidence shows that in some areas recommendation using social media services, such as Twitter, is overtaking Google in driving traffic.

I myself use bit.ly which shows that tweets are now delivering significant traffic to my blog – or look at the viral effect Twitter provided for the recent CILIP1 campaign.

Twitter provides many of the benefits which we expected from RSS – but allows users to respond and discuss the ideas.

Twitter is valuable when time is at a premium. No time to read through all of those lengthy posts on LIS-LINK? Well then develop your professional network using Twitter and find yourself receiving well-targetted resources and pithy summaries – and serendipitous benefits in receiving the unexpected.

And you can do this on the bus or the train travelling to work (although use when driving is not recommended!)

Twitter: clearly an essential tool for the information professional: the evidence demonstrates its value – but librarians need to embrace it in order to maximise the impact it can provide.

Hmm – is that too much content for 60 seconds? Here’s my first attempt (MP3 audio file) with the text slightly modified).

So this is about a 1 minute argument on the benefits of Twitter for information professionals.  Clearly the issues are more complex than can be given in this short period of time.  But, allowing for that, would you agree or disagree with the basic premise that, slightly more nuanced, Twitter can provide a valuable tool which can support the activities for many information professionals?

The Need To Promote The Benefits Of Events

It was in a post entitled Fahrenheit 451 published back in August 2008 when I first made reference to the impending economic crisis, describing how, at the JISC Innovation Forum HEFCE’s John Selby had praised the work of the JISC and JISC Services but “went on to warn of troubled financial times ahead for the educational sector. The glory days of the past 10 years are over, he predicted.”  As we have seen from today’s emergency budget, he was right :-(

We have been very aware that cuts across institutions may mean that it will be difficult to find funding to attend events – and therefore  we have known that although last year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009) was the largest ever, attracting almost 200 participants, there might be risks that the numbers for this year’s event, IWMW 2010, might be significantly down.

Our approach to managing that risk is to ensure that we ensure that potential participants and their managers and other decision makers are aware of the benefits which attendance at the 3 day event can provide. We therefore set up the IWMW 2010 blog and published a series of posts in which we highlighted a number of important areas to the sector which will be addressed at the event including the Mobile Web, the Social Web and Linked Data as well as the many other aspects of managing large scale institutional Web services in the context of the economic uncertainties. The event, we feel, is relevant to newcomers to the sector and to those who are well-established in their role.

The cost of the event is £350 for the three days which also includes two night’s accommodation. This is clearly a very cost-effective way of ensuring those with responsibilities for managing mission-critical institutional Web services are kept up-to-day with both new areas of innovation as well as approaches to managing services at a time of reductions in funding.

The event can be regarded as a shared centralised service, in which the effort and expertise provided by members of the Web management community who give the plenary talks and facilitate the parallel sessions helps to ensure a cost-effective solution for the community.  The Web management community is part of a ‘Big Society’ one might say if there is a need to reflect the current political ideology.

The IWMW series of workshops, which started back in 1997, has always been willing to acknowledge the advantages which can be gained in working with commercial companies  which provide products and services to the sector.  One again we have a number of companies which are sponsoring the event.  In addition, as described in a post which yesterday announced Sponsored Place for those with No Funding thanks to the sponsorship provided by Statistics into Decisions (or SiD), we are able to offer a limited number of free places to participants who would like to attend the IWMW 2010 but are unable to do so due to lack of institutional support.

If you are in the position of wishing to attend the event but finding that there is a lack of institutional support please send an email to Marieke Guy, the programme chair of IWMW 2010 by 17:00 on Friday 25^th June with details of:

• The benefits you feel that attendance at IWMW 2010 will provide for you and your institution.
• How you feel you can participate at IWMW 2010 in order to enhance the event.

You should also provide details of the reasons you are seeking funding to attend.

Note that in case of the number of applications exceeding the numbers of sponsored places the IWMW 2010 organising committee will allocate the places based on the information provided in the submissions.

If, however, institutional funding is available but you haven’t yet booked a place (or perhaps were unaware of the event) you should note that since the booking deadline has been extended until Friday 25^th June.  Of course if you are a manager or budget holder and wish to ensure that your staff have the technical and organisational skills needed to develop Web services in these difficult times you may wish to point them in the direction of the online booking form.

Rapid Software Development Using Twitter

Helping New Twitter Users ‘Get It’

I’ve recently acquired some new Twitter followers and have become aware that in some cases newcomers to Twitter feel that they should be using the service but don’t quite ‘get it’.  An  example of the benefits Twitter can provide for those involved in IT development activities might help not only to demonstrate Twitter’s potential but also to highlight one of the subtler aspects of Twitter use – how messages sent using the @ command may not be seen by those with a small Twitter community.

Monitoring Twitter Usage Over Time

Last week I noticed Twitter chat between Martin Weller (@mweller) and Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) about, if I remember correctly, ways of measuring trends in numbers of Twitter followers.  Tony suggested (correctly) that the TwapperKeeper Twitter archiving service couldn’t be used as that archives tweets and not information about Twitter users.

At this point I joined in the discussion. I have an interest in how Twitter discussions centred around an event hashtag might evolve over time.  I had captured a screen image of the Summarizr word cloud for the @iwmw10 hashtag, with the intention of repeating this  the week before the event, during the event and the week after in order to see how the discussions had evolved over time.

I was aware that my approach was not a scalable solution. However the Twitter discussion led to some thoughts of ways in which this process could be automated. I wondered whether use of an archiving solution layered on top of Summarizr might be feasible. Myself and Andy Powell (who wrote Summarizr)  did briefly suggest meeting up for a drink and a chat about possible Summarizr developments. However with the World Cup being on the TV most nights we didn’t get round to finding a suitable free evening.

Meanwhile Martin Hawksey observed our discussions and, as he has described in a post on  Using Google Spreadsheet to automatically monitor Twitter event hashtags and more on the MASHe blog he has developed “a Google Spreadsheet which could capture and report the daily/weekly twitter activity from an event hashtag“.

The Benefits of Growing Your Twitter Community

I’ll not describe Martin’s development work as this is described in his post (and he’s even recorded a video which gives an overview of how to use the service and what it does. Rather I’ll reflect on the process.

Martin (Weller) and Tony were (openly) discussing an area of interest to them. I had similar interests and described what I had been doing (and was aware of the limitations of my approach).  Meanwhile Martin (Hawksey) observed the discussion and (while Andy and I were thinking of having a meeting) developed a solution.

Without the open discussion on Twitter this would not have happened!

But I have also realised that this happened because we all follow each other and so @ messages aimed at either of us were visible to each other.  This is a subtlety of Twitter which is probably not appreciated by new Twitter users (and, I suspect by many established Twitter users).  It was, after all, only in May 2009 that Twitter changed how the @ command worked in Twitter – as described on the Twitter blog “you only see replies by people you follow” (although if you prefix an @ reply with another character – a . is often used – the reply will be visible in the Twitter stream).

If you’re a new Twitter user and have decided to start off slowly by following only a small number of Twitter users you may therefore miss out on the wider set of discussions which are taking place.

I’d therefore suggest that if you are new to Twitter and are willing to give it a fair trial you should seek to grow your Twitter community.  One suggestion I have for growing the numbers of people you follow is to watch hashtags of interest to you and follow people who seem to be making interesting comments. If you are a librarian, for example, follow the @lisrc10 event hashtag, especially on 28 June (the date of the Evidence, Value and Impact: the LIS Research Landscape in 2010 Conference).

LateRooms and Tripit

In a post on Saving Money on Accommodation I described how I often use LateRooms when booking hotel accommodation. I described how this also provides details of the discounts that one has obtained and suggested that such evidence may be useful if there is a need to demonstrate how one is providing cost effective working practices.

I’ve noticed recently that LateRooms now provides an AJAX interface which can be used when selecting one’s preferred options.  I used this recently to find a hotel near Covent Garden which had WiFi available – and was pleased to find a room at £37 pounds per night rather than £150. Quite a significant saving for the two nights I stayed there!

Since December 2007 I have been using Tripit.com to help in the planning of my trips. I’ve used it for 64 of my trips, which includes many of my work trips (normally for those which involve an overnight stay) together with my holidays.

Although it is a Social Web service, by default others can’t see details of your trips.  There are people in my Tripit network who can see details of forthcoming and recent trips, but I ensure that these are people whom I have met and trust.

When I was away in southeast Asia couple of years ago I shared the details of where I was staying with UKOLN’s departmental secretary – so in case of any unforeseen problems (and I was in Thailand shortly before the airport was closed due to political unrest) it would be possible to see the hotels I had stayed at.

A nice feature of Tripit is that when you enter the date and flight number for a flight it will know when you are flying to. It uses this to provide a local map of the airport  and details of the flight status.

An even better feature is that, for many journeys, you don’t even have to type in the details. Instead you can simply forward an email conformation to Tripit and it will parse the information and add this to your travel details.  I used this feature for a train trip to London and the service automatically included the full details in my travel schedule, as illustrated.

As well as automatically including a map of your destination for flights the Tripit application also allows you to embed maps -again I use this so I have maps typically  showing the directions from the train station to my accommodation, my accommodation to the venue for my meeting and from the venue back to the station.

There is also an app for Tripit which I have installed on my iPod Touch so I have access to this information in my pocket.

Shouldn’t everybody who does a fair amount of travel make use of such services?  And are there other services which you’ve used which you find indispensable to support your trips?

One Minute Madness at the LIS Research Coalition’s Conference

Earlier this year I was invited to join the planning group for the LIS Research Coalition‘s conference on Evidence, Value and Impact: the LIS Research Landscape in 2010 which will be held at the British Library on 28 June 2010.

This one-day conference will consider perspectives on the library and information science research landscape with reference to: identifying LIS research opportunities; translating research outcomes into practice; growing research capacity amongst LIS professionals and developing the future UK LIS research agenda (note, incidentally, that bookings for the event close on Friday 18 June).

One feature of the conference will be the One minute madness. As described on the Web site “One minute madness sessions give conference participants the chance to present their ideas to their peers in an informal and fun way. This type of session often allows presenters to put across a core idea much more successfully than is the case when presenting a full conference paper“.

This is an approach which was used in July 2009 at a JISC projects start-up meeting which adopted a30-second version of the format. Videos of the performances are available on YouTube which  include:

• Dave De Roure
• Jackie Knowles
• Chris Awre
• David Bourget
• William Nixon

Chris Awre’s Introduction to the JISC CLIF project is particularly impressive, featuring some impressive juggling in addition to a focussed summary of the Content Lifecycle Integration Framework project.  If you have 34 seconds to spare you may wish to view the video:

Hmm, quite a challenge. I wonder what topic I should choose for my contribution to the one-minute madness – and whether I should be brave enough to follow Chris’s lead and try to multitask during those sixty seconds?

Has anyone seen such One-minute madness themselves and have any thoughts on how well they work?

Shouldn’t Information Professionals Use A Dedicated Twitter Client?

I recently described Nicola McNee’s #CILIP1 Twitter campaign in which she encouraged librarians to respond to a KMPG report which questions the future of professional librarians.

I announced the post on Twitter:

Worried about the future for librarians? Join the #CILIP1 Twitter campaign – it’s taking off :-) http://bit.ly/dt6w4P

and was pleased to see, via the statistics provided by bit.ly, the large number of retweets of my announcement and, I hope, active participation in the campaign.

I was also interested to observe the referrer statistics provided by the service which summarised the Twitter clients being used when the link was followed.

As can be seen the majority of views came via the Twitter.com Web site, with smaller numbers for Adobe Air clients, mobile clients and other mobile interfaces.  The statistics also showed that use of the TweetDeck  client (which I use) was significantly less than the accesses from Twitter.com.

I must admit I find this slightly surprising. Over a year ago colleague at Bath University admitted that he only “got” Twitter after using a dedicated client rather than the Twitter Web site.

In recent talks on “Exploiting the Social Web to Promote Your Resources” commissioned by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) I have described how I use TweetDeck to group the tweets to reflect my areas of interest.

An example of how I use TweetDeck so that alerts in areas of particular interest are grouped together is shown (note click on image for full-size display). If I so desire, I can configure the client so a audio and visual alert is provided when a new tweet in one of the categories is posted.

As well as the search columns I also have columns for all my followers (the view you get using the Twitter.com Web site), mentions (the @briankelly columns), direct messages and any groups which I have created – I have a Bath group containing the Twitter used I follow who are based in or around Bath) I know that  some people have an A-List column containing the followers whose tweets they are particularly interested in.

I feel that information professionals who use Twitter should be aware of the benefits which can be gained from use of dedicated twitter clients – not only for their own benefits but also in advising their users of best practices for using Twitter effectively.

But perhaps librarians and information professionals aren’t allowed to install desktop applications and this is the reason for the popularity of the Twitter.com Web site. In which case a more sophisticated Web-based twitter client might be a useful tool to use. Why not give Hootsuite.com a try? As shown below this provides multiple configurable columns plus a tabbed interface.   Surely it’s time to move on from Twitter.com?

Geeks, Linked Data and the World Cup

Linked Data and the World Cup

A couple of months ago Kingsley Idehen (Founder & CEO of OpenLink Software and an Open Linked Data enthusiast according to his Twitter profile) mentioned on Twitter that he expected to see lots of interesting Linked Data developments taking place around the World Cup. This prediction seems to be coming true judging by the tweet I received from @AdamLeadbetter last night:

@briankelly RT @rlpow: Our #semweb #worldcup crazies are on a roll! @neumarcx @hekanibru @uogbuji

Looking at @neumarcx’s tweets I find a link to a DBpedia entry related to the World Cup:

well so far http://dbpedia.org/resource/France_national_football_team is doing a few things better I’d say #WC2010

and:

Je suis désolé, mais je n’ai pas le choix. But my money is on http://dbpedia.org/resource/Uruguay_national_football_team

I think Kingsley is right – there’s now a great opportunity to see some Linked Data developments in an area which will be of interest to many people around the world. And let’s be honest, the bioinformatics Linked Data examples haven’t really had much public appeal! In addition the public awareness of football and the World Cup also provides an opportunity to raise awareness of some of the complexities in machine-understandable – we know, for example, what Americans mean when they talk about ‘soccer’ but software wouldn’t unless mappings between ‘football’ and ‘soccer’ are provided.

Ownership of the Data

There will also be an opportunity to raise awareness of the issues associated with ownership of data.  As I described in a post entitled What’s The Score? And Whose Score Is It, Anyway? according to an entry in Wikipedia the fixture list for UK’s four professional football leagues: the Premier League, The Football League, the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish Football League is owned by Football DataCo. And a year ago @ollieparsley in his The FootyTweets “Cease and Desist” Story described how he “received a Cease and Desist notice from a company that looks after the Premier League and Football Leagues copyright online“. He went on to add that he “checked that the company was legitimate and I am unhappy to say that they are legitimate“. Ollie subsequently also wrote about a MotorTweets Formula 1 Cease and Desist letter. This described how the “Formula One Administration Limited (”FOA”) has the exclusive right to commercially exploit the FIA Formula One World Championship (”the Championship”) including, but not limited to, all moving images, other audio/video content, timing data and results“. So I hope that the Linked Data football-supporting geeks have good lawyers! Or perhaps we should regard this as an opportunity for civil disobedience, claiming that we, the public, have the rights to do what we want with our sporting data – it’s part of our culture and shouldn’t be privatised. Peter Murray-Rust has argued a similar argument related to scientific outputs in a post where he argued that scientists (and librarians) should “Post ALL ACADEMIC OUTPUT publicly – IGNORE COPYRIGHT“.

What Can Linked Data Offer?

What Linked Data applications might appeal to the general public? I have tried DBpedia’s Relationship Finder which depicts relationships between data provided in Wikipedia information boxes. The image shown below shows the relationships between the entries for the England national football team and the German national football team. As can be seen the 1966 World Cup Final is shown as a significant relationship between these two countries :-)

As depicted in the graph, the relationship is actually between the England and West Germany national football teams, although there is a direct relationship between the West Germany and Germany teams. How, I wonder, would this relationship have been depicted is we had beaten USSR – a county which, like West Germany, no longer exists. Seeing such relationships makes one aware of the complexities in interpreting data.

What About Twitter?

We saw with the #uksnow example how Twitter can be used to aggregate lightly-structured data.  Might Twitter have a similar role to play during the World Cup.  If World Cup tweets are to be analysed there will be a need to identify the relevant hashtags – and I have seen, from my Twitter followers, the #wc2010 and the #worldcup tags both being used.  But will there be agreement on a hashtag for the countries competing in #wc2010 (to use by preferred hashtag)? Last night I observed three character country codes being used (#FRA and #URU).  Assuming there is an agreed international standard for such country code for national football teams it might be possible to carry out some interesting sentiment analysis  - although as we learnt from the #nickcleggsfault st0ry automated analyses can misinterpret irony. We might also need to be aware that disgruntled Scottish fans may be included to tweet for #AnyTeamBarENG! As for me, I’ll be tweeting for #ENG erland, #ENG erland,#ENG erland!

If we want to analysis World Cup-related tweets we will need an archive of the tweets, ideally from a service which provide APIs. I have checked TwapperKeeper and found there are archives for both the #wc2010 and #worldcup hashtags – interestingly the latter is much more popular with over 202,00 tweets compared with the 43,000+ tweets from the shorter variant. I also noticed that @jennifermjones, a researcher at Loughborough University whom I follow on Twitter created these two archives – and herself seems to prefer the #worldcup tag.

What Else Is Happening?

Are there any examples of innovative uses of Linked Data and Social Media in the content of the football that you are aware of? Or, indeed, ideas you would like to suggest which football-supporting geeks might be interested in implementing? But please provide suggestions before the quarter finals – English developers tend to lose interest in the World Cup around that time! And Wimbledon doesn’t have the same appeal.

Getting Into The Top Ten For Your Institutional Repository

Statistics on Downloads for the University of Bath Institutional Repository

The University of Bath is currently testing the IR Stats package in Opus, the University’s institutional repository. Using the Web interface to the package I ran a search for the top ten downloads over the past year.   The results are shown below -and, as you can see, a paper on “Library 2.0: balancing the risks and benefits to maximise the dividends” by myself, Paul Bevan, Richard Akerman, Jo Alcock and Josie Fraser is in second place!  You’ll have to scroll on beneath the image to discover the secrets of how to ensure that your research paper gets into the top ten for your institutional repository :-)

Seeking An Explanation

On 11 August 2009 I wrote a blog post in which I described how my Paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” [had been] Published in Program.

Now looking at the blog statistics for visits to the post I discover that there have been a total of 735 views (with 162 on the day of publication ).

Since the blog post linked directly to the details of the paper provided in the institutional repository I believe that many of the visits to the blog post resulted in downloads of the paper in the repository – and so it was a direct result of having a blog and writing a timely post about the paper which resulted in the paper being the second most downloaded paper last year.

Do I have any further evidence to back up this assertion? It would have been interesting to see it a tweet about the post had generated traffic to the article but, having looked at the archive of my tweets in BackUpMyTweets it seems I didn’t use Twitter on the day the post was published. It also seems that a bit.ly URL for the post hadn’t been minted previously, so unfortunately there are no bit.ly statistics to examine.

However looking at the download statistics over the past year for my other items in the repository this particular item stands out for its popularity – and so I will assert that the timely blog post linking to the repository item generated over thirty times the normal annual traffic to one of my papers.

Looking at the search engine statistics for all of my items over the period I discover than 80% of the traffic is not delivered by a search engine (the red quadrant in the pie chart).

Using the display of referring traffic to my items confirms that search engines aren’t significant in providing traffic (20%) and the repository search itself only that only delivers 10% of the traffic. Rather it is external Web sites (i.e. my blog, I believe) which delivers 39% of the traffic with 31% of the traffic having no referred information (I have found this is often traffic from Twitter clients but in this case in may be traffic coming from RSS readers used to view the post).

Discussion

Of course the large number of downloads is no indication of the quality of the paper.  And it might be that the paper was downloaded by an automated agent (perhaps someone was retrieving papers on Library 2.0 and the harvester repeatedly downloaded this paper).  Or, alternatively, maybe the statistics package is producing incorrect results.

But, unless I come across alternative evidence, I will regard the popularity of this item as an indication that blog posts can have a significant impact on the traffic to items in an institutional repository.  Note that I am not saying that blogs are the only significant factor – my UKOLN colleague Alex Ball and Andy Ramsden, head of the e-learning team (both of whom work on the same corridor as me) also figure in the top ten downloads. In their case I think embedding links to their Opus items in external Web sites helps to drive traffic.

However, especially for those working in areas in which there are significant numbers of blog readers, having a blog and using it effectively may provide the researcher with an advantage in raising awareness of their research.

Would you agree?

If Social Discovery Is Beating Traditional Search, Then What?

Workshop on the Importance of the Social Web for Maximising Impact and Traffic

A year ago I facilitated sessions in a series of two-day workshop on “Improve your online presence“ which had been commissioned by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA). In the run-up to the workshop, whilst preparing my session on how the Social Web can enhance access to resources I published a post entitled From Search Engine to Twitter Optimisation which was based on my observations that Twitter, and not Google, was becoming the most significant driver of traffic to this blog.

Further research revealed that I was not alone in noticing this trend, with a TechCrunch article being published around the same time pointing out, with evidence, that For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown).

The Evidence

In my talks in the workshop I referenced another TechCrunch article which suggested that The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links. The venture capitalist Fred Wilson was quoted as predicting that “at current growth rates, Twitter [and Facebook] “will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year“.

That post was published on 16 June last year. On 2-3 June this year I took part in the first of a further series of workshops, again commissioned by the SCA and again delivered by myself in conjunction with Netskills. My slides had been slightly updated, but when I came to the slide referring to Fred Wilson’s prediction I had to stop and say “This isn’t a prediction – it has happened!“.

Image from http://searchenginewatch.com/3639969

My comments were made in the context of a presentation given by George Munroe in the opening session of the workshop. George referred to a blog post on Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media published in SearchEngineWatch on 1 April 2010. This reviewed data from Compete from November 2009 which observed that a number of the top media properties are already seeing a dominant effect in traffic from social networking services.

As can be seen USA Today is getting 32% of its traffic from Social Networking services and only 6% from Google!

The Implications

Such evidence supports the observations I have been making on my blog.  But if this is true more widely, then what are the implications?  If, to restate the question, traffic is increasingly being driven by recommendation rather than metadata and clever algorithms, what are the implications for service providers?

For me it is clear that service providers will need to be engaging with the Social Web.  There will be a need to ensure that one’s social network is cultivated and maintained – and the associated dangers identified and avoided.

But I’d be interested in your thoughts on my question: if traffic is increasingly being driven by recommendation rather than metadata and clever algorithms, what are the implications for service providers?

Is this a valid supposition and, if so, what should we be doing, what should we be doing differently and what should we not be doing?

From Web Sites to Data for Events

The Importance of Open Data

The importance of open data has been highlighted over the past few days with the Government’s public release of the Coins database. For those of us working in the public sector I feel there will be a need to move beyond the provision of Web sites designed for humans to the provision of open data for consumption by software, unencumbered by licence conditions which place restrictions on how the date can be used (a point, incidentally, raised yesterday by Tony Hirst in a post on “Time for data.ac.uk? Or a local data.open.ac.uk?“).

This post describes how the data contained in Web sites for UKOLN’s IWMW events has been made available in RSS format, thus allowing reuse by others. The challenges in understanding the meaning of the data (which may have subtly changed over the years) and the quality of the data (which was not initially provided for use by others) is described, with conclusions provided for best practices in this area.

Web Sites for IWMW Events

The Web sites for all of UKOLN’s IWMW events since the event was launched in 1997 are still available in their original format. in 1997, 1998 and 1999 the Web site consisted of a couple of pages giving details about the events and providing links to the workshop materials. In 2000 we launched a more comprehensive event Web site which provided comprehensive details of the timetable, speakers’ biographies, abstracts of the talks and workshop sessions, information about the social; events, latest news, etc. We have continued with this approach ever since, although the look-and-feel of the Web site has changed a couple of times.

Web-Accessible Data for IWMW Events

This information was initially provided as HTML pages. However a few years ago we decided to make the key informational resources – speakers’ biographies, session abstracts as well as the latest news – available in RSS format. As described in a post on “RSS Feeds For Structured Information About Events” this enabled this data to be used by other applications, such as location maps of the speakers or Wordle displays of the session abstracts.

We now provide access to comprehensive data (as opposed to Web sites) related to all 14 of the IWMW events which are available in RSS formats. These files are listed below.

Data	Links to RSS Feeds
Plenary Speakers	[2010] – [2009] – [2008] – [2007] – [2006] – [2005] – [2004] – [2003] – [2002] – [2001] – [2000] – [1999] – [1998] – [1997] – [All years]
Facilitators	[2010] – [2009] – [2008] – [2007] – [2006] – [2005] – [2004] – [2003] – [2002] – [2001] – [2000] – [1999] – [1998] – [1997] – [All years]
Plenary Sessions	[2010] – [2009] – [2008] – [2007] – [2006] – [2005] – [2004] – [2003] – [2002] – [2001] – [2000] – [1999] – [1998] – [1997] – [All years]
Workshop Sessions	[2010] – [2009] – [2008] – [2007] – [2006] – [2005] – [2004] – [2003] – [2002] – [2001] – [2000] – [1999] – [1998] – [1997] – [All years]

Note that the RSS feed for the abstracts of the plenary talks over all 14 years has been created using a Yahoo Pipe which aggregated the RSS feeds for the individual years. Yahoo Pipes are also available for aggregating the information for the abstracts of the workshop sessions and the biographical details for the plenary speakers and workshop facilitators are also available.

What’s The Data About?

Releasing data is one thing; understanding the data is another. One response to the Guardian article on the Government’s release of the Coins database commented that “This data is pretty much unintelligible to anyone outside of Treasury“. There are dangers that even simple data, such as the data files described above, may not be what they appear, the data may be inaccurate or links from the data may be broken.

I feel there is a need to provide a statement about the data quality when making data available for reuse by others. In order to attempt to identify what might be included in such a statement I am summarising my knowledge regarding the data described above.

Data files: This statement relates to the RSS files providing information about the speakers and workshop facilitators and the abstracts of plenary talks, workshop sessions and other events at UKOLN’s IWMW events from 1997-2010 together with location data for the events.

File formats: The data is provided in a mixture of RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 formats.

Workflow: The data has been manually migrated from the initial HTML formats.

Description of the files: The files for the plenary speakers and sessions should contain information about speakers who gave plenary talks to all participants at the event and abstracts of the plenary sessions. This may also include panelists for panel sessions which were provided in plenary sessions. The files for the workshop facilitators and sessions should contain information about those involved in hosting parallel workshop sessions and the abstracts for the workshop sessions.

Data elements: The files will normally contain a title (speakers or facilitators name, sometimes with the year, and the name of the talk or session, sometimes with a session code); a URL to further information about the speakers, facilitator or session, where this information is readily available; biographical details of the speaker, facilitator or session abstract, based on information provided by the speaker or facilitator and the data, and sometimes the time, the session was given.

Known limitations: Full information about the speakers and facilitators may not be available (e.g. where people had multiple roles at the event there may only be a single entry provided). There may have been errors in the original HTML resource or changes to scheduled timetable (e.g. due to last minute cancellations or changes in the running order). There may also have been errors introduced in migration of the data to RSS format. Links from the RSS files may also contain errors,

Risks: In light of the possible limitations of the data care should e taken in exploiting this data.

Changes: The information provided in the RSS files may change as errors are fixed. When errors are fixed we will seek to regenerate a new RSS feed providing information which covers all years.

We hope this summary of the limitations of the data files prove useful to anyone who wishes to make use of the data.

What About Linked Data?

Although we are aware of limitation in the quality of the data perhaps the biggest barrier to reuse of the data relates to the very limited links to other related information, Information about speakers and their host institution, for example, is provided as text strings and not links so we (currently) don’t provide links which allow the data to be easily integrated with other data stores. We are currently exploring ways in which we can migrate from an open structured data to open linked data. If and when such data becomes available we will provide a summary of the approaches used in the data migration and explore ways in which such data can be used.

The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community

Decline in Usage of JISCMail Lists for the Web Management Community

Earlier this year I published a blog post entitled “My Significant Drop in Use of JISCMail Lists” which described how the numbers of messages I have published to the web-support JISCMail list has dropped from a peak on 53 in 2001 to only two messages in 2009.

I speculated that such a steep decline was true more generally in many of the JISCMail lists I subscribe to – but was unable to easily provide evidence due to the resource effort in having to manually count the numbers of posts to the lists.

Following the recent upgrade to the JISCMail Web site searches across JISCMail archives now include the total numbers of matching search queries. So carrying out a search of JISCMail archives for author’s addresses which contain ‘@’ for each year should enable trends to be observed.

The results for the numbers of posts to the web-support and website-info-mgt JISCMail list between 1999 and 2009 are shown.

The peak for the web-support list was 2002 when 2,540 messages were posted. The website-info-mgt list had a peak of 568 messages posted in 2001.

The decline of both of these lists now appears to have stabilised at just over 200 messages posted per year (less than 5 messages per week).  Many of these messages will related to announcements of events, job vacancies, etc. rather than the discussions which took place in the early days of these lists.

Clear evidence, it would appear, of the decline in importance of mailing lists over the past 5 years, replaced, we would imagine, by use of a variety of Social Web tools. The Web Management community is now, perhaps, a blogging, twittering and social bookmarking community.

Comparisons with Usage of a Popular JISCMail List for the Library Community

But how have other popular JISCMail lists used by other communities changed over the past 10 years?

In the case of the lis-link JISCMail list it seems that the Library community still makes intensive use of mailing lists.

Over the same time span this list was mostly widely used at the start of the period, with 3,651 posts in 1999. The decline since then has, however, been relatively slight with 2,226 posts in 2008 (and a rise t0 2,401 posts in 2009).

Whilst the institutional Web management community has moved away from JISCMail, those working in the library sector are still making intensive use of the service, receiving, on average, 46 messages per week on this list. And since there are a number of more specialist JISCMail lists aimed at the Library community (including LIS-CIGS, LIS-E-BOOKS, LIS-E-RESOURCES, LIS-ILL and LIS-Web2) it is quite clear that mailing lists still provide an important service for this community.

Accessing This Data

Unfortunately the JISCMail search facility does not provide a RESTful interface so I can’t provide a link to the data used to produce the graphs shown above.  However Google Spreadsheets was used to produce the graphs and this has been made publicly available.

Discussion

“Email Must Die!” was the deliberately provocative  title of a talk I gave at the ILI conference back in 2005 (and having noticed that the iPres 2010 call for proposals requests that “Panels should be lively, controversial and provoke discussion” I am unapologetic in being prepared to occasionally use somewhat controversial titles for my talks).  A report on the talk (available in PDF format) described how I introduced a “whole plethora of alternative methods of communicating information that enable collaboration or that provide information to the gadgets or programs that people use in real life, such as RSS feeds from blogs, instant messaging, wikis, podcasts, and so on” and argued that “it won’t be too long before our users will expect libraries to be able to communicate using these channels, so we’d be well advised to explore them now!“.

This prediction seems to have come true amongst Web managers, with the main mailing lists used by the community seemingly being used for  one-way announcements rather than discussions and debates.  But in other communities this hasn’t happened. Why is this, I wonder?

My initial suspicion was simply the lag in the adoption of new technologies, with the early adopters having embraced various Web 2.0 communications technologies a number of years ago to be followed by mainstream users. In this spectrum we might expect those primarily involved in Web support and development work to be part of the early adopter community, with those who have a prime focus on other areas (teaching and learning and research, for example) to be somewhat behind in making use of new technologies.

But does such a technological deterministic really reflect reality?  There will be additional factors such as ease of access to networked computers and access to Web 2.0 services themselves – and many of the librarians on the LIS- lists who work in FE colleges, public libraries and, indeed, the commercial sector,  may not have the ready access to the services which many of us working in HE have now come to expect.

There is also the question of whether users need to migrate to new technologies if well-established approaches, such as email lists, fulfill their purposes.

On the other hand, revisiting my post on “Decommissioning / Mothballing Mailing Lists” the trends showing the numbers of messages posted to lists seem to clearly indicate the majority of lists no longer have any traffic and those with over 100 messages posted per year (such as the LIS-LINK) are very much in a minority.

Does this evidence (taken from the JISC Monitoring Unit Web site) suggest that the library sector are out of synch with the rest of the community??

You Have 5 Seconds to Make an Impression!

Social Networks Can Be Too Heavyweight

I think many of the 750 participants at the recent JISC 10 conference regarded the event as a valuable networking opportunity, as well as an opportunity to hear the two plenary talks and listen to presentations and watch demonstrations that were given throughout the day.

Much of the networking will have been carried out using networked technologies.  I have previously pointed out that the Ning network wasn’t really used to support communications and user interactions – and as it has recently been announced that Ning is laying off 40% of its staff and will no longer be providing a free service I suspect that Ning won’t have a role to play at next year’s JISC event. Instead, as can be seen from the statistics on WHashtag and the Summarizr service,  much of the networking was carried out using Twitter.

Twitter as a Lightweight Social Network

But how do you make an impression on Twitter? Or, if you feel that ‘making an impression’ isn’t what Twitter is about, how do you establish effective business relationships using Twitter, if that is something you would like Twitter to achieve?

In a post I wrote in March 2010 I described how “It Started With A Tweet” – ‘it’ in this case being a joint paper which Sarah Lewthwaite (@slewth) on “Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World” contributed to which was presented recently at the W4A 2010 conference.

The post didn’t, however, describe how Sarah’s Twitter biography provided me with the opportunity to contact her and discuss her interested in disability issues.

The first thing you should notice from her Twitter biography (which is illustrated) is that it provides a brief summary of her interests and, most importantly as far as I am concerned, a link to her blog.  It was that link that I followed from which I learnt that, in addition to her interests in Web 2.0 which she mentioned in her response to my initial tweet, she  also had research interests in disability issues. It was her blog post which introduced me to the concept of ‘aversive disablism’ which formed a valuable new contribution to the model myself, David Sloan and other Web accessibility researchers have been developing over the years and which was included in our recent paper.

In has recently occurred to me that if Sarah had not provided a link to her blog in her Twitter profile, leaving it blank or simply linked to the University of Nottingham Web site (her host institution) we would not have had the Twitter discussion, I would have been unaware of the concept of ‘aversive disablism’ and David and myself would probably have been unable to provide significant new ideas for a paper for the W4A conference – which, thanks to Sarah’s valuable contribution, won the John M Slatin award at the conference :-).

Writing Skills for Twitter Profiles

I recently worked with Netskills to deliver a training course.  During the workshop I heard that one of the new trainers will be delivering a workshop on Writing For The Web.  I wonder if the course will cover writing biographical details for use on social networking services and the importance of hyperlinks to make it easy for others to identify possible business opportunities.  I probably spent about 5 seconds looking at Sarah’s profile before deciding to follow the link to her blog. And those 5 seconds provided tangible benefits.  I wonder why Twitter users who use the service to support their professional activities would fail to include a link back to further information in their profile?