Comments on: If Social Discovery Is Beating Traditional Search, Then What?

By: One Minute Madness: Twitter: An Essential Tool for the Information Professional! « UK Web Focus

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:19:46 +0000

[...] If Social Discovery Is Beating Traditional Search, Then What? [...]

By: Tom Franklin

Tom Franklin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:14:19 +0000

It would also be interesting to know if most of the (admittedly small number at this stage) of social network refers relate to new items – and possibly even from their creators / depositors advertising them to their networks.

By: AJ Cann

AJ Cann — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:24:08 +0000

If we’re saying that traditional search tools are being superseded by social recommendation, yes. Trouble is, librarians are not in a position to do this as academic network curation requires subject-specific knowledge.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:13:15 +0000

Useful evidence. It would be interesting to see the trends over time for your repository, and also how your experience compares with others.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:11:47 +0000

Hi Tony, I’d agree on the need to avoid concluding that what might be true in one area (e.g. the news sphere you mention) is necessarily true in other contexts. This also relates to Les Carr’s point.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:09:46 +0000

I agreed that this is a real need. But who should have responsibility for doing this? Librarians have traditionally provided support in use of information retrieval tools, but would they feel that this should extend to supporting users in the development of their personal networks?

By: Les Carr

Les Carr — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:53:30 +0000

EPrints ECS reports the following referers in the period 6th June 4am till 9th June 3pm

Google: 5418
Twitter: 42
bit.ly: 18
Facebook: 1
delicious.com: 3

By: Epictrafficsystemsbonus

Epictrafficsystemsbonus — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:25:28 +0000

I would personaly focuss on search traffic, it is still the most targeted traffic i know, that exists on the web. I think that media traffic is kind of overhyped and a lot of people should prever learning the basics, befpre they explore that kind of traffic.

Eric
———————————————————— epictrafficsystemsbonus

By: Tony Hirst

Tony Hirst — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:30:26 +0000

When looking at those results, I’d suggest that you also need to segment not on user, but on content type?

Different content types may well receive different proportions of traffic from search engines vs social networks.

If you’re a news site, then a lot of your content has a peak demand period just after it’s published. This is also the sort of thing that folk will natural share on social networks (“Did you that X just Y – [link]“).

For content that is longer living, then I think discovery will still be weighted back towards the search engines. You might put out a query to a social network, but you’ll also use a search engine. Unless you imagine a limiting case where people predominantly only ask a social network (“anyone know where I can find X?”) and then maybe some of their social network who remember/know how to use a search engine send them a link back to a search results page…

By: AJ Cann

AJ Cann — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:14:04 +0000

Teach people to build and curate effective personal networks.