The mobile app for the IWMW 2013 event

A video summary entitled Use of Social Media at IWMW Events is available on YouTube. The brief video (which lasts for just over one minute) explains how since 2005 we have tried to make use of a new online technologies at UKOLN’s IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) events. The video clip describes how the availability of a WiFi network at the University of Manchester, the venue for the IWMW 2005 event, provided our first opportunity to explore the benefits which use of communications technologies could provide at an event. Back then we were using IRC, which was available to a small number of people (about 18) who had brought along a laptop with WiFi capabilities.

I was one of those 18 people, and was therefore one of the first to hear the news of the London bombings. It was a strange experience to be aware of the news, but not the full extent of the news, whilst most people in the audience were listening to the speaker. I waited until the speaker had finished before announcing the news, with many of the London based participants then using the coffee break to ring home.

The incident brought home to me the importance of online communications at events, not only for significant incidents but also for more mundane occurrences such as missing keys, speakers delays and problems with public transport.

In addition to the need for event organisers to be able to communicate with speakers and delegates, the experiments a few years ago demonstrated the value of peer-to-peer communications using popular technologies such as Twitter for enriching the experience of events by allowing open discussions and questions to take place.

This Year’s Experiment: The Bizzabo Mobile App

Since mobile technologies are now mainstream, especially amongst Web professionals, this key we are experimenting with Bizzabo, a mobile app we are using to provide access to the IWMW 2013 timetable together with the event’s Twitter stream, as well as providing a communication channel for IWMW 2013 participants and other interested parties.

As can be seen from the screenshot, the opening page for the event shows its name and location, people who have signed up to the community, and recent tweets with the event hashtag.

The agenda for the three-day event is also available and you can bookmark your favourite sessions and add details to your mobile device.

One limitation I have found with the Bizzabo app is that the number of parallel sessions if limited to ten. As the IWMW 2013 event has eleven parallel sessions on Wednesday 26 June and ten on Thursday 27 June this causes a slight problem as one of the slots has to be allocated to the main plenary sessions.

The IWMW 2013 timetable for day 2 shown in Bizzabo

However this isn’t an insurmountable problems, and won’t be relevant for events which have fewer parallel sessions.

For me the success of apps such as this is whether they will be actively used by sufficient numbers of people. As described on the Bizzabo blog:

The community is the most important part of Bizzabo and what we’re all about. Once you join the community, you’ll be able to see all other members, go through their profiles, discover mutual connections and interact with the people you want to connect with. 

Note that the Bizzabo app is available for the iPhone and Android environments. The event organiser’s interface is available using a Web browser, which enables the event organiser to provide details about the event (name, location, programmes, times, etc.) as well as information about the speakers. It should be noted that speaker profiles can include details of the speaker’s Web site, blog, Twitter account and LinkedIn profile.

The programme for the IWMW 2013 event is also available on Lanyrd, which also provides a mobile interface. It will be interesting to see how Bizzabo compares with Lanyrd. The latter, to be fair, is more of a social directory for events, allowing you to see participants at events via their Twitter ID. However it will also be interesting to make a comparison between a responsive Web site (Lanyrd) and a dedicated mobile app (Bizzabo). From a provider’s perspective it can be advantageous to provide a single source of information which is available for both desktop and mobile browsers. However might users prefer a solution which could exploit a mobile phone’s characteristics more effectively and, arguably, is more easily found via the phone providers’ app store?

Bizzabo provides a simple way of ensuring that an event programme is available in a format suitable for viewing on a mobile device for free. However for me the important thing is whether the community aspect of Bizzabo takes off. I’m willing to give it a go. If you are attending the IWMW 2013 event, or are simply interested in the event, why not download the app and give it a go. Your feedback would be welcomed, including comments on the mobile app versus mobile web approach to providing information about events.

As mentioned above a brief video summary of the history of use of social media tools at IWMW events is available on YouTube and embedded below.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

PDF metadata – why so poor? asked Ross Mounce in a blog post published on New Year’s eve.

In the post Ross expressed surprise that although ”with published MP3 files of audio you get rather good metadata … the results from a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” were poor: “Out of the 70 PDFs I’ve published (meta)data on over at Figshare, only 8 of them had Keywords metadata embedded in them“.

This made we wonder about the quality of the metadata for papers I have uploaded to Opus, the University of Bath repository.

I looked at a paper on A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First which is available in Opus in PDF and MS Word formats.

I first used Adobe Acrobat in order to display the metadata for the original source PDF file, prior to uploading to the repository. As can be seen from the accompanying screen shot the metadata included the title, the author details (with the email address for one of the authors) and two keywords.

However looking at the display for the PDF downloaded form the repository we find that no metadata is available!

This PDF differs from the original source in that a cover page is added dynamically by the repository in order to provide appropriate institutional branding. It would appear that in the creation of the new PDF resource, the original metadata is lost.

Looking at the metadata created in the original source document – an MS Word file – we can see how the authors’ names which were subsequently concatenated into a single field. We can also see that although the title of the paper was given correctly, poor keywords had been included, which did not reflect the keywords which were included in the paper itself (Web accessibility, disabled people, policy, user experience, social inclusion, guidelines, development lifecycle, procurement).

I suspect that I am not alone in not spending much time in ensuring that appropriate metadata is embedded in the master source of a peer-reviewed paper. I have also previously not considered how such metadata might be lost in the workflow processes when uploading to an institutional repository: after all, surely the important metadata is added when the paper is deposited into the repository?

Ross’s blog post made me check the embedded metadata – and I discovered that the correct metadata is still included in the MS Word file which was uploaded to the repository along with the PDF copy.

Does the loss of the metadata embedded in the PDF matter? After all, surely people will use the search facilities provided in the repository in order to find papers of interest?

But people will not necessarily visit a repository to find papers of interest. A post which described A Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities showed that on 1 August 2012 there were over 18,000 users of ResearchGate in the 24 Russell Group universities and judging by the messages along the lines of “28 of your colleagues from University of Bath have joined ResearchGate in the last month. Why not follow them today?” which I am currently receiving, use of this service is growing.

As can be seen from the screenshot of my ResearchGate profile, the service provides access to PDF copies of my papers. I normally simply provide a link to the PDF hosted in the repository but the example illustrated contains a copy of original PDF which was uploaded to the service by one of the co-authors.

In the case of most of my papers it is clear from the thumbnail of the PDF that the paper contains the coversheet provided by the repository.

Discussion

We can see that the PDF copy of a paper hosted in a repository should not be regarded as a final destination; rather the PDF may be surfaced in other environments.

It will therefore be important to ensure that workflow processes do not degrade the quality of the PDF. It will also be important to ensure that authors are made aware of how embedded metadata may be used by services beyond the institutional repository. But to what extend do repository managers feel they have a responsibility to advise on practices which will enhance the discoverability of content on services hosted outside the institution?

In a paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” myself and Jenny Delasalle commented on how “commercial publishers are encouraging authors to use social media to drive traffic to papers hosted on publishers’ web sites” and provided examples of such approaches from Taylor and Francis, Springer, Sage and Oxford Journals. As an example, Taylor and Francis describe how they are “committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers” and go on to document services which can help achieve this goal.

In a blog post which discussed the ideas describe din the paper I described how we had failed to find significant evidence of similar approaches being employed by repository managers:

It was interesting that in Jenny’s research she found that a number of commercial publishers encourage their authors to use services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu to link to their papers hosted behind the publishers paywalls – and yet we are not seeing institutional views of the benefits of coordinated use of such services by their researchers. Institutional repository managers, research support staff and librarians could be prompting their institutions to make the most of these externally provided services, to enhance the visibility of their researchers’ work in institutional repositories.

But that paper was limited to use of third-party services to provide access routes to research papers. What of the bigger picture in which institutional work flow processes should be designed to enhance discoverability?

The ‘inside-out and outside-in library’

On Wednesday in a post entitled Discovery vs discoverability … Lorcan Dempsey explored the idea of the “inside-out and outside-in library“. In the post Lorcan described how:

Throughout much of their existence, libraries have managed an outside-in range of resources: they have acquired books, journals, databases, and other materials from external sources and provided discovery systems for their local constituency over what they own or license.

However in a digital and network world, there have been two major changes, which shift the focus towards inside-out:

First access and discovery have now scaled to the level of the network: they are web scale. If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. … Secondly the institution is also a producer of a range of information resources: digitized images or special collections, learning and research materials, research data, administrative records (website, prospectuses, etc.), faculty expertise and profile data, and so on.

Lorcan goes on to describe the challenge facing libraries:

How effectively to disclose this material is of growing interest across libraries or across the institutions of which the library is a part. This presents an inside-out challenge, as here the library wants the material to be discovered by their own constituency but usually also by a general web population.

I would suggest that institutional repositories could usefully adopt the approach taken by Taylor and Francis:

 ”[The institution is] committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers“

But rather than simply encourage researchers to simply add links to papers deposited in the repository from popular services such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate might the institutional goal be enhanced by encouraging researchers to make the content of their papers available in such third party services (subject to copyright considerations) – with the institutional repository providing both a destination and a component in a workflow, with papers being surfaced in services such as ResearchGate, as I have illustrated above.

If such an approach were to be embraced there would be a need to ensure that embedded metadata was not corrupted through repository workflow processes. If, however, the repository is regarded as the sole access point, there would be little motivation to address such limitations in the work flow.

Or to put it another way, repository managers will have a need to manage content hosted within the institution, including management to support the use of the content by services they have no control over.

To a certain extent, this has already been accepted: repositories were designed to have “cool URIs” which can help resources to be discovered by Google. I am suggesting that there is a need to observe usage patterns which indicate emerging ways in which users are finding content. The growing numbers of email alerts from ResearchGate suggest that it may be a service to monitor – with Ross Mounce’s recent post of on the quality of metadata embedded in PDFs suggesting one area in which there will be a need to revisit existing workflow processes.

PS. Ross Mounce described “a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” and has published the data on Figshare. Has anyone harvested the metadata embedded in PDFs hosted on repositories and published the findings?

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]

Yesterday while visiting Google Scholar I noticed an alert which informed me that there were 10 new notifications for me (see image but note that as I have viewed the updates the alert which was displayed in the top right is no longer shown).

I’d not seen this alert before so I followed the link and discovered a set of recommended papers based on my citations. The second recommended paper in this list seemed particularly interesting: a paper on How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

I viewed the paper (available in PDF and HTML formats) and found that a recent accessibility audit of Library web sites in Ontario and found that, despite legal requirements for web sites to conform with WCAG 2.0 guidelines “an average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page“.

Back in 2002 I published An Accessibility Analysis of UK University Entry Points which found that only 3 University home pages out of 163 conformed with WCAG 1.0 AA guidelines. Two years later a follow-up survey was published which reported that 9 out of 161 home pages conformed with WCAG 10. AA guidelines. Since I was well aware of the importance University Web managers placed on addressing Web accessibility issues, especially since the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) accessibility legislation was enacted in 2002, I regarded this as evidence of the limitations of WCAG guidelines. Around this time our first peer-reviewed paper on Web accessibility, Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility, was published. In 2005 a paper on Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World documented the limitations of WCAG guidelines and the WAI model. A series of accessibility papers followed with the most recent paper, A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First, describing how:

This paper argues that web accessibility is not an intrinsic characteristic of a digital resource but is determined by complex political, social and other contextual factors, as well as technical aspects which are the focus of WAI standardisation activities. It can therefore be inappropriate to develop legislation or focus on metrics only associated with properties of the resource.

It was therefore disheartening to read the paper on Ontario Library Web sites concluding:

Since none of the library web sites examined in this study currently conform to WCAG 2.0, many changes will need to be made before sites can meet the new legal requirements for accessibility. Web accessibility guidelines and standards will need to be incorporated and integrated into the vocabulary, thinking, and processes of web content creators to successfully achieve WCAG 2.0 conformance. Complying with new web accessibility standards will involve a significant change in web development processes.

However the good news is that Google Scholar Updates correctly identified a paper of interest to me.

Learning More About Google Scholar Updates

This morning I spotted a tweet from Glyn Moody which stated:

Moody’s Microblog Daily Digest 120809 - http://bit.ly/QLn6Xe yesterday’s tweets as a single Web page

Since I know that Glyn uses his Twitter account to post links to resources which are likely to be of interest to me (especially related to a variety of open practices) followed the link to Glyn’s most recent tweets. There I spotted a timely tweet:

Wow – Google Scholar “Updates” a big step forward in sifting through the scientific literature - http://bit.ly/MAPqvZ nice

This provided a link to a blog post by Jonathan Eisen, Professor at UC Davis who described his reaction when encountering this new service from Google:

Wow. Completely awesome if it works well. So, well, let’s see if it works well. For me the system recommends the following

Jonathan Eisen went on to share his experiences in identifying the value of the recommendations. After concluding that the first recommendation was of little interest, like me he then looked at another suggestion:

paper number 2 seems a bit closer to my heart: REGEN: Ancestral Genome Reconstruction for Bacteria. And bonus – it is freely available. And so, well, I read over it. And it is definitely related to what I do and I probably would not have seen it without this notification. Cool.

Reflections

From a post entitled Scholar Updates: Making New Connections posted on the Google Scholar blog it seems that this new service was only released two days ago, on Wednesday 8 August. The post describes how:

We analyze your articles (as identified in your Scholar profile), scan the entire web looking for new articles relevant to your research, and then show you the most relevant articles when you visit Scholar. We determine relevance using a statistical model that incorporates what your work is about, the citation graph between articles, the fact that interests can change over time, and the authors you work with and cite. You don’t need to configure updates or enter any queries. We’ll notify you about new updates by displaying a preview on the homepage and highlighting a bell icon on search results pages.

I therefore seems that researchers can gain value by ensuring that they have a Google Scholar account containing information about their research publications which Google’s sophisticated search algorithms can use to suggest other relevant papers. It’s therefore interesting to note that last week’s Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities reported that 5,115 users at Russell Group universities have claimed a Google Scholar account, ranging from 77 at the University of Exeter to 580 at UCL.

In addition to the value of Google Scholar Updates it also occurred to me how valuable the links to resources provided by Glyn Moody in his tweets could me, if they were more easily accessed that the daily updates posted on his blog.

Aaron Tay is another person I follow who also provided valuable links to resources using his Twitter account. Back in February 2012 in a post entitled My Trusted Social Librarian I described how I had set up a Twitter list containing just @aarontay. I used this list with the Smartr app to view the content of links which Aaron tweeted. However Smartr is no longer available. In addition such access to Aaron’s links required every individual user to install Smartr or a similar app. Wouldn’t it be useful if there could be a web-based aggregation providing a summary of links which a Twitter user has tweeted? As I described last week, this is what RebelMouse provides. Even better, Aaron also uses RebelMouse. And, as can be seen, 19 hours ago Aaron also tweeted a link to the blog post about the Google Scholar Updates:

RT @figshare: Wow – Google Scholar “Updates” a big step forward in sifting through the scientific literature:http://vsb.li/m2p1bC by @p …

To conclude, if you use your Twitter account for sharing links, consider using a service such as RebelMouse to make it easier for others to see the content of the links you’ve shared.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Back in March 2012 in a post on Profiling Staff and Researcher Use of Cloud Services Across Russell Group Universities I summarised usage of Academia.edu, LinkedIn, ResearcherID and Google Scholar Citations across the 2o Russell Group universities. The post highlighted complementary surveys which had been carried out by Jenny Delasalle, who in Twitter profile describes herself as a “Research support Librarian: interested in bibliometrics, copyright, scholarly communications, and all sorts!” based at the University of Warwick. That connection subsequently led to Jenny and I writing a paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” which was presented at the Open Repositories 2012 conference, OR 2012.

As described in a one-minute video summary and a 4 minute slidecast, in our paper Jenny and I described personal evidence which suggested that use of LinkedIn and Academia.edu can help to raise the profile of peer-reviewed papers hosted in institutional repositories if links to the papers are provided in these popular services as this may enhance the Google ranking for the institutional repository.

As described on the Russell Group University Web site: “Through their outstanding research and teaching, unrivalled links with businesses and a commitment to civic responsibility, Russell Group universities make an enormous impact on the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of the UK“. But to what extent are the Russell Group universities making use of researcher profiling services to enhance access to their research outputs, especially, those hosted in institutional open access repositories?

Updated Survey of Russell Group University Use of Researcher Profiling Services

The methodologies which were used in the previous blog posts and repeated for the findings published in our paper has been used again, this time to provide a benchmark for use of these services across the enlarged collection of Russell Group universities, which was enlarged to 24 institutions on 1 August 2012 following the incorporation of Durham and Exeter University, Queen Mary, University of London and the University of York.

In addition to benchmarking four additional institutions, following Jenny Delasalle’s blog post about ResearchGate the ResearchGate service was also included in the survey.

The findings are given in the following table. Note that the data for the LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID and ResearchGate services was collected on 25 July 2012.

Corrections:

It was noted that the figures given in this table for the Google Scholar Citation are an underestimate. This appears to be due to the design of the REST interface to the entries.  The table has been updated with the correct figures.

Notes:

• The numbers may be skewed by errors or variants in names of institutions. For example there are 140 people in academia.edu who are associated with the bham.ac.uk rather than the birmingham.ac.uk domain.
• The numbers for Academia.edu and ResearcherID were obtained by a search for the institution’s name. However a link to the findings is not available.
• Searches for ResearcherID were for institution name except for the University of Birmingham which included UK to avoid name clashes.
• The findings for institutions such as Queen’s University Belfast and King’s College London with apostrophes in the institution’s name may be skewed due to different policies on resolving such names.

Discussion

It should be noted that the five services covered in this survey are different and it would be inappropriate to make comparisons across the services – in particular although Academia.edu, ResearcherID, Google Scholar Citations and ResearchGate are intended for the research community, LinkedIn  has a wider remit and, understandably, has a larger audience.

In addition, as described in the Notes, there may be flaws or inconsistencies in the way in which the data was gathered and displayed. In particular it seems that the lack of an agreed institutional ID means that users may associate themselves with different variants of their institution, with this seemingly being the case for institutions contains apostrophes, in particular.

The previous survey and subsequent paper suggested that use of popular social media services by researchers could enhance access to the researchers’ research outputs if links to their outputs were provided from the services.  I am still convinced that this is the case but appreciate that further evidence may be needed in order to convince decision-makers that a coordinated approach to providing links to the content of open access repositories would help to maximise access to the resources.  For now, however, this post is intended to provide a benchmark of use of the services on the launch day for the enlarged group of Russell Group Universities.  In addition I would welcome feedback on the survey methodology, especially from the Russell Group Universities who may find that their information is fragmented across several variants of the institution’s name.

I would also, of course, welcome comments in the implications of the findings and their relevance in the context of the 24 institutions referenced in the survey. Researchgate, for example, appears to have information on over 426K papers ranging from 1.8K at LSE to 39K at the University of Cambridge.  What proportion of research papers hosted in institutional repositories does this cover?  And if the numbers appear low for some institutions does this mean that the institutions should seek to take appropriate actions to increase the numbers, or ignore such findings as it may simply demonstrate the  lack of relevance of the services?

Paradata:   As described in  a post on Paradata for Online Surveys blog posts which contain live links to data will include a summary of the survey environment in order to help ensure that survey findings are reproducible, with information on potentially misleading information being highlighted.

The data for the Academia, LinkedIn,  Google Scholar Citations,  ResearchGate and ResearcherID was collected on 25 July 2012.

The values for Google Scholar Citation for the universities of Birmingham and Newcastle include ‘UK’ in the search field in order to avoid including information from US and Australian universities with the same name.

It should also be noted that I was logged into the services when I gathered the information.

It should also be noted that the low values for LinkedIn followers for King’s College London and Queen’s University Belfast are felt to be due to the apostrophe used in the institution’s names. For example of search (carried out on 31 July 2012) on LinkedIn for King’s College London gives 3,758 hits but a search for Kings College London gives 328 hits.

Yesterday I came across RebelMouse which initially appeared to provide a similar service. However after having had my application for an account approved I realised that RebelMouse was providing something slightly different – it was providing others with a display of the content of links which I tweet. As described in a post entitled Why This Month-Old Startup Is The Most Promising To Launch In A While ”RebelMouse is a snapshot of your social media activity“. The article went on to explain how:

RebelMouse is like a Facebook profile page; it’s meant to help other people learn your interests.

When you scan other people’s Rebel Mouse pages, you learn a lot about them, even if you already follow them on Twitter. It resurfaces things you may have missed in social media streams in a visually compelling way.

In March 2010 in a post entitled It Started With A Tweet I described the importance of one’s Twitter bio and the link to further information which can help potential followers to decide whether to follow an unknown Twitter user, especially in cases in which Twitter is used to support professional activities. Two years later I realise that such decision-making processes can be helped by providing an easy-to-digest summary of a Twitter user use of Twitter.

I’ve therefore created my RebelMouse page and have also embedded it within the UKOLN Web site. In addition I have  updated my Twitter biographical details to include a link to the RebelMouse account, as illustrated.

To summarise in an application-independent way:

As part of my open practices which support my professional activities I will make it easy for others to see how I use Twitter so that potential followers can decide whether to follow my Twitter account.

I’m currently using RebelMouse to achieve this goal but will be willing to use an alternative should I come across a service which I feel supports this goal more effectively.

A recent post entitled IWMW 2012: The Feedback summarised the feedback we had received for the recent IWMW 2012 event. In addition to this summary more detailed information was sent to the individual speakers and workshop facilitators on their talks and workshop sessions. Such feedback can be valuable in either showing the value of the contribution made at the event or providing suggestions on how the talk could be improved in repeated in future.

We published the feedback two weeks after the event as it is important that such information is available while the event is fresh in people’s memories. But, of course, there can be other ways of getting feedback. At the UCISA User Support Services Conference which took place a few day’s ago at the impressive Crewe Hall Hotel I was pleased to receive feedback on Twitter on the talk I gave on “Social Media: For Ourselves and For Our Customers” which have been summarised on Storify. The feedback included:

• Excellent presentation, you gave me a lot of new ideas for how I can communicate with my staff and customers. Thanks!
• Brilliant presentation from @briankelly – good to have a push to tweet a bit more!
• Brilliant talk from @briankelly – typically informative, insightful, and full of #lolz…
• Also really enjoyed @briankelly talk about social media. Engaging. Had a chuckle. And I think he likes a real ale so is in my good books

together with an example of an action taken as a result of the talk:

• Inspired to send my first tweet

Beyond the tweets, a post entitled What a difference a day makes published on the Musings from the frontline blog described how

Today we sat and listened to people who had not only aspired to do things differently and better but, most importantly, had achieved it.

and went on to conclude:

So, thank you @heloukee, @maffrigby, @briankelly and #ussc12 for the inspiration. You have provided the relationship counselling that I needed and me and conferences are now blissfully happy together again (for now anyway…

It’s About Links; It’s About Connectedness!

The topic of my talk was the importance of social networks to facilitate more effective collaborative working by making use of the existing social networking infrastructure. Although this is a subject I have spoken about previously, as described recently in a post on It’s About Links; It’s About Connectedness! I was fortunate to see Cameron Neylon’s opening plenary talk at the Open Repositories 2012 conference. As described in the live blog of the closing session for the conference given by Peter Burnhill:

we need to think about connectivity, as flagged by Cameron. And these places ie Twitter and Facebook… We don’t own them but we need to be I them, to make sure that citations come back to us from here.

The importance of use of such social media services to provide links to papers hosted in open repositories was also highlighted by Peter Burnhill in his observation that:

And there was talk of citation… LinkedIn, Academia.edu etc. is all about linking back to research to data

It was pleasing to see that the ideas described in a paper by myself and Jenny Delasalle which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academic.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” had been highlighted in the conference conclusions. But these particular ideas were just a simple example of the bigger picture provide by Cameron Neylon on the importance of networks which, on a global scale, can enable researchers to address difficult research topics which cannot be achieved by the single researcher or research group.

The Video For Connecting, For Sharing

Cameron’s talk, which is available on YouTube and embedded below, makes the point about the importance of connectivity (the social web) and ease-of-use (the lack of ‘friction’ needed to embed social web tools in workflow practices) very eloquently and is well worth viewing (and I’d like to give my thanks to the OR 12 organisers for publishing this video recording so quickly – and also for making it available on YouTube so it can be embedded in this blog).

It would, however, be a mistake to regard social networks as being purely a tool for scientific researchers – just as some people mistakenly feel that social networks are just for young people or for purely ‘social’ purposes a confusion caused by the different meanings of the term ‘social’. As I described in my talk, for which a video recording is also available, social networks can also be valuable for those working in support services – and institutions should gain benefits in use of social networking services across teaching and learning, research, marketing and support areas if they are regarded as valuable tools rather than treated with suspicion as is current the case in some areas.

Another important point made by Cameron is the importance of openness for both facilitating connections and minimising the friction caused by licensing barriers. The videos of Cameron’s talk and my talk provide another example of the ways in which connections can be made and knowledge and ideas shared by facilitating access to videos of talks at conferences. As I have described in previous talks on amplified events, such approaches can help the ideas shared at conferences escape the constraints of space and time. Many thanks to the OR 2012 and UCISA conference organisers for providing the live videos streams (escaping the constraints of space) and providing rapid access with little access barriers to the recordings of the talks (escaping the constraints of time).  Long may this continue – and if you are considering organising an amplified event the recent “Event Amplification Report” may be of interest.

Twitter conversation via Topsy: [View]

[Note After publishing this post I came across Sarah Horrigan's Event Report: Google European User Group 2012 post in which she described how "One of the things that was most interesting from this session [of student portals] was the student response to it – they LOVED it” and pointed out that “Universities feel comfortable moving to Google when others have already moved. For example, 25% institutions in Spain now on Google Apps“].

I was particularly interested in the talk given by Sarah Horrigan, Learning Technologies Manager at the University of Sheffield on Opening up our Practices – Going Google. The event organisers streamed several of the sessions and have provided access to recordings of the talks so I was able to replay Sarah’s presentation.

Four minutes 20 seconds into the talk Sarah told us that:

Our students love Google. They don’t just like it, they love it. The Students Union did a survey on technology in learning and teaching. One of the questions they were asked was ”What web sites or online services could you not live without?” Do you know what came number 1? It wasn’t our VLE! It was Google Apps. They love it: everything from Docs to Mail to Scholar – the whole shabang! They love Google Apps.

The popularity of the IT applications provided at the University of Sheffield didn’t come about by chance. Back in March 2011 Chris Sexton, head of CICS, the IT Services department at the University left a comment on this blog:

We made the decision to move to Google for students nearly two years ago, and are just in the process of moving all of our staff over. That will be for mail, calendar, docs, chat, etc. we see it as much more than just mail. The data side isn’t an issue. Google store all of their data under the safe harbor agreement which is perfectly sufficient for UK data protection/privacy law – I have personally confirmed this with the ICO. And anyway, even if it was all held in Europe, it is still covered by the Patriot Act if it is a US company.

I can see no reason for any HE IT department to run their own email service. 

Further back, 0n 27 May 2009 Chris reported on the move to GMail for students:

Formally announced the Google mail for students option last night by sending an email to all staff and students. Replies are split almost 50/50. From students saying this is great news, and from staff saying why can’t we have it!

I picked up on the importance of being aligned with one’s user communities a few days after I attended the GEUG12 event. In the session on New to the Sector? New to Web Management? New to IWMW? I suggested that the perform storm which has hit the sector, in general, and IT and the Web in particular means that there is a need to revisit assumptions about the role of the institutional Web team and the approaches taken to delivering this role – and, perhaps, to unlearn established beliefs and conventions.

I illustrated this point by giving a specific example: the role of events such as the IWMW series. UKOLN does not exist to provide a successful IWMW event; rather our aim is to ensure that the event delivers a specified objective for its community: “To keep web managers up-to-date with developments and best practices in order that institutions can exploit the web to its full potential“. In the talk I explained how technological developments were changing the nature of events and external factors, such as reduced levels of funding and environmental concerns, meant that we needed to not only acknowledge that the nature of our events might change, but that we should also be prepared to be instrumental in leading such changes – something we have been doing in our role in delivering amplified events and, in particular with our Greening Events II: Event Amplification Report” sharing best practices with others.

I went on to argue that institutional Web teams need to ensure that they are aligned with institutional aims and with the needs of their user communities. Easy words to say – but what if they are in conflict with well-established cultural norms in Web and IT teams? We have seen an example in students are happy with the services provided by Google, suggestions that staff did not want to be left behind and the IT Service departments is aligned to support these preferences. But is this the norm in the sector? Are we more likely to see users, IT staff and perhaps Web teams arguing for their preferred technological environment? And perhaps the argument “we use open sources solutions” in preference to licences solutions is becoming increasingly redundant when there are Cloud service providers?

Note that a video recording of Sarah’s talk on Opening up our Practices – Going Google is available on YouTube and embedded below.

In addition Sara’s slides are hosted on Sliideshare and also embedded below:

This paper, which is available from the University of Bath institutional repository, is based on work initially published on this blog.

A blog post entitled “How Researchers Can Use Inbound Linking Strategies to Enhance Access to Their Papers” published on 2 March 2012 described an Inbound linking strategy to get to the top listing on google fast. It occurred to me that my willingness to make use of researcher profiling services such as Academia.edu, ResearcherID, Scopus, Researchergate, Mendeley, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations may have helped to enhance the visibility of my research papers which are hosted in the University of Bath repository. The blog post went on to describe how I found that I was author of 15 of the most downloaded papers in the repository from my department.

More recent investigations reveal that, as illustrated, I have the largest number of downloads of any author at the University of Bath! This was recently brought to the attention of the PVC for Research who, in a departmental meeting, informed me that a University of Bath Research Group had discussed these figures and asked me to share the approaches with other researchers at Bath. In response I mentioned that the approaches I’d taken, the evidence I’d gathered, the hypothesis I had proposed for explaining the evidence, possible alternative hypotheses, the limitations of the approaches, the implications of the findings and areas for further work had been submitted to the Open Repositories 2012 conference – and if the paper was accepted the findings would be available to all, and not just researchers at my host institution.

The paper explores other possible reasons for the high visibility of these papers – and one possibility worthy of further investigation is the provision of many papers in HTML formats and not just PDF and MS Word. However the use of popular researcher profiling services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu are felt to be worth recommending to researchers in order (a) to ensure that their research papers can be more easily found by their peers on these services and (b) so that links to the paper on their institutional repository can enhance the visibility to Google of the papers as well as enhancing the Google ranking of the repository itself.

Of course it probably needs to be said that that the number of downloads is not necessarily an indicator of quality. However the converse is also true: just because a paper in a repository is seldom viewed does not indicate that it must be a great paper! I am quite happy to promote the use of such approaches since increased numbers of views, especially for the target communities, can help to both embed the ideas given in the papers by practitioners and increase the likelihood that the papers will be cited by other researchers. In my case I’m pleased that, according to Google Scholar Citations, my most cited papers have been cited 87, 67, 54 and 40 times.

My co-author Jenny Delasalle has been investigating use of researcher profiling service at the University of Warwick, her host institution. It was interesting that in Jenny’s research she found that a number of commercial publishers encourage their authors to use services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu to link to their papers hosted behind the publishers paywalls – and yet we are not seeing institutional views of the benefits of coordinated use of such services by their researchers. Institutional repository managers, research support staff and librarians could be prompting their institutions to make the most of these externally provided services, to enhance the visibility of their researchers’ work in institutional repositories.

Surely it is time for the research community to develop inbound linking strategies to their research work, especially as this can be done so simply. Indeed the OR12 conference organisers have invited us to summarise the ideas described in a poster and a one-minute presentation. The ideas have been summarised using the Pixton cartoon generation tool in four strips.

[link to source]

[link to source]

[link to source]

[link to source]

I’m not sure if it will be possible to use PowerPoint during the one-minute madness but I have prepared some slides which are available on Slideshare and embedded below.

NOTE: A one minute summary of this paper was given on the opening day of the OR 12 conference. A video recording of the summary is available on Vimeo and embedded below.

Also note that a slightly modified version of this post was published on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog on Thursday 23 August 2012. You can also view the bit.ly statistics for access to the post via the bit.ly URL.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

“Conferences don’t end at the end anymore” tweeted @markpower two days after IWMW 2012 delegates had left Edinburgh and returned home.  This has always been the case: conferences organisers will have evaluation forms to analyse and invoices to chase.  But the point Mark was making related to the continuing discussions about the ideas discussed at an event and the accompanying resources, resources which increasingly these days may have been created during the event and support for the participants, which can help to ensure that an event is not just an collection of individuals who are co-located for a few days but, as I described in a recent post, a sustainable and thriving community of practice.  A related point was made recently in a post on “#mLearnCon 2012 Backchannel – Curated Resources” in which David Kelly described how “The backchannel is an excellent resource for learning from a conference or event that you are unable to attend in-person” and went on to add that he finds “collecting and reviewing backchannel resources to be a valuable learning experience …, even when [he is] attending a conference in person. Sharing these collections on this blog has shown that others find value in the collections as well.” But what are the resources from the IWMW 2012 which may be of interest to others, where can they be found and what value may they provide?

Key Resources

Slideshare

The slides used by the plenary speakers were uploaded to Slideshare in advance of the talks in order to allow the slides to be embedded in relevant Web pages and enable a remote audience to view the slides.  It should also be added that this also allowed participants at the event to view the slides if they were not able to view the main display of the slides. The slides have been tagged with the “iwmw12″ tag on Slideshare.  This enables the collection of slides to be accessed by a search for this string or by  browsing slideshows which use this tag.  Note that in previous years an event tag had been used, but this service was discontinued recently, after Slideshare had been bought by LinkedIn.

Creating a collection of slides used at the event enables a Slideshare presentation pack to be created, as illustrated, thus making it easy to access all slides used at the event which have been made available. As can be seen from the IWMW 2012 web site, the presentation pack can be embedded in Web pages. This service is being used since participants at IWMW have frequently asked to be able to access slides, including slides used in parallel sessions which they were not able to attend. Using Slideshare makes it easy to respond to this user need. In addition it helps to raise the profile  and visibility of speakers at the event.

Lanyrd

The IWMW 2012 Lanyrd page was set up in advance to provide a social directory for participants at the event so they could see who else was attending. The value of this grows as Lanyrd is used across a number of events: from my Lanyrd, profile, for example, I can see that I have appeared at events on 12 occasions with my colleagues Marieke Guy and on 5 occasions with Paul Boag, Tony Hirst, Andy Powell, Keith Doyle and  Mike Nolan. In addition to the social dimension. Lanyrd also provides calendar entries for sessions at events. The date and time of sessions at IWMW 2012 has been provided together with links to the main page on the IWMW 2012 web site have been added, together with slideshows and links to reports on the sessions which we are aware of. It should be noted that, as illustrated, a Lanyrd has a Wiki-style environment for uploading resources which avoids the single-curator bottleneck. As the person who set up the IWMW 2012 Laynrd entry, together with the IWMW guide for all IWMW events, it should be noted that I receive an email alert when new entries are added to the coverage, such as:

<http://lanyrd.com/2012/iwmw12/?t=c955d8172reV> (In guide IWMW) [22nd Jun 2012 07:52] *
@sheilmcn added coverage “Developing Digital Literacies and the role  of institutional support services” (http://www.slideshare.net/sheilamac/developing-digital-literacies-and-the-role-of-institutional-support-services  type:slides)
to session  ”B2: Developing Digital Literacies and the Role of Institutional  Support Services” http://lanyrd.com/sqwtp

This can help to spot if inappropriate entries are being added.

Vimeo

As described in a post on Streaming of IWMW 2012 Plenary Talks – But Who Pays? we used the ustream.tv service for the live video stream. The videos are currently being processed and will be made available via UKOLN’s Vimeo account shortly. This service will be used to wider access to the plenary talks so that they are available for those who were not present at the event – although, of course, they can also be viewed by people who were at the event and wish to watch the talks again. In addition to the video recordings of the talks we have also taken a number of short interviews with participants at the event which will enable their thoughts on the event to be shared with a wider audience.

Flickr

With so many delegates now having digital cameras and smartphones there are a large number of photographs which have been uploaded to Flickr with the IWMW12 tag which can help to provide a collective memory of the event.

Having a large number of photographs, rather than a small set of selected ones taken  by an official photographer, provides a much broader perspective on the event. It also means that images browsing interface services, such as Tag Galaxy, are more useful by having a more diverse range of content.

The two images show a display of a Tag Galaxy search for photographs on Flickr with the “iwmw12″ tag and one of the many photographs taken by Sharon Steeples of the final conclusions session during which I showed an image of the video stream, captured earlier that morning when Dawn Ellis gave a summary of Web developments at the University of Edinburgh, subverting normal conference-style approaches to case studies by telling this as a fairy tale. The video recording of this talk will be particularly worth watching.

Twitter

As can be seen from the image shown above, the lecture theatre also has a large blackboard.  The opportunity to use a blackboard during the final session provided too much temptation to ignore –  so in the summing up a tweet posted on the backboard was displayed, as a reminder that not everyone necessarily has a mobile device they could use for tweeting. However many people did use Twitter during the event. As is widely known, content posted on the Twitter stream becomes unavailable available a short period. There is therefore a need to analyse event tweets shortly after an event – or archive the tweets to allow them to be analysed subsequently.

Topsy

As can be seen from the image of the Topsy search for #IWMW12 tweets posted over a period of the past 7 days (click for a larger display) there were 666 mentions on 18 June and 574 on 19 June.  The most highly tweeted link was to the IWMW 2012 video page, which was mentioned in 43 tweetsduring the week on 17-24 June 2012. In total Topsy reported that there were 748 tweets during the week on 17-24 June 2012, 808 in the month from 24 May-24 June and an overall total of 846 tweets to date.

Other Commercial Twitter Analytics Tools

It should be noted that a large number of Twitter analytics tools are available which be used to analyse how Twitter has been used. The Tweetreach service, for example, reports that tweets containing the #iwmw12 hashtag have reached 7,553 Twitter accounts. However, as is often the case with usage statistics, such figures need to be treated with a pinch of salt.

Beyond Commercial Twitter Analysis Tools

Topsy, Tweetreach and other Twitter analytics tools can provide a useful summary of use of Twitter hashtags. However  in the UK higher education development community we are fortunate to have the expertise of developers such as Martin Hawksey and Tony Hirst who have a well-established track record in the development of value Twitter analysis tools and who can continually develop their tools based on particular needs and interests of the community.

As Martin described in a post entitled IWMW12 Data Hacks for the IWMW 2012 event he was  ”collecting an archive of tweets which already gives you the TAGSExplorer view“.

Looking at Martin’s Twitter archive of #iwmw12 tweets, provided by the TAGS v.40 service, we can see that the top five Twitterers were @iwmwlive (281 tweets), @PlanetClaire (149 tweets), @sharonsteeples (103 tweets), @mariekeguy (100 tweets) and @jessica_hobbs (81 tweets). Since the @iwmwlive Twitter account was managed by Kirsty Pitkin it seems that the top twitters at the event were all female: this seems particularly interesting in light of the fact that only about a quarter of the participants were female.

It should also be noted that this tool also provides a display of the tweets over time.  It can also be seen (right) that tweeting peaked at 2pm on Tuesday, 19 June 2012 with 229 tweets.

Finally I should mention Martin’s most recent development:  a filterable/searchable archive of IWMW12 tweets. As illustrated below, this provides a clickable word cloud of the content of the tweets, together with a search box and browse interface for the tweets.  It was while browsing the tweets that I came across a comment from @JohnGreenway who, during the conclusions, tweeted:

As someone from a commercial background, #iwmw12 has been excellent – hope everyone in HE realises how rare this is in other industries!

Such live tweeting helped in providing useful real time feedback not only to the event organisers but also the plenary speakers.  Other comments received during the event included:

•  Excellent talk by Stephen Emmott – always a reliable IWMW speaker! #iwmw12 from @adriant
• First time at #iwmw12 and had a brilliant time. Great ideas, great people, great weather, who could ask for more. from @millaraj
• First time at IWMW: great speakers, interesting topics, fantastic Ceilidh. Many thanks to organisers and presenters. #IWMW12 #new #social from@seajays
• Great summary by @sloands on how to build accessibility into project management processes using BS8878 #iwmw12 from @chistabel6

Further examples of tools which Martin Hawksey developed at the IWMW 2012 event can be accessed from his Delicious IWMW12 Hacks set of bookmarks.

The paper.li Daily newspaper

Finally I should mentioned the IWMW12 paper.li daily newspaper, which had been set up in advance of the event. This automated newspaper consisted of articles based on links which had been tweeted  containing the event hashtag.

Reflections

Conferences have never ended immediately after the final talk has been given – this is always the paperwork to be processed, the evaluation forms to be analysed and feedback given to the speakers and local event organisers. What is different nowadays is that event resources and discussions are no longer ‘trapped in space and time’.  If an event has value, it should surely have value for those who may not have been able to attend.

It was therefore appropriate that during my opening talk I was able to announce the launch of the JISC-funded Greening Events II; Event Amplification report. We hope that the report will be useful for others who are planning amplified events.  As Mark Power put it: “Conferences don’t end at the end anymore” – you need to make plans for managing the resources after the conference is over. We hope the report will be useful for those planning amplified events.

NOTE: Shortly after this post was published a post entitled “But who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!” How researchers can collect and share relevant social media content at conferences was posted on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog which echoed the approaches described in this post.

“Why does everybody ask for slides during/after a presentation? What do you do with them? I’m genuinely curious.” asked @MattMay last night. I use Slideshare for a number of reasons:

• To enable a remote audience to view slides for a presentation they may be watching on a live video stream, on an audio stream or even simply listening to the tweets (and a provide a slide number on the slides to make it easier for people tweeting to identify the slide being used.
• To enable the slides to be viewed in conjunction with a video recording of the presentation.
• To enable my slides to be embedded elsewhere, so that the content can be reused in a blog post or on a web page.
• To enable the content of the slides to be reused, if it is felt to be useful to others. Note that I provide a Creative Commons licence for the text of my slide, try to provide links to screenshots and give the origin of images which I may have obtained from others.
• To enable my slides to be viewed easily on a mobile device.
• To provide a commentable facility for the slides.
• To enable my slides to be related, via tags, to related slideshows.

It seems that I am not alone in wishing to share my slides in this way. Slideshare, the market leader in this area, was recently acquired by LinkedIn. As described in a TechCrunch article published on 3 May 2012: “LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock“.  The article went on to state that: “SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors”.

Slideshare is also widely used in higher education. But how is it being used, especially in the context of annual events for those involved in web management and web development activities?

Use of Slideshare at IWMW Events

A year ago today, on 31 May 2011, in a post entitled Evidence of Slideshare’s Impact I reported on the number of views on slides of talks which had been given at UKOLN’s IWMW event since 2006.  hosted on Slideshare. It is timely to update that survey.

The slideshows for each year are available in the following Slideshow event groups: IWMW-2006, IWMW-2007, IWMW2008, IWMW2009 and IWMW2010 (note we changed the naming convention in 2008 once Twitter started to gain in popularity).  Note that since not all of the slideshows have been added to the event groups the analysis also made use of the Slideshare tags: IWMW2006,IWMW2007, IWMW2008, IWMW2009, IWMW10 and IWMW11. It should also be noted that on 20 May Slideshare discontinued event groups so we will not be able to use this approach for grouping slides used at IWMW 2012.

The numbers of views for each slide are available on Slideshare.  A Google Spreadsheet has been created which summarises the figures. The overall totals are given below.

Note that these figures were mostly collected on 25 May 2012, but a small number of changes were made on 30 May. Also note that two different slideshows used in workshop session at IWMW 2012 had the largest numbers of views in May 21011 and 2012.

Discussion

A paper on “Who are we talking about?: the validity of online metrics for commenting on science [v0]” presented at the Altmetrics11 Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web workshop described how:

… we are not searching in online bibliographic databases for evidence of publications but that we are isolating the existence of online activity on the social web including: blogs; micro-blogging (Twitter); activity on social platforms – LinkedIn, and Mendeley; and sharing of presentations through Slideshare. 

The potential importance of Slideshare metrics was also highlighted yesterday in an article entitled Scientists: your number is up published in  Nature:

Herbert Van de Sompel at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who is a long-standing proponent of author identifiers, hopes that the [ORCID] system might be used to generate alternative metrics by linking authors to their outputs in “less traditional venues of scholarly communication, such as tweets, blog posts, presentations on Slideshare and videos on SciTV”.

To illustrate the possible benefits of using Slideshare to host a slideshow consider Kristen Fisher Ratan’s slides on “Metrics: The New Black?“. From this I can view Kristen’s other slideshows and discover that she is the Product Director at PloS (Public Library of Science) and that her Twitter ID is @kristenratan. I can also find related slides hosted on Slideshare with the tags alms, metrics, publishing and altmetrics.  This can be useful and I haven’t even looked at the slides yet! Slide 18 (illustrated) states that “Powerpoint download feature inadvertently tracked sub-article usage“ which suggests that links to a PowerPoint presentation from a paper might provide usage information about the paper which might be difficult to find in other ways. I’m please that this slideshow has been uploaded to Slideshare!

But if Slideshare have a role to play in a portfolio of online metrics which may help to provide a better understanding of the impact of scientific research, what can be learnt from these metrics taken over a period of six years? Although the IWMW event is aimed at practitioners rather than researchers, it did occur to me that the experiences gained in collating these statistics might be of interest to those who are considering use of Slideshare statistics in an alt.metrics context.  Some thoughts that occurred to me:

• Fragmented statistics: A number of speakers uploaded slides to their own Slideshare account. In cases where this was done after the slides had been uploaded to our main IWMW Slideshare account, we did not always know about the alternative location, which could result in difficulties in aggregating the usage statistics.
• Reuse of slides at other events: On a couple of occasions, slides used for presentations at IWMW event were also subsequently used at another event.

However there are clearly more significant things to consider when looking at Slideshare metrics: namely, what is it that is being measured?  In this post I will not attempt to answer that question.  Instead I will simply conclude by providing a simple answer to Matt May’s question: ”Why does everybody ask for slides during/after a presentation? What do you do with them? I’m genuinely curious.” by pointing out what the evidence tells us “They ask for them because they wish to view them. Why, therefore, would you not provide access to the slides?“. Even if the slides don’t provide significant textual content, they may be useful by letting others see how you have designed your slides and structured your ideas.

As I concluded in last year’s post:

Martin Weller made [the] point in his post on The Slideshare Lessons when he said: “by sharing good Slideshare presentations you are sharing ideas, and people will react to these. It can be in the form of comments on your blog post which features the presentation, on the Slideshare site itself, or through other social media such as twitter“.  Why, I wonder, are people still hosting their slides in the silo of an institutional Web site when the slides can easily be made available as a social object?

Or to put it another way, why would you not publish your slides on Slideshare?

I recently heard about the Kik Messenger app, an instant messaging application for mobile devices which, according to Wikipedia “took only 15 days for Kik Messenger to reach one million user registrations“. Kik Messenger has been described as a BBM killer – and as someone who has never owned a Blackberry phone I was interested in evaluating a cross-platform application who appears to be a competitor to the Blackberry’s key selling point: instant messaging.

I have now installed the app on my Android phone and iPod Touch. I’m familiar with the benefits which messaging applications can provide over email through over five years of Twitter use and am interested in exploring the potential of an app which can be used with non-Twitter users.

However in order to use such communication tools, you need to have people to communicate with. At present I only know the Kik username of one person. My username is ukwebfocus and I’d be interested in seeing how this app might be used to support my professional activities. Perhaps a tool such as Kik Messenger could have a role to play at an event, such as UKOLN’s 3-day IWMW 2012 event, in which it might not be appropriate to use Twitter for, say, administrative queries.

When making use of such new services I use three guiding principles to assist the decision-making process which were described in a paper on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web“:

1. Understanding the reasons why a service will be used.
2. Understanding possible risks in using the service.
3. Identification of ways of minimising such risks.

A summary of how these principles have been applied in installing Kik Messenger are given below:

Reasons for using Kik Messenger
The reasons include:

• A desire to evaluate instant messaging tools to complement use of Twitter.
• A need to evaluate tools which can be used to support communication needs at an event.
• A wish to be an early adopter in use of a social networking / communications tool in order to claim a meaningful identifier and to facilitate the development of a community.

Risks in using Kik Messenger

The risks in making use of the tool include:

• The tool may fail to reach a critical mass.
• The service may not be sustainable and the terms and conditions may change or the service itself, and the accompanying network and data may be lost.
• Use of the tool may result in a failure to make use of richer alternatives.
• The tool may not address a significant need.
• The benefits provided by the tool may not be sufficient to motivate others to use it.

Approaches for minimising risks in using Kik Messenger

The approaches being taken to minimising the risks include:

• Raising awareness of the tool across my network.
• Acceptance of possible loss of content and community (as is the case with use of Twitter and text messaging on my mobile phone).
• Evaluation of use of the toll in different contexts.
• A willingness to use the tool in a small-scale context if it fails to gain significant market penetration.
• A willingness to accept the time lost in downloading and learning use of the tool if the service itself is not sustainable.

On his blog Doug Belshaw has documented his “3 principles for a more Open approach” which appear to provide a similar goal in documenting principles to aim the selection of new services:

“I’ve come up three principles to guide me:

1. I will use free and Open Source software wherever possible. (I’m after the sustainable part of OSS, not the ‘free’ part)
2. If this is not possible then I will look for services which have a paid-for ‘full-fat’ offering.
3. I will only use proprietary services and platforms without a paid-for option if not doing so would have a significant effect on my ability to connect with other people.”

It is interesting to note the differences between our two approaches. Doug, it seems, very much focusses on the service itself (it needs to be available as open source software) and a particular business model (a subscription service, rather than one which is funded through advertising, for example) although, like me, he provides an escape clause which acknowledges that there are risks in failing to use a service if doing so would mean he was unable to fulfil particular requirements. My approach, on the other hand, focusses on the outputs of the service and takes a disinterested view of the development approaches.

The principles which Doug mentions do, of course, have validity. However for me Open Source Software is simply software which should be evaluated alongside proprietary software, with an open source software licence being no guarantee of the value of the software or it sustainability. I agree with Doug on the value of services having a variety of business models for their sustainability. However although the availability of open source software so that users can install the software on their own server may help Doug, who runs his own dougbelshaw.com domain, and others who have the technical expertise, time and motivation to be system administrators, for many people this will not be the case. It should also be added to the availability of open source software is also not necessarily a guarantee that one’s host institution, which has traditionally provided the IT infrastructure will install the software. Indeed, even if software, including social software, is installed within one’s host institution, there is no guarantee that the service, the data or the community will be available if one leaves the institution. As Sarah Lewthwaite in a post entitled University Email: A PhD Exit Strategy reminded research students who were about to finish their PhD:

Your email account has been an academically sanctioned identity for three or more years. And, unless you have a particularly benevolent institution that guarantees email for life, your account is about to end. Full stop. You may receive a letter asking you to ‘forward all important emails to an external account’ before your account is sedated (suspended) and put out of its misery (erased). If, like me, you have come to rely on your university email, you need an exit strategy, fast.

Sarah went on to reiterate this point:

“Now, two essential factors come into play. They’re so important; so you can quote me.

1. Your email is not yours. It belongs to your university.
2. Your university email address constitutes and validates your academic identity. This signifier is about to expire.”

If you (as is the case for me) you do not wish to become a system administrator, you should understand alternative sustainability options. Many people will be happy to make use of free services for which advertising and other uses of activity data help to fund the service whereas others, such as Doug, will be willing to pay a fee for such advertisements to be removed.

It will be interesting to see the approaches to sustainability which users will select. There will be personal factors which come into play – and as someone who is happy to pay my TV licence feed and accept that when I watch ITV for ‘free’ that “I’m the product, not the user” I have chosen not to subscribe to Sky because of my antipathy towards Murdoch (although I have watch football on Sky in pubs).

Revisiting my initial comments about the Kik Messenger service, I should probably add that there would also be costs and risks in using an open alternative (perhaps Jabber/XMPP). But what if a proprietary approach, though not platform-specific such as Blackberry’s BBM, is needed in order to establish that there is a real user need and establish appropriate technical requirements before the open alternatives are developed? Karl Marx suggested that there were a number of evolutionary stages in society’s development (the slave society, feudalism and capitalism) which had to be passed before a more equitable society was reached. The evidence of Twitter’s success and social networks such as Facebook hints at the difficulties of achieving the seemingly more equitable online environment which, as Doug describes in a post on Why we need open, distributed social networks supporters of identi.ca and Diaspora claim these services will provide. But can we build Openness in one country or might Blackberry BBM users benefit from moving to a more open cross-platform solution which has an API, albeit a solution which is not open source and for which, according to the FAQ, it does not seem possible to pay for an account?

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Whilst installing the Skydrive tool on my PC I noticed a tweet which announced that Google Drive had been released. Google Drive, like Skydrive and Dropbox (the utility I normally use for shipping files between various devices) provide cloud storage – and, as described in a BBC News article, Google Drive offers up to 16TB of storage with 5Gb for free – not as much as Microsoft’s offering but, to be fair, I’m getting that deal as an early adopter.

Shortly after the initial tweet I encountered the scepticism with a tweet from @sydlawrence saying:

Holy crap. Google owns everything on google drive. Tell me a business that will use it… cl.ly/1W2h1A163p0W2A … 

which linked to the following screenshot of the Google Drive terms and conditions:

There is clearly a discrepancy between the tweet and the terms and conditions: how is “Google owns everything on google drive” reconciled with “You retain ownership of any intellectual property that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours“?

But if we ignore such hyperbole, what should we make of the terms and conditions page which states:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Although it was truncated in the screenshot I should add that the terms and conditions went on to say that:

 The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. 

Indeed, as I asked on Twitter in a different context though related to terms and conditions for social media service, what should we make of terms and conditions which state:

We may update these Terms (including our Privacy Statement) from time to time. Changes will have immediate effect from the date of posting on this Site and you should therefore review these Terms regularly. Your continued use of this Site after changes have been made will be taken to indicate that you accept that you are bound by the updated Terms.

My view is that I will use these three Cloud storage services for both personal and work-related activities. I’m pleased that Google have been open about the fact that they may modify my content as this will include compressing my files – a Cloud storage service which did not do this would be guilty of using energy unnecessarily: something which should not be done in light of global warming concerns.

I’m also happy if Google decide to explore ways in which they can monetise my attention data, just as Facebook do when they observe my interests in beer and sport and present me with a personalised ad.

But what if they use the terms and conditions to take a copy of my content and sell it on? I don’t think this is likely, but I do accept that it is risk. I will therefore assess such risks when I make use of the service – and would advise others to take a similar approach if they store content on the service. But I’m also aware of the missed opportunity costs if I don’t use such services.

So I’ll use Google Drive, once I’ve been given access to the service. What about you?

Bloggers’ Squabble Involves Lawyers

An article published in the Guardian the week before Christmas announced “Hacked climate emails: police seize computers at West Yorkshire home” and went on to describe how “Police officers investigating the theft of thousands of private emails between climate scientists from a University of East Anglia server in 2009 have seized computer equipment belonging to a web content editor based at the University of Leeds“. It seems that “detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router“.

But rather than comment on a climate denier’s blog of more interest was Tattersall’s post regarding Greg Laden: Libellous article which describes how “Blogger Greg Laden has libelled me [Tattersall] in a scurrilous article on his blog“. In brief, Greg Laden appears to have accused Roger Tattersall of illegal activities. However being a climate denier is not illegal and Laden seems to have opened himself up to accusations of libel. He seems to have realised this and has updated his post so that it now begins:

I’ve decided to update this blog entry (20 Dec 2011) because it occurs to me that certain things could be misinterpreted, in no small part because of the common language that separates us across various national borders, and differences in the way debate and concepts of free speech operate in different lands.

I want to make it clear that I do not think that the blogger “TallBloke” a.k.a. Roger Tattersall has broken British law

I hope that will be the end of that matter, but it does highlight some additional legal risks related to publishing a blog, beyond the issue of the cookie legislation which was discussed in a recent post. This incident highlights possible reputational risks for an organisation which employs a blogger (even if, as in this case, the blog is published anonymously and is not related to work activities) and risks that impassioned debate may lead to libellous comments being posted.

A Risk Register For Blogs

There may be dangers that risk averse institutions may use such incidents as an opportunity to restrict or even ban blogs provided by their staff. In order to minimise such risks it may be advantageous to take a lead in providing a risk register which documents possible risks and ways in which such risks may be minimised.

I am in the process of providing a risk register and the draft is given below. I welcome feedback on the risks listed below and the approaches described to minimising the risks. In addition I would welcome suggestions for additional risks which I may have failed to address = and suggestions for how such unforeseen risks can be minimised.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

A few days ago I read Steve Wheeler’s post on Content as Curriculum? having being alerted to it by Larry Sanger’s post on An example of educational anti-intellectualism to which Steve provided a riposte in which Steve argued the need to Play the ball, not the man.

From the blog posts I learnt that Larry Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia and, as described on his blog is the “‘Founding Editor-in-Chief’ of the Citizendium, the Citizens’ Compendium: a wiki encyclopedia project that is expert-guided, public participatory, and real-names-only”.

I have to admit that I had forgotten about Citizendium but the little spat caused me to revisit the Web site. While searching I came across a discussion entitled Why did Citizendium fail? and yes, it does seem that this “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” has failed. But although we often talk about success criteria, it can be more difficult to identify failures. How then, can we describe Citizendium as a failure?

Experiences With Citizendium

A few years ago I signed up for a Citizendium account. In order to register you need to provide your real name and include “a CV or resume … as well as some links to Web material that tends to support the claims made in the CV, such as conference proceedings, or a departmental home page. Both of these additional requirements may be fulfilled by a CV that is hosted on an official work Web page“.

I registered as I felt that if Citizendium became successful being an author could provide a valuable dissemination channel for those areas in which I have expertise. In particular I had an interest in helping to manage the Web accessibility entry in Citizendium. However I found that I did not have the time – or inclination – to edit this article. Looking at the article today it seems that the “page was last modified 09:25, 10 January 2008” and “has been accessed 221 times“. It is perhaps good news that the page has been viewed so little as it is not only very out-of-date but is also poorly written. It also seems that there have been no content added to the Talk, Related Articles, Bibliography or External Links pages or the also no entries

In comparison we can find that the Web Accessibility entry in Wikipedia has been edited 575 times by 277 users. There were also 10,911 views in November 2011.

Discussion

Perhaps there may be those who could argue that Citizendium isn’t a failure, but has a valuable role to play in a particular niche area which is not being addressed by Wikipedia. But how can this argument be made when Citizendium’s aim to “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” results in entries such as this one on Silverlight vs Flash:

With the rocket development of Internet, the techniques used for building web pages is improving all the time, which not only brings people more information but new experience of surfing on the Internet. Many techniques have been applied to enrich the web page these years, from totally the plaintext in early 90′s, first to web page with pictures and then that with embedded sounds. Later, Sun Microsystems proposed Java Applet, which was popular for not long time until being conquered by Adobe Flash.

Back in March 2008 the Citizendium FAQ asked the question:

How can you possibly succeed? Wikipedia is an enormous community. How can you go head-to-head with Wikipedia, now a veritable goliath?

The solid interest and growth of our project demonstrates that there are many people who love the vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia, but who believe it needs to be governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts. We hope they will join the Citizendium effort. We obviously have a long way to go, but we just started. Give us a few years; Wikipedia has had a rather large head start.

Three and a half years later it seems clear that in the battle between the online encyclopedia “governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts” has been unable to compete with the “vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia“.

I’m pleased that Steve Wheeler’s link to Larry Sanger’s blog post helped me to remember my initial curiosity regarding the more managed approach to gathering experts’ knowledge provided by Citizendium and demonstrated the failings in such an approach. Let’s continue making Wikipedia even better is my call for 2012.

Do University IT Service departments also need shaking up? A few days ago I came cross a post on Social Media in CiCS on Chris Sexton’s From a Distance blog in which she described use of social media within CiCS, the Corporate Information and Computing Services department. Chris, the CiCS director, explained:

Blogging is something some individual members of the department do. Some, like me, use commercial products like Blogger or WordPress and have them hosted off-site, some use our in-house blogging software, uSpace, based on a Jive product. Some blog regularly, some less often. What we haven’t had before is a departmental blog, so we’ve changed what used to be a static news page on our web pages into a blog. So much better – it’s easy to update, we can include pictures, links and videos, and, more importantly we can collect feedback in the comments field.

and went on to add that the department has “been using Twitter in the department for a few years” and has “finally taken the plunge and set up a [Facebook] page“.

In addition to running an IT Services department for a large Russell Group University Chris has been a prolific blogger since she set up the blog in October 2007, having posted 62 posts in the first three months of the blog, 208 posts in 2008, 183 in 2009, 162 in 2010 and 147 to date this year. It does seem to me that Chris’s blog will provide a good insight into IT departments in a large University so I hope that the content of the blog, which is hosted on Google’s Blogspot service, will be preserved. But it also seems to me that the sector would benefit if such openness and transparency were to be the norm across not only IT Service departments but also other service departments including the Library. So whilst Chris’s recent post demonstrates a commitment to use of social media to support the user community at Sheffield University, and a willingness to exploit both in-house and cloud services, perhaps the most important signal being sent from Sheffield University is the willingness to be open and invite comments and feedback on development plans. I’d be interesting in hearing if there are other IT Service departments which have taken a similar approach.

The New Media Horizon’s “Technology Outlook: UK Higher Education” report, which was commissioned by UKOLN and CETIS,  explores the impact of emerging technologies on teaching, learning, research or information management in UK tertiary education over the next five years. As described in a recent post on What’s On The Technology Horizon? Implications for Librarians I’ll be summarising the technologies featured in the report which I feel will have particular relevance to those working in Libraries at the forthcoming Internet Librarian International (ILI 2011) conference.

The report highlights ‘Collective Intelligence‘ as one emerging technology which is predicted  to have an time-to-adoption horizon of 4-5 years. But what exactly is ‘collective intelligence’ and what impact might it have on those working in libraries?

Collective intelligence is defined in Wikipedia as “a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks“. The article uses the delicious.com social bookmarking service as an example of collective intelligence :

Recent research using data from the social bookmarking website Del.icio.us, has shown that collaborative tagging systems exhibit a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics. Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources has been shown to converge over time to a stable power law distributions. Once such stable distributions form, examining the correlations between different tags can be used to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtained a form of community or shared vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be seen as a form of collective intelligence, emerging from the decentralised actions of a community of users.

Other examples of ways of the relevance of social media in providing collective intelligence might include:

Predicting flu epidemics by observing search terms in Google: Back in 2008 an article published in the Guardian entitled “Google predicts spread of flu using huge search data” described how “Google Flu Trends takes the general search tracking technology pioneered by Google Trends and applies it specifically to influenza. The firm’s engineers claim to have devised a way of analysing millions of individual searches related to the disease that in tests proved to correlate closely with the actual incidence of illness.“.  A Google Scholar search for “predicting flu epidemics using google“

Predicting earthquakes using Twitter:  An article entitled “Twitter can predict earthquakes, typhoons and rainbows too..” described an  ”academic paper introduced by Takeshi Sakaki, Makoto Okazaki and Yutaka Matsuo from the University of Tokyo [which] investigates the real-time interaction of events such as earthquakes in Twitter and proposes an algorithm to monitor tweets and to detect a target event“.

Predicting social unrest in the Middle East using social media: An article on “The Social Media Revolution” described how “the CIA has been criticized for not being ‘followers’ on Facebook and Twitter and therefore failing to capitalize on the information those sites could have provided in predicting the recent turmoil“.

“We Predict A Riot”

These examples illustrate how social media can be used for predictions.  But predictions usually aren’t provided in isolation: rather predictions are used to identify appropriate actions which may need to be taken.  In the first example we might example doctors to ensure that they stock up on medical supplies and, if a particularly severe flu epidemic is predicted, the NHS may decide to fund a marketing campaign aimed at sectors of the population most at risk.  The second example  could also result in government action such as as mobilising emergency forces which could help to save lives.  The third example, however, could result in less benign interventions.

The Kaiser Chiefs sang “I predict a riot” but as suggested in a blog post which hosted the accompanying carton it might now be the crowds which are now predicting upheavals, whether geo-physical or social.

This move to collective intelligence might seem to challenge notions of centralisation and authority and thus, returning to the talk I’ll be giving at the ILI 2011 conference, be challenging to the traditional roles of libraries.

But these examples also highlight both the potential benefits and risks associated with trends which may be predicted through large scale use of social media. As has been highlighted in recent posts about privacy concerns related for Facebook users such issues are very relevant for mainstream users of social media today. (And yesterday’s announcement about the new range of Amazon Kindle devices and the Amazon Silk browser have raised additional privacy concerns).

Facebook’s analysis of users’ attention data can be clearly financially beneficial to Facebook in providing targetted advertising (which may also be beneficial for the end user) and of concern to users when information thought to be private is made available to others in unexpected ways (which tends to be the current focus of user education of the risks of use of social media).  But rather than the obvious embarrassing photos which people may be worried about, might it be the less obvious activities which may have the more significant impact in the future?

If I update my status saying I’ll be celebrating with a few pints of Deuchars IPA if England beat Scotland in the Rugby World Cup game on Saturday (while I am in Glasgow) this might be used to suggest that myself and others in my demographic like real ale and use this for targetting adverts (which might help me discover a Scottish real ale which I am unfamiliar with).

If I update my status saying I’m getting a sore throat this might help in providing signals of the flu (and could be more significant in terms of instigating change than my wasted vote in a General Election in Bath).

And if I update my status if I notice possibly illegal activities taking place, am I being helpful to society or could my status update be used by the authorities to justify unnecessary actions?  And could a provocative status update (which might be part of a large number of updates which cause people to riot) be therefore treated as incitement?  Has the future described in Minority Report (which addresses the theme of  ”the role of preventative government in protecting its citizenry“) arrived?

Lots of questions, I know.  But I also feel that information professionals should have an important role in engaging with the debate. I should also add, as suggested in the post on “The Facebook Chart That Freaks Google Out” and the accompanying chart which is illustrated above, Facebook’s popularity does mean that it is a significant harvester of activity data, since people spend their time on the service and will often have provided their profile information.   But if Facebook users migrated overnight to, say, Diaspora would that mean that the benefits of analysis of activity data and content updates could be lost, including the positive benefits?  Or might it mean that although users will own their own data, they, understandably, won’t be aware of the possible misuses which could be made of their content updates?

There is a need to address the concerns raised by Facebook’s dominance and their cavalier approaches to privacy – but there’s also a need to look at the wider issues and not assume that any service which provides an alternative to Facebook will necessarily provide benefits across all areas.

Orla Weir, head of Digital Strategy at the University of Salford, recently asked me for suggestions on place places to publish information about a number of vacancies which are available in the new central digital team at the University of Bath.  My initial suggestion was to use the website-info-mgt and the web-support JISCMail lists and, as can be seen from the list archives, the message, which is summarised below, has been sent to the 564 members of the website-info-mgt list and the 588 members of the web-support list:

Digital Communications Officer
Grade 7 – £29,972 – £35,788
The Central Digital Team is part of the Communications Directorate and leads and manages the digital engagement, visual standards and digital presence of the University. As a small team, it is responsible for the creation and implementation of Digital Strategy including governance, platforms, innovation, and best practice and is essentially the glue that sits across many of the university engagement tools and services. The remit of the team includes: CMS, Web, Social, eLearning (promotion and visualisation), eCRM, Mobile, SEO and URL strategy.
The Digital Communications Officer will be a critical part of this small team and will be responsible for managing the digital presence and engagement model for the University. This includes internal customer relationships, project leadership, implementation, content delivery and evaluation. The role is a hybrid role which requires both technical and communications skills. It also requires an appetite and enthusiasm for all things digital and a desire to be part of creating an exemplar digital engagement presence.
The purpose of the role is to implement and manage the University’s web presence and digital engagement including content and platform implementation, design, communications and measurement. The scope of the role includes the appropriate use of all digital platforms using truly multichannel integration consistent with the University Digital Strategy.
Closing Date – 21/09/2011

But in a era of social media and syndicated content might there be additional ways of making such information available to a wider range of potential applicants?  And might we not expect those working in institutional Web teams within higher education to be pro-active in looking oat communication channels which may provide  additional benefits, such as being able to reach out to potential applicants who may not be members of these two mailing lists?

Careers 2.0: the Stack Overflow Careers Site

Coincidentally a recent tweet from @psychemedia (Tony Hirst) asked’:

Wondering if any HEIs ever post developer job ads to stack overflow careers site? http://bit.ly/pluFJE #devcsi @briankelly

I had a look at this site and found that although a search for vacancies containing the string “Web” shows that there are currently 404 (!) positions currently available, carrying out a search for “University” in the UK results in only five hits, as illustrated.

However, as described in the FAQ, the Careers 2.0 service is intended for employers who are looking for programmers, which they suggest can have a role to play as “part of the process as the first technical interview. Instead of scheduling a screening call with a member of your technical staff, just have your staff review the candidate’s profile“.  The service, which provides information on 38,127 , is aimed primarily at developers who have contributed to the Stack Overflow service – although there is a job listing service which employers may be interested in using as a means of reaching out to developers who are users of Stack Overflow.

IWTB, the Institutional Web Team Blog Aggregator

UKOLN’s IWTB (Institutional Web Team blog aggregator) service was officially launched at the IWMW 2011 event held at the University of Reading on 26-27 July. The service aggregates blogs provided by those working in (or have close affiliations with) institutional Web teams.  The service can be used to help identify what one’s peers across UK’s institutional Web teams are doing and what they are communicating to their users.

A search for ‘vacancies’ shows that several vacancies were advertised in July on the University of Bath Web services blog, with the University of Essex also advertising vacancies in their team in July.

As will many social Web services, the blog aggregator will become more effective as the numbers of users grows. We will shortly be promoting use of this service more actively. For now I will give a reminder that an online form for submitting the URL for an institutional Web team blog can be accessed from the IWMW home page.

Harvesting RSS Feeds

In a post entitled Autodiscoverable Feeds and UK HEIs (Again…) Tony Hirst revisited the provision of auto-discoverable RSS feeds on institutional Web sites. Tony’s post listed a number of areas in which RSS feeds can add value which  included:

jobs: if every UK HEI published a jobs/vacancies RSS feed, it would trivial to build an aggregator and let people roll their own versions of jobs.ac.uk.

Tony’s post also that he had developed a  developed a Scraperwiki tool to find auto-discoverable RSS feeds on University home page, which builds on his previous work in this area which used a Yahoo Pipe.  The Scraperwiki tool now analyses the RSS feeds and the output from the tool provides listings of news feeds, event feeds, research information feeds, Twitter feeds, as well as for jobs feeds. A summary of the UK University home pages which provide autodiscoveable job feeds is given below:

The Future

In a recent guest post entitled Lend Me Your Ears Dear University Web Managers! Dave Flanders, a JISC Programme Manager which summarised work carried out in the “Linking You“ project at the  University of Lincoln. A survey of 40 Web sites across the .ac.uk domain (ten from each university group) was carried out in order to compare patterns of usage for URLs to key information sources.  The project found there were inconsistencies in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates.  However there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector. From this work the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional Web sites.

The project outlined a number of benefits to the sector which can be gained from agreement on common URI practices, which included:

• Provision of news feed aggregators: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a UK University News Aggregation Service where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.
• A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and HEI data geeks.

I can’t help but feel that Universities (and institutional Web teams) which are early adopters of such practices may gain advantages.  The Web teams which highlight their vacancies in a Web team blog will be able to see the content surfaced to viewers of the IWMW service and content linked in from University home pages in ways which can be found by software will continue to of interest to developers who will be looking for institutional data. I wonder how long it will take before others start to follow the approaches taken at the Universities of Bath, Cumbria, St. Andrews and Edge Hill?

One of the sessions I attended at the SOLO (Science Online London) 2011 event held in London last week addressed the role of ‘microattributions’ in science (note that there isn’t a specific page on the SOLO11 Web site which I can link to so I have created a Lanyrd page about the Microattributions breakout session).

Use of Microattributions in Wikipedia

The session began with Mike Peel (@Mike_Peel) showing how contributions to Wikipedia provided an example of a service which supports microattributions. Looking at an example which I am familiar with, a year ago in a post entitled How Can We Assess the Impact and ROI of Contributions to Wikipedia? I commented on the potential value of entries in Wikipedia with the example of Andy Powell’s update to the HTTP_303 entry. This entry has been viewed no fewer that 5,032 times in the past 30 days which I think illustrates Wikipedia’s strengths in providing outreach. However I hadn’t been aware that it was possible to view details of the contributions made to Wikipedia articles. Looking at the list of contributors for the HTTP_303 entry I find that Andy Powell is the top contributor, having made 7 updates – between 09.53 and 10:13 on 24 September 2010.

Looking at a more significant article, such as the Wikipedia entry for World Wide Web, we can see that the top contributor, Susan Lesch, has made 253 edits between March 2008 and July 2011. The next most prolific contributor, NigelJ, has made 127 updates followed by the Cluebot bot, which has made 70 automated updates (fixing vandalised updates to the article).

Mike Peel illustrated the importance of being able to identify significant contributors to Wikipedia in a story of Professor Gets Tenure With The Help Of His Wikipedia Contributions. The Wikimedia blog provided further information on the contributions which Professor Michel Aaij had made: “more than 60,000 edits, a couple of Good Articles, a Featured List, almost 150 Did You Knows“.

Microattributions in Scientific Research

Following Mike Peel’s very tangible example of both use of microattributions and the value that they can provide for an individual, Martin Fenner (@mfenner) described the origin of the term. As Martin described in a recent blog blog one of the first mentions of the term appears to be an August 2007 Editorial in Nature Genetics (Compete, collaborate, compel). Martin provided a definition of the term:

Microattribution ascribes a small scholarly contribution to a particular author.

and went on to describe how a paper published in March 2011 in Nature Genetics (Systematic documentation and analysis of human genetic variation in hemoglobinopathies using the microattribution approach) concluded that “microattribution demonstrably increased the reporting of human variants, leading to a comprehensive online resource for systematically describing human genetic variation“.

A Microattribution Article in Wikipedia

During the Microattributions session we heard of several other examples of microattritibutions including contributions to source code on software repositories such as Github.

During the session Mike Peel updated his personal page on Wikipedia with some of the ideas which were discussed. On the page Mike pointed out that there wasn’t a Wikipedia entry on Microattributions and invited volunteers to create a page.

I responded to this challenge and created the initial stub entry for the article, as illustrated.

In my initial draft which, following the suggestion provided by the article creation wizard, I created in my personal Wikipedia space, I included the other examples of microattributions which I mentioned above. However since I wasn’t aware of any significant publication which had documented use of the term in these contexts I defined microattributions in the context of its use in the Nature Genetics paper.

Making Use of Wikipedia in Other Areas

I don’t know if the Microattributions will remain in Wikipedia. It might be deemed to be not sufficiently note-worthy. Or perhaps it could be included in some other entry: what, for example is the relationship between a microattribution and a nanopublication – a term coined, I think, by Barend Mons.

However I am convinced of the importance of Wikipedia for defining scientific and technical terms and documenting significant issues related to their origin and use. Should funders, such as Research Councils and JISC, encourage funded projects to make use of Wikipedia as a dissemination channel which can help to enhance the impact of funded work? If this does happen there will be a need to understand best practices for creating and maintaining sustainable items in Wikipedia, including concepts such as NPOV.

I also feel it would be useful to be able to monitor contributions to Wikipedia across sectors, such as JISC-funded project developments. Although it seems that we can identify individual contributors I don’t know if it is possible to aggregate information related to groups of individuals. Since myself and Andy Powell both have profiles in Wikipedia, is it possible, I wonder, for statistical information about our contributions to be automatically gathered and analysed? I’ll leave that as a challenge to developers :-)

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Do we want diversity in the technologies used to provide various institutional Web services or should we be seeking to gain benefits which may be provided by adoption of a small range of technological approaches?

The instinctive answer for some is likely to be a desire to embrace diversity and to encourage ‘a thousand flowers to bloom‘. Others, however, will be concerned that such approaches will be costly and lead to confusions for user communities and will make it difficult to provide a harmonised services once the best approaches become accepted.

Such issues are likely to be revisited in the context of approaches and technologies which will be used to deliver mobile web services.  UKOLN and CETIS recently carried out a survey on Institutional Use of the Mobile Web. Although we are still working on our report on the survey the  findings for the initial question “How is your institutional website(s) delivered to mobile devices?” appear interesting. It seems that the most widely used approach to the provision of access to mobile devices is no different to that taken to provide access to conventional devices.  A significant number are providing a separate site for mobile users whilst similar number have developed stylesheets for their Web styles which are specifically designed for mobile devices.  One institution is providing access to mobile devices using a mobile plugin which is provided by their institutional CMS.

Whilst CETIS’s Mobile Web Apps briefing paper (PDF format) (which is described on the CETIS blog) provides the advice that:

There is no such thing as the Mobile Web. Design for the usual Internet and then make your site adaptable for mobile devices for example decreasing the screen size using CSS media queries and then scaling up for larger devices like tablets and PCs by progressively enhancing access for larger audiences.

in reality it appears that such advice is not currently being widely implemented. There will be understandable reasons why such advice cannot necessarily be easily implemented (there will, for example, be existing technologies in place which cannot easily be updated or replaced and there will be the need to find resources to carry our usability testing on a variety of devices). In addition, as discussed on this blog in the context of the Shhmooze app for Apple’s mobile devices,  there may be business reasons for developing an app for a popular mobile device in order to validate the potential demand for a new service by providing a tool which maximises the usability provided on a specific device before developing device-independent solutions once the demand has been established.

But whilst one can appreciate the current diversity, there will be a need to understand how the landscape may develop in the future.  The comments in the survey describe how, in addition to existing implementation challenges, staff in institutions are still debated longer-term strategic policies.

Revisiting Decisions on Institutional Web Site Search Facilities

Might there be understandable reasons for diversities in the technical directions which institutions across the sector take?  Is there value in welcoming a thousand mobile flowers blooming?  In order to provide a historical context to such discussions I thought I would revisit the ideas which were being discussed regarding the provision of search engine technologies on institutions’ Web sites over ten years ago and look at how institutions are currently providing such services.

In a short paper on Approaches to Indexing in the UK which was delivered at conference on Managing the Digital Future of Libraries hosted in Moscow in 2000 I presented the results of a survey of software used to provide search facilities on institutional Web sites in UK Universities.  As shown in the accompanying table the most widely used indexing tool was the open source ht://Dig solution. The survey shown a wide range of applications were used, with 13 institutions using software which was used by only one or two institutions.   It was also noticeable that no few than fifty higher education institutions in the UK were failing to provide a search facility on their institutional Web site back in July/August 1999.

My recollection of the discussions on the mailing lists back then tended to focus on a variety of factors: ht://Dig was preferred by many as it was an open source solutions, whereas others were happy to use the service provided by the Web server software provided.  I can recall the Ultraseek’s management capabilities where appreciated by institutions hosted multiple Web servers who were  willing to pay the licence fee for this commercial product, whereas Harvest’s distributed indexing was felt to provide a scalable solution which can be used to provide a national indexing across UK University Web sites, known as AC/DC. Only three institutions, however, made use of an externally hosted solution (two used Freefind and one used the public Alta Vista search facility.

A survey of institutional search engines was carried out for the twenty Russell Group Universities in December 2010. As described in the post on Trends For University Web Site Search Engines we found that “15 Russell Groups institutions (75%) use Google to provide their main institutional Web site search facility, with no other search engine being used more than once“.

In this case we can clearly see that arguments for a diversity of solutions based on preferences for open source or bundled solutions, ease of management or the distributed architecture seem no longer to be relevant, with a Google solution now being the preferred option.

Will we see simple arguments for diversity in the ways in which institutions provide support for the Mobile Web until we eventually arrive an approach which is used by most institutions? And whilst it may be dangerous to mandate a preferred solution too soon (after all, the majority of search engines used in 1999 are probably no longer in existence) might there not also be risks in failing to engage with mainstream approaches?

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third-party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

Whilst reading this news earlier today I followed a link to Third Party Applications on the Develop WordPress.com site which currently only lists one application which is “built to work with WordPress.com and enable you to interact with your blog in new ways” – namely Memolane.

I registered with the Memolane service for producing timelines some time ago but the connection with WordPress made me revisit the service. A display of my timeline is illustrated.

I have configured Memolane to include a feed from this blog. In addition to a display of recent blog posts I have also included RSS feeds of areas of work for which several years ago I recognised that RSS could have a significant role to play.  In particular I have included a link to the RSS feeds for my forthcoming  events, previous events (for every year since I started in UKOLN in 1997)  and for my peer-reviews and related papers.

As show in the bottom of the image you can quickly display previous events, so I can find that in the latter part of 2000 I gave a talk on “Externally Hosted Web Services” on 12 October 2000 (well-before the current hype about Cloud Computing!) and a talk on “Approaches To Resource Discovery In The UK HE Community” at the Verity 2000 conference on 30 November 2000.

It seems from this timeline display that life was much more leisurely eleven years ago,  with the record of public engagement suggesting a six week gap between my activities! Of course I will have posted to email lists and written documents, but it is now difficult to see what I was doing back then.

RSS feeds provide a means of keeping a reusable record of activities which can be processed by a variety of applications. This is the reason why I maintain a page of RSS Feeds For UK Web Focus Web Site and provide similar links for the QA Focus project which I was the project director for from 2002-2004.

Despite a number of third party services having withdrawn support for RSS I am still convinced of the benefits of RSS.  Those who make use of WordPress software either as a blogging platform or as a CMS will be able to exploit the feeds provided by the platform and many other services still provide RSS.  The most significant gap in the services I make use of, however, is ePrints which drives our institutional repository service.  Sadly ePrints support for RSS is very limited and so I am forced to maintain my RSS feed for my publications separately :-(  It would be great if ePrints were to support the interoperably provided in a Web 2.0 world by RSS and not just the much smaller Library world based around OAI-PMH.  But, as I asked last year: Is It Too Late To Exploit RSS In Repositories?

I have also been exploring Scoop.it. I am thinking about the potential the service may have curating content related to an event, as opposed to subject areas such as “The latest news about microbiology” and “Annals of Botany: Plant Science Research” which have been the focus of Alan’s curation activities.

I have therefore set up a Scoot.it topic on “IWMW 2011 (Institutional Web Management“, UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (which this year takes place at the University of Reading on 26-27 July).

The page currently contains content published by event organisers, primarily on the IWMW 2011 blog. The blog has been set up to highlight the key aspects of the event (the plenary talks and the parallel sessions) in advance of the event. We hope that this will provide evidence of the relevance of the event for those who are involved in the important task of managing institutional Web services and convince managers that, at a time when funding is tight,£250 for a two-day event (which includes accommodation) is a bargain for the professional development and networking opportunity which the event provides (especially in comparison with similar events for those involved in Web management activities).

I suspect, however, that the Scoop.it page should become more interesting as more varied content is published about the event (ideally with the #iwmw11 event hashtag so that such content can be easily discovered) by those intending to attend the event or have an interest in the topics which will be addressed at the workshop.

Our intention is to update the IWMW 2011 Scoop.it page on a weekly basis over the next few weeks and then see if we can update it more frequently during the event itself. I should add that although the official programme for the event has been finalised in light of various recent announcements (such as the Cookie legislation and the requirement for Universities to publish data related to the services they provide) we are exploring ways in which such topics may be address at the event.

If you do have an interest in either the topics which may be published on Scoop.it or, indeed, the opportunities which Scoop.it may provide, we invite you to follow our Scoop.it page. And if you’d like to read some more about this service, which, perhaps surprisingly, was developed in France, you may wish to read the guest post on the TechCrunch Europe blog by Guillaume Decugis, CEO of the company behind Scoop.it who explains “Why this could be the moment for the curators“.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

On a day on which the main headline on the BBC News Web site announces the Government’s Competition Plan For Universities which “could bring more competition between universities and greater powers for students” it would seem timely to publish a survey which makes use of a number of social media analytic tools to explore how Russell Group Universities are making use of their institutional Twitter accounts and to invite discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches. After all if, as described in an accompanying article “Students [are] to get best-buy facts“, shouldn’t the facts about Universities’ online presence also be provided – especially if you believe in openness and transparency?

Background

A survey of Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities was published back in January 2011. This survey provided a snapshot of institutional use of Twitter across the twenty Russell Group Universities based on the statistics provided on Twitter account profile pages (numbers of followers, numbers of tweets, etc.). The survey was warmly received by those involved in managing institutional Twitter accounts or with an interest in activities in this area, with Mario Creatura expressing the view that the survey provided an “excellent gathering of data in an area that quite honestly is chock full of confusing stats“.

The interest in gathering further evidence of the value of Social Web services continues to grow. A recent study, for example, sought to answer the question “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?” and concluded that “1 Facebook fan = 20 additional visits to your website“. But what approaches can institutions take to gain a better understanding of institutional use of Twitter?

Use of Social Analytic Services

In a recent post entitled Analysing influence .. the personal reputational hamsterwheel Lorcan Dempsey highlighted three social media analytic services. The post described how it has been suggested that the “Klout score will become a new way of measuring people and their influence online“. In addition to Klout, (which according to Crunchbase ”allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph“) Lorcan’s post also referenced PeerIndex (which according to Crunchbase ”identifies and ranks experts in business and finance based on their digital footprints“) and Twitalyser (described in a Mashable article as “provid[ing] detailed metrics on things like impact, engagement, clout and velocity for individual Twitter accounts“) .

Although Lorcan’s blog post addressed the relevance of such service for helping to understand personal reputation I felt it would be useful to gain a better understanding of how these service work by using them to analyse institutional Twitter accounts. I have therefore used the Klout, Peerindex and Twitalyzer social media analytic tools to analyse the twenty Russell Group University Twitter accounts. The table below summarises the findings of the survey which was carried out on Thursday 23 June 2011. It should also be noted that the table contains live links to the services which will enable the current findings to be displayed (and also for any errors to be easily detected and reported).

Please note that you will need to sign in to Klout in order to view the findings.

A Russell Group Universities Peerindex group and two Klout groups (since there is a limit of ten entries these are split into Russell Group Universities (1 of 2) and Russell Group Universities (2 of 2) ) have been set up) which should enable comparisons to be made across the institutions based on the particular social media analytic service elected.

It should be noted that since the original survey of institutional use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities accounts for the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester have been identified. The University of Liverpool account (@livuni) seems to have replaced an older @liverpooluni account which was never used (although it did have over 2.000 followers). The University of Manchester account (@UniofManc) was set up on 14 March 2011 and there have been insufficient numbers of tweets for the PeerIndex and Twitteralyzer services to provide meaningful reports.

About the Social Media Analytic Metrics

In Klout:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content.

Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. The ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.

The True Reach does not appear to be defined.

PeerIndex is built up of three components: authority, activity and audience score (all three are normalised ranks out of 100):

Authority is the measure of trust; how much can you rely on that person’s recommendations and opinion on a given topic. The authority is calculated from eight benchmark topics for every profile: AME (arts, media and entertainment); TEC ( technology and internet); SCI (science and environment); MED (health and medical); LIF leisure and lifestyle); SPO (sports); POL news, politics and society) and BIZ (finance, business and economics). These are used to generate the overall authority score as well as produce the PeerIndex Footprint diagram.

The authority is a relative positioning against everyone else in each benchmark topic. The rank is a normalised measure against all the other authorities in the topic area.

Note that the PeerIndex findings for the University of Oxford are illustrated with a comparison being made with the the Peerindex findings for the University of Cambridge. The analysis suggests that both institutions have a broadly similar ‘fingerprint’ but Oxford tends to focus on news, politics and society whilst Cambridge on technology and Internet.

Audience is indication of an individual’s reach. It is not simply determined by the number of people who follow you, but instead generate from the number of people who listen and are receptive to what you are saying.
Being followed by large number of spam accounts, bots, inactive accounts will reduce an audience score. The audience takes into account the relative size of the audience to the size of the audiences for the rest of community.

Activity is the measure of how much you do that is related to the topic area. Being to active and people will stop listening to you and if you are too inactive people will never know to listen to you. The Activity Score takes into account this behaviour. Like the other scores Activity Score is done relative to the community. If you are part of a community that has lots of activity your level of activity will need to be higher to achieve the same relative score as in a topic that has a lot less activity.

Realness is a metric that indicates the likelihood that the profile is of a real person, rather than a spambot or Twitter feed. A score above 50 means Peerindex thinks this account is of a real person; a score below 50 means it is less likely to be a real person. When Peerindex comes across a new profile, it gives it a score of 50. Initially, Peerindex doesn’t have the information to make any determination. As more information is gathered Peerindex modifies the number accordingly. Peerindex looks at a range of information to generate realness such as whether the profile is claimed and been linked to Facebook or LinkedIn. Peerindex is continually adding new signals to the realness calculations to improve it. The calculations are modified by the realness metric in order to penalise non-real people. Claiming a profile will boost the authority, audience and activity scores and consequently the PeerIndex as well.

Note that before the PeerIndex scores are displayed that are normalized. This means every number in PeerIndex is based on a scale of 1 to 100, showing relative positions. An aggressive normalization calculation is used which helps to discriminate between top authorities. The benefit is that you can more easily understand who the top authorities are. The trade-off is that many users end up with seemingly lower scores. Here’s an example: If you are in the top 20% by authority in a topic like climate change, it means you have higher authority than 80% of other people who we measure within this topic. Your normalized authority score for this topic will be in the range of 55 to 65 (that is, significantly lower than 80). Remember, however, that a score of 60 puts you higher that 80% of people we track in that topic. A score of 65, means you rank higher than 95% of the people we track. PeerIndex focuses on tracking the top people on a specific topic, not just anyone.

In Twitalyzer the Impact measure is a combination of the following factors:

• The number of followers a user has.
• The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter.
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted.
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people.
• The relative frequency at which the user posts updates.
• Twitalyzer’s ”Impact Percentile” score provides insight into the relative rank of the individual within the service’s dataset. A ranking in the 69.8th percentile means that the user’s Twitalyzer Impact score is higher than 69.8 percent of the hundreds of thousands of active Twitter accounts the service is tracking.
• Twitalyzer’s user profiles report 30-day trailing averages for Impact to help visualize how the user’s Impact trends over a longer period of time. This mitigates out weekends, vacations, etc.

Thoughts on Openness of Social Media Analytics Data

We are starting to see a stream of social media analytic services being developed, together with companies offering to analyse institutional use of social media and advise on best practices. There is a danger, I feel, of unnecessary duplications of such analyses being carried out, with funds which could be used to enhance the teaching and learning and research services provided by institutions being used to pay for unnecessary consultancy work. Whilst there maybe legitimate justifications for such consultancy, I feel that factual data which is gathered should be made openly available. In addition I feel that there is a need for open discussion on how social media analytic findings should be interpreted and used.

Issues for the “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact” Workshop

On 11 July I am facilitating a one-day workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact” which will be held at the Open University. The workshop aims to ensure that the participants:

• Have a better appreciation of the importance of the need to gather and interpret evidence.
• Understand how metrics can be used to demonstrate the value and ROI of services.
• Have seen examples of how institutions are gathering and using evidence.
• We aware of limitations of such approaches.
• Have discussed ways in which such approaches can be used across the sector.

When I updated my RSS Reader this morning and opened my JISC folder I noticed that there were several unread posts which had been published a few weeks ago. I looked at the post on ”Early Findings for Shibboleth Futures” which told me that Nicole’s “slides are available below, and might be of interest!“. In my RSS reader, however, there was just a blank space.  Not a problem, I thought, I can view it in the Safari browser.  But, as can be seen in the accompanying image, nothing was displayed in the Web browser either.

The problem is that the embedded slideshow was hosted on Slideshare and the embedding technology uses Flash which is not support on my iPod Touch or other Apple devices such as iPhones or iPads.  Some may respond “You should use an Android device” to which my response could be that I do own an Android phone but prefer the usability of my iPod Touch.  But rather than getting drawn into such platform wars there is a very simple solution to embedding Slideshare resources in blog posts whilst allowing the slides still to be viewed by users of Apple’s mobile devices.

A post published on this blog recently on Metrics for Understanding Personal and Institutional Use of the Social Web also contained an embedded Slideshare presentation. As can be seen when viewing the blog post on an iPod Touch a blank screen was displayed where the embedded Flash object would be displayed on a typical desktop PC.  However the post contained a link to the resource hosted on Slideshare. Clicking on the link took me to a mobile-friendly version of the resource which made use of HTML5 so that the slides could be viewed on device which don’t support Flash, as illustrated below.

My advice to people who wish to embed objects (which might include other types of images and videos and not just Slideshare resources) is:

• Include a direct link to the host which is provided in the HTML of your page.
• Use linking phrases of the form “The slides for the talk are available slides for the talk are available on Slideshare ” rather than “The slides for the talk are available on Slideshare” since the latter more clearly links directly to the resource rather than the Slideshare home page which is implied on the latter example.
• Avoid links such as “Click here to view the slides” as this is bad practice from an accessibility perspective.

Back in February in a post entitled Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper I described the Smartr personalised Twitter-based personalised newspaper service for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

This is an application which I now use on a daily basis to view the contents of the links posted by my Twitter community. It has also provided the motivation for me to make greater use of Twitter lists – the lists I have created recently include JISC Services, UKOLN colleagues, IWMW 2011 speakers and attendees at a forthcoming UKOLN workshop on Impact, Metrics and Social Web.

The accompanying image shows the content of links to resources which have been tweeted by accounts on my JISC Twitter list. As might be expected this provides content which reflects the interests of the particular service and is often content published by the service. It does occur to me that JISC Programme Managers who wish to keep informed of project developments may find it particularly useful to use Smartr in conjunction with a Twitter list of their project Twitter accounts.  However in addition to providing a simple means of getting relevant content to a iPhone/iPad environment I have to admit that my initial use of this application when I am  on the bus in the morning is to view the contents tweeted by all of the people I follow on Twitter, as this can provide serendipitous benefits which are not provided when following official accounts.

Smartr Developments

Recently I updated the app to Smartr 2.0 and started to notice that various people had started to follow me on Smartr, perhaps having read the blog post and a followup post published last month which described how Ariadne Is Getting Smartr.

When someone starts to follow you on Smartr, as with many other social apps, you get an email which provides brief information about how the person is using the service.

As can be seen from the accompanying screenshot of a recent email I received Dave has 182 followers, 134 sources and 5,208 stories. You can also see the stories which Dave has recent read which seem to indicate that he has an interest in road racing – this isn’t of particular interest to me so I decided not to follow Dave.

But the links to stories (which I prefer to refer to as articles) which Dave has recently read, as opposed to links he has recently posted, shows an aspect of Smartr which I hadn’t been aware of when I first started using the application – and whether this is because I was using version 1 or because I wasn’t following anyone within the Smartr app (as opposed to on Twitter) I don’t know.

Is seems that when someone follows you on Smartr they can see the articles you have recently read. What might be revealed in my case?

It seems that the articles I have recently read within Smartr include a post which described how World IPv6 Day went mostly smoothly, with a few surprises, another which asked What impact are your resources making and one on Posterous, From SaaS to PaaS Using an API.

So the 19 Smartr users who are following me can see note only the articles I have posted on Twitter but also the articles I have read (and the time I read them). Is this:

• A great example of sharing resources across one’s community which exemplifies the benefits of adopting a culture of openness?
• A privacy intrusion which should cause concerns?

What are your thoughts?

Discussion

If you visit the Smartr Web site you will see an image of Smartr running on an iPhone with a link to the iTunes store which enables you to download the app. There are links to articles about Smartr but no obvious FAQ. There is, however, a prominent Smartr byline: “See what your friends are reading on Twitter and Facebook” which perhaps suggests that you are making your reading habits publicly available.  But this aspect wasn’t mentioned in the Mashable article when Smartr was first released.  There is not just a lack of an FAQ on the Smartr Web site, there is also no information provided about release dates and the functionality of the two versions of the software which have been released to date.

Smart does have a user forum which is hosted on the Uservoice Web site.  I published a comment on the forum in which I suggested that there was a need for documentation on the functionality provided by the service and the associated privacy issues.  Temo Chalasani, the founder of the company behind Smartr, responded and asked me what documentation I feel is required. Here are my suggestions for an FAQ:

• When was Smartr first released?
• What subsequent versions of Smartr have been published and what additional functionality has been provided?
• What are the privacy implications of using Smartr?
• Can I read the contents of articles posted by my Twitter followers without others being able to see what I have read and when?
• Can I block others from following me on Smartr as I can do on Twitter?

Will I Still Use Smartr?

Smartr does raise some interesting privacy issues – and since this is a dedicated app rather than a Web service  the use of cookies is not an issue, so recent EU legislation in which the requirement for users to opt-in to accepting cookies is irrelevant. Here are some scenarios which may concern some users:

• The parent who follows their children on Smartr in order to see what links the child has been following.
• The child who follows their parents on Smartr!
• The manager who follows members of staff to see what inappropriate articles are being read during work time.
• The journalist who follows politicians and celebrities in order to write articles about their reading habits.

It should be noted that although it is possible for the parents, children or mangers to view the links which may be being posted, Smartr provides something different – the ability to see links posted by others which are being read.

Despite such concerns, I intend to continue to make use of Smartr as I find it such a useful service even though  I am aware that I could follow a link to a Web site which I would normally be embarrassed to be seen reading. But for me the important thing is user education so that users are made aware of possible risks.  I would therefore encourage Smartr to highlight possible risks.  The question though is “Am I being smart or dumb in using this tool?”

Tomorrow (Thursday, 12 May) I am attending the Eduserv Symposium on “Virtualisation and the Cloud: Realising the benefits of shared infrastructure“. The event hashtag is #esym11 and, based on last year’s experiences (with, according to Summarizr, 1256 tweets from 190 twitterers) we can expert to see a large amount of tweets about the event.  Since many of the attendees are likely to have an iPhone (or iPod Touch) – the Android app has not yet been released – might this provide an opportunity to evaluate the potential of a location-based social photographic sharing app?  Note that if the function of the app is unclear you may wish to  view the accompanying video clip.

The time last week I was arriving at the first face-to-face meeting of the Purpos/ed campaign. Purpos/ed describes itself as:

a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education? With a 3-year plan, a series of campaigns, and a weekly newsletter we aim to empower people to get involved and make a difference in their neighbourhood, area and country.

The launch event, the Purpos/ed Summit for Instigators, was held at Sheffield Hallam University on Saturday 30 April – clearly those who attended the event were passionate about helping to engage in discussions about the future of education – or perhaps they wanted to travel to Sheffield on the previous day to escape the Royal Wedding (I have to admit that in my case both reasons are true!)

Image from Flickr

As can be seen from the list of blog posts, participants at the event seemed to find it stimulating.

The context to the day was summarised by Josie Fraser, chair of the event who described how she “spent Saturday 30 April in Sheffield, at the Purpos/ed Summit for Investigators, along with 50 delegates from across the UK who had given up their Saturday to take part in a day of discussion and action planning aroundPurpos/ed.

Julia Skinner invited readers to “Picture a group of like-minded folk, a state-of-the-art university and cupcakes and you have a recipe for a great afternoon of discussion and debate” whilst Doug Belshaw, one of the co-facilitators described “yesterday [as] one of the best days of my life“.

I’ve spend a week reflecting on the event.  Whilst I too found enjoyed  meeting like-minded people and was pleased that the event was so well organised, I couldn’t help but feel that the enthusiasm for engaging in a  debate on how education can be reshaped was, perhaps, somewhat misplaced.  In my 3 minute talk on Education: Addressing the gaps between the fun and the anxieties I suggested that there will always be a need to be anxious about education and that such anxieties will not only be felt by learners but also those who are engaging in learning processes, including teachers, academics, learning support staff and learning organisations themselves.

“The Death of Universities”

Yesterday I came across a tweet which provided a link to a discussion on “Massively Open Online Courses – the Death of Universities?“.

Image from Wikipedia

The title of the discussion reminded me that the Purpos/ed meeting was held at the Conference 21 venue, which overlooks Park Hill Flats. I was told that this is the largest listed building in Europe – and the Wikipedia entry confirms this. Park Hill Flats are, however, currently empty.  Wikipedia describes how “Although initially popular and successful, over time the fabric of the building has decayed somewhat“.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether we may see a similar fate for large buildings to be found in many University campuses.  We have seen investment in higher education during the Labour Government which has some parallels with the investment in public housing in the 1950s and 60s.  However the approaches taken to providing homes weren’t sustainable and whether due to  a lack of further investment to support maintenance or the occupants’ preference for an alternative living environment, we found that such large council housing estates were either demolished (such as Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds) or  mothballed, awaiting further investment as is the case in Sheffield.

Dave Kernohan has contributed to the discussion on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) by arguing that traditional Higher Education models are under attack from two sides: the government cutbacks which we will all be familiar with and, in addition, the views that independent learners are well-positioned to exploit the availability of open educational resources and the wide range of freely available online tools which are also now available  which can be effective in supporting one’s personal learning network.

Dave Kernohan suggested that “we are also seeing an attack based on stuff like Anya Kamenatz’ idea of a DIY U (http://www.diyu.com) ” – this echoes my “Dazed and Confused After #CETIS10” post in which I also suggested that the “case for radical innovation” associated with the DIY University could result in the dismantling of high educational institutions, rather than reforms and improvements which many of those working in education may be seeking.

If the future of education does lie in  Massively Open Online Courses it seems to me there will be many empty buildings on campuses. Perhaps every University town will be competing to boast that it has the largest listed building in the country? Of course this won’t happen (just as the developers of the high rise buildings knew that their work would also have a long-lasting impact:-) But I do  think that the debate of the Purpose of Education does need to address the negative implications of ideas for the future.

I installed the Chrome extension to use this service (a bookmarklet is available for other browsers) and annotated the home page for this blog. As can be seen the service creates a copy of the page on the markup.io service with annotations using simple drawings and text tools.

I recently mentioned the Bo.lt service and suggested that although there are obvious copyright concerns in allowing any public Web page to be copied and edited, such an easy-to-use service might be particularly useful in the context of open educational resources (OER) for which licences are available which permits such re-use. It should also be noted that additional annotations can also be added – although it does not appear to be possible to delete annotations, so there will be dangers about graffiti appearing (such as, for example the name of a famous footballer who took out a super-injunction appearing on a BBC news article).

It does strike me, though, that the direct editing of a page which Bo.lt provides does have risks, not least the dangers of  the ease of forging content which Bo.lt provides.  Although markup.io is also taking a copy of a page and hosting it one its own servers the annotation approach which the service provides seems to minimise risks of forgery.  Perhaps this is a useful approach for annotating Web-based OER resources?

The comments on the article were somewhat predictable; as seems to be the norm for announcements of new services published in TechCrunch some were clearly fans (“OMG! This is going to change everything!“) whilst others point out that the new service provides nothing new: “Shared Copy (http://sharedcopy.com/) is a great service that’s been around for 4 years that does ~the same thing“.

Of particular interest to me, however, were the comments related to the potential for copyright infringements using a services which, as the TechCrunch article announced “let’s you copy, edit and share any page“. As the first comment to the article put it: “I can just see it…this will make it easier for 1) people to create fake bank statements, 2) awesome mocking of news headlines, 3) derivative web designs“.

In order to explore the opportunities and risks posed by this service I registered for the service and created a copy of the home page for my blog and subsequently edited it to remove the left hand sidebar. As can be seen an edited version of the page has been created, and you can view the page on Bo.lt.

So it does seem that it will be easy for people to copy Web pages, edit them for a variety of purposes, including poking fun, creating parodies (has anyone edited a Government Web page yet) as well as various illegal purposes.

But what about legitimate uses of a service which makes it easy to copy, edit, publish and share a Web resource?  The educational sector has strong interests in exploring the potential of open educational resources (OERs) which can be reused and remixed to support educational objectives.  We are seeing a growth in the number of OER repositories.  Might a service such as Bo.lt have a role to play in enabling such resources to be reused,I wonder?  Will Bo.lt turn out to be a threat to our institutions (allowing, for examples, disgruntled students unhappy at having to pay £9,000 to go to University to create parodies of corporate Web pages) or a useful tool to allow learners to be creative without having to master complex authoring tools?

I came across Zapd whilst browsing Apple’s App store on Wednesday night. It was a featured app, available for free and was highly rated – so Ii installed it on my iPod Touch.  A few minutes later I had created a Web site containing annotated photos of a wedding I went to over the weekend.  The applications byline – “Websites in 60 seconds from your iPhone” – seems to be true.  Zapd seems to provide a useful tool for such social applications, but could it be used in a professional context, I wondered. Or might it be regarded as a threat to Web professions, who might doubt whether it is possible to create a Web site so quickly, and question the underlying technical approaches (does it validate? does it conform with accessibility guidelines?), the legal implications, the dilution of an institution’s brand or the sustainability of the content.  Does Zapd provide an opportunity or a threat?

Using Zapd

Yesterday I attended the launch event of the Bath Connected Researcher series of events which has been summarised in a post by Jez Cope, one of the organisers. The #bathcr event (to use the event’s Twitter hashtag) began with a seminar given by Dr. Tristram Hooley who described how he has used social media in his research and to pursue his academic career. Tristram has written a blog post about the seminar which includes access to his slides which are embedded in the post. In addition a recording of the seminar is also available.

The seminar was aimed at researchers who may be new to social media.  I got the impression that many of the participants had not used Twitter to any significant extent.  I had been invited to participate in a workshop on the use of Twitter which was held after the seminar. As I could only attend the workshop briefly it occurred to be that I could try Zapd to see if I could create a Web site which shows how I use Twitter on my iPod Touch.

I captured screen shots of the Twitter’s mobile client, Tweetdeck and Smartr (see recent post) and added text which showed the benefits of Tweetdeck’s columns for providing filtered views of tweet streams (e.g. for an event which has a hashtag such as #bathcr) and how Twitter lists can be used to provide additional filtering capabilities for the delivery of Web pages from selected Twitter accounts.  It took 10 minutes to create and publish the Web site on my iPod Touch while I was also listening to Tristam’s seminar.

It should be noted that the application had created a Web site with its own domain: (http://1a5c.zapd.co/) .  So this application does seem to provide something more than uploading photos to Flickr.

Discussion

Is this a Web site? After all it’s only a simple single page containing text and a few images. But as it has its own domain name surely it must be regarded as a Web site. But should such Web sites be allowed to be created – aren’t they likely to infringe instituional policies? Aren’t we moving away from a distributed environment and towards a centrally managed environment for Web resources? After all, as was suggested to me on Twitter, aren’t Web sites which can be created in less than 10 minutes likely to be forgotten about a week later?

Perhaps this is true, but for me an important aspect of the Web is in providing a communications environment and not just a institutional tool for the publication of significant documents.  And sometimes the communications may be an informal discussion – and I think that Zapd could have a role to play in that space.

I also think that we should be willing to learn from new approaches. Being able to create a Web site on a mobile device is quite impressive. It was also interesting to observe how the service creates a new domain name for each resource created.  Should this be something for institutions to consider?

For me I regard Zapd as another in my Personal Learning Environment which I’m happy to use if it fufills a useful purpose. And if it fails to do that, I’m happy to throw it away.  And with 100,000 downloads since its launch two weeks ago it seems I’m not alone in exploring its potential.  What’s your take?

• A live video stream of the talk published on Bambuser (taken using Rocketfish Webcam on an Apple Macbook)
• Live streaming of the slides using the broadcast feature introduced in Microsoft Powerpoint 2010.

Comments on the talk were made in Bambuser. In addition discussions also took place using the #bathlib Twitter hashtag. Afterwards Storify was used to aggregate these tweets.

The point of use of these technologies was to illustrate how mobile devices can be used to most publish and view lectures (on this occasion  I used a portable Apple Mac to stream the video although I have previously used an iPod Touch and a HTC Desire Android phone to do this).  There was some discussion about the quality of the video and audio. I was able to ask the remote audience for their feedback and received the following comments on Twitter:

• Audio good, video patchy at first but now pretty good – bit blurry but very much what you’d expect from a phone and v. acceptable #bathlib
• #bathlib Video quality better now than at start of session. Beard concealing lip-synch quality

Comments made on the Bambuser channel included:

• 11:26  anonymous: Hi Brian!  Bir jerky on the video, audio is fine. :)
• 11:26  working pretty well brian: Yeah a bit jerky now
• 11:27  itsme: video jerky audio good
• 11:27  lescarr: Quality of video & audio very good. It does halt sometimes.
• 11:27  mhawksey: audio is great, vid a bit jerky cam keeps refocusing
• 11:29  Jo Alcock: Audio OK – video a bit jerky (but my connection isn’t very good here)
• 11:30  Jo Alcock: Started watching it on iPad (through Twitter app), works well but moved to desktop now to enable chat
• 11:30  Nicola: As tweeted: Audio good, video patchy at first but now pretty good – bit blurry but very much what you’d expect from a phone and v. acceptable #bathlib
• 11:33  working pretty well brian: Video fairly patchy – Mahendra, Audio ok

You can judged for yourself how good the video and audio were by viewing a recording of the video.  It should be noted that the quality of the audio was the most important aspect with the video helping to provide a content to the slides being displayed.

During the talk I mentioned how such lightweight video and audio streaming devices (and video recording devices such as a Flip camera) can help to enhance the benefits of such staff development courses.  I described how members of staff at the University of Bath Library who were unable to attend will be able to view the video. But in addition making such resources publicly available can help to enhance the ROI associated with the preparation and delivery of such courses.  As can be seen from the accompanying image there have so far been 62 views of the talk (of which 40 were of the live video stream).  As @annindk (Ann Priestly, an information professional currently working in Denmark) commented:

Watched yr seminar over lunch – thanks! Quality just fine, thinking ROI must be good for these quick sessions

The question of costs and ROI arose during the discussions after the presentation.  ”What are the costs in making use of such technologies and can the investment be demonstrated to provide benefits?” was how I interpreted one question I received.  Following a show of hands it appeared that everyone in the room (apart from possibly one person) had a phone which contained a camera.  So we will probably find that the capital costs in the purchase of mobile devices has already been paid for and as phones are upgraded their functionality will continue to be enhanced.  So rather than having to be able to justify the costs of centralised provision of, say, video recording systems in lecture theatres I suggested that it would be more appropriate to explore a bottom-up approaches, with individuals taking responsibility for recording themselves or their colleagues. A post on the DMU Mashed Library blog picked up on this idea:

One interesting point that came out was Brian’s description of people tweeting their comments on attending conferences to a wider (twitter reading) audience: Can this really be seen as engaging in support for the Big Society? I guess I was consciously doing this from Eduserv’s ‘Work Smarter, not Harder’ workshops #oa11.

My suggestion that taking responsibility for making resources available beyond their immediate target audience could be regarded as a form of the ‘Big Society’ was slightly tongue-in-cheek. But surely if one can provide materials which will be of benefit to others at little additional cost or effort, we should be looking to do this?  And as there were about 25 people in the seminar but 40 people watching the live video stream, can’t this be regarded as providing additional ROI?

My original post summarised some of the benefits of the service but highlighted a number of concerns:

Has Scribd raised the bar in users’ expectations for digital repositories? In some respects, I feel it has. However there are concerns which need to be recognised:

• Poor quality resources which are hosted: there is no guarantee of the quality of the resources which are hosted on Scribd. And there are copyrighted publications (including those from O’Reilly) which have already been uploaded.
• Sustainability of the service: As will all of these type of services, there is the question as to whether such services are sustainable. Techcrunch reported on 6 March 2007 that the service “is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000.“This may keep the service running for a short time, but will it be around in the medium to long term? And what will happen if copyright holders, such as O’Reilly, take the service to court for their misuse of their copyrighted resources (as Viacomm have recently done to YouTube).
• Lack of a interoperable resource discovery architecture: The approach taken by Scribd is not interoperable with the approach being taken by the JISC development community, which is looking to support the development of distributed interoperable digital repository services which make use of OAI-PMH.

Three years later the service is still available.  And looking at the statistics for access to documents I uploaded to the service, it also seems very popular:  during 2010 there were no fewer than 11,729 views of the 15 papers I uploaded to the service, an average of 32 per day.  As you can see from the graph below there were two significant peaks in the year, when there were over 800 in a day.  If I remove these outliers by viewing the statistics for the last six months of the year I find 4,215 views in the six month period, giving an average of  24 per day.

In comparison looking at the usage statistics for my 26 papers hosted in the University of Bath Opus repository I find that there have been 2,505 views during 2010.

Hmm, the repository has almost twice as many papers and resources in the repository are linked to from the UKOLN Web site and  from posts on this blog.  The repository also benefits from being part of a larger repository ecology, with access available from services such as OpenDOAR and MIMAS’s Institutional Repository Search.  And yet the Scribd service seems to get significantly more visits.

Looking at a specific instance, my most recent paper, “Moving From Personal to Organisational Use of the Social Web“, was presented at the Online Information 2010 at the end of November. This paper was uploaded to the University of Bath repository and was mentioned in a blog post on “Availability of Paper on “Moving From Personal to Organisational Use of the Social Web”” which linked to the copy in the repository.    The paper was also uploaded to Scribd – and this was also mentioned in the blog post (and was, indeed, embedded in the post). The usage statistics to date (10 January 2011) are 53 views in the University of Bath repository and 447 views on Scribd.

Scribd also provides a  easy-to-use interface for viewing usage statistics for individual papers. As can be see from the image, there was a peak (of 181 views) on the day the blog post was published with a smaller peak (102 views)  three days previously.  The total number of views from embedded reads (i.e. people who read the blog post and may – or may not -have actually read the embedded paper) is 349. This leaves 160 views of the paper within the Scribd environment – over three times as many views as received for the copy in the institutional repository.

Whilst I can’t help but think that the usage statistics are flawed, I don’t have any evidence of this. I would appreciate suggestions why the views seem so large. But I also suspect that there will be views from people who were searching for information provided in the papers – and if only 10% of the views came from satisfied users that would be on par with those viewing the larger number of papers in the institutional repository (which is also likely, of course, to be inflated by readers using  Google to view papers which aren’t of interest).

Now Scribd does seem to host, how shall I put it, a wide variety of types of documents, not all of which are of relevance to researchers. But the service does have a variety of features which can help to enhance access to documents such as links to Social Web services such as Twitter and Facebook for promoting documents of interest to one’s professional network and the ability for documents to be embedded in other Web sites.

So if one wishes to maximise the impact of one’s ideas will the institutional repository or a commercial service such as Scribd provide the best solution? Or perhaps one should use both approaches?  And if you feel that researchers will prefer to use a more research-friendly environment than is provided by Scridb, remember than researchers, like everyone else, use Google, which will also find resources of dubious scholarly relevance for searches.