A few weeks ago I came across a referrer link to a blog post from a post entitled “Google Scholar Citations y la emergencia de nuevos actores en la evaluación de la investigación“. My Chrome browser helpfully informed me that the page was in Spanish and provided a link to an automated translation of the page. The post began:

The launch of a few months ago Google Scholar Citations [1], the tool for measuring the impact of research publications in indexed by popular search engine, leads us to revise this and other bibliometric applications such efforts to measure the visibility of academic and researchers on the web. This impact is not limited to traditional media (citations received from other scientific works) but embraces new ways of scientific communication and their associated indicators, as the number of downloads of a job, people store it in your manager references or the time that a presentation is envisioned online. It discusses briefly the extent to affect the emergence of these new tools to the traditional databases for evaluation of science, Thomson Reuters, Web of Science [2], and Scopus, Elsevier [3].

I think this provides a comprehensible summary of what the post will cover. The post concluded:

Since the level of university policy and research evaluation, the question to be made ​​is whether any of the products mentioned both Microsoft and Google mainly but also alt-metrics initiatives can be serious competitors in the near future to the two large databases that provide information bibliometric, important cost, especially in an era marked by budget cuts. Traditional products are more creditworthy and stable than new ones by offering a wide range of possibilities and associated metrics, not just jobs but also to journals in which they are published. Besides its use is widespread and there are some metrics validated by professionals and bibliometrics by agencies with responsibility for research. However, it is legitimate debate about whether these databases are essential in research assessment processes. In our opinion, at present these databases (ISI Web of Science or Scopus, no need for two) are essential for the evaluation, however the new generation Science Information Systems (CRIS) [28] together seekers free scientists such as Google Scholar, and metrics based on the use of information may provide new solutions to the evaluation of science, perhaps the medium term by decreasing the need for costly citation indexes. Making prospective fiction might think how it would change the market for scientific information and assessment if Google decided to launch its own “impact index” from the indexed information, which does not seem unreasonable since its popular search management PageRank is based on a principle that already apply other bibliometric indicators. In any case, what is certain is that new products and tools available to researchers and evaluators to facilitate the dissemination and the retrieval of scientific information and open new possibilities for the exchange of scientific information and assessment.

The meaning is less clear, but it does seem that the authors, Alvaro Cabezas Clavijo and Daniel Torres-Salinas of the EC3 Evaluation Group Scientific and Scientific Communication at the Hospital Universitario Virgen de las Nieves in Granada, have been asking whether new tools and approaches for identifying the value of scientific research are challenging the well-established tools provided by ISI Web of Science and Scopus. They seem to feel that researchers will need to continue to make use of ISI Web of Science or Scopus but new approaches may increasingly be relevant, especially if Google make a business decision to further enhance their Google Citation service.

Although not mentioned in the conclusions, the article also reviews Microsoft Academic Search and suggests that “compared to Google Scholar Citations, the process of updating the cv is heavier“; a conclusion which reflects my experiences in the long delay in having updates accepted. The article also mentions the altmetrics initiative and provides links to a number of examples of such approaches including “Total Impact [19] where, in the same line, we can find metrics posted on Slideshare presentations [20], the times they shared a scientific article on Facebook [21], or the number of groups Mendeley which has collected a certain job”.

I found the article of interest and I’m pleased to have found it via the referrer link. Should searches of online foreign language resources now become a significant part of a research strategy I wonder? I also wonder what the term “prospective fiction“, mentioned in the conclusions, means? Can any Spanish speakers explain what a better translation for the following sentence could be:

Haciendo prospectiva-ficción cabría pensar cómo cambiaría el mercado de la información y evaluación científica si Google decidiera lanzar su propio “índice de impacto” a partir de la información que indiza, lo cual no parece descabellado ya que su popular sistema de ordenación de búsqueda PageRank se basa en un principio que ya aplican otros índices bibliométricos.

Note that “prospectiva-ficción” was italicised in the orignal article.

The Linking You project was provided by the University of Lincoln and funded by the JISC under the Infrastructure for Education and Research Programme. Its aim was to look at and make recommendations for improving the way that identifiers for .ac.uk domains are planned and managed in higher education institutions. The background to this work was described on the project web site:

The web is now fundamental to the activity and idea of the university. This Toolkit provides a standard way of thinking about your institutional URI structure, making it easier for people (and their browsers) to both remember your web addresses and locate where they are in your web site. It also helps prepare your institution for the world of linked data by proposing a clear and concise model for your data, making smooth integration with other systems easier and faster. A good URI structure can be easily understood by both humans and machines.

Although one of the benefits which implementation of the report’s recommendation was to “Improve discoverability of resources (and SEO)”, the Linking You project focussed primarily on identifiers for resources hosted within an institutional domain. This post aims to complement the Linking You work by gathering evidence on additional aspects: gaining an understanding of the size of institutional web sites, measuring the numbers of links to the institutional home page and other resources hosted within the domains and variants of the URI for the most important page on a web site – the institutional home page.

About Blekko

A few weeks ago James Burke (@deburca)  introduced me to Blekko: a “search engine that slashes out spam, content farms, and malware. We do this by having a smaller crawl of 3 billion pages that focuses on quality websites. We also have a tool called a slashtag that organizes websites around specific topics and improves search results for those topics.“ In response to the question “What information is available on the SEO pages?” the site describes how:

blekko doesn’t believe in keeping secrets. As part of our effort to make search more transparent, we provide a view of the data that our crawler gathers as it crawls the web.”

Every blekko search result has data associated with it that you can see. You can access it by either clicking on the SEO link tool in the second line of each result or else searching with the /seo slashtag. For example, apple.com /seo

Further information about Blekko (although it spells its name as ‘blekko’ on its web site I’ll use ‘Blekko’ in this post) is available on Wikipedia.

Using Blekko to Analyse Russell Group University Web Sites

What might Blekko tell us about UK university web sites? Blekko’s SEO pages provide details of the following information: geographic link distribution by state and country; inbound links; duplicated content; page source; sections and site pages. Blekko was used to survey the 20 Russell Group university home pages. The survey was carried out on 2 January 2012. However on 24 January it was noticed that the host rank, numbers of site pages and numbers of inbound links had changed significantly from  702.3 to 205.4, 945 to 8,406 and 24,442 to 627 respectively. The findings were rechecked but no other significant changes were noted.

The results are given in the following table.  Note that you need to be logged in to the service in order to view the results.

Note that in the above table explanatory notes are given for figures displayed in braces e.g. {0}. Also note that the Universities of Newcastle and Nottingham both seem to have 16,041 pages.

A Tale of Two Domains

Whilst carrying out this survey it was noticed when checking inconsistencies that different results were obtained when using variants of the domain name and the institutional entry point. The following table lists known domain name variants. Note that the main domain was taken from the address given on the Russell Group web site.

It should be noted that although the table describes the institutional part of the domain which is taken from the Russell Group web site, the analysis is carried out using www.official_domain.ac.uk  In two cases the well-established www. prefix was not used. These were www3.imperial.ac.uk and www2.warwick.ac.uk. However for the analyses the www.  prefix was used as it was felt that this would be the form used by the majority of users.

Discussion

The Blekko web site contains a page which summarises its core principles, which include:

Quality vs Quantity: blekko biases towards quality sites. We do not attempt to gather all of the world’s information. We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low quality content.

Source based, not link based: blekko does NOT rely solely on link based authority.Too many people engage in efforts to game search by linking for purposes other than navigation. blekko relies on human beings and their judgement of the authority of sources to dictate search results.

Open and Transparent: blekko makes freely available to its users all of the data that provide the underpinning of our search results. This includes web data, ranking information and the curation efforts of our users.

Blekko would appear to have a role to play in providing universities  (which are unlikely to use ‘black hat’ SEO techniques such as use of link farms) with a better understanding of their visibility to search engines. However, despite the commitment to openness and transparency, the Blekko web site does not appear to provide details of their ranking algorithms.

Despite the current difficulties in interpretting the host rank in the above table, the information is provided as a snapshot, which may prove useful if Blekko subsequently do publish details.  Of perhaps greater interest is the site pages column which, it would seem, contains the number of pages which have been indexed.

There does appear to be a significant diversity in the size of the Web sites, ranging from 4,727 (for the University of Liverpool) to  507,319 (for UCL), although apart from these two outliers the size of other Russell Group university web sites ranges from  9,679 and then 9,679 to  20,053.  These figures seem to suggest that there may be differing patterns of uses for institutional Web sites, ranging form the small and managed provision of focussed resources through to a more devolved approach. However although the managed approach would appear to have benefits, it does lead to the question as to where resources and services which are felt to be useful to the individual researcher or academic or their department should be hosted, and whether policies which acts as barriers to the creation of resources on an institutional service will result in content being hosted on cloud services.

Further interpretation of these findings will probably require an understanding of the institutional web environment.  However one aspect of the survey which does not require an understanding of the local context is the numbers of links from external services to the institutional web site. Links from authoritative web sites to a web site can influence the discoverability of the resources. A more detailed survey of such links will be published shortly.

Paradata: As described in a post on Paradata for Online Surveys it is important to document the tools and methodologies used when gathering evidence based on use of online tools in order that findings can are reproducible. In addition possible limitations in the tools or the way in which the tools are used should be documented.

This survey was carried out using the Blekko web-based service over the first two weeks in January 2012 and the findings rechecked on 25 January 2012 and changed recorded. Links are provided to the  results provided by the service. However in order to view the findings you will need to be signed in to the service (the service is free to join).

The findings for the University of Birmingham had changed significantly over a period of three weeks. It is not clear whether the variation was due to changes in the University of Birmingham web site, an artefact of the multiple domain names and entry point URLs for the University of Birmingham home page (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/, http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/index.aspx, http://www.bham.ac.uk/ and http://www.bham.ac.uk/index.aspx all resolve to the same page) or changes at Bleeko (e.g. reindexing the web site).

Note that the form of the domain name give on the Russell Group University Web site has been used. This is normally based on the full name, with the exceptions of Cambridge (which uses “cam.ac.uk”), Edinburgh (“ed.ac.uk”), Glasgow (“gla.ac.uk”) .

The results for the host rank are based on an undocumented algorithm. The information on the size of the site is dependent on the number of pages which are harvested. prefix was used as it was felt that this would be the form used by the majority of users.

A recent post outlined My Predictions for 2012. However rather than just posting some idle speculations on technological developments which I feel will have an impact across the higher education sector this year, I also pointed out that there was a need  at a later date to be able to identify ways of gauging whether the predictions were accurate or not.

This suggestion followed on from a recent post in which I described “The Need for an Evidence-based Approach to Demonstrating Value“.  This post was highlighted by Stephen Downes who introduced me to “people like Rudolf Carnap [who] used to talk about ’the requirement of total evidence’ and the ‘principle of indifference’” and went on to add that “These are as valid today as when they wrote it“. These two post inspired further discussion by Keith Lyons in a post on Probability and Sensemaking on the Clyde Street blog who cited a post on massively scalable sensemaking analytics which has links to other posts in this area including:

Sensemaking Systems Must be Expert Counting Systems, Data Finds Data, Context Accumulation, Sequence Neutrality and Information Colocation to new techniques to harness the Big Data/New Physics phenomenon.

This provides another take on my suggestion of the importance of Collective Intelligence. I’m therefore pleased to have been alerted to further relevant posts in this area. Indeed I can repeat the final two paragraphs in Keith’s posts as they are equally applicable to me:

It is fascinating that two early morning links can open up such a rich vein of discovery. At the moment I am particularly interested in how records can be used to inform decision making and what constitutes necessary and sufficient evidence to transform performance.

I have a lot of New Year reading to do!

But in addition to the analysis of big data in order to help make sense of future trends, it can also be useful to explore what other experts are predicting.

16 Predictions for Mobile in 2012

In my list of predictions I made uncontroversial comments regarding the growth in ownership of tablet computers. My interest was  not in tablet computers per se but in the implications of increased opportunities for content creation and curation, as well as content consumption which such devices would seem to provide.

On the GigaOm blog Kevin C. Tofel provides his more detailed predictions on development in mobile computing. Here are my thoughts on the implications of some of Kevin’s predictions:

Wearable computing becomes the next mobile frontier: Even more opportunities for content consumption, creation and curation. And, as explaijed in a post which described how “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Fact That You Did It” favouriting a tweet or +1ing a post can be useful and valuable activities.

A jump in wireless home broadband adoption: More opportunities for online access in the home environment.

Windows Phone usage grows, but slower than expected: There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Windows tablets in 2012 will sell like Android tablets did in 2011. There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Research In Motion will no longer exist as we know it today: Some platforms will fail, so it can help to minimise the risks by minimising developments of platform-specific services.

Nokia uses Symbian as a backup plan (but doesn’t call it Symbian): See above.

The patent wars worsen: Sigh :-( The W3C will seek to avoid standards which are encumbered by patents, but the devices themselves, their networking connective, etc. may be covered by patents which could, as we have seen recently in the case in which Dutch court blocks Galaxy phones in parts of Europe | ZDNet UK, can lead to devices not being allowed to be sold. Best avoid developing device specific services, then!

Apple’s next iPhone will be the iPhone 4GS: When will 4G arruve in the UK, I wonder?

There will be an iPad Pro available in 2012: Ooh, so we should develop apps for the iPad, should we?

Android’s momentum will continue thanks to Android 4.0: Oh, and the Android?

Hybrid apps with HTML5 will be the norm: Maybe not!

Predictions from the BBC

The BBC News blog has a post entitled Mind-reading, tablets and TV are tech picks for 2012 in which a panel of experts “look ahead to the technologies that will change the way we live and work in 2012 and beyond“.

Mt predictions of the continuing growth in importance of tablet computers and social networks, including Facebook, are echoed by Robert Scoble who points out “in terms of the businesses I follow – start-ups – they’re all building into Facebook’s Open Graph technology” and adds “I think business is going to have to have a Facebook Open Graph strategy next year. Even if we’re ignoring it because it’s too freaky on the privacy side, they’re going to have to at least consider it.“.

I suspect that universities will be amongst those businesses which will be exploring how to make greater use of Facebook. As Scoble pointed out “I visited Yahoo recently and they said they’re seeing 600% more visits from Facebook because of it” – with an increasingly competitive market place across higher education I suspect we will be seeing even greater use being made of Facebook during 2012 and, as mentioned above, there will be a need to consider “the requirement of total evidence” and the “principle of indifference“.

But in addition to Facebook as an application environment, Scoble’s comment reminded me of the importance of Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.  I wonder whether it will be possible to gather evidence of Facebook’s success by monitoring the growth of the social graph rather than simply the numbers of Facebook users.

The continuing importance of social networks was also the key message given by Tim Barker of Salesforce.com. Barker felt that:

The big one is the social enterprise revolution.

It’s the idea that you can see the power shifting from companies to consumers. There are more than 1.7 billion people on social networks now; Facebook is the size the entire internet was in 2004.

It’s really defining the way that consumers and customers interact with companies and what they expect from them.

Such issues are equally relevant for the university sector, in part because the increasing costs of going to university will mean that future intakes of students will see themselves regarding themselves as customers who are paying a lot of money for the ‘product’ they are buying. In addition something that both staff and students have in common is that we are all consumers when we leave our ivory towers and go into town for the January sales!

We may not like such terminology and be concerned about how the future seems to be arriving, but remember ”the requirement of total evidence” and the ”principle of indifference“.  On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fatalistic about the future.  But if we do wish to build an alternative reality we will still need to gather the evidence.

In a recent post in which I gave My Predictions for 2012 I predicted that “Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector“. But how will we be able to assess the accuracy of that prediction? One approach is to see if there are significant changes in the number of links to social media services from institutional home pages.

The following survey provides a summary of links to social media services which are hosted on the institutional entry point for the 20 Russell Group universities.

Update: The information published about Imperial College was incorrect. This has been updated.

Ref No.	Institution	Services	Type of Link	Screenshot	Icons for KCL
1	Birmingham	None
2	Bristol	None
3	Cambridge	[iPhone] – [iTunesU] – [YouTube] -[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [Flickr]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service
4	Cardiff	None
5	Edinburgh	None
6	Glasgow	[Generic bookmarks] – [WordPress] – [Facebook] – [Twitter] – [email]	Link to visitor’s own presence on social media service.
7	Imperial College	None [Delicious] – [Twitter] – [Digg] – [Stumble] – [Facebook]	Link to visitor’s own presence on social media service.
8	King’s College London	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Favourites ] – [Digg] -[Delicious] – [RSS]		See sidebar
9	Leeds	[Facebook] – [Twitter]
10	Liverpool	None
11	LSE	[iTunesU] – [YouTube] – [Twitter] – [Facebook] – [Delicious] – [RSS] – [Flickr]	Link to page on institutional web site providing information about institutional use of social media services.
12	Manchester	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [Google Maps]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
13	Newcastle	[Facebook] – [Twitter] - [YouTube] – [iTunesU]	Link to page on institutional web site providing information about institutional use of social media services.
14	Nottingham	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Flickr] – [LinkedIn] – [FourSquare]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
15	Oxford	None
16	Queen’s University Belfast	[Facebook] – [Twitter]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
17	Sheffield	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
18	Southampton	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
19	UCL	[Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Facebook] – [Soundcloud] – [Flickr] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
20	Warwick	[Facebook] – [YouTube] – [Twitter] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
	Total	59 64

A summary of the number of occurrences of the services is given below.

Discussion

If either all of the Russell Group University home pages had links to the same social media services or none did, this survey would be uninteresting. However since about 30% of the institutions do not have such links this seems to be suggesting that the value of having such links on a high profile page is not universally agreed.

For those institutions which do provide such links we can see that Facebook and Twitter are the most popular services, followed by social media sharing services. A number of services, including LinkedIn and FourSquare, have links from only a single institution.

It was also interesting to observe that although most institutions provided links to their institutional presence on social media services, a number of institutions used such links to allow visitors to provide links to the institution from the visitor’s own account, so that the institutional home page could be bookmarked or commented on.

Finally we can also observe how institutions label access to these services. This includes use of terms such as “Join us“, “Follow us“,”Find us on …“, and “xxx in the Social Media“.

From a user perspective we should also note that the different purposes provided by these links may be confusing. The norm is for links to provide read access to an institutional presence on a social media service. However in a number of cases the links are intended to allow users with accounts on particular services to bookmark or cite the institutional page on the service. Although this usage may be appropriate across a group of pages with the same purposes (for example, blog posts) this approach may cause confusion for a visitor who is either unfamiliar with the service or who expects the links to provide read access to the service.

Looking to the Future

This post has sought to identify patterns of usage of links to social media services on Russell Group university home pages and highlighted areas in which in may be beneficial for institutions to reappraise their uses of such services. However the main purpose of this survey was to provide a benchmark to help identify future trends in institutional use of social media.

Use of institutional home pages for such benchmarking can be beneficial since changes to institutional home pages will probably require approval at a senior level, and will therefore be less likely to reflect short term technological trends.

It will therefore be interesting at the end of the year to observe whether:

• The current popular social networking services continue to remain popular.
• New social media services are provided on social media services.
• The ways in which the links to social media services are labelled and the functionality they provide changes.

I’d welcome comments on patterns across the wider University sector.

I recently described developments which suggest the potential for Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More). The post pointed out that links Facebook and Twitter seem to becoming more embedded within services, such as bibliographic services, in order to make it easier for researchers to share papers of interest across their professional network. Recently Martin Belam (@currybet) tweeted “Frictionless sharing – exploring the changes to Facebook” – a piece I’ve written for FUMSI magazine http://bit.ly/z930Wc and his article explored other developments we are seeing which can make sharing of resources even easier than clicking on a Like or Tweet button. Martin is the Lead User Experience & Information Architect for the Guardian Web site and blogs about UX/IA, digital media & journalism on currybet.net. He is also a contributing editor for the FUMSI online magazine. His opening paragraph, in an article aimed at information professionals, suggests that he feels that Facebook can bring benefits to this sector:

As 2012 begins, Facebook remains one of the amazing growth stories of the internet. Some argue that an eventual flotation will mark the high tide of a second internet bubble, whilst others are awe of the fact that a website that started in a college dorm has grown to have nearly one billion members

The main focus of his article are the recent technical developments which make sharing of resources transparent:

One of the biggest changes for content providers is “frictionless sharing”. In the past, users had to actively share content by pressing a “Like” button on a website, or “Like”-ing a Facebook page, or including a URL in their status update. Facebook is changing this. They have opened up what they call their “Open Graph”, which allows apps and publishers to automatically insert “actions” into a user’s Facebook timeline. And, in plain English, that means that for some sites or apps, simply listening to a song or reading an article is enough to see it posted to your Facebook activity stream without you lifting so much as a mouse-finger.

At the time of writing only a handful of applications have been launched which take advantage of the feature, including those by Yahoo!, Spotify, the Guardian, Independent and the Washington Post’s “Social Reader” app. That is sure to change in 2012, but the roll-out of further apps seems tied into Facebook launching “Timeline” – a new way for users to view their profile pages.

As an example of what is meant by frictionless sharing a screenshot of my Facebook news updates showing the Guardian articles I read using the Guardian’s Facebook app is shown. As can be seen the articles I read included ones on “Sherlock: BBC will no remove nude scenes” and “A Thatcher state funeral would be bound to lead to protests“. Note that the links I have provided go directly to the Guardian Web site so you can follow the links in the knowledge that your interest in nudity and right wing politicians will not be disclosed to your liberal colleagues :-)

This provides an interesting example of the risks of sharing the articles you read, without having to manually select an article of interest and consciously share it, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or whatever, across your network. And this is a reason why some people, including people in my network whose opinions I respect, have concerns over this development. On the other hand, the Guardian Facebook app does seem to be popular. It seems I was not alone in reading the article on how “Footage of nude dominatrix shown before 9pm watershed have prompted more than 100 complaints” and the hypocrisy of the Daily Mail in expressing their outrage whilst including the ‘shocking’ images in their web site.

But the 8,995 people who viewed the article shortly after it had been published was beaten by the 11,686 people who read the article on how Pale octopus, hairy-chested yeti crab and other new species found (warning the first link is to the Guardian Facebook app).

So how popular is the Guardian Facebook app? A post which suggested that We Can’t Ignore Facebook described how the Guardian Facebook app was launched on 22 September 2011. Statistics for a number of the Guardian sections collated on 14 January 2012, just over three months after the app’s launch, are given below.

These figures seem to suggest the popularity of the Guardian Facebook app although, as ever, care must be taken in interpretting figures. In particular I do not know if these figures may include use of a pre-frictionless sharing app. In addition this single set of figures doesn’t provide any comparisons with views of the Guardian Web site or shown trends.

But returning to the recent FUMSI article Martin Belam provided some suggestions aimed at information professionals

Think again about Facebook metadata
Facebook’s Open Graph is a metadata standard for marking up your web content. It sits quietly in the HEAD of your HTML, and replicates many fields that you might be familiar with from metadata standards like Dublin Core. The fact that anyone can access it via a web request allows Facebook to say the standard is “open”, although they tightly control the spec themselves. To take advantage of the new frictionless sharing, even if you don’t build an app yourself, making that metadata available is going to be a requirement to have your content display properly within the many social reading experiences that are sure to be developed.

Think again about audit trails
“Frictionless sharing” changes the nature of our digital audit trails on Facebook. From a competitive intelligence point of view, it is great news, because potentially seeing what someone from a particular company is reading about and watching can give you clues as to where their work may be heading. It also means being careful not to leave audit trails yourself if you want the research you are doing to be kept “under the radar”.

Discussion

The ‘Frictionless Sharing’ Term

Martin Belam’s article generated some interesting Twitter debate on the day it was published. I spotted the initial tweet from @currybet and shortly afterwards read @ppetej’s comment that:

Much as I loathe the whole ghastly “frictionless sharing” thing, some useful thoughts/pointers by @currybettinyurl.com/6rvnqx7

and @mweller’s response:

@ppetej frictionless sharing is interesting I think for academics – it certainly shaped the way I wrote my last book

I curated the discussion on Storify since I felt it raised several interesting issues, in particular in taking the discussion about frictionless sharing beyond one particular instance (Facebook, which tends to focus concerns on other aspects of Facebook’s activities) into the more general issues of frictionless sharing in an educational context. Indeed, as Pete Johnston pointed out, a post on Martin Weller’s The Ed Techie blog published back in 2008 described The cost of sharing in which Martin made the point that “The ‘cost’ of sharing has collapsed, but institutions don’t know this“. Martin went on to point out that:

Clay Shirky argues that the cost of organisation has disappeared, and I believe this is because sharing is easy, frictionless. If I come across something I share it via Google shared items, Twitter, my blog, etc. If I want to share I stick it up on Slideshare, my blog, YouTube. There is a small cost in terms of effort to me to do the sharing, and zero cost in anyone wanting to know what I share. Sharing is just an RSS feed away.

Hmm, so back in November 2008 Martin Weller stated that “sharing is easy, frictionless“. Can anyone find an early reference to use of this term in this context? In a post on Sharing Learning Resources: shifting perspectives on process and product Amber Thomas used the term to describe activities taking place in the 1990s: “For example, the late 90s to early 2000s emphasised the benefits of collaborative resource development. Later on, some advocates of Open Educational Resources (OER) brought to the fore the concept of content as by-product, exhaust, frictionless sharing” but was not using the term at the time. I wonder if the Sharing article in Wikipedia should include a reference to ‘frictionless sharing’ and whether Martins’ blog post would be an appropriate reference for an early citing of the term in the context of sharing resources on social networking services?

Whenever the term first originated (and on Twitter Martin Weller suggested that “around the time of the dot com bubble ppl talked about the frictionless economy“) by December 2011 the ReadWriteWeb was predicting a Top Trends of 2011: Frictionless Sharing. This article illustrated frictionless sharing initially by Facebook are doing but also sharing music and news items.

But what of the potential for frictionless sharing in higher education?

Martin Weller feels that such approaches are already becoming embedded in some of his working practices, in particular: “frictionless sharing is interesting I think for academics – it certainly shaped the way I wrote my last book“. In My Predictions for 2012 I suggested that we will see an increase in the amount and types of ‘open practices’ including not only the well-established areas of open access and open educational resources, but also open approaches to being recorded and videoed. But such areas are still relate to the creation of content. Frictionless sharing is interesting as it relates to openness in a more passive content: openness about what you may be reading (and as well as Faceboook, apps such as GoodReads allow one to share information on what you are reading).

Tony Hirst explored these ideas in a post published in Ocober 2010 entitled in which he asked Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? And Who Owns Your Search Persona? when he asked “: if librarians become Facebook friends of their patrons, and start “Liking” high quality resources they find on the web, might they start influencing the results that are presented to their patrons on particular searches?“. Tony referred to this post last week when he revisited the potential role of librarians in supporting sharing of resources in a post in which he asked Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not to be Socials? His comment that:

The idea here was that you could start to make invisible frictionless recommendations by influencing the search engine results returned to your patrons (the results aren’t invisible because your profile picture may appear by the result showing that you recommend it. They’re frictionless in the sense that having made the original recommendation, you no longer have to do any work in trying to bring it to the attention of your patron – the search engines take care of that for you (okay, I know that’s a simplistic view;-). [Hmm.. how about referring to it as recommendation mode support?]

was particularly interesting in that Tony seems to have changed from using ‘invisible’ to ‘frictionless’ during the course of writing the post.

The Challenges

In some respects pragmatic advice regarding privacy issues and uncertainties as to how such data could subsequently be used would suggest that you should avoid the risks associated with frictionless sharing. Indeed, I made this point in a post in which I asked Is Smartr Getting Smarter or Am I Getting Dumber? following the Smartr app’s unannounced release of frictionless sharing for reading Twitter links read by members of one’s Smartr network.

But as the evidence of the Guardian app seems to suggest, people may be willing to share their interests in a passive fashion, and benefit from ways in which members of their networks reciprocate.

I guess the questions to be answered are:

• What other types of frictionless sharing are there?
• What benefits can frictionless sharing provide?
• What are the risks in frictionless sharing?
• Will the benefits outweigh the risks?

But before we can start to discuss these questions we perhaps need to define the terms. So what is ‘frictionless sharing‘? On this occasion Google currently seems to suggest that the term relates primarily to a recent Facebook developments, but I’m interested in the generic meaning of this term.  And perhaps we can use the Wikipedia entry for Frictionless sharing to agree on a definition.

Will your app be available only from a mobile device?

In the anti-pattern Wikipedia article we learn that “In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. Reading the GigaOM article on “Whip myself–and Path–into fighting shape“, which is the ninth in a series of 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012, I fear that we may be seeing the development of a mobile-only app anti-pattern.

In the article David Morin, co-founder of the Path social media sharing service, describes how:

“I think 2012 will truly be the year of mobile Internet” and goes on add that “I mean, it’s so big. I get the GigaOM Pro reports on mobile, and I see these numbers: The amount of mobile display inventory, the fact that Apple’s paid out $2 billion to app developers, there are something like one million Android phones being activated daily. It goes on and on. The industry as a whole hasn’t come around to realizing how big mobile is just yet. But I think this will be the year where we focus on building companies that solely address the post-PC era.“

I’d agree with that analysis.  My concern, though, is the author’s vision for Path (and Flipboard): “I think Path and Flipboard and a few others are leading the way. We don’t even have a website.”  He goes on to expand on this:

“Products you build for the Web, which people access with a big screen and a keyboard and mouse while sitting at a desk, need to be completely different than what you build for a mobile device. You can’t just hire one mobile developer and take the interface you’ve built on the web and cram it onto a mobile device.“

And then concludes:

“It makes me think of something that Steve Jobs said: You can’t serve two masters. Well, the Bible said it first, but I think it applies to product design as well. You can’t serve both the Web and mobile with the same product. You have to choose.“

It’s actually not quite true that “We don’t even have a website“. There is a Web site about the Path app, as illustrated, which has an handful of pages.  However there isn’t a Web interface for users of the app – so if you want to use the “smart journal … to share life with the one you love” you’ll have to install the app on your iPhone  or Android device (although you can, as I have done, also use an iPod Touch).

Beyond the Mobile Web vs Mobile App Debate

Much of the recent debate has focussed on whether one should develop for the Mobile Web, which through use of appropriate style sheets and other techniques, aims to ensure that the same content can be provided to both desktop computers and mobile devices, or develop Mobile App, which may exploit specific features of particular mobile devices and be more easily marketed and made available through mobile vendor’s apps stores and market places.

Source: Worklight

A Google search for “Mobile Web vs Mobile App Debate” highlights several articles including one which explains how Mobile Web App vs. Native App? It’s Complicated, This article recommends a “must-read article” on The fight gets technical: mobile apps vs. mobile sites which includes the accompanying image which graphically depicts some of the pros and cons of the different approaches to mobile development.

In the JISC CETIS briefing paper on Mobile Web Apps: A Briefing Mark Power makes the case for a universal approach to development which will ensure that access can be provided to both desktop and mobile users: “A viable, alternative approach is developing Mobile Apps using open web technologies and standards; technologies that continue to improve performance and offer more powerful functionality – as is now being talked about quite a bit on the topic of HTML5“.

There is, however, a recognition that mobile app development may provide benefits for users of the supported mobile developments. However the service provider is likely to find such development and subsequent maintenance costly and time-consuming and, at a time in which funding is being cut it would appear sensible to develop a platform- and application-independent approach through making use of W3C’ standards, such as HTML5, CSS and the related Open Web Platform standards.

However the anti-pattern described above take another approach to the issue of minimising development and maintenance costs: develop for the mobile device only and ignore the Web browser and the desktop computer!

I find this a worrying approach. However, as I described above, I have installed the Path app on two of my mobile devices. So rather than writing a post which simply reiterates the benefits of “open standards”, “device independence” and “universal access” I think there’s a need to understand the pros and cons of the approach taken by David Morin and welcome the clear and unambiguous statement he has made on why he feels this approach is best for his company:

The one big lesson I’ve learned from the past year is that every entrepreneur goes through really hard times — periods of time where people don’t believe in what you’re doing, or the numbers don’t look good. Entrepreneurs always have a vision: You wouldn’t have started a company if you didn’t. But the first implementation may not be getting you all the way there.

Find the users who see your vision and talk to them. Find out why they love the product and what they’re trying to do with it. Often, they’re trying to do something that you haven’t designed it for. You need to unlock that potential. Take away the things that don’t matter, and unlock the stuff that does — remove the complexity. That’s what will make it catch on with everyone.

I do wonder whether we will see institutions developing their own apps across a range of areas and whether we will find that the apps will not provide functionality for those without the appropriate mobile device. It would be useful to monitor such developments, particularly if the anti-pattern I have described turns out to be a successful pattern for mobile development.

As a footnote to this post I should mention the The State of the Mobile Web in Higher Education (2012) survey is currently open. The result’s of last year’s survey are available on the collegewebeditor.com blog. It will be interesting to see how institutional approaches to the mobile web have developed over the past year – and if institutions are considering developing mobile-only applications.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to James Burke (@deburca) for his tweet which alerted me to this article.

“Learning is performance” Steve Wheeler tells us in his opening sentence in his first blog post of the year. Steve goes on to describe how:

Some of our earliest performances, particularly in formal learning contexts (school, college, university), are under the scrutiny of subject experts who award grades, and ultimately, some form of accreditation. This kind of performance is commonly referred to as formal assessment. Sadly, it is often the case that the measure of performance is not fit for purpose, as we have all witnessed recently in the universal failure of standardised testing, or the exam paper fiascos that continually assail our senses via the media.

The implication may to be that since sometimes (is there evidence that the term ‘often’ should be used in this context?) a “measure of performance is not fit for purpose” we should avoid assessment. However as Steve goes on to point out:

[Assessment] is important for the community, because the community needs skilled and knowledgeable members, and some form of check is required to ensure that the skill or knowledge is up to date, safe to use, and is relevant for the needs of society. If we get assessment wrong, we fail the student, and ultimately we fail society.

The JISC CETIS service has had a long-standing involvement in exploring issues related to assessment. But Steve Wheeler’s comment that ”Learning is performance” has reminded me that it may be beneficial to explore approaches to assessement beyond the tools, projects and resources which CETIS have documented on their web site.

Sporting Performance

One lunch time a few month’s ago I met Doctor Ken Bray, a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Bath.

Ken’s work has been featured in a couple of press releases published by the University of Bath. In January 2009 the focus was on work related to the physics of darts:

As the British Darts Organisation’s (BDO) Lakeside World Professional Darts Championships gets into full swing this week, new research from the University of Bath shows that the secret of true darts skills is all in the maths.

Visiting fellow Dr Ken Bray’s calculations for the Get On campaign shows how darts stars taking to the oche this week will have to master geometry, physics and algebra to win their place in the sport’s hall of fame.

However Ken’s main interest is in the science of football. Ken is author of How to Score: Science and the Beautiful Game which was published in 2006. His interests in this area have continued and were featured on the This Is Bath Web site in March 2011:

​They may not realise it, but the best footballers are actually skilled mathematicians, according to an expert from Bath.

University of Bath sports scientist Dr Ken Bray has analysed hours of football footage to conclude that as much as 30 per cent of a player’s technique is down to an intuitive understanding of maths and science.

A criticism of which could be made of a scientific study of sports is that ”We all use mathematical principles – we’d fall over when walking if we didn’t!” And it would clearly be wrong to suggest that David Beckam’s success in taking free kicks is due to a conscious analysis of the variables (the distance, the weather conditions, the angles, …) and the implementation of the appropriate formula which will ensure that the ball succeeds in bending around the defensive wall and out of the reach of the goalkeeper to ensure that England reach the final stages of the World Cup, as Beckham famously did with his 30-yard free kick, three minutes into injury-time of the game against Greece in 2006.

However although footballers and other sports stars may have an “intuitive understanding of maths and science” those involved in coaching nowadays do have an understanding of the maths and physics associates with sports success and are developing measurement techniques which can provide ways of helping to ensure success.

Some approaches will be be related to the individual sportsman, for example their diet and general fitness. However others will relate directly to their sporting performance and the performance of the opposition. This is now a major industry with companies such as Prozone analysing sporting performance and selling their methodologies, tools and data to interested parties, including sporting clubs, sportsmen and women, coaches, agents, newspapers and TV companies and sports fans.

As described on the Prozone web site the company provides:

Post match analysis: Analyse every aspect of team and player performance via a range of interactive platforms.

Opposition Analysis: Prozone can provide pre-match performance information on your forthcoming opponents. Commonly known as ‘technical scouting’ this allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of upcoming teams and individual players.

Through interactive coaching tools, users are able to gain a unique insight into the performance of upcoming opposition teams. These can help to supplement the knowledge of your scouts and enable you to better prepare for upcoming matches. Scouting analysis can be delivered using a range of video clips, in-depth data and multi-layered graphics and can be accessed online or sent direct to the training ground.

Live Performance Analysis: By offering ‘real time’ information about the game, our Live Analysis service gives management and coaching staff an immediate insight into the performance of players on the pitch.

Enhanced Player Trading: An advanced online solution allowing clubs to make objective and better informed decisions on player trading through the use of accurate performance data.

I wonder to what extend these approaches may have some relevance to the higher education sector? Back in Ocober in a post on  Learning Analytics and New Scholarship: Now on the Technology Horizon I summarised Dave Pattern’s talk at the ILI 2011 conference which describef how “The project looked at the final degree classification of over 33,000 undergraduates, in particular the honours degree result they achieved and the library usage of each student” and explored the hypothesis “There is a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment‘.  Hmm, does this have parallels with analyses of Arsenal’s defensive frailties and strategies for playing against them.  And should we be looking to provide services similar to Prozone’s:

Live Performance Analysis: By offering ‘real time’ information about students’ learning experiences, our Live Analysis service gives management and academic staff an immediate insight into the performance of students in their learning.

Steve Wheeler concluding his blog post by suggesting that:

Knowledge performance is at the centre of community as curriculum. From the sharing of knowledge comes the discourse that adds to everyone’s collective knowledge within the community of practice, and extends its boundaries. It is this sharing of experience, new ideas, contention and support that advances the community of practice exponentially. The tools are here to achieve it. Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of education and training in the coming years.

I agree with that final sentence: “Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of education and training in the coming years“. But this will not be restricted to learning and teaching. I would slightly modify this conclusion by saying: “Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of research, education and training in the coming years“. And being able to analyse the performance will be a major growth area. Or at least that is what the  NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Education Edition seems to be suggesting with the NMC Horizon’s 2012 Preview Report (PDF format) suggesting that Learning Analytics has a time-to-adoption horizon of 2-3 years.

The report defines Learning analytics as

the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. Data are collected from explicit student actions, such as completing assignments and taking exams, and from tacit actions, including online social interactions, extracurricular activities, posts on discussion forums, and other activities that are not directly assessed as part of the student’s educational progress.

Or if we, this time, apply this to a sporting context with the changes highlighted:

the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of footballers in order to assess football progress, predict future performance, and spot potential issues. Data are collected from explicit sporting actions, such as completing passes and taking penalties, and from non-sporting actions, including online social interactions, extracurricular activities such as not been caught for drunken driving, posts on the footballer’s Twitter account, and other activities that are not directly assessed as part of the footballer’s sporting and non-sporting progress.

The major difference is that football is a game of two halves but an undergraduate course is a game of three years :-)

On 19^th February 2011 I signed up for the trunk.ly service.  The email I received which confirmed my registration summarised the features of this service:

• Trunk.ly indexes the full web page that all your links point to. Just search and find, no need to worry about tagging or summarizing content.
• If you #tag content in Twitter, or tag it in Delicious, Trunk.ly will create tags for you.
• Trunk.ly also checks your Twitter favorites so you can just favorite content with links without retweeting it if you prefer.

I have to admit that I’d forgotten about trunk.ly until I received an email recently telling me that the service has  been acquired by AVOS (who have recently acquired Delicious.com) and that the trunk.ly service will terminate from the end of the week: Friday 13^th January.

The email did inform me that I can export the content created by trunk.ly:

This tool creates a list of all your bookmarks in a format understandable by most browsers. You can save the generated page (as HTML) and import it into your browser — or anything else that accepts bookmarks in a standard format.

Your tags will be included in the export file even if you don’t see them on the page. This is the limitation of the export file format.

I have exported the content and hosted it on the UKOLN Web site.  However before the service is withdrawn I thought it would be useful to explore what it can tell me about the links I have shared on Twitter.

The service is associated with my main Twitter account (@briankelly) and with the UK Web Focus blog.  Since registering with the service ten months ago it has harvested 4,997 links. I am followed by six other trunk.ly users and follow 13 users.

The service allows me to browse through the links I have created in chronological order as well as the links created by people I follow. As illustrated Trunk.ly can summarise the content of the link and, if available, include an embedded image.

Trunk.ly also allows me to explore the content by any associated tags.

As shown in the accompanying screen image I can see that I used the #altc2011 Twitter hashtag for a number of tweets.  Clicking on the tag enable me to view the three tweets I posted: one which linked to a FriendFeed post in which Seb Schmoller described how  ”“Recording can improve a bad lecture! 7… – Seb Schmoller – FriendFeed”; one on ““Battling legal, logistical and technical obstacles to archiving the Web” « UK Web Focus” which summarised one of my blog posts on Twitter archiving and one on “Martin Hamilton’s blog: ALT-C 2011: Cloud Learning with Google Apps” in which I retweeeted Martin Hamilton’s link about a presentation he gave at the ALT-C 2011 conference.

Of more interest, however, is Trunk.ly’s search interface.  This enable me to search not only resources which I have shared but also resources shared my the people I follow as well as all Trunk.ly users. Examples of the terms contained in links posted by myself and Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) are given below:

Unsurprisingly we both tweet significant numbers of links back to our host institutional Web site.

It is also possible to search by the resource type which have been shared:

Discussion

In February 2009 Mike Ellis that, for services such as Twitter and blogs “The person is the point“:

Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness. As long as institutions can retain this – i.e., do it for a reason – then, IMO, things will get more interesting. If they don’t, we’ll probably all be unfollowing museums as quickly as we can slide down the steep, slippery trough of disillusionment…

That may have been the case in Twitter’s early days but now Twitter does not need to have an edge. Twitter can be used for sharing ideas and resources and for discussing the implications of the ideas and commenting on the resources.

The Trunk.ly blog has announced that:

Trunk.ly will be discontinued, and we will immediately start working to integrate our technology and insights to accelerate the link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious. 

I’m pleased that I still have my Delicious account and will be interested  to see how the service becomes embedded within Delicious. It will also be interesting to see if the resource sharing capabilities provided by Twitter, and the ways in which such sharing can now be analysed will have a role to play in the development of altmetrics. As described in the altmetrics manifesto:

 Articles are increasingly joined by:

• The sharing of “raw science” like datasets, code, and experimental designs
• Semantic publishing or “nanopublication,” where the citeable unit is an argument or passage rather than entire article.
• Widespread self-publishing via blogging, microblogging, and comments or annotations on existing work.

A Google search for “altmetrics twitter” provides a link to a tweet from @jasonpriem:

BIG #altmetrics news: Highly tweeted articles 11x more likely to be highly cited http://doi.org/hb6#scholcomm #twitter

The tweet provides a link to a paper on “Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact” which concludes:

Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.

These conclusions were based on analysis of all tweets containing links to articles in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). For a subset of 1,573 tweets about 55 articles published between issues March 2009 and February 2010, different metrics of social media impact were calculated and compared against subsequent citation data from Scopus and Google Scholar 17 to 29 months later. A heuristic to predict the top-cited articles in each issue through tweet metrics was validated.

For those working in the area of medical internet research it would seem that Twitter has an important role to play in increasing citations or helping to identify important papers. Perhaps, after all, Mike Ellis is right: the person is the point. But the person may be the researcher and the point may be the research, rather than the researcher’s edgy voice.

Survey 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 survey findings described in this post were collected on 30 December 2011 using the Google Chrome browser on a PC running Windows 7.  It was noticed that there were differences between the  two ways of finding the numbers of links which have been harvested: the information provided in the user’s profile (e.g. see my profile page which states that there are 4,997 links)  and the numbers given for a search for the user (see my search results).

Wasn’t last week’s episode of Sherlock (“A Scandal in Belgravia“) great! I thought so and when I looked at my Twitter stream last Sunday night it seems that many of the people I follow on Twitter were impressed. too.  I then searched Twitter for #sherlock and found the approval of the first in the new series was pretty overwhelming.

As a friend of mine later said, it’s not surprising that Twitter users liked the programme so much as it was written with users who are au fait with Web technologies in mind.  Note only did the programme feature @TheWhipHand it also mentioned John Watson’s blog.  Both had been created to accompany the programme, and yes people did view the Twitter stream and the blog while they were watching the programme, as can be seen from the accompanying screenshot of the tweets which were posted during the show.

TV’s ‘Second Screen’

The link between a TV programme and a Twitter stream reminded me of the pioneering which Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey were involved in back in 2009.

As described in the Wikipedia entry for “Twitter subtitling”:

The concept of combining video and twitter feeds for recorded events was first proposed Tom Smith in February 2009^[1] after experiencing Graham Linehan’s BadMovieClub^[2] in which at 9pm exactly on the 13th February 2009, over 2,000 Twitter users simultaneously pressed ‘Play’ on the film ‘The Happening‘ and continued to ‘tweet’ whilst watching, creating a collective viewing experience.

Smith, in response, proposed that media such as DVDs and YouTube videos could be enhanced by overlaying asynchronous status updates from other Twitter users who had watched the same media ^[1].

Separately, in March 2009 Tony Hirst (Open University), in consultation with Liam Green-Hughes (Open University), presented a practical solution for creating SubRip (*.srt) subtitle files from the Twitter Search API using Yahoo Pipes. The resulting file was then uploaded to a YouTube video^[3] allowing users to replay in realtime audio/video with an overlay of status updates from Twitter. Hirst subsequently revisited his original solution creating the simplified Twitter Subtitle web interface for the original Yahoo Pipe^[4]

The concept was revisited on the 16th February 2010 by Martin Hawksey (JISC RSC Scotland North & East) in response to a notification by Hirst made via Twitter during a broadcast of the BBC/OU’s The Virtual Revolution series in which Hirst requested information on replaying the #bbcrevolution hashtag in real-time^[5].

Although Tony and Martin’s work initially focussed on providing a mashup of tweets and recordings of a number of BBC TV programmes Martin subsequently developed the iTitle tool which was used to merge event tweets with video recordings taken at a number of events held with the UK higher education sector.

As described in a post on Captioned Videos of IWMW 2010 Talks iTitle was used after UKOLN’s IWMW 2010 event to provide Twitter captions of the discussions which took place during the plenary talks at the event.  One of the developments Martin made to iTitle was to provide a search facility which enable you to jump directly to the video associated with the content of a tweet.  I described this can be used to provide crowd-sourced bookmarking capabilities of live video feeds. As illustrated using an example of the IWMW 2010 conclusions I could search for “good stuff” and find three examples of tweets containing these words.  In the screen shot I seem to be looking at the Twitter Wall at 10:51 on as @PlanetClaire as she tweets “Professional network grown after this IWMW. Good stuff. #iwmw10″. It’s not only the BBC which can take a post-modernist approach to the blended real world and online environment!

After speaking at the University 2.0: the Extended University Conference held at the UMIP in Sandanter, Spain in 2010 at which a number of the plenary talks were live-streamed it occurred to me that there could be other ways in which iTitle could be used. Professor Alejandro Piscitelli, University of Buenos Aires gave a fascinating talk on Explorando los bordes y contornos de la Universidad 2.0. The talk was given in Spanish and I listened to the English translation.  Since the audience were mostly Spanish the tweets were also in Spanish. The talk seemed to be one which Professor Piscitelli had given on a number of occasions. But what aspects of the talk would be of particular interest to the Spanish audience, to an audience in Argentina or in the UK or USA (Professor Piscitelli is a fluent English speaker). I should also add that Martin Hawksey was a remote observer of the conference. Martin processed the tweets posted during Professor Piscitelli’s talk by using Google Translate to translate them into English, Spanish and Catalan. The user could selected their preferred language and view a recording of the talk will the translated tweets being displayed in the recording. Note that although this interface is still available it seems that the original video recording is no longer available at the UIMP.

These thoughts came back to me when I saw Sherlock and the accompanying Twitter backchannel.

I am sure the BBC will have been analysing the tweets and interpreting how the audience was responding to the complexities of the plot.  But will they be using analyses of live Twitter posts in order to make comparisons between the posts from the UK audience and a US audience when the programme is broadcast over there?

Back in February 2010 Tony Hirst gave his thoughts on Broadcast Support – Thinking About Virtual Revolution:

I watched the broadcast on Saturday, I started wondering about ‘live annotation’ or enrichment of the material as it was broadcast via the backchannel. Although I hadn’t seen a preview of the programme, I have mulled over quite a few of the topics covered by the programme in previous times, so it was easy enough to drop resources in to the twitter feed. So for example, I tweeted a video link to Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, explaining how Google ad auctions work, a tweet that was picked up by one of the production team who was annotating the programme with tweets in real time

Tony concluded by referencing Martin Hawksey:

PS here’s another interesting possibility – caption based annotations to iPlayer replays of the programme via Twitter Powered Subtitles for BBC iPlayer Content c/o the MASHe Blog (also check out the comments…)

The Ideas and Experimentation Become Apps

We are now seeing these ideas being deployed in a commercial context. Just before Christmas I came across the Zeebox app. This is described as “new way to watch television. It’s social, connecting you to your TV-watching friends, so you can chat, share and tweet about whatever’s on” which I have now installed the app on my iPod Touch.  Previously I typically used my iPod Touch to view tweets and had a large enough Twitter community to spot hashtags which may emerge or have been minted about a TV programme. However apps such as Zeebox are now managing this process and provide a ‘frictionless’ way of sharing thoughts and opinions.

This is an example of a “Second screen” which is defined in Wikipedia as “A term that refers to the electronic device (tablet, smartphone) that uses a television user, to interact with the content they are consuming“.

It’s good to see ideas which were explored in the higher education sector a few years ago starting to be used by the early adopters in the mainstream community.  There’s a danger, though, that such mainstream uses of Twitter will lead to a backlash by those who are uneasy when a technology become used in entertainment.  But rather than looked at the trivia which we’re likely to see on the backchannel for Saturday night entertainment programmes, let’s explore how the easy-to-use applications which are now becoming available can be used to support our educational and research interests.

Looking back at the blog posts written by Tony and Martin in 2009 and 2010 might be a useful starting point for seeing what the future may hold :-)

This year’s theme is “Embedding Innovation“. At the IWMW 2010 we explored the theme of The Web in Turbulent Times and last year we described institutional approaches for Responding to Change. Now, after having absorbed the implications of reductions in funding and begun the processes of new approaches to delivering services we now wish to explore ways in which embed changes related to new working practices and the rapidly changing technical environment and user expectations, especially from students will will be paying significant amounts of money to attend University.

The call for proposals is now open. Since the event is aimed at a broad section of those involved in the provision of institutional Web services we welcome proposals which cover the spectrum of  interests ranging including the technical challenges of managing institutional Web service, the ways in which a diversity of user needs can be addressed, the ways in which content and services can be managed, the increasingly challenging legal  implications of providing online services, they ways in which the Web can be used to support a broad range of business requirements, the growing importance of social media, the opportunities and challenges posed by Cloud Services, strategies for dealing with a mobile environment, staff development issues, etc.

We welcome submissions for plenary talks. There will be a small number of plenary talks which typically last for 45 minutes and should be of relevance to a broad section of the audience. Since the event has always sought to provide opportunities for active participation we will be providing a larger number of workshop sessions, which normally last for 90 minutes and aim to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate actively.  In addition we welcome other ideas, perhaps for panel sessions, debates, and other ways in which the challenges of managing large-scale Web services can be addressed in an informative and, perhaps, fun ways.

If you have never attended an IWMW event before you may wish to view the programme for the IWMW 2011, IWMW 2010 and IWMW 2009 events to get a feel for the range of topics which have been covered.

If you have any queries or would simply like to have a chat about possible contributions, feel free to get in touch with me.

First off, on January 6th 2012, the TwapperKeeper.com site, and all related archives, will be shutdown with no access to any existing archives. Please ensure you have compiled all of your data by this date.

What should you do if you wish to continue keeping an archive of tweets, especially for event-related tweets which seems to be one particularly valuable use case?

One solution is to use Twapper Keeper! Or perhaps I should say Your Twapper Keeper, the open source version of Twapper Keeper. As part of the developments to the Twapper Keeper service the software was made available under an open source software licence in order to decouple the provision of the service from the software used to provide the service. Anyone, therefore is free to download the software from the Github repository and set up their own Twitter archive.

For those who have warned about the risks of dependencies on third party services for which their are no formal contractual agreements this example perhaps demonstrates the value of funding the development of an open source alternative. But is this really the case? Will institutions be downloading the software in order to be able to manage their own archives? I see no evidence that this is having, but I’d like to be proved wrong.

Perhaps this is a case for which an easy-to-use proprietary solution is all that is needed, especially since the content is typically not created primarily be members of a specific institution but, in the case of event-related Twitter archives, attendees at an event who are likely to be based across the sector rather than at a single institution.

On the Event Amplifier blog in a post entitled Goodbye Twapper Keeper Kirsty Pitkin explores the possibility of using Hoot Suite, the company which purchased Twapper Keeper, for managing Twitter archives. However Kirsty has described the financial implications of such a decision:

A Pro customer (paying $5.99 per month) can archive only a measly 100 tweets, or purchase a bolt on to archive up to “100,000 tweets and download all keyword related Twitter messages”. When I attempted to upgrade my plan, I found that 10,000 additional tweets would cost me $10 per month, and 100,000 additional tweets would cost me $50 per month.

But in addition to the options of installing the Your Twapper Keeper software or purchasing an appropriate account from HootSuite, Kirsty has highlighted an alternative approach: “Martin Hawksey is a master of Google Spreadsheet tools and has created this alternative method of collecting tweets and has provided detailed instructions to archive and visualise Twitter conversations around an event hashtag“.

Martin has helpfully provided a video which is available on YouTube and embedded below which describes how to use his solution.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these options proves the most popular solution across the sector: the open source solution, the subscription service, the Google solution or possibly an approach I haven’t described. Which will you be choosing?

I installed the app on my iPod Touch and was interested to note that there were just three ways of sending information about the 2,000+ peer-reviewed journals, 49,000 books, 127,000 open access articles: as illustrated the three dissemination tools are email, Facebook and Twitter.

Via @Wowter’s Twitter timeline I also found the news, initially announced by @MFenner, of the “New blog post: CrowdoMeter goes Mobile http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/01/04/crowdometer-goes-mobile/“.

The blog post describes how “Two weeks ago Euan Adie from altmetric.com and myself launched the website CrowdoMeter, a crowdsourcing project that tries to classify tweets about scholarly articles using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) … This project is far from over, ideally we want 3-5 classifications per tweet or an additional 1,000 classifications“. In order to “make the classifications as simple as possible, and to help further with this we today [4 January 2012] launched a mobile version of CrowdoMeter. Simply browse to http://crowdometer.org with your iPhone or Android phone [and] sign in via your Twitter account“.

I did this and captured the following screenshots:

Initially in this post I intended to highlight how the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices. However when I read Martin Fenner’s blog post I realised that Twitter, in particular, may have a role to play in the curation of information about research papers and scientific data.

Hmm, I wonder if Twitter will catch on outside this niche area?

Inspired by WordPress.com’s suggestion that WordPress users may wish to publish a blog post a day (see the post on “Challenge for 2011: Want to blog more often?“) I have set up this blog.  This will be used for informal notes, ideas, etc.

The blog was used actively during the first six months of the year with 30 posts being published in January, 27 in February, 26 in March, 30 in April, 24 in May and 26 in June with the final 6 posts published during the year being published in July.

The blog made use of the P2 theme which is described as “A group blog theme for short update messages, inspired by Twitter“. As can be seen in the screenshot the post creation window is displayed at the top of the blog, thus making it simple to create brief posts.

The content posted is unlikely to be of significant interest to others; the blog was primarily intended to keep brief notes about topics of interest to me.  However shortly after launching the blog I realised that it could be used to see how much traffic a blog generates if no attempt is made to promote the blog. However on 8 January  a post in which I described how I intended to Unsubscribing from RSS feeds with only summary content contained links to two blogs, which subsequently resulted in comments being posted on the blog.  I therefore subsequently did not publish any links to blogs in subsequent posts and I described this experiment in a post entitled Build It and They’ll Come? which was published on 23 January.

As can be seen from the accompanying image, as expected the numbers of visitors to the blog were low (apart from the home page there were only four posts which received over 10 visits).

It will be noticed that there was a big jump in the numbers of statistics in June. As described in a post entitled Blog Views Up By 300%! this occurred after the blog to search engines, including Google, was removed on 31 May.

Normally experiments look at ways of measuring strategies for maximising access to resources. This experiment looked at ways of publishing content openly whilst keeping the numbers of visitors to a minimum – along the lines of publishing the plans for the destruction of Arthur Dent’s home planet to make room for an expressway at the city planning office, “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’“

The suggestions I have for those who wish to minimise the chances that people will find a blog were:

• Block search engines from indexing the site (note you can also create a unique string so you can check if Google has indexed the site).
• Don’t link to other people’s blog posts: they’ll see the referrer link and possibly choose to subscribe to your blog).
• Don’t allow comments: people may find what you are writing about of interest, add their own thoughts and then look for further comments.
• Don’t add the blog to any directories.
• Don’t refer to your blog on other web sites or blogs.
• Don’t tweet about the blog.

Of course if you want others to read your posts you’ll do the opposite! More seriously, this experiment has helped to demonstrate the fact that simply building an online resource isn’t sufficient if you want users to make use of your resource.  The launch of the web site is just the start of the process.

I wouldn’t like to be critical of people “who’ve undertaken outstanding work in their communities” – although, as described in the Observer “It is far more difficult to see the reasoning behind the award of an unprecedented third of knighthoods to bankers and businessmen, including Paul Ruddock, a hedge fund manager and Tory donor who profited from the collapse of Northern Rock“. But rather than make this obvious political point, I feel there is also a need to reflect on the implications of the minor decisions and actions we can all make which can have an impact across the society we live in.

This is clearly true in the parliamentary democracy we live in. Last year I took part in our democratic processes by voting in the General Election. And whilst it’s true that I am unhappy with the result and the subsequent consequences, I know that that’s how western democracy works and I’ll have to accept the implications of my vote for the Lib Dems, in order to keep out the Conservatives in Bath.

Voting in general elections every four to five years is accepted as how parliamentary democracy works in the UK. But it has recently occurred to me that we are also seeing similar effects happening in the online world, in which the small actions of individuals can have a significant influence in both the online and offline (real) worlds.

We see this with Google searches, in which the first sets of results will be affected by the numbers of links to the pages. People who create Web pages containing links to other pages are therefore helping to vote for pages which will be displayed at the top of a Google search.

The influence of individual Web page authors is now likely to be fairly minimal, as Search Engine Optimisers will be using a variety of other techniques in order to manipulate Google’s search algorithms. However the social media provides an alternative means by which simple actions can have an influence.

The University of Oxford’s Facebook page informs us that there have been “349,820 likes” and “5,549 are talking about the page”.

Looking at the most recent Facebook status update for the page, the season’s greetings from the institution, we can see that 707 people have liked this and 192 comments have been made.

The implications of lightweight activities such as liking a resources, favouriting a resource or following a user struck me after the recent update to the Twitter Web site (and Twitter client on my iPod Touch).

The activities of people I follow on Twitter are now highlighted so, as illustrated, I can see how the Twitter account for the J Paul Getty Museum has favourited a tweet from Carl Silva, how Garret McMahon has started to follow Elaine Byrne and Clay Shirky, James Burke and Mike Gulliver are now following Rupert Murdoch.

Back in June 2010 Christina Rogge suggested ways in we could go about BUILDING A COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE WITH TWITTER and, In November a post on the Mashable blog described How Hashtagging the Web Could Improve Our Collective Intelligence. Also last year Anthony Deacon suggested ways of Using Facebook Groups to Harness Collective Intelligence.

In the 2010 General Election there were 10,706,647 votes for the Conservatives, 8,604,358 for Labour and 6,827,938 for the Liberal Democratic Party (including one from me). There have also been 349,831 Likes of the University of Oxford Facebook page, also including one from me. I wonder if my trivial activities on social media sites will have a more productive outcome than my vote in the last election? And although we will still need people to “undertake outstanding work in their communities” we should also remember that, to a certain extent:

“It ain’t what you do, it’s the fact that you did it. That’s what’s gets results.“

The “it” can involve a mark on a voting slip or a click on a Like or +1 button. Activists understand the importance of the need to persuade people to exercise their vote at elections. We will need to understand the potential significance of  similar small-scale actions in the online environment.

How will the technology environment develop during 2012?  I’m willing to set myself up for a fall my outlining my predictions for 2012 :-)

Tablet Computers …

After a couple of years in which use of smart phones, whether based on Apple’s iOS or Goole’s Android operating system), became mainstream for many when away from the office, 2012 will see use of Tablets becoming mainstream, with the competition provided by vendors of Android continue to bring the prices for those reluctant to pay a premium for an iPad.

Once the new term starts we’ll see increased numbers of students who received a Tablet PC for Christmas making use of them, not only for watching videos and listening to music in their accommodation, but also in lectures. As well as note-taking the devices, together with smart phones, will be used for recording lectures.  In some cases this will lead to concerns regarding ownership and privacy infringements but  students will argue that they are paying for their education and they should be entitled to time-shift their lecturers. Since it will be difficult to prevent students from making such recordings lecturers will start to encourage such practices and will seek to develop an understanding of when comments made during lecturers and tutorials should be treated as ‘off-the-record’.

Open Practices …

Such lecturers will be providing one example of an ‘open practice’. Such encouragement of recording or broadcasting lecturers will become the norm in several research areas, with organisers of research conferences acknowledging that they will need to provide an event amplification infrastructure (including free WiFi for participants, an event hashtag, live streaming or recording of key talks) in order to satisfy the expectations of those who are active in participation in research events.

Such open practices will complement more well-established examples of openness including open access and open content, such as open educational resources. We’ll see much greater use of Creative Commons licences, especially licence which minimise barriers to reuse.

Social Applications …

Social applications will become ubiquitous, although the term may be rebranded in order to avoid the barrier to use faced by those who regard the term ‘social’ as meaning ‘personal’ or ‘trivial’. Just as Web 2.0 became rebranded as the Social Web and the Semantic Web as Linked Data, we shall see such applications being marked as collaborative or interactive services.

Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector. However the view that the popularity of such services will be dependent on conformance with a particular set of development (open source and distributed) or ownership criteria (must not be owned by a successful multi-national company) will be seen to be of little significance. Rather than a growth in services such as identi.ca or Diaspora, we will see Facebook continue to develop (with its use by organisations helped by mandatory legal requirements regarding conformance with EU privacy legislation described in a post on 45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law). In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will continue to be of importance across the sector.

Learning and Knowledge Analytics ….

The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with greater use of social applications as part of a developing cultural of open practices will lead to an awareness of the importance of learning and knowledge analytics. Just as in the sporting arena we have seen huge developments in using analytic tools to understand and maximise sporting performances, we will see similar approaches being taken to understand and maximise intellectual performance, in both teaching and learning and research areas.

Collective Intelligence

Just as the combination of developments will help us to have a better understanding of intellectual performance, so too will these development help to in the growth of Collective Intelligence, described in Wikipedia as the “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 driving forces behind Collective Intelligence will be the global players which have access to large volumes of data and the computational resources (processing power and storage) to analyse the data.

How Will I Know If I’m Right?

In a way it is easy to make predictions. A greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2012, whether these predictions reflect reality?

Monitoring Trends

There will be statistics which can help support the predictions.  for example a few day’s ago Glyn Moody tweeted that:

Google announces 3.7m #Android activations over the Christmas weekend - http://tnw.co/sjAZEd impressive

But there are a range of other indicators which can help to spot trends which may be applicable.

A Google Trend comparison of the terms ‘tablet computer’ and ‘smartphone’ currently show the greater popularity of the latter term although there was a peak in searches for ‘tablet computer’ after the news (labelled F in the screenshot) that “India launches $35 tablet computer“.

Using Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles may also have a role to play.  For example we can compare the entries for tablet computer and collective intelligence between January and December 2011 which might help to provide a better understanding of how the Wikipedia community is describing these terms.  Similarly looking for the usage statistics for these two entries shows 40,567 visits in January and 73,181 in November 2011 for the entry for tablet computer and 10,711 visits in January and 11,126  in November 2011 for the entry for collective intelligence.

In addition to the content coverage and usage statistics for Wikipedia articles, the creation of an article may also indicate that the term has become significant. It is interesting to note that there is currently no entry for ‘open practice’. Will this have changed by this time next year, I wonder?

Snapshots of Social Network Usage

I have previously provided snapshots of institutional use of Facebook from November 2007 up to January 2011, together with similar surveys of institutional use of services such as Twitter, YouTube and iTunes. It would be interesting to capture early examples of institutional uses of Google+, identi.ca and Diaspora. However I am currently unaware of such institutional uses.  Until I discover some examples I will provide a personal summary of my uses of these services.

This data was gathered on 29 December 2011. It will be interesting to see how this compares with the data for the end of 2012. Of course the above table only indicates the extent of my interest and engagement with the services. I have documented these figures so I will be able to benchmark any changes on my usage of these services over the year.

Institutional Trends

It will be interesting to see examples of institutional trends, perhaps by observing topics presented at conferences and also by reading about new developments. One useful source of new developments is Chris Sexton’s From a Distance blog. Chris, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, has recently published a post entitled Tablet News in which she describes how:

Today sees the publication of our newsletter, myCiCSnews, which can be downloaded as a pdf from here.  There’s articles on learning technologies, research on the campus compute cloud, information security, and many more.
For the first time we’ve made it available in a tablet version, which works really well on iPads and other tablets,  and includes embedded video etc.

The Flip Side

The flip side of the growth in use of new services and in discussions about the benefits of such services is the criticisms of such developments.

Criticism and scepticism can take several forms.  We can probably remember when mobile phones were large and expensive and, together with the yuppies and businessmen who could afford such devices, were the butt of jokes on comedy sketches.

Mike Ellis has provided his take on the development of online reputation tools such as Klout in his Klunt parody which he announced on Twitter back in September.

We are unlikely to see this example in the Daily Mail but I think we can expect middle England to express outrage at some of the developments I’ve described in this post.

We have already come across examples of the way in which Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry phones have been used to organise illegal events or promote riots. I wonder if the Android tablet will be next in line to race the wrath of the Daily Mail?

Or perhaps the success will be indicated by the backlash. Might we find that the move towards open practices beyond the early adopters will be met by opposition from those who point out the legal risks of such practices, with examples of such risks becoming widely tweeted and retweeted?

Revisiting Predictions

On 29 December 2010 I asked Will #Quora Be Big In 2011? It is difficult to provide an answer to that question.  Looking at the Wikipedia article for Quora I find that others also felt that the service would be significant:

Quora has been praised by several publications such as New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine and The Daily Telegraph.^{[28][29][30][31]}

According to Robert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and various websites that employ a system of users voting content up.^[32] Scoble later criticized Quora, however, saying that it was a “horrid service for blogging,” and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites.^[33] The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom has predicted that Quora will go on to become larger than Twitter in the future.^[31][34] Quora, along with Airbnb and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups by the New York Times.^[35]

Quora itself hosts a question which asks How fast is Quora growing on a weekly basis? What are the growth metrics? However the responses fail to give a clear answer to this question.

I intend to revisit this post in December 2012. I’d welcome suggestions on additional ways in which it will be possible to detect if predictions have become true. I’d also welcome comments on the predictions I’ve outlined in this post.

Checking my email it seems that these were the words I used when I voted for Ian Anstice as this year’s IWR Information Professional of the Year.  As described in the announcement about the award published in IWR “The judges – all previous winners- gave Anstice, a branch manager of a public library in Cheshire, the honour for his work in documenting the changes taking place across the public library sector as a whole“.  Ian Anstice was quoted as saying “In a time of cuts to library services and being aware that knowledge is power, I was surprised to see there was no publicly available site to show what was going in each authority. I started the blog [at www.publiclibrariesnews.com] in October 2010. This includes all news articles on public library cuts, doing a map of the cuts, and producing a tally of cuts and proposals by authority.“

But what does “evidence-gathering” entail? There is a real danger that selective evidence-gathering is used in order to justify a particular position. This is a approach which has been discredited when governments in the UK and US sought evidence to demonstrate Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Quite clearly we expect a higher level of integrity from the library sector!

A great example of an honest and open approach to the current challenges facing the library sector can be seen in Aaron Tay’s recent post which asked “Is librarianship in crisis and should we be talking about it?“ Aaron, a librarian at National University of Singapore, is a prolific blogger on his Musings About Librarianship blog.  In his post Aaron described how:

Librarians are worriers, and one thing we like to worry a lot about is the future of libraries.

Veronica Arellano however thinks that we should stop writing about it. Why? She gives several reasons in “A Crisis of Our Own Making” but concludes with

“Writing about the ‘crisis’ in libraries tries to elicit change out of fear, rather than a desire to better serve our communities. By continuing to write our own obituaries, we are dissuading enthusiastic, forward-minded young scholars, technologists, and community leaders from entering the profession by painting ourselves as stuck in the past and obsolete.”

Really?  Should discussions of the implications of the perfect storm caused by the combination of the cuts being faced across many public sector organisations, the technical revolution caused initially by the first generation of the Web and subsequently by the popularity of Web 2.0 and the Social Web together with the changing expectations in the user community be ignored?

Aaron feels that “thinking that everything is fine, and business as usual, always choosing the options with the least risk (when there is no such option in fact) will suffice is equally perhaps a recipe for disaster” and this is a view which I would support.

Aaron’s post asks how one should advise potential newcomers to the profession:

Imagine a young potential librarian-to-be contacts you and asks you for advice on whether he should enter the profession. What picture of librarianship should you paint? I believe it would be irresponsible not to at least mention the challenges and potential stumbling blocks that libraries are facing in the future, so they will know what they will be up against.

and concludes by encouraging a response which is honest about the changing context to the library profession:

For the record, I don’t think libraries are definitely doomed to extinction, but there is much to be done and the library world needs passionate and energetic librarians to fight for the future of libraries and the last thing we need is for recruits to come in because they think libraries are a soft option or because the job outlook is stable.

We do need to continue to gather evidence of the value of services, and not just library services.  But we need to understand that the evidence will not necessarily justify a continuation of established approaches to providing services.  And if evidence is found which supports the view that libraries will be extinct by 2020 (PDF format) then the implications need to be openly and widely discussed. I’m pleased that Aaron is helping to encourage such a debate. And in light of Aaron’s post I’d like to slightly modify the reason why I supported Ian Anstice’s well-deserved award:

At a time when the library profession is suffering from the economic turmoil there is a need for an evidence-based approach to demonstrating the value for libraries and for open debate on the interpretation of such evidence and the implications of policy decisions based on such interpretations.

The Environmental Cost of using Computers

At every step of the PCs product life-cycle carbon footprints are left behind, during the initial extraction of minerals from the environment; the processing of raw materials; production of sub-components; PC assembly and manufacture; global distribution; and power consumption in usage.

The production of every PC requires 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels. According to empirical research published by Williams and Kerr from the UN University in Tokyo, the average PC requires 240kg of fossil fuels, 22kg of chemicals and 1,500kg of water. That’s over 1.7 metric tonnes of materials consumed to produce each and every PC. PCs require so much energy and materials because of the complex internal structure of microchips.

Why it is better to reuse rather than recycle

Given the substantial environmental cost of production it important we recover the full productive value of every PC through reuse before eventually recycling it to recover parts and materials at its true end-of-life. A refurbished computer can provide at least another three years productive life.

How does the WEEE directive affect UK Universities?

Since July 2007 the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive has been in force. The WEEE directive is an EU initiative which aims to minimise the impact of electrical and electronic goods on the environment, by increasing reuse and recycling and reducing the amount of WEEE going to landfill.

The WEEE directive affects every organisation and business that uses electrical equipment in the workplace. The regulations cover all types of electrical and electronic equipment including the obvious computers, printers, fax machines and photocopiers, as well as fridges, kettles and electronic pencil sharpeners. The regulations state that business users are responsible, along with producers, for ensuring their WEEE is correctly treated and reprocessed. The regulations encourage the reuse of whole appliances over recycling. When you are disposing of your IT equipment you must ensure that it is sent to an organisation that has been approved by the Environment Agency to take in WEEE who will provide you with Waste Transfer Notes for your equipment.

Do I need to worry about data security?

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 it is your responsibility to destroy any data that may be stored on the machines. Just hitting the delete button is not enough to wipe the data. To ensure you are protected make sure any organisation you use to dispose of your IT equipment uses a professional data wiping solution that has been approved by CESG or similar.

An environmentally friendly and socially responsible solution to your unwanted IT equipment

Donating your unwanted IT equipment to a charity such as Computer Aid International is both environmentally friendly and socially responsible. You will be fully complying with the WEEE directive and benefiting from a professional low cost PC decommissioning service, which includes free UK Secret Services approved Ontrack Eraser data wiping.

Computer Aid is the world’s largest provider of professionally refurbished PCs to the not-for-profit sector in the developing world. It has been in the business of IT refurbishing for over 14 years. The charities aim is to reduce poverty through practical ICT solutions.

To date Computer Aid has provided just under 200,000 fully refurbished PCs and laptops – donated by UK universities and businesses – to where they are most needed in schools, hospitals and not-for-profit organisations in over 100 countries, predominantly in Africa and Latin America. In order for Computer Aid to continue with its work it relies on universities and companies donating their unwanted computers to them.

Schools and universities in the developing world using a PC professionally refurbished by Computer Aid will enjoy at least 3 years more productive PC use. This effectively doubles the life of a PC halving its environmental footprint whilst enabling some of the poorest and most marginalised people in the world to have access to computers.

Anja ffrench

Director of Marketing and Communications
Computer Aid International
10 Brunswick Industrial Park
Brunswick Way, London, N11 1JL
Registered Charity no. 1069256

Tel: +44 (0) 208 361 5540
Fax: +44 (0) 208 361 7051

Email: anja@computeraid.org
Website: www.computeraid.org
Twitter: www.twitter.com/anjaffrench and www.twitter.com/computer_aid

_____________________________________________________________

Computer Aid International is the world’s largest and most experienced not-for-profit provider of professionally refurbished PCs to developing countries. We have provided over 185,000 computers to educational institutions and not-for-profit organisations in over 100 different countries since 1998. Our aim is to reduce poverty through practical ICT solutions.

Perhaps 2011 has been the year of the mobile, with a range of new devices and applications transforming our work and study environment?  When I asked for a show of hands at the start of the IWMW 2011 event for people who had a mobile device with them, the sea of hands was unexpected. But I also found that significant numbers had brought along multiple mobile devices and, in response to a question as to whether people preferred use a handheld device to, say, a laptop whilst at home in front of the TV, I was pleased to discover that I am not alone in using my  mobile phone rather than my laptop when I wish to look up the TV guide, the football scores or take part in a Twitter discussion.  But to be honest I feel that the growth in the importance of mobile has been gradual, with no sudden large scale change being noticeable, not even after the subdued launch of the latest iPhone – although whether we will see the expected large numbers of Andoid Tablet PCs being bought this Christmas (and cheaper models in the January sales) making 2012 the year of mobile remains to be seen.

Or has 2011 saw the belated arrival of Linked Data?  Again despite the feeling that more pragmatic approaches to linking data from disparate sources are becoming accepted, Linked Data doesn’t seem to have yet set the world alight.

I don’t think there has been a significant new major technical development during 2011.  But for me 2011 has been the year in which amplified events have started to grow beyond their roots in technologically-focussed events to become more widely embedded.

But what evidence do I have to back up this assertion?  It does seem that we are finding that delegates at conferences:

• Expect events to have a WiFi network so that they can discuss talks with other attendees and share their thoughts with a remote audience.
• Expect event organisers to provide an event hashtag to make the event back channel easy to find.

In addition to seem to be finding that speakers:

• Are willing to be live streamed.
• Are appreciated that delegates who are using their mobile devices during their talks are likely to be actively engaged in the topic and helping to engage others in discussing the ideas

There is also a growing expectation that large-scale events will provide deciated effort to support such activities:

• An event amplifier who will be responsible for expanding the audience, an enhancing the experience and spreading ans sharing ideas.
• Technical support to manage video-streaming and/or recording of talk.

I’m looking forward to participating in more amplified events in 2012. But what have your technological highlights of 2011 been?

We are approaching not only the end of the year but also, if you start counting at ’1′ rather than ’0′, the end of the millennium’s first decade. It is therefore timely to consider not only the developments which may be influential for the next decade (for which I feel that large-scale collaborative and communications technologies will result in Collective Intelligence being significant for the sector, which will be helped by a continuing trend towards Openness) and the new technologies of a few years ago which were initially dismissed as irrelevant and unsustainable, but are now used by many mainstream users (in December 2009 I asked 2009 – The Year Of Twitter?; I now wonder when not having a Twitter account will be regarded as odd) but also technologies which have been widely used in the past but now seem to be in decline.

In this post I’ll avoid temptations to be speculative about emerging and emerged technologies and reflect on an aspect of IT which I first started using in, if I recall correctly, 1983 and have used on a variety of platforms, from Prime and VAX mini-computers, Multics and IBM mainframes, through to today’s PC and Apple Macintosh desktop computers and Android and Apple phones and tablet computers.  I’ve also used the default mail application on various platforms as well as Pegasus, Eudora, Outlook, Thunderbird and K-9  email clients.  We can truly day that email has proved itself to be popular, ubiquitous, platform and application independent and clearly long-living.  Email, we can safely say, provides an example in which the IT profession should be pleased to have delivered such a well-liked and robust service.

But is this really the case?  Are we starting to see weak signals which suggest that email may be in decline?  Might we be in the early stages of a move away from use of email towards an environment in which other forms of collaboration, communication and dissemination tools may provide benefits which email may fail to provide?

“Email is Dying”

At the ILI 2005 conference in London in October 2005 I gave a talk entitled “Email Must Die!” in which I, rather provocatively, argued that if we information professionals, in particular, were well-placed to appreciate the implications of the suggestion that  ”E-mail is where knowledge goes to die” and should be welling to take a lead in exploiting a variety of Web 2.0 tools which were starting to emerge at the time which could address the various well-known deficiencies of email: the spam; the duplication of information; office politics based on use of cc: and bcc: the lack of structure; the difficulties of content reuse; etc.

A subsequent Ariadne article with the rather more hesitant question “Must Email Die?” discussed these issues in more depth and outlined how technologies such as blog, wikis, instant messaging, RSS, Skype and other VOIP systems could all replace various uses for which email has traditionally been used.

Two years later, in May 2007, a post entitled “Email IS Dying” referenced an article on “Firms to embrace Web 2.0 tools” published in the Computing newsletter from an original article published in a Gartner report. This article reminded me of a  UCISA Poll on Instant Messaging published in 2004 in which a correspondent from the University of Bath stated that “mail seen by younger people to be ‘boring’ ‘full of spam’, IM and SMS immediacy preferred“.

The Gartner report described how:

MySpace and FaceBook are the most successful community environments on the planet because they have pulled people away from email, which is the one thing that nothing else has managed to do so far’.

Facebook has clearly developed significantly in its user base and functionality since Gartner published the report in 2007 although, on the other hand, MySpace has declined significantly.  Perhaps the uncertainty as to who would ‘win’ in the battle over the social networking environments – a battle which is irrelevant for email users for which application independence has always been a key feature – has been a barrier  to takeup of alternatives to email?

Are Email Lists on Life-Support?

The talks and articles which were presented and published over five years ago where meant to highlight to both early adopters and policy makers that there may be significant changes in the offing, which advance planning will need to consider.  At the time the suggestions of a growth in importance of instant messaging (in itself, not a new technology, but one which had previously had little significant role in mainstream university activities) was meant to highlight a possible need to change institutional acceptable use policies which may previously have banned instant messaging services as having no useful role in support teaching and learning or research activities.   I suspect that use of instant messaging technologies is now widely permitted across the sector,  perhaps because of an acknowledgment of the value of instant messaging, but also possibly due to the difficulty in banning such technologies, which seems to be now provided within many networked environments.

But although there is a need for advocacy and highlighting potential changes there is also a need to monitor changes in order to see if predictions are coming true or not.

In June 2010 a post on  The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community documented evidence on 10 years use of two JISCMail lists which clearly demonstrated the decline in usage since about 2004 (illustrated in accompanying image).

A follow-up survey which explored use of JISCMail by the Dublin Core community was described in a post on DCMI and JISCMail: Profiling Trends of Use of Mailing Lists. This showed that although the overall numbers of lists is still growing, the total volume of traffic has been in decline since 2005.  That survey caused me to speculate that new lists which have been created are failing to stimulate discussion and debate but are merely used to replicate posting advertising events, job vacancies and similar broadcast announcements across a range of lists.  Although the limited interface options to JISCMail lists meant that I was not able to validate this speculation, in a post entitled Are Mailing Lists Now Primarily A Broadcast Medium? I did discover some small-scale evidence which backs up this assertion for a number of lists to which I subscribe.

Email lists are clearly still being used but evidence is starting to question their value. But at least email lists work across platforms. Or do they?

Are Email Lists Really Interoperable?

Client Limitations

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek post by Scott Wilson describes a Revolutionary messaging technology will challenge FB, Twitter, IM which:

• It works on all kinds of devices and across all networks
• You can search, read and respond to messages even when you’re offline
• Works with intelligent filtering services
• You can send and receive messages with anyone on any network, not just the same service provider you use
• The server code is open source so you can run your own
• Completely distributed architecture with no central server or hub node
• Uses open standards for pretty much everything
• Clients for all platforms including mobile, even TV – and anyone can make their own client as the API isn’t proprietary
• …

Of course Scott is describing email. Scott goes on to add; that:

However, not everyone is convinced yet and think that we should stick with proprietary messaging silos tied to one service provider such as Facebook and Twitter, despite the obvious risk of these services being discontinued, monetized, tracking your communications for nefarious purposes, and spamming you with advertising at any opportunity. 

But is email really as interoperable as has been suggested? I used to think that email was interoperable – until I started to use email clients on a variety of platforms.

I’ve experienced particular problems with reading digests of messages from JISCMail lists. This is my preferred way of using mailing lists, as it helps to minimise the numbers of messages arriving in my incoming mail folder.  However despite being able to view messages successfully using the digest’s MIME interface in the past, since moving to new email clients I have found that either such messages can’t be viewed (on an Apple Macintosh or iPod Touch email client) or have to be viewed by Notepad (using Thunderbird on an MS Windows platform).

HTML and Email

A W3C Note on Conventions for use of HTML in emailwas published way back in January 1998. However it wasn’t until May 2007 that the W3C organised a W3C HTML Mail Workshop and the minutes failed to provide details of any actions which arose from the meeting. It does appear that, despite the paper on Web standards: a must for html email which was presented at the meeting, there is a lack of agreed standards for how HTML should be used in email, resulting in IT Service departments, such as Glasgow University’s “recommend[ing] sending ‘plain text’ email instead of HTML or rich text email, particularly if sending email to a large distribution list“.  Despite suggestions that we should we moving towards use of more semantically rich content we do seem to often be discarding the simple structural elements provided in HTML when we make use of email.

Technical Challenges in Reusing Email Content

As well as the lack of visual clues which can be presented by HTML, I am also aware that software developers who wish to process content held in email archives can find it difficult to process the variety opf ways in which messages and accompanying attachments can be stored.

Email has been described as the place “where knowledge goes to die“. A cynic might also regarded mailing lists as a DRM system which makes it harder for content to be reused!

Email is Happy in its Rest Home?

Two years ago Esther Steinfeld asking people to Stop Saying Email is Dying. It’s Not. But last week an article on the Financial Times Web site (free subscription needed to view article) reported on the story about how:

When Thierry Breton, chief executive of Atos, said the IT services company would ban use of internal email by 2014, it caused a sensation across the media, with commentators describing the idea as either “brave”, “stupid” or doomed to failure.

but went on to point out that:

a number of companies have been quietly moving away from using email as the primary way of communicating within the company.

The article described how companies such as Capgemini are making use of social networking tools such as Yammer to replace some of the functionality traditionally provided by email, with Capgemini stating that “it has reduced its internal email traffic by 40 per cent in the 18 months since staff began using Yammer“.  Capgemini, together with companies such as Klick and Atos continue to use email for communicating with people outside the companies and expect that email will continue to exist in some form for many years to come. However email management consultant Monica Seely suggested that “In three to five years we will see a more pluralistic landscape with messages being transferred to some kind of social media platform. But email will remain a bedrock of businesses for some time to come.”

A post on the Social Media in Organisations blog entitled The “End” of Email: Reflections from a Digital Era Thinker also highlighted “the recent statement made by Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, about the “elimination” of email at the company [which] churned up quite a bit of controversy in cyberspace” and suggested that “It All Boils Down to Leadership“.

The (Technology) Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come

This post was initially entitled “Reflections on the Slow Death of Email“.  But since there have been 10 responses in May 2007, 14 responses in June 2010, 3 responses in December 2010 and 8 responses in May 2011 to previous posts on this topic, rather than revisiting the discussions on the flaws and merits of email we need to accept that there will be a divergence in views on the merits of email and on the merits of promoting changes or accepting user preferences.

It should also be clear that a move towards making greater use of  richer alternatives to email isn’t imply a matter of leadership, as was suggested above. In the commercial sector companies may find it easier to enforce policy decisions about technologies, as was seen when WH Smiths made the business decision to stop selling LPs. In the public sector, however, there is a need to support sectoral needs rather than being driven by purely commercial interests.  And since it is clear that there is  no clear support for a move away  from email, the suggestion that it boils down to leadership does seem incorrect.

For me, therefore, a broader question which considerations of the slow decline in email raises  is “What technologies do we have today which we might like to replace and how do we, if at all, address a reluctance to change?“

An example of a technology which some people expected to experience a sharp decline was Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office applications. Back in the mid to late 1990s I can recall people arguing that due to factors including:

• The cost of these products
• The proprietary nature of the products
• Legal moves within the EU and the US based on possible illegal selling practices
• The growing maturity of open source alternatives such as Linux and Star Office and Open Office

we would see Microsoft decline in importance.

This clearly didn’t happen.  Microsoft is still around but is now facing other threats including a renewed popularity of Apple Macintosh  computers and a growth in mobile devices, including smart phones and tablet computers, with Apple and Android providing the main threats.

But writing off Microsoft can be easy (and tempting) to do.  It will be more interesting to think about other areas of technology in which we might expect innovations to replace existing well-established products and services, but subsequently find that users are content with the existing working patterns, even if flawed, and remain unconvinced that it is worth making a change.  I’d welcome your suggestions.

An Evidence, Impact, Metrics blog was set up on the UKOLN Web site, but the usage statistics for the first few blog posts provided evidence of a lack of use of the blog.  This evidence led to a decision to set up an Evidence category on the UK Web Focus blog which was used with related posts which were published on this blog.  The aim of the blog posts was to raise awareness of the importance of metrics, explore ways of gathering and interpretting such metrics and encourage discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of using metrics, leading to recommendations on how metrics can be used.

As described in a report on Blogs Posts about Evidence of Impact by 13 December 2011 there had been 28,5907 views of the 35 relevant posts published in this category. In addition there had been 275 comments, although the numbers for the comments include trackbacks and may also contain automatically-generated links from other WordPress blogs which may subsequently be deleted.

This example provides an illustration of how metrics can be used.  It should be noted that this does not say anything about the quality or relevance of the posts. It also summarises ways in which the metrics may be misleading (and note it was only when updating the figures on the numbers of comments posted on the blog that I became aware that automatically generated links to posts on this blog may subsequently be deleted.

The final report on this work has been published on the Evidence, Impact, Metrics blog. The report has been produced as a series of self-contained documents which are suitable for printing as well as being published in HTML format.

The following sections of the report are available:

• Why the Need for this Work?:  This document provides the background to the work.
  [HTML] – [MS Word].
• Summary of Events:  This document provides a summary of the three one-day workshops and talks given at other events.
  [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Summary of Blog Posts:  This document provides a summary of the blog pots published related to this work.
  [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Feedback from the Second Workshop: This document provides a summary of the feedback received at the second one-day workshop. [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Summary of the Final Workshop:  This document provides a report on the third and final one-day workshop.
  [HTML] – [MS Word]
• A Framework For Metrics:  This document provides a summary of the lightweight framework developed for gathering quantitative evidence.
  [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Metrics FAQ:  This document provides an FAQ about the metrics work.
  [HTML] – [MS Word]

Note that the MS Word files are intended for printing in A5 format on a printer which supports double-side printing. For a number of the reports the content is duplicated to enable A5 summaries to be printed.   The HTML format contain the same information in a more universal format.

As can be seen from the altmetrics manifesto the research community has strong interests in developing metrics which can help to identify evidence of value related to various aspects of research activities. The manifesto highlights the changes in ways in which research activities is being carried out and points out that “as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs“.

The Evidence, Impact, Metrics work has sought to engage in a related area of work for those involved in both project and service who wish to make use of new approaches for which metrics can help to identify the value (or not) or new ways of working and share examples of appropriate best practices.  Feedback on this work is welcomed.

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.

Back in May 2011 I asked How Should UK Universities Respond to EU Cookie Legislation? The context to this post was the EU’s Privacy and Communications Directive which officially came into force on 26 May 2011, the day the  post was published.  However as I described  ”the good news is that the ICO has recognised the complexities in implementing this legislation” with UK websites being given a year to comply with EU cookie laws.

My initial post was followed by a report on a survey of Privacy Settings For UK Russell Group University Home Pages.  This helped to identify how cookies are currently being used on the institutional home page for a selected group of institutions, explore a tool which can be used to report on the various types of cookies and to help raise the importance of institutional activity in this area, in particular in identifying cookie usage and ensuring that documentation on such usage is provided for visitors to the institutional web site.

Update On Institutional Activities

Over six months since those two posts were published, how are institutions responding to the year’s grace which the ICO has granted?

There has been some discussion on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list on how institutions should respond. Back in May Claire Gibbons,  Senior Web and Marketing Manager at the University of Bradford initiated a discussion on the Changes to the rules on using cookies and similar technologies for storing information which seems to have been the liveliest discussion on the list all year. The following month Web managers became aware of the news that 90% of visitors declined ICO website’s opt-out cookie and were worried that implementation of the legislation would result in similar loss of traffic to UK University Web sites.

Moving forward six months on 13 December the ICO, announced a new set of Guidelines on the Rules on use of Cookies and Similar Technologies (available in PDF format) in a blog post entitled Half term report on cookies compliance. And it seems that they have taken a pragmatic approach which describes realistic and implementable solutions for Web site managers.

If you have a responsibility for managing a Web site I would advise you to read this 26 page report.  However here are some of the key points are given below with my personal comments.

My optimistic interpretation of the guidelines seems to be shared by Matt Jukes who, on the Digital by Default blog, yesterday suggested that we might be seeing A crack in the cookie craziness? Matt felt that “The final entry in the FAQ offers a glimmer of hope for those of us stressing about losing access to our usage data“, although his views were tempered slightly by some concerns that “the wording seems intentionally vague and non-committal” which may “scare a lot of pubic sector organisations into total compliance“.  Overall, however Matt was reasured that the guidelines “ does at least seem to be saying that noone is going to prosecute you for using Google Analytics – especially if you make some concerted effort to inform and educate your users about the existence of those Cookies“.

Further commentary on the guidelines have been provided by Ranjit Sidhu on the Sidspace blog.  Ranjit comments that:

This is the key statement “Which method (of consent) will be appropriate to get for cookies will depend in the first instance on what cookies you use” – In other words- ‘we are not making a blanket ban- check what you are doing, if you are not being evil and creating a profile on the user without them knowing with a persistent cookie, then be sensible, do all that we have told you to do and you will be ok. And to confirm….

On the last page (p 27) specifically on “analytical cookies” they say ” In practice we would expect you to provide clear information to users about analytical cookies and take what steps you can to seek their agreement…… Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.”

Ranjit’s post concludes:

As a last point as I know there has been a lot of talk on this, and plenty of scare stories peddled by legal practitioners in particular, make sure you and your bosses are aware as to the enforcement of this (p24 of the report). The ICO will first issue an information notice if they think the organisation is doing something wrong, then ask it to take an “undertaking” notice which asks the organisation to change some practice to comply or an “enforcement” notice to make it comply, only finally if your organisation totally doesn’t listen at all will be fined! In other words, it is about the ICO helping organisations comply and improve rather then jumping out of the blue on organisations naming them as illegal and shutting them down. There are some industries this is going to effect badly…newspapers etc.. but honestly, what you Uni’s do in tracking is very, very low in its privacy implications.

First steps should be to:

1. Check what type of cookies and similar technologies you use and how you use them.
2. Assess how intrusive your use of cookies is.
3. Where you need consent – decide what solution to obtain consent will be best in your circumstances.

followed by “provid[ing] clear information to users about analytical cookies and take what steps you can to seek their agreement“.

Many institutions will use technologies such as Google Analytics for which documentation will need to be provided.  In addition there will be other commonly-used systems, such as content management systems,  for which shared approaches in documenting information about the purposes of the information being gathered and the approaches to seeking user agreement would be beneficial.

Claire Gibbons, Senior Web and Marketing Manager at University of Bradford is currently developing guidelines for the University of Bradford which she has described in a post on Cookies and legislation – some thoughts and a sector invite. As suggested by the title, Claire would like to invite others to contribute to:

 a Google spreadsheet … to store our info so we can share and learn from each other [in areas including:]

• Institution name
• Audit done
• Types of cookies used
• Technologies used
• Where consent is needed
• Any other comments
• Link to published or draft policy

This initiative, which is being driven by practitioners, is to be welcomed. Textual information, such as details of policies, processes, etc. can be added to the Google Document on Cookie Policies. In addition a Google Spreadsheet on UK HEI Privacy Policies is also available which can be used to provide links to privacy policies and provide brief comments. Finally Delicious users may wish to add a link to their privacy polices using the privacy-uk-heis tag so that their contribution can be included in an aggregation of tagged resources (although note that following recent changes to Delicious service the usefulness of this service is currently uncertain).

Why You Should Actively Engage

As Ranjit points out “the ICO helping organisations comply and improve rather then jumping out of the blue on organisations naming them as illegal and shutting them down“.  He points out that some sectors seem to be doing badly.  If the higher education sector can be seen to be implementing appropriate and achievable best practices, respecting users’ needs whilst understanding the difficulties in blunt implementation of the legislation this will be beneficial for the sector as a whole. I do hope you will spend a small amount of time in giving comments on this post and on Claire’s, in providing links to your policy statements, so that others can learn from their peers and in documenting other aspects of this work which may be useful to others.

It should also be remembered that ways in which we should respond to cookie legislation will go beyond those working in institutional Web management teams. Clearly it will also be important for institutions which have a devolved approach to Web management. But responsibilities must also be shared by individuals who provide Web content, whether hosted within their institution or by third party services.

I have just added a widget on the right hand sidebar of this blog which describes how WordPress.com, who host the blog, make use of Google Analytics.  I have gone beyond the issued of cookies by reminding people who leave comments on this blog that they are required to provide an email address. I have now published a policy which states that such email addresses will not be disclosed.

Is this an approach which we can reccomend to others?

A recent post on Blogging Practices Session at the JISC MRD Launch Event (#jiscmrd) contains access to the slides hosted on Slideshare used at the JISC MRD Programme Launch Meeting. In the talk I reflected on the discussion on Should Projects Be Required To Have Blogs? which took place initially on Twitter and then on this blog in February 2009.

The context to the discussion was described by Amber Thomas: “I should clarify that my colleagues and I were thinking of mandating blogs for a specific set of projects not across all our programmes“. During the discussion the consensus seemed to be that we should encourage a culture of openness rather than mandate a particular technology such as blogs. One dissenting voice was Owen Stephens who commented “I note that Brian omitted one of my later tweets – not sure if this was by mistake or deliberately because he recognised it for a slightly more light-hearted comment “i say mandate – let them write blogs!” – but I wasn’t entirely joking.“

Owen’s view is now becoming more widely accepted across the JISC development environment with a number of programmes, including the recently established JISC Managing Research Data and the open JISC OER Rapid Innovation call both requiring funded projects to provide blogs. This current call (available in MS Word and PDF formats) states that:

In keeping with the size of the grants and short duration of the projects, the bidding process is lightweight (see the Bid Form) and the reporting process will be blog-based

and goes on to state that:

We would also expect to see projects making use of various media for dissemination and engagement with subject and OER communities, including via project blogs and twitter (tag: ukoer)

I’m pleased that JISC have formalised this requirement as I feel that blogs can help to embed open working practices in development activities as well as providing access to information which is more easily integrated into other systems and viewed on variety of devices than formats normally used for reporting purposes.

But how should projects go about measuring the effectiveness of their blogging processes and should should the findings we made openly available, as part of the open practices which projects may be being encouraged to adopt, and as data which is available under an appropriate open data – as we might expect data associated with these two programmes in particular – which is unencumbered by licencing restrictions which may be imposed by publishers or other content owners?

Openness for Blog Usage Data

In addition to providing project blogs there may be a need to be able to demonstrate the value of project blogs. And as well as the individual blogs, programme managers may wish to be able to demonstrate the value of the aggregation of blogs. But how might this be done?

A simple approach would be to publish a public usage icon on the blog. As well as providing usage statistics such tools should also be able to provide answers to questions such as “Has IE6 gone yet?” and “What proportion of visitors use a mobile device?“. But beyond the tools which we will be familiar with in the context of traditional Web sites there may be a need to be able to measures aspects which are of particular relevance to blogs, such as comments posted on blogs and links to blogs posted from elsewhere.

A post on Blog Analytic Services for JISC MRD Project Blogs explored this issue and described how tools such as Technorati and eBuzzing may provide lightweight solutions which may help to provide a better understanding of a blog’s engagement across the blogosphere. It should be acknowledged that such tools do have limitations and can be ‘gamed’. However in some circumstances they may help to identify examples of good practice. In addition gaining an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of such analytic tools may be helpful if the altmetrics initiative which, in its manifesto, describes how “the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem” and goes on to “call for more tools and research based on altmetrics“.

In a post The OER Turn (which is, according to the author, ” the most read post of 2011 on [the JISC Digital Infrastructure] team blog“) Amber Thomas reflects on developments in the Open Educational Resources environment and describes how she now “find[s] [her]self asking what the “Open” in Open Content means” and concludes by asking “What questions should be asking about open content?“.

My contribution to the discussion is that I propose that when adopting open practices, one should be willing to provide open accesses to usage data associated with the practices.

This was an idea I explored in a post on Numbers Matter: Let’s Provide Open Access to Usage Data and Not Just Research Papers in which I highlighted the comment published in JISC-funded report on Splashes and Ripples: Synthesizing the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources which said that:

Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports.

which suggests how quantitative data can be used to support marketing activities. But beyond such marketing considerations, shouldn’t those who believe in the provision of open content and who, in addition, wish to minimise limitations on how the content can be reused (by removing non-commercial and share-alike restrictions from Creative Commons licences, for example) also be willing to make usage statistics similarly freely available? And to argue that “my use case is unique and usage statistics won’t provide the nuanced understanding which is needed” is little different from those who wish to keep strict control on their data?

In other words, what is the limit to the mantra “set your data free“? Does this include setting your usage data free?

On 8^th December 2011 the following announcement was made on the Twapper Keeper Web site:

Transition update
Twapper Keeper’s archiving is now available in HootSuite! As a result, we will be shutting down Twapper Keeper. Existing archives will be kept running until Jan 6, 2012, after which you will not be able to access your archives anymore.

Twapper Keeper has been widely used within the UK’s higher education sector, especially for archiving tweets containing event hashtags at events aimed at the developer, researcher and library sectors.

The popularity in the service has helped to demonstrate the importance of Twitter archiving, something which was not necessarily widely appreciated a few years ago. But in light of, for example, the recent news item on the JISC Web site which announced that “Social media ‘not to blame’ for inciting rioters” and went on to describe how:

A study of 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the riots has found that politicians and other commentators were wrong to claim the website played an important role in inciting and organising the disturbances.  

we can see that the importance of Twitter archiving for a variety of purposes is now more widely understood.  However it seems that Twapper Keeper will not be providing a long term repository of tweets. This does not necessarily mean that tweets will be lost since, as described in an article on Tweet Eternal: Pros and Cons of the Library of Congress Twitter Archive published in Time on 8 December 2011 “Thanks to a deal between Twitter and the United States Library of Congress, every public tweet sent on the social messaging service since its creation will become part of the Library of Congress’ digital archive, available to researchers and historians as an example of contemporary life and culture“. However as highlighted in Nature in  n article on Social science: Open up online research “Social media hold[s] a treasure trove of information [but]  the secretive methods of ethics review boards are hindering their analysis, says Alexander Halavais.“

Since it unclear when and if the Library of Congress archives will be made publicly available people and organisations which have made use of Twapper Keeper may wish to migrate the content of these archives. This post will describes approaches for migrating existing data, ways of identifying which archives may need to be preserved and ways of identifying key stakeholders who may need to make such decisions.

Migration of Existing Archives

Tools

Since creators and users of Twapper Keeper archives have less than a month to migrate their content, this post will outline ways in which the archives can be managed, and a discussion about the implications of the announcement of the closure of the service will be made at a later date.

Martin Hawksey has published a post on his MASHe blog which describes how you can Free the tweets! Export TwapperKeeper archives using Google Spreadsheet.  Martin’s post also links to a post entitled LIBREAS.Library Grab your TwapperKeeper Archive before Shutdown! which describes a technique which can be used by those familiar with R code. Tont Hirst on the OUseful.info blog has also listed a technical solution based on R code in his post on Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish.

For people who may not be familiar with use of Google Spreadsheets or implementation of software applications for accessing Twitter archives you should note that you can also use a Web browser to view archives of interest (having ensured that all items are displayed and not just the default 10 items). You can then view the HTML source and save the file so that you have a HTML representation of the tweets which you can take manage locally.  In addition, you can also save an RSS representation of the tweets which will provide a more structured format which should be more amenable to subsequent processing, if you wish to do this. Examples of this approach can be seen from the copies of the  IWMW10 and IWMW11 archives.

Selection Criteria

In addition to being aware of the tools which can be used there will also be a need to decide which archives may be still be of relevance and identifying who may need to take responsibility for migrating the content to an appropriate location. Tony Hirst, in his post on Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish, has suggested that “one approach might be to look to see what archives have been viewed using @andypowe11′s Summarizr“. However although the Summarizr home page  lists recently viewed Summarizr summaries of Twapper Keeper archives, it is not clear if a comprehensive list is available and, even if such a list could be made available, how this would inform decisions on the selection of archives to be migrated.

An alternative approach is to look at the TwapperKeeper archives which have been created by particular Twitter IDs.  We can see, for example, that Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) has created 27 archives.  Similarly using Twapper Keeeper’s search facility I find that I have created a total of 62 Twapper Keeper archives. Perhaps the initial stage in identifying archives to be migrated is for active Twapper Keeper users to identify the archives they have created, and then for them to make a decision of archives to be migrated, where the new archives are to be hosted and what to do for acrhives which will not be migrated, which might include informing key stakeholders.

Case Study

Rather than attempting to keep a copy of all of of the Twapper Keeper archives I have created, in this post I will provide a summary of the archives I created and docum the decisions I have taken regarding migration of the content and the reasons for these decisions.

Migrated to UKOLN Web site: The IWMW2009, IWMW10 and IWMW11 archives, which will be made publicly available, together the UKOLN and Ariadne_Mag archives which will be stored locally if we decide at a later date to analyse the tweets.

Key stakeholders informed:  A number of archives may of interest to organisations such as JISC, CILIP, ALT, UCISA and CETIS. These organisations will be notified of the archives which I have created and will be informed of the techniques described in this post if they wish to migrate the content.

Archives of personal interest: Archives of personal tweets and personal interests have not been migrated.

Other archives: Other archives include archives for broad subject areas (e.g. #a11y, #phdchat) for which a general tweet about the forthcoming demise of the Twapper Keeper archive will be made and archives for events and areas of interest for which I had a short-term interest and wished to be able to view the tweets but which which I have no longer term interest.

A summary of the Twitter archives and the decisions I have made are given below.  Please note that:

• The data given in the table was collected on 9 December 2011.
• The decisions given in the table may be changed at a later date.
• Twapper Keeper archives for other areas relevant to myself and UKOLN colleagues  may have also been created.  The #IWMW09 archive, for example, will be migrated and decisions about other archives will be made shortly.

I welcome suggestions on other tools and approaches which can be used for managing such archives and also approaches to selection and deletion criteria for Twitter archives.

The Call for Papers was unambiguous about the important of metrics:

The goal of this symposium is to bring researchers and practitioners together to scope the extent and magnitude of existing …. metrics, and to develop a roadmap for future research and development in the field.

although there was an acknowledgement of the challenges in developing appropriate metrics:

Using numerical metrics potentially allows a more continuous scale for [measurements] and, to the extent that the metrics are reliable, could be used for comparisons. However, it is unclear how metrics can be developed that fulfill requirements such as validity, reliability, and suitability.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve had a paper accepted for the online symposium which will take place on 5 December 2011.  But what is the subject of the symposium?  I have recently published posts about the complexity of metrics for research papers, including issues such as download statistics for papers which are distributed across multiple services and metrics for providing answers to the question of “what makes a good repository?”.  Or perhaps the paper concerned metrics associated with use of Social Web services, another area I have addressed in several posts over the past year.

Both areas are very complex, with people questioning the validity of current approaches which are being taken to developing metrics which can be used to make comparisons – clearly areas worthy of research into how metrics can be developed and to have a questioning and critical appraisal of approaches which are being proposed. But this wasn’t the area addressed in the paper and in the symposium.

Online Symposium on Website Accessibility Metrics

The paper was, in fact, accepted for the Online Symposium on Website Accessibility Metrics (and is available in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats)

As the call for papers points out “conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is based on 4 ordinal levels of conformance (none, A, AA, and AAA) but these levels are too far apart to allow granular comparison and progress monitoring; if a websites satisfied many success criteria in addition to all Level A success criteria, the website would only conform to level A of WCAG 2.0 but the additional effort would not be visible.”  It seems that rather than having simple four conformance levels, WAI are looking for more sophisticated algorithms which will be able to differentiate cases in which, for example, a Web page contains hundreds of images, none of which contain the alt attributes which are needed to enhance access to assistive technologies and a Web page which also contains hundreds of images, only one of which fails to have a meaningful alt attribute.  Currently both pages with fail WCAG conformance, since this requires all images to contain alt attributes.

It seem that the goal is a Klout score for Web accessibility, but with the difference that the underlying algorithms will be made public. But just as with Klout there is, I feel, a need to question the underlying assumptions which underpin the belief that accessibility can be determined by conformance with a set of rules, developed as part of the WAI’s model based on conformance with guidelines for content (WCAG), authoring tools (ATAG) and browsers and other user agents (UAAG). It is worth, therefore, making some comparisons between metrics-based tools such as Klout for measuring and the range of web accessibility measurement tools of which the now defunct Bobby tool was an early example.

Using Metrics In Context

However I do feel that there is value in metrics, whether this is for helping to identify the quality of research publications, online reputation or  accessibility of online resources.  The difficulty arises when the metric is regarded as the truth, and becomes a goal in itself.  So whilst I feel there is validity in publishing details of Klout, PeerIndex and Tweetstat statistics across a selection of institutional Twitter accounts in order to help understand patterns of usage and, I should add, to understand the limitations of such metrics-based tools, I also feel that institutions would be foolhardy to regard such statistics as concrete evidence of value.  Rather such statistics can be useful when used in conjunction with other evidence-based parameters.

The danger with Web accessibility metrics is that they have been used as a goal in their own right. In addition, sadly, the previous government has mandated conformance with these metrics across Government Web sites.  And back in 2004 WAI gave their views on Why Standards Harmonization is Essential to Web Accessibility, which seems to be leading to WCAG conformance being mandated across EU countries. If a proposal on “Why Online Reputation Standards Harmonisation is Essential” was published, especially by the body responsible for the online reputation standard which was proposed as the only standard which should be used,  there would be uproar, with, I would hope, the research community seeking to explore limitations in the proposed standard.

Fortunately the organisers of the WAI symposium do seem to be aware or criticisms of their approaches to Web accessibility as providing the only legitimate approach.  The Call for Papers invited contribution which ”may include approaches for measuring ‘accessibility in terms of conformance‘ (metrics that reflect violations of conformance of web content with accessibility guidelines such as WCAG or derivatives such as Section 508) and ‘accessibility in use‘ (metrics that reflect the impact that accessibility issues have on real users, regardless of guidelines)” (my emphasis).

The fundamental objection myself and fellow author of our series of paper on this subject, is that accessibility is not an innate characteristic  of a digital object, but of the user’s difficulty in engaging with an object to fulfil a desired purpose. The view that all Web resources must be universally accessible to everyone, which underlies pressures for organisations to conform with WCAG guidelines, is a flawed approach.

So if I’m critical of metrics related to conformance with guidelines, what do I feel is needed?  Our papers argues for making use of metrics related to guidelines related to the processes surround the development of online resources.  In the UK the BS 8878 guidelines provide the relevant Code of Practice.  As Jonathon Hassell pointed out in a recent post on For World Usability Day: The state of accessibility on the HassellInclusion blog:

[BS8878's] goals were to share best practice in the first Standard about the process of accessibility rather than it’s technical aspects. It’s succeeded in helping harmonise the separate worlds of inclusive design, personalisation and WCAG approaches to accessibility.

Jonathon went on to add:

Uptake is always difficult to measure, and it’s still early days for organisations to go public and say they have changed the way they work to follow BS8878. However, some organisations already have including: Royal Mail, beta.gov.uk and Southampton University. And many others are working on it. BS8878 is one of the best-selling standards BSI have ever created – so it’s met their goals. I’ve trained many organisations globally and my BS8878 presentations on slideshare have been viewed by over 6000 people from over 25 countries.

There is a need to encourage greater take-up of BS 8878, and I hope our paper will help in describing ways in which such take-up can be measured.

But what of the development of new ways of measuring WCAG conformance? As described in a paper on Involving Users in the Development of a Web Accessibility Tool at a cost of over 2M Euros the EU-funded European Internet Accessibility Observatory Project developed a robot for measuring conformance with WCAG guidelines across a range of government Web sites in the EU. As described on the eGovernment Monitor Web site has released  the eAccessibility Checker which builds on the EU-funded project and can be found at http://accessibility.egovmon.no/.  However looking at the results of a survey carried out last month across a number of Norwegian Web sites it seems that  there of a number of problems which are experienced by over 80% of the Web sites! If such tools report a low-level of conformance can’t we then use this as evidence of the failures of the WAI model rather than, as has been the case in the past, a failure in organisations to be willing to enhance the accessibility of their services?

The winner of this category was Elizabeth Harrin for her blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management.  As described on the About page on her blog Elizabeth also launched her blog in 2006. Looking at the frequency of her postings, Elizabeth is clearly passionate about her blog and reading her page on Earning Disclosure she takes an open and responsible approach in being honest with the readers of her blog.  Elizabeth is a well-deserved winner of this award and I was pleased to have the opportunity to chat with her briefly last night.

For those who are unfamiliar with the UK Web Focus blog it “functions as an open notebook which provides personal thoughts, reflections and observations on the role of the Web in higher and further education which I hope will inform readers and stimulate discussion and debate“.

Although the blog regularly addresses technical Web developments an additional important area covers the importance of openness, in a broad sense to support key institutional activities.  As well as writing papers in this area (such as the paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access and Let’s Free IT Support Materials!) the blog also embraces such values: content published on this blog is available under a Creative Commons licence (which, during Open Access Week 2011 was changed from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY) and comments are open on all 1,000 blog posts which have been published.

The approaches taken in providing this blog seem to be widely appreciated as can be seen not only from the people who voted for the blog but also from comments I have received recently:

Your blog is an inspiration, long may it continue!

Well done by the way – I catch your bog in my rss reader and am flabberghasted that you can post so much (and all good) – I’m cheering for you.

I love your blog. You have a knack of finding the right subject and the right lessons from it. 

Your blog is an excellent way to keep myself informed about Web 2.0 and it’s good to have a HE perspective.

Many thanks for the comments and the votes :-)   And note that if you’d like to see what happened at the awards ceremony, Elizabeth Harrin’s blog post on “Thank you! I’m IT Professional Blogger of the Year” blog post contains a brief video clip.

Looking at my own host institution, which is a member of the 1994 Group, at the time of writing there are 33 profiles for a search for the University of Bath but only 23 profiles for a search for the “University of Bath”.  We can see that the findings differ depending on the search syntax, such as whether the search term in enclosed in quotes or not.

There is therefore a need to be explicit about the way in which the searches are constructed in order to ensure that findings are reproducible.  In previous surveys I have tried to document the survey methodology in the text of the blog posts but it has occurs to me that the specific details may be overlooked.  I therefore feel that further surveys should include explicit details of the survey paradata, a term which is defined in Wikipedia as “data about the process by which the survey data were collected“.

The blog posts I have published have, wherever possible, provided live links to the services used to gather the data. Such links may provide parameters which may differ depending on factors such as the browser environment you are using,  The hyperlink used for the search described above, for example, is:

http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&hl=en&mauthors=%22University+of+Bath%22&after_author=sDUAAPv___8J&astart=20

As described in the Google documentation:

The hl parameter specifies the interface language (host language) of your user interface. To improve the performance and the quality of your search results, you are strongly encouraged to set this parameter explicitly.

This is a simple query. However the Google search box in my browser produces the following URL as a result of a search for google scholar citations:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=google+scholar+citations&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=6lXSTrP8FoOh8gOkoJ0I

In order to ensure that a rich description of the survey environment is available, my intention is that surveys published in future will contain survey paradata details along the lines illustrated in the following table, which describes the survey published in the recent post.

Any suggestions on things I may have missed?

The quality assurance approaches or metadata we described in the papers was focussed primarily on the service providers. However, six years later, the importance of the quality of metadata for resource discovery is no longer just of relevance to service providers. In a Web 2.0 environment in which content providers can make their teaching and learning and research outputs available on a wide range of services without the mediation of information professionals there is a need to ensure that a wider range of content providers are aware of risks that poor quality metadata can lead to valuable content being difficult to find.

I became aware of such risks while Surveying Russell Group University Use of Google Scholar Citations which I described in a recent blog post.  As mentioned in the post I became aware of the dangers of over-counting the numbers of researchers who have claimed a profile by aggregating researchers from the University of Birmingham with those from the University of Birmingham at Alabama or those from Newcastle University with Newcastle University,  New South Wales.

 Of further investigation I discovered entries from researchers who had misspelt the name of their university by using “univeristy” – a common typo which I myself have made. Currently it seems there are only 33 such misspellings.

A recent post gave some “Thoughts on Google Scholar Citations“. I concluded by suggesting that researchers could find it useful to claim their account on Google Scholar Citations and  ensure that the details of their papers are accurate but speculated on whether there would be barriers to researchers doing this. In order to investigate the level of usage of Google Scholar Citations in the UK higher education sector a survey of its usage across the twenty Russell Group Universities has been carried out and the findings published in this post. The institution’s name, as listed in the first column, was used as a search term.  The number of entries gives the current number of researchers found, with a link provided to the current final page of results.  In addition in order to investigate whether the service is being used by new researchers, who are likely to have a low number of citations or well-established researchers with large numbers of citations, a summary of the top three researchers having the largest numbers of citations is give, with links to the researchers profile together with details of the numbers of citations for the three researchers having the lowest numbers of citations. The results are given in the following table.  The survey was carried out on Tuesday 22 November 2011

* It was noted that the first entry for a search for the University of Birmingham referred to Mary Vignolo Wheatley from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The numbers of Google Scholar Citation entries is therefore overstated for the University of Birmingham and potentially for the other institutions which are listed. ** I was informed after publication of this post that of the 44 citations quoted for Newcastle, 11 are actually for the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Such errors could creep in for other institutions for which there are name clashes (e.g. York University and New York University). This highlights the need for globally unique institutional identifiers – but such discussions are outs the scope of this post. It was also noticed that the third entry for the University of Cambridge referred to Alan Turing, the English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist who, as described in Wikipedia, lived from 1912-1954.  Unsurprisingly his Google Scholar Citation entry states that his email address has not been verified!

Discussion

In a recent discussion about Google Scholar Citations I have been told about the difficulties in claiming authorship of papers after one has left one’s host institution and no longer has an institutional email address.  A second discussion I heard from one person who claimed his Google Scholar  account shortly before leaving his host institution who provided an alternative email account which could be used one his institutional email account had been deleted. The first example highlights a potential difficulty in asserting authorship of papers after one has left the host institution and the second example describes one way in which such potential problems can be addressed.  It would therefore appear sensible for researchers to claim a Google Scholar account while they are in a position to associate it with papers published in their host institution. An interesting issue, therefore, will be who should take responsibility for advising researchers on best practices for using services such as Google Scholar Citations.  Should the library include such advice in its training courses for new researchers?

Conclusions

A recent post by Wouter Gerritsma, subject librarian and bibliometrician at Wageningen UR Library described “How Google Scholar Citations passes the competition left and right“. Wouter’s post concluded:

Google Scholar is only about five years old. Give them another five years and they will have changed the market for abstracting and indexing database totally. If only 20 percent of all scientists make their publication lists correct (also editing of the references which can be done to improve the mistakes Google has made) even without making them publically available, Google sits on a treasure trove of high quality metadata. Really interesting to see how this story will develop.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops.  And as the launch of Google Scholar Citations was only announced a week ago today, we do have an opportunity to observe its take-up within our institutions from its early days.  Monitoring the take-up of the service, the approaches taken in managing the information and understanding difficulties in such management activities will be valuable not only in developing plans for use with other services in this space. Hmm, I wonder if Google Scholar Citations has APIs which will enable such monitoring approaches to be implemented in a scalable way?

Quite a while ago I became somewhat frustrated with the limitations of WordPress.com’s search facility for searching this blog.  I had hoped that there would be a Google search tool which could replace the search box at the top right of this blog’s Web site, but the limitations on the HTML code which can be included in blog widgets meant that this wasn’t an option. However whilst searching for alternatives I came across the Lijit search tool.  Since I am not able to provide a search box for this tool it is instead provided as a link under the WordPress search box – and is probably little used.  However in addition to providing a standard search for content posted on this blog  its key strength, for me, is its ability to search across my blogging community.

If, for example, I search for RDFa I find a conventional set of links to posts I have published about RDFa.  But if I click on the Network tab I find details of posts published by contacts in my blog network, as illustrated.

Using a search for HTML5 I found that Anthony Leonard has published an interesting post on Fixing academic literature with HTML5 and the semantic web.

A search for “schema.org” reveals that Peter Sefton and the UK Access Management team have written several posts on this topic.

Similarly a search for “JISC” finds posts published by my networks on ‘JISC’ which might be of interest for those working in JISC, especially those with an interest in what people are saying about the organisation.

One of the interests I had in better searching was to be able to spot spam comments which I had failed to delete.  A search for Viagra found only a legitimate post on “Dodgy Blog Link Spam“. How searching across my network for this term I found one blog which contained a large number of spam comments  (I have informed the blog owner so hopefully the spam will be deleted shortly).

How Does It Work?

Initially I had thought that the Network search was based on harvesting blogs of people who have commented on my blog.  However the FAQ states that

“The Network tab contains all of the results found from the sites automatically detected from your blogroll, and any other site you’ve manually setup via the ‘Network’ section of Lijit.com.“

This is somewhat strange as I know longer publish a blogroll. However use of Lijit did make me realise that the people who have commented on my blog (which, looking at the WordPress administrator’s interface, I find includes Christopher Gutteridge, Andy Powell, Chris Rusbridge, Les Carr, Anthony Leonard and Martin Hawksey) are probably people whose posts I am likely to find of interest – after all, if they are motivated to comment on my posts we will probably have shared interests.

As an experiment I have therefore revived the blogroll on this blog and populated it with the blogs provided by those listed above together with other bloggers whose content I find particularly interesting and relevant to my interests.  I hope that this will mean that when I’m search this blog for things I have written about in the past that I’ll be able to see what my blogging peers have said on the same topic.  And although this may be regarded as an ‘echo chamber‘ for me this provides valuable personalised searching.

I should add that I removed the blogroll several years ago in order to try to minimise clutter in the blog’s sidebar, so I’m not convinced that having a long list of blogs is my blogroll is desirable for this blog. But I do wonder what such an approach might be particular useful for project blogs, with blogrolls for all blogs provided for a particular programme helping to both help end users with an interest in the programme are to find other projects as well as providing a search facility across the blogs. It may be, of course, that others will have developed a more elegant solution for searching across a blog community, in which case I’ve welcome links to such approaches.

I recently wrote a post entitled “Will the Real Scott Wilson Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up” in which I described my initial experiences with the Microsoft Academic Search service.  I have to admit that I was impressed by the user interface and how, for example, it depicted links with my co-authors.

Revisiting Microsoft Academic Search

The main limitation with the Microsoft Academic Search service was, I felt, the accuracy of the data and the need to get author buy-in in order that authors could claim their own papers and remove papers incorrectly attributed to them.  The information it has about me, for example, suggests that I have published 56 papers, including one dating back to 1979. In fact it should know about 30 of my papers, the earliest of which was published in 1994.

Several weeks ago I edited my publications list to remove papers written by other Brian Kellys.  These edits have been accepted and when I sign in I get confirmation of the 38 papers I have confirmed authorship of and the 18 which have been removed from the list. However the wiki-style approach to editing the content means that edits have to be confirmed and this does not appear to have happened.  I therefore appear to be claiming more publications that is the case and, possibly, the citation statistics (G-Index=11 and H-Index=6) for my papers may be inaccurately calculated.

Google Scholar Citations

Whenever I come across a new service which appears to provide value I am also interested in seeing if there are alternative offerings. In part this is to ensure that I don’t find myself being locked into a single vendor. But in addition it can also help to see how other providers address the same area. As the Microsoft Academic Search service is based on harvesting metadata about papers hosted on institutional repositories, publishers Web sites and similar resources we should expect to see similar competing services.  I was therefore pleased when I received an email last week which announced that the Google Scholar Citations service, which I had signed up to during the beta testing, had been opened as a public service.

A post was published on the Google Scholar blog on Wednesday 16 November 2011 entitled “Google Scholar Citations Open To All‘ which described how:

You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics – the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

My Google Scholar Citations page is illustrated below. In comparison with my Microsoft Academic Search page this page appears somewhat limited in its functionality. It also has much less social connectivity, with links to only six of my co-authors who have registered for the service.

In addition to differences in the user interface and the social connections, Google Scholar Citations also has differences in the papers it has analysed and the corresponding citation indices, giving a H-index of 11 (in comparison with Microsoft Academic Search’s H-index of 6). Google Citations also provides a I10-Index score of 12 whereas Microsoft Academic Search provides G-Index score of 11.

Google Scholar Citations’ analysis of the papers indexed by Google Scholar seems to be based on a more accurate representation of my papers, possibly because I verified my papers some time ago.  Google Scholar also includes a number of popular articles I wrote which haven’t been deposited in the University of Bath repository and therefore don’t seem to have been indexed by Microsoft Academic Search, such as the Ariadne article on “An accessibility analysis of UK university entry points” for which there have been 28 citations. But in addition a paper on “Using networked technologies to support conferences”  delivered at the EUNIS 2005 conference which has been deposited in the in the University of Bath repository has been indexed by Google Scholar but not by  Microsoft Academic Search.

Whilst investigating Google Citations I came across a tweet from Les Carr who provided a link to his Google Citations page, which is illustrated below (which brought to my attention the paper on “Earlier web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact” from 2006 which will be worth reading in light of Social Web developments since the paper was published in 2006).

Carr

In order to make some further comparisons between the coverage and citation analyses of Google Citations and Microsoft Academic Search I’ve summarised details for Les Carr together with the co-authors of my papers who have registered with Google Scholar Citations in the following table.

It should be noted that:

• The Microsoft Academic Search entry for Jane Seale has her affiliation listed as the University of Southampton. She is now based at the University of Plymouth so her citation statistics may be split across two entries.
• There are two Microsoft Academic Search entries for Lorcan Dempsey: entry 1  and entry 2.
• here are two Microsoft Academic Search entries for Alastair Dunning: entry 1  and entry 2.

Discussion

I’m pleased that Google have provided an alternative to Microsoft for providing details of citations for research publications (there are similar services, of course, but I thought it would be worth focusing this post on a newly released service and provide comparisons with a service I described recently).

Microsoft Academic Search seems to have taken an approach of indexing as many research papers as it can find, associating the papers with author and institutions. The Microsoft Academic Search  entry point currently states that it provides access to “6,684,802 publications and 18,831,151 authors, 5,472 updated last week“.  Papers are automatically assigned to organisations, with the details for the University of Bath providing the following information: Publications: 29,331; Citation Count: 131,732; H-Index: 96 and 1,638 authors. In addition papers may also be assigned to departments with the details for Bath/UKOLN providing the following information: Publications: 262; Citation Count: 932; H-Index: 15 and 245 authors.

The problem with such automated processing is that the data can be flawed with.  In contract the Google Scholar Citations requires users to opt-in before their papers are assigned to their Google account.  This means, for example, that Google Scholar Citations currently has details for only 18 authors from the University of Bath.

It seems to me that rather than the functionality of the services I’ve described, the main challenges will be getting buy-in from the authors’ whose papers have been indexed.  They will be both a significant user community for such services as well as possibly having responsibility for cleaning up the data.

Some questions which came to mind when I was looking at these services:

• What is being indexed?  The Microsoft Academic Search service seems to have indexed primarily my peer-reviewed papers which I have deposited in the University institutional repository and from publishers’ databases. The Google Scholar Citation service, in contrast, seems to have also included papers from the UKOLN Web site which I wouldn’t have classed as ‘papers’.  I have removed papers which don’t fit in with my view of what should be included, but I appreciated that such definitions are likely to be very subjective.
• Motivation to manage one’s content. What is the motivation to manage one’s content?  Since the automated harvesting and assignment of papers is liable to lead to errors, there will be a need for the data to be cleansed.  But what are the motivating factors for authors to do this?
• Barriers to the management of one’s content.  Although authors may have motivating factors, such as ensuring that popular services provide an accurate view of their research publications, there may also be barriers to updating one’s data.  This might include the user interfaces provided by the services, the turnaround time for changes to be approved and the requirements for a Windows Live ID (in the case of Microsoft Academic Search) or a Google ID (in the case of Google Scholar Citations).

I recently came across a tweet from Guus van Brekkel (@digcmd) who described:

How Google Scholar Citations passes the competition left and right at WoW! Wouter on the Web bit.ly/uw8ppc

The tweet introduced me to the WoW!ter blog, written  by Wouter Gerritsma, subject librarian and bibliometrician at Wageningen UR Library. In the post Wouter gave his thoughts on the service:

 Google Scholar Citations really excels at finding publications you completely forgot about. 

and went on to make comparisons with other alternatives:

Google Scholar easily beats ResearcherID since it updates automatically and Scopus ID because you can make your list with citations publically available. To make your publication list openly available is really recommended to all scientists, it helps your personal branding.

although he admitted that:

there are disadvantages to Google Scholar as well. The most serious at this moment all kind of ghost citations.

Wouter concluded:

Google Scholar is only about five years old. Give them another five years and they will have changed the market for abstracting and indexing database totally. If only 20 percent of all scientists make their publication lists correct (also editing of the references which can be done to improve the mistakes Google has made) even without making them publically available, Google sits on a treasure trove of high quality metadata. Really interesting to see how this story will develop.

Perhaps the risk of failing to engage with the service and update the information which Google has will turn out to be the motivating factor for updating the content.  I’ve updated my content and started to email my co-authors so that they are listed. Have you updated your papers?  And if not, I’d be interested to know the reasons why not.