[libraries and mobile technologies]

Very interesting report by Ellyssa Kroski on mobile technology and it's shaping/changing of libraries and information access. See page 27 for a detailed analysis of social networks as a mobile subgenre. From chapter 1:

"Imagine walking by a movie poster for the upcoming Harry Potter film and scanning it with a click of your camera-phone in order to download associated ringtones, get showtimes, or even buy tickets. How about snapping a photo while browsing through a magazine to get a free sample of a new perfume? This may sound like science-fiction right now, but in Japan, this type of mobile search technology is widespread, and already similar services in the U.S. are developing which promise just this type of virtual engagement with the world around us. Think about the convenience of scanning the logo on someone’s Yankees cap to instantly receiving the latest score from the game. This is what's coming.
Today, most of us are primarily using our cell phones to download ringtones and check our email, but there is an abundance of truly amazing services we can access through the mobile Web right now. Armed with a smartphone, PDA, or other Internet-ready mobile mechanism, users can retrieve local traffic information, bus, train, and airline schedules, and look up weather reports. But more impressively, they can also access mobile social networks which will alert them when their friends are nearby, text in a pizza order to Dominos, borrow e-books from their library, take a guided audio tour of a museum, and watch CNN. Through the mobile Web, people can download audiobooks, upload camera-phone photos to Flickr, receive turn-by-turn driving directions, and have in-store coupons delivered to them.
The computer, media player, and cell phone are all converging into a single device as manufacturers aim to provide a complete experience for the consumer. This evolution of handheld devices combined with new high-speed wireless data networks make browsing the mobile Internet a more compelling experience. Much like the transition the Web experienced when broadband access became widely attainable, the mobile Web is turning a corner and becoming useful to the everyday user. While mass adoption is still in its infancy in this country, the landscape is developing quickly. Now is the time to get on-board and on-the-move with the mobile Web."

About libraries:

"Libraries are mastering the mobile Web to bring patrons a new set of services – services that their users are coming to expect from their communities and content providers. They are leveraging the technology that their patrons are currently using, such as cell phones and iPods, to deliver robust new services without making users leave their comfort zones. And these portable offerings are serving to integrate library services with patrons' daily lives.
Mobile Library Websites and MOPACs (Mobile OPACs) A growing number of libraries are creating mobile versions of their websites for their patrons to access on-the-go. They are offering information about library services and collections, providing access to library catalog search, portable exhibit information, subject guides, e-journals, and library hours, all formatted for the small screen."

Read more here: http://eprints.rclis.org/15024/1/mobile_web_ltr.pdf

[social media analytics]

Great post from Ben Parr on Mashable on how to track social media stats:

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Understand what you want to track

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As with most things in life, you can’t conquer what you don’t understand, or at least what you haven’t really though about.

What is your goal? Do you want to track how people are sharing your website? Do you want to track a specific social media campaign? Or maybe you’re just interested in trends related to a specific meme or social media phenomenon? Each one requires different tools and different focus.

You’re going to focus on traffic statistics if you’re tracking social media website engagement, while if you’re tracking a wider campaign, TwitterTwitter reviews response and positive comments might be a more appropriate metric.

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Optimize your existing analytics software

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Most of us use analytics software like Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics reviews, Woopra, or Omniture to track website data like traffic, visitors, pages per visitor, and traffic sources. Most of these analytics tools can track a wealth of data, but they are not designed to track social media data. Luckily, there are a few ways to beef up your analytics software for social media. Some quick tools and suggestions:

Social Media Metrics Plugin: Social Media Metrics is a greasemonkey extension that adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics, providing information on Diggs, stumbles, delicious bookmarks, and more for each individual page. Be aware - it’s not perfect.

Set up specific campaigns and events for social media: Most analytics software has custom campaigns to make it easy to track specific events. You can track a specific Twitter traffic campaign or DiggBar URL with campaigns.

Reorganize dashboards and set up email reports: To get specific information on social media, have traffic stats from top social media websites (i.e. Digg, FacebookFacebook reviews, Twitter, etc.) emailed to you so you can see it all in one place. In addition, reorganize any dashboards you have to show this information for easy access.

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Add new analytics tools

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Even with web analytics tools, you don’t have all the tools necessary to get started tracking analytics related to social media. Why not add some more tools to your inventory that track detailed social metrics? Some suggestions:

Bit.ly: When you use a URL shortener, it’s always a smart idea to use one that has analytics information, like Bit.ly. This will track information like number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur.

Xinureturns: Despite the funny Scientology-inspired name, xinureturns provides a great dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will receive information on Technorati, Googe Pagerank, Diggs, and even backlinks to your website.

PostRank: Formerly known as AideRSS, PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content.

SocialToo: SocialToo is a comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter.

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Aggregate your analytics

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There are a lot of tools for gathering social media information, but no one place has everything you need. You don’t have time to look at all of the tools, so aggregate your analytics information.

There is no single tool that will bring this information together, so you’ll have to do it yourself. Export data into excel, pdf, or email and record all of the information to one area, whichever works best for you. Building a spreadsheet may be best for playing with the numbers. Make it easily accessible.

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Analyze and engage

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The last step is always the most important one - the actual analysis. It takes years of dedication to the art of web analytics to really understand how each variable affects website traffic and user engagement, but by looking at this data in one place and comparing the information, you will hopefully be able to pick up on trends.

This guide is only how to get started with social media analytics. Take the time to find great tools and to understand how each of the social media levers affects traffic and analytics data. But most of all, use the data to engage your audience. You can figure out what they’re looking for using social media analytics, so be sure to act upon the data once you’ve analyzed it.

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Read the post here: http://mashable.com/2009/04/19/social-media-analytics/

[andrea saveri at the ioct]

nb: live-blogged

Andrea Saveri at the IOCT on The Future of Work: Amplified Individuals, Jobs & Organizations

Institute for the Future - founded in 1968

• How to forecast the future, applied to business, government and non-profits

Think about the future though aware of the present

In terms of business there are 6 key themes that are changing/shaping the future. Accordingly there is a set of new jobs that are going to be important in the future

Collective intelligence officer - oversee the improvisation human resources for the company
Amplification Engineer - improve organization innovation by creating more flexible work styles
Chief Visualization Officer - of Data Whisperer, to devise new ways of visualizing our business
Data Ecologist - design and manage both private and public data clouds
Affinity Agent to build shared values and vision among highly divers collaborates
Junior Catalyst - spark new and experimental collaboration that emphasize diversity as source of innovation
Chief Wellness Officer - implement and oversee a culture of health
Biocitizen Liason - to serves as the primary point of contact between the senior management and individual members of the company's various social health networks
Senior Green Strategist - minimize organizations resource usage while maximising productivity and profit
Ecotect - for a complete and custom sustainability make-over of our work environment
Cognitive Resource Manager - coordinate and augment mental efforts at the workplace
Neurological Training Officer - improve cognitive fitness among employees

But what about the people?

Amplified Individuals - through their access to social media and their practises they are expanding the reach and effect of businesses - amplifying and challenging processes of business

How are they doing it?
Highly social - providing social filters to help process massive amounts of information (flickr - the photo becomes an artifact around which people comment, tag etc...)
classic fm, digg, delicious etc...

Amplified individuals are highly collective, they can tap into knowledge of a group and use it - wikis, twitter, prediction markets etc...

they are into crowd sourcing (see crowdspirit.com, innocentive)

lifehacker - software downloads that help keep you focused (see the anti-procrastination alert!)

cognitive interfaces - think ADHA drug provigil, tested in the military to enhance "alertness" and memory...uni students have been using it around exam time.
Raises the issue - what is "normal" performance
So here you might see the Amplification Engineer and the Chief Performance Officer come together to develop the intelligence of the organisation

Diversity Redefined - instead of diversity as something politically correct now something that is a core initiative, instead of thinking about it as race, income, age, ethinicity...now cognitive diversity, disciplinary styles that appear and add to the workforce. The whole way we describe and characterise people is expanding.

Surowiecki popularised idea of crowd intelligence and it's actually better when the group is diverse, spanning hierarchies etc...HP has used this kind of info when they do their sales forecasts, going across hierarchies in the organization, leverged the diversity of perspective on their question

What IOCT and Transliteracy is - disciplinary, multidisciplinary interdisciplinary to transdisciplinarity - a biologist who can speak math and the language of art. Can create a different perception and different frame of thinking. The is the key to innovation.

Idea - knitting dna and proteins so that scientists get a spatial perception of information

mChek - mobile payments
dispersed innovation networks start to become embedded in urban centres instead of a cloistered innovation park. Idea that innovation and diversity and urbanism combine = future. Here affinity agents and junior catalysts will come into play.

Visible World is changing - sensory perception, bio metric RFID, pedometres - people, places, things and processes are surrounded by this new layer of visible information

Every object and every interaction is really a data point - as we contribute to wikipedia and leave a trace of where we've been, using a thumbprint scanner at disneyworld...we're leaving trails of ourselves all over the place - see Kevin Kelly

What is important is the need for a new kind of literacy - how do we decode/translate all these different kinds and sources of information?!

Check out Intel Mash Maker which suggests kinds of mashups based on your web browsing (see also swivel)

Science at work - fMRI that scans people while tasks are undertaken (that's what I'll be exploring for part of my research fellowship at the IOCT)

biocitizen - people are designing ways to become the originators of good health so wellness programmes on the rise in the workplace, new media ecologies (see Daily Strength), biotechnology, risk society (Who is sick) - we are going to want to navigate a personal health geography

****
Discussion:
Andrea asked us which of these future jobs we'd each like to take on.
Talked about discrepancy between language, same words don't necessarily share the same values. A "pattern" for a scientist is very different to an artist.

Question of metrics and evaluating performance is a real challenge, especially for universities and hierarchical organisations.

Visualisation is is key - think of the prius which shows drivers exactly how fuel efficiency is going - also has a ludic quality. But in a general context what kind of data streams would you want to visualise?


My question: who is going to be the person to translate these very North American-sounding job titles into more culturally specific ones?
Also - these futuristic jobs might be important for us (UK, North America) but what about other countries? How will Ethiopia or Afganastan benefit from this...how will they even begin to implement it and is it right for them?

[rae & metrics 2.0]

The other day I posted about Stevan Harnad's "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" and today I've seen the "New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure" artile in the Chronical of Higher Ed. In the article Andrea Foster tells us about "Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media." To those in the know Re:Poste is "the Pool," and might well help new media scholars and practitioners "measure" their imput levels. Gerry McKiernan at Scholarship 2.0 says "No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors" but "once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence."

A bit about Pool:

"Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.

Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.

The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers. If a reviewer receives a low appearance rating for his own projects, then his assessment of how others' projects look will not be given much weight.

The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers."

There's more at the Chronicle on how tagging works in Pool and check out Scholarship 2.0 for an idea of future instantiations including maps of how articles fit into the larger landscape.

[rae, metrics & open source]

Maintaining an academic career means paying close attention to your publishing record and its effect on the RAE. I'm not up on the metrics and specific weighting of kinds of publications and how that might differ across disciplines but I've just come across this interesting paper: "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" by Stevan Harnad. In this article Harnad gives us an idea of how metrics and open source might work as an alternative to the usual "academic bean-counting of publications for performance evaluation and funding."


"Open Access. Until now, the reference metadata and cited references of the top 25% of the c. 24,000 peerreviewed journals published worldwide, across disciplines and languages, have been systematically fed (by the journal publishers) to the Institutite for Scientific Information (ISI), to be extracted and stored. But soon this is will change. It has been discovered (belatedly) that the Web makes it possible to make the full-text (not just the reference metadata and cited reference) of every single one of the 2.5 million articles published annually in those 24,000 journals (not just the top 25%) freely accessible online to all users (not just those that can afford
paid access to the journals and the ISI dtabase).

[...]

Lawrence (one of the co-inventors of Citeseer) published a study in Nature
in 2001, showing that articles that were made freely available on the Web were cited more than twice as much as those that were not ; yet most researchers still did not rush to self-archive. The finding of an OA citation impact advantage was soon extended beyond computer science, first to physics (Harnad & Brody 2004), and then also to all 10 of the biological, social science, and humanities disciplines so far tested (Hajjem et al 2005) ; yet the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving rate continued to hover around 15%.
If researchers themselves were not very heedful of the benefits of OA, however, their institutions and research funders – co-beneficiaries of their research impact – were: To my knowledge, the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton was the first to mandate self-archiving for all departmental research articles published: These had to be deposited in the department’s own Institutional Repository (IR) (upgraded using the first free, open source software for creating OA IRs, likewise created at
Southampton and now widely used worldwide)."

Interesting...

As Harnad says, the RAE is "a very cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive undertaking, for the researchers as well as the assessors" so we should really be looking into other possibilities.

"The data-mining potential of an OA corpus is enormous, not just for research evaluation by performance assessors, but for search and navigation by reseacher-users, students, and even the general public."

I wonder how this kind of OS metrics might fit in with the new RAE:

• 2008 will mark the final appearance of traditional peer review systems for the UK research assessment exercise (RAE)
• The UK government has announced plans to use a metrics system to assess research quality and guide funding
• A metrics system could fit well to chemistry but some worry that an element of peer review will need to be retained for areas such as theoretical chemistry