March 19th, 2010

Online advertising network Chitika conducted a study exploring the interest areas of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by analyzing the sites that receive traffic from them. 47% of Twitter users are most interested in news while MySpace users prefer video game content.
Posted in Reports, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010

Jay Baer at the Social Media Examiner posts about 5 Easy Steps to Creating Reusable Social Content. Learn how to cut down on the time you spend creating content for social media websites by cross-leveraging your creations. Here are his recommendations:
- Understand Taxonomy
- Seek Content Inspiration
- Understand Your Frequency Ecosystem
- Test and Track
- Tweak and Repurpose
Posted in Best Practices, Marketing, Social Networking, Social Software | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010
Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg have published an article in First Monday discussing How Today’s College Students use Wikipedia for Course-Related Research.
“Findings are reported from student focus groups and a large–scale survey about how and why students (enrolled at six different U.S. colleges) use Wikipedia during the course–related research process. A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were more likely to use Wikipedia for course–related research than respondents in other majors. The findings suggest Wikipedia is used in combination with other information resources. Wikipedia meets the needs of college students because it offers a mixture of coverage, currency, convenience, and comprehensibility in a world where credibility is less of a given or an expectation from today’s students.”
Posted in Information Literacy, Libraries, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
March 16th, 2010

Want to learn how to set up goals to measure the success of your website in Google Analytics as well as how to track funnels, or paths users take to reach your goal pages? If so, you’ll want to check out Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels by Dave Sparks at Six Revisions. This step-by-step article is the first installment in a series of Google Analytics articles.
Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »
March 16th, 2010

Dan Freeman at ALA Techsource was kind enough to write up my Library Technology Report on mobile libraries with regard to my discussion of QR codes and their potential uses for libraries and Jason Griffey’s recent blog post about them. They have made the issue publicly available for a limited time via their new online archive, and I have made the pre-print of the report open access via E-LIS.
Posted in Mobile, Reports | No Comments »
March 15th, 2010

Library Journal has just issued its annual list of Movers and Shakers for 2010. These are cutting-edge librarians who are making a difference in the field. Congratulations to everyone on this well-deserved honor.
Posted in Library 2.0 | No Comments »
March 15th, 2010
Today I had the pleasure of presenting on cloud computing in libraries in Copenhagen to the IT-faggruppen interest group of the The Danish Librarian (Workers) Union. It was a great all-day conference dedicated to cloud computing topics.
Posted in Cloud Computing, Libraries, Library Services | No Comments »
March 12th, 2010

Free Technology for Teachers rounds up Nine Tools for Collaboratively Creating Mind Maps. Each entry in this helpful list includes a discussion of the application’s best features, cost, and usability.
Posted in Collaboration, Information Literacy | No Comments »
March 12th, 2010

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook has put together suggestions for 4 Ways To Monitor Your Facebook Page Traffic. In addition to Facebook’s inherent tools for tracking traffic, this post recommends some techniques to track traffic within custom tabs and more.
- Webtrends Tool
- Facebook Insights
- Core Metrics
- Google Analytics
Posted in Marketing, Social Networking, Social Software | No Comments »
March 10th, 2010

Vanessa Davis at Web Design Ledger has compiled a list of 10 Useful Website Analytics Tools. If you want to track information about your website or blog traffic you may want to check out some of these tools.
Posted in Lists | No Comments »
March 9th, 2010
The folks at Educause have put together 7 Things You Should Know About E-Readers. This brief guide details the essentials about these portable devices such as:
- What is it?
- How does it work?
- Who’s doing it?
- Why is it significant?
- What are the downsides?
- Where is it going?
- What are the implications for teaching and learning?
Posted in E-Books, Guides | No Comments »
March 9th, 2010
Twitter can be used as a powerful listening tool and Cindy King at Social Media Examiner offers 8 Easy Twitter Monitoring Ideas. If you’d like to monitor your organizations brand as well as what’s happening in your field, you may want to check out these suggestions:
- Decide What You Want to Monitor
- Find the Best Real-Time Monitoring Tools
- Track With URL Shorteners
- Follow Hashtags
- Monitor Trends When It’s Appropriate
- Use Twitter Lists to Monitor People on Twitter
- Set Up a Listening Plan
- Build Relationships
Posted in Lists, Marketing, Microblogging | No Comments »
March 8th, 2010
Isaac Gube at Six Revisions has published a lengthy article on How to Make Remote Team Collaboration Work. He provides tips and guidance by discussing common remote collaboration problems and how to address each in turn.
- Problem #1: Staying in sync
- Problem #2: Task management
- Problem #3: Idea generation and brainstorming
- Problem #4: Version control of files
- Problem #5: Task delegation
Posted in Best Practices, Collaboration | No Comments »
March 8th, 2010

Drew McLellan of The Marketing Minute has put together a helpful Social Media Cheat Sheet listing the best ways to leverage today’s popular social media websites.
Posted in Best Practices, Guides, Social Networking, Social Software | No Comments »
March 7th, 2010
Kristin Burnham of CIO.com writes for PCWorld about 8 Must-Have Twitter and Facebook Add-Ons. Most of these are Greasemonkey scripts and require first downloading the program, but many seem like they’re well worth the effort. The two I’ll be addimg right away are:
- Nested Twitter Replies which displays tweets in a nested conversation format.
- Facebook Purity which removes third-party games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille itens from your newsfeed.
Posted in Lists, Social Networking, Social Software | No Comments »