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What Social Media Users Want

March 19th, 2010

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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.

5 Easy Steps to Creating Reusable Social Content

March 18th, 2010

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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:

  1. Understand Taxonomy
  2. Seek Content Inspiration
  3. Understand Your Frequency Ecosystem
  4. Test and Track
  5. Tweak and Repurpose

How College Students Use Wikipedia

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.”

Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels

March 16th, 2010

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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.

QR Codes & the Mobile Web

March 16th, 2010

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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.

Congrats Movers and Shakers

March 15th, 2010

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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.

Libraries and Cloud Computing

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.

Nine Tools for Collaboratively Creating Mind Maps

March 12th, 2010

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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.

4 Ways To Monitor Your Facebook Page Traffic

March 12th, 2010

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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.

  1. Webtrends Tool
  2. Facebook Insights
  3. Core Metrics
  4. Google Analytics

10 Useful Website Analytics Tools

March 10th, 2010

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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.

7 Things You Should Know About E-Readers

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:

  1. What is it?
  2. How does it work?
  3. Who’s doing it?
  4. Why is it significant?
  5. What are the downsides?
  6. Where is it going?
  7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

8 Easy Twitter Monitoring Ideas

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:

  1. Decide What You Want to Monitor
  2. Find the Best Real-Time Monitoring Tools
  3. Track With URL Shorteners
  4. Follow Hashtags
  5. Monitor Trends When It’s Appropriate
  6. Use Twitter Lists to Monitor People on Twitter
  7. Set Up a Listening Plan
  8. Build Relationships

How to Make Remote Team Collaboration Work

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

Social Media Cheat Sheet

March 8th, 2010

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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.

8 Must-Have Twitter and Facebook Add-Ons

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.