Archive for July 2009

JISC, the UK organization that “inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies”, has published a 10-minute documentary on Libraries of the Future.

via Librarians Matter

Microsoft has unveiled a real-time Twitter search engine which it has combined with results from its new Bing “decision engine”. The BingTweets engine provides popular Twitter Trending Topics at the top of the search interface, with a real-time stream of tweets along the left sidebar, and finally Bing search results down the center portion of the page.

ReadWriteWeb takes a look at disruptions in the book publishing business in a two-part post which discusses three big waves hitting the industry including; the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part One introduces these waves while Part Two takes a look at what this means for the major players including; readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.

Vadim Lavrusik, new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, blogs for Mashable about 10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media. The article discusses different strategies university public affairs offices are using to connect with their communities such as:

1. Gathering and Sharing Information
2. Showcasing Student and Faculty Work
3. Providing a Platform to Broadcast Events
4. Emergency Notification
5. Connecting People
6. Producing, Not Just Promoting
7. Creating a Dialogue and Communicating to Students
8. Facebook Office Hours
9. Coaching for the Spotlight
10. Getting Wired Via Mobile

Chris Lake from Econsultancy puts together a list of 16 bitchin’ commands and shortcuts for Twitter. Many of these look interesting including:

• NOT / MINUS / AVOID
• GO LOCAL
• EXACT MATCH
• CITATIONS

Be sure to check out the posting to see how to conduct each of these searches.

Meryl Evans at Web Worker Daily comes up with a helpful list of innovative ways to make use of LinkedIn professionally in 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business. Here are the top 10 recommendations:

1. Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.
2. Use widgets to integrate other tools, such as importing your blog entries or Twitter stream into your profile.
3. Do market research and gain knowledge with Polls.
4. Share survey and poll results with your contacts.
5. Answer questions in Questions and Answers: show expertise without a hint of self-promotion.
6. Ask questions in Questions and Answers to get a feel for what customers and prospects want or think.
7. Publish your LinkedIn URL on all your marketing collateral, including business cards, email signature, email newsletters, web sites and brochures, so prospects learn more about you.
8. Grow your network by joining industry and alumni groups related to your business.
9. Update your status examples of recent work.
10. Link your status updates with your other social media accounts.

Sam Dean at OStatic puts together a list of Over 40 Free, Must-Have Open Source Resources ranging from OpenOffice to digital music managers. Open source applications are organized into the following categories:

• Digital Music, Video Graphics and Multimedia Resources
• All Things Firefox
• In Our Linux Toolboxes
• For Developers
• Apps and Resources for Them
• In Need of Open Source Work?

via What I Learned Today

Ben Parr at Mashable post about How To: Manage Social Media Goals and Expectations. This useful article discusses how to set realistic goals on the social Web.

• Popularity game vs. real value
• Avoiding pitfalls
• Setting goals
• Remember, it’s not a race

Mahendra Palsule at MakeUseOf posts about keeping up with multiple online networks in 20 Tips to Define And Manage Your Social Networks. Organized into Part I and Part II, this helpful post provides many recommendations for managing your online presence such as:

1. Visualize Your Social Map
2. Define Your Target Audience
3. Use a Password Manager
4. Separate Private & Public Photo-Sharing
5. Use One Social Bookmarking Site

Facebook now offers a widget for Facebook Page creators that they can embed in their websites. The widget is called a Fan Box that Page admins can access by clicking the “Add Fan Box to your site” link. The Fan Box will allow website visitors to become FB fans by clicking within the widget. The announcement on the Facebook Developers blog lists several implementation including Coca-Cola, Newsweek, and Threadless.

via Mashable

If you’re interested in what’s happening in the search arena, please check out my latest article Search Engine Wars Redux in my Stacking the Tech column in LJ’s Academic Newswire.

“As the content of the Web continues to grow, we are seeing search engines and other similar services competing to serve our retrieval needs. To access the vast content stores of the read/write Web, these search tools make use of structured and linked data, real-time search, personalization, and more focused filtering techniques. If you’re a fan of buzzwords, you might say we’ve entered Web 3.0, a new era that is motivated by the need to more effectively organize, filter, and access information online.”

Stan Schroeder at Mashable reports on the iStrategyLabs study of Facebook’s demographics in Facebook Users Are Getting Older. Much Older. According to their analysis, the social network’s userbase is shifting older, with growth in the 35-54 age range growing 190.2% between January and July of this year and users older than 55 years a whopping 513.7%.

Last night Google announced that they will be releasing an operating system based on their Chrome Web browser. They will open-source its code later this year.

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has made his latest 288-page book, Free, available on Scribd. Here’s the description:

“In his revolutionary bestseller, THE LONG TAIL, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in FREE he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, FREE is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.”

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), writes for the May/June issue of Educause Review. In Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality, Alexander discusses strategies to identify future trends in technology including the environmental scan, Delphi Method, prediction markets, scenerios, and crowdsourcing.

“This article will introduce and explore methods for apprehending the future as it applies to the world of higher education and information technology.2 These are not hypothetical approaches; they are realized, documented, and applied methods. There is no perfect method; nor has any one approach emerged to overshadow the others. This article will thus explore each for its specific affordances, structures, and practical usage. Together, they represent an aggregate, sector-wide movement that tries to help academics understand the future as it hits the present. Put another way, these future-scanners seek to follow the translation of digital ideas from science fiction to campus reality.”