Archive for December 2010

Brenna Ehrlich at Mashable provides a tutorial for How To: Back Up Your Social Media Presence Before the Ball Drops. This detailed post provides helpful information about how to download and back up all of your online content. The post is divided into the following sections:

• Back Up Your Facebook
• Back Up Your Tweets
• Back Up Your Blog
• Back Up Your Photos

Many of us are already using cloud computing for our personal computing needs, however there are legal and privacy considerations when using such third-party services on behalf of your organization. Alex Williams at ReadWritecloud discusses 3 Legal Issues to Consider When Going to the Cloud. He raises some very good points in this brief article which discusses the following concerns:

• Do You Know Where Your Data is Located?
• Who Takes Responsibility?
• Intellectual Property Rights

Mollie Vandor at Mashable writes about How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions Using Social Media. This quick article discusses how to use social media apps to improve your online presence, manage your finances, and even get in shape for the new year.

“Whether your New Year’s resolutions involve getting yourself in better physical, financial or social media shape, the web can help you figure out exactly what you want to change and how you’re going to keep yourself accountable for changing it. 2011 is a brand new year and a completely fresh start, and, breaking your New Year’s resolutions is so 2010.”

Mari Smith at the Social Media Examiner creates a mega-list of the Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page. These are the cream of the crop among the thousands of apps that can help you engage your users. The apps included in this list will allow you to customize your landing tabs, add your blog, add videos and photos, add chat, add polls, contests, geolocation, scheduling, email, ecommerce and much more.

Tyler Gray & Alla Goldman at The Bivings Report present a Web 2.0 Year-End Recap. This is part one of a two-part post series which rounds up the biggest trends in social media, mobile, and 2.0 in the past year. Here are the first five tech trends:

1. Location, location and location
2. Trend toward mobile + Cloud continues
3. Websites making increasing use of social networking
4. Nonprofit and Charitable Giving: Be Strong and Innovate
5. Apple and Facebook threaten the end of the web as we know it?

Dawn Foster at GigaOm writes about 5 Simple Ways to Get More out of Google Analytics. If you’re interested in effectively using Google Analytics to track your blog or website traffic, you’ll want to check out this article which discusses useful advanced features of the application such as:

1. Alerts
2. Custom Reports
3. Export
4. Customize Your Dashboard
5. In-Page Analytics

The Association of Research Libraries has published a report summarizing their research into Fair Use Challenges in Academic and Research Libraries. Sixty-five librarians were interviewed for this study in which they were asked about their employment of fair use in five key areas of practice: support for teaching and learning, support for scholarship, preservation, exhibition and public outreach, and serving disabled communities.

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers writes about How to Back-up Your Blog and Why You Should. This quick but effective post provides instructions for how to back up your content on Blogger, Edublogs, and WordPress as well as tips for what to do with the blog backup files.

Curious as to what’s being researched on Britannica’s Web site? History and economics dominate the list of the most-read articles in the Top 10 Britannica Queries in 2010.

1. French Revolution: Explore the movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and introduced the world to the guillotine.
2. Romanticism: This attitude or intellectual orientation that rejected the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
3. Civil Rights Movement: In this essay by Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, delve into the mass U.S. protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination that came to national prominence in the mid-1950s.
4. Walt Disney: The world’s animator-in-chief changed the way that we look at the world and the way we vacation. The company he founded is now one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.
5. Industrial Revolution: In this brief treatment of process that moved Europe from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture, you’ll learn that there was not one but two industrial revolutions. (Britannica’s detailed treatment can be found in our European history article.)
6. Great Depression: With insights from Richard Pells, history professor at the University of Texas, and Christina Romer, an economist at University of California, Berkeley and former head of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, learn about the decade of depression between 1929 and 1939 from both an economic and cultural perspective.
7. World War II: With dozens and dozens of videos and photographs, you can grapple with this worldwide conflict that ended in the deaths of some 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people.
8. Socialism: Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, professors of political science at Arizona State University, discuss the economic and social doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. If you hear some called a socialist, especially as a pejorative, this is essential reading to know whether the label is accurate or not.
9. Danube River: It is one of the most picturesque rivers in the world, and Europe’s second longest (after the Volga), rising in Germany’s Black Forest and flowing about 1,770 miles to the Black Sea.
10. United States: With an essay on cultural life by Adam Gopnik, editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, and two dozen other contributors and the history of the United States through the passage of health care earlier this year, the midterm, and the effect of the WikiLeaks disclosures, explore in-depth this country of more than 300,000,000 people.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Emily Banks at Mashable puts together a mega-list of 150+ Business and Marketing Resources From 2010. This is a stellar list of articles and blog posts from this past year in the following categories:

• Social Media
• Mobile
• Real World Success
• Starting Up
• Business 101
• Networking
• Marketing

The latest issue of Library Technology Reports looks fantastic! It’s titled Privacy and Freedom of Information in 21st-Century Libraries and it’s authored by an all-star cast of talented, forward-thinking librarians such as Sarah Houghton-Jan, Jason Griffey, Eli Neiburger, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Angela Maycock, and Barbara M. Jones.

“As libraries increasingly move beyond provision of print material and into their expanding roles as providers of digital resources and services, intellectual freedom concerns have been magnified as they apply to a range of complex new issues.”

Keith Webster, University Librarian and Director of Learning Services at the University of Queensland, Australia, writes for Educause Review about The Library Space as Learning Space. In this article he discusses a series of studies done at the University of Queensland Library investigating the use of their library space. As a result of these studies they report twelve key findings:

1. Most respondents visited the library to undertake individual study-related activities, and they accomplished this.
2. Respondents also visited the library to undertake social or group learning activities.
3. In all but a few instances, respondents did less of what they had intended to do.
4. In all but a few instances, respondents did more “other” things than they had intended to do.
5. Most respondents chose to work in the library because it is conveniently located and provides good study spaces.
6. All respondents put location, atmosphere, study space, and finding what they need above social reasons (e.g., group meetings for visiting the library.
7. Most respondents visited the library after they had been at home or at a class.
8. Most respondents planned to stay in the library for between thirty minutes and two hours.
9. Respondents were regular library visitors.
10. Students spent most of their time in the library using computers and quiet study spaces.
11. Students also used e-mail, the Internet, and Facebook, met and chatted with friends, ate, and borrowed books.
12. Students wanted the library to provide more computers and more quiet areas.

Ryan Malone at the Social Media Examiner suggests 11 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts With Interviews. This excellent article discusses ways to take an interview and turn it into eleven different types of blog posts. Here are just the top five:

• #1: Informational Post
• #2: The Numbered List
• #3: The Mini Case Study
• #4: Link or Resource Round-Ups
• #5: Expert Guide

This great infographic created by the folks at DigitalSurgeons breaks down the demographics of Facebook and Twitter users.

Klint Finley at ReadWriteCloud suggests 3 Ways to Host Your Own Delicious Alternative. Libraries and other organizations will want to check out these three open source solutions that will let you host a custom social bookmarking service.