Yes! Or so says Evgeny Morozov of Foreign Policy magazine’s net.effect blog.
I don’t agree. Or, maybe more correctly, I think he misses the point. If Twitter reveals that people are acting like a dumb herd of swine (which I’m not sure is the case), then so much the better! That’s an interesting and potentially valuable thing to know!
Read more…
I’ve created a quick and dirty Yahoo! Pipe that aggregates news from Google News and Yahoo! News about the ongoing swine flu outbreak and plots it on a map.
And here is a dynamic graph showing Twitters mentioning “swine flu,” “flu,” or “influenza.”
[Also posted at Transformation Tracker.]
Technorati Tags: swine flu, flu, influenza
A recent post on the Zotero blog points readers to the most recent development road map for the open source citation management extension for Firefox. It looks as though the features that I have argued are essential to making Zotero truly unique and powerful are in our near future. Those features include the ability to sync one’s references across multiple computers, the ability to share references/collaborate with others, a recommendation engine to help the user find other, related sources, and finally, a quasi-social networking feature that will allow users to find other users who have similar interests. More after the jump.
Patronus Analytical, a blog covering security issues facing NGOs and other humanitarian organizations operating in dangerous environments, has used Google Trends to compare interest in Darfur, Afghanistan, Beer, and Breakfast. The results are interesting, sad, and all-too-predictable. Of course, in my previous post comparing Iraq, economy, health care, and taxes, I used BlogPulse and IceRocket. Looks I will have to add Google Trends to the buzz tracking toolbox. One of Patronus Analytical’s charts is pasted after the jump.
Above are a couple of charts I just created, on the fly as it were, which track the relative blogosphere buzz for four topics of concern in the upcoming election. Data from both IceRocket and BlogPulse indicate that the economy has overtaken Iraq as a topic of concern, with the buzz lines for the two crossing on or about January 14 of this year. At about the same time, taxes overtook health care. These two sites raise interesting possibilities for informally tracking buzz on particular issues.
To quickly save and then blog these graphs, I used a Flickr bookmarklet that allows me to send the images of the charts created by IceRocket and BlogPulse directly to my Flickr account, from which I can blog them. Also, I figured out how to “hack” the URLs to add more search terms over a greater period of time. The two services limit you to 3 simultaneous searches, with BlogPulse allowing up to a 6 month time-span and IceRocket a 3 month time-span. However, if you modify the URL manually, you can add as many searches as you like, as well as set the time-span to whatever you like. So, the examples above each track 4 issues over 6 months.
[Cross-posted here.]
–Sean
Technorati Tags: buzz, buzz tracking, icerocket, blogpulse, politics, election
From Chronicle of Higher Education:
Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better - Chronicle.com
What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?That’s the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.
The idea took shape when Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, was talking with his editor at the press about peer reviewers for the book he was finishing, The book, with the not-so-playful title Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, examines the importance of using both software design and traditional media-studies methods in the study of video games. (more)
Back in October, while attending the 4S conference, Hector, Casey, and myself (Sean) had lunch with Bill Turkel of the blog, Digital History Hacks. During the discussion, we were talking about blogging, its role in academic careers, as well the “blogger ethic” which tends to value substantive posts over link posts. Of our discussion, Bill recalled I had argued that
…given the sheer volume of stuff that comes through the feed reader
every day, these link posts serve a useful “buzz” function… you tend
to check out the pointers that recur in the blogs that you follow
regularly. In a sense, both the glut of information and the new value
of “unoriginal” content (like link posts) are concomitants of the shift
to what Roy Rosenzweig called the culture of abundance.
There is way too much out there now to monitor by yourself; you really
need other people to add their “me too” when someone thinks something
is cool. Think of these link posts as providing a gradient to the
search space, so you or your bots have a better chance of finding
spikes of interest.
As it turns out, I’m not crazy after all…well, at least not crazy for thinking that link posts serve a useful purpose. A recent Wired article about Jorn Barger, coiner of the term “weblog,” quotes Barger:
My intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of
“mesh network,” where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best.
So there you have it. Two cheers for being unoriginal!
Later, he goes on to argue that “A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So
del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)” If this is true, then I wonder if blogging applications like Blogger, WordPress, etc. are really the best platform for amplifying signals. If del.icio.us is better in that regard, then why not just use that? Or, could something like the shared items feed in Google Reader serve the signal amplification function even better yet?
These are the types of questions I wrestle with myself in terms of trying to put together a personal information system. Each tool does something slightly different and it’s tough sometimes to figure out how to make best use of multiple tools operating in combination. So, with shared items in Google Reader vs. del.icio.us, for example, when should I use one, the other, or both? I typically think of marking something as “shared” as the first step towards amplifying it. But not everything that gets marked as shared gets saved to del.icio.us (or Diigo…which I also use). Second level amplification comes with sharing and bookmarking at del.icio.us/Diigo. I guess the highest level of amplification would constitute the first two plus actually posting the link and/or the link and some related commentary on my blog.
Of course, I haven’t even mentioned “meme-diggers” like Digg.com. They certainly also serve an amplification function. I haven’t gotten into them much, however, precisely because I have not been sure how to work them into what little bit of a system I already have for combing through tons of information each day.
I guess what I’m driving at here is… How do we, as scholars, combine these types of tools (feeds, readers, persistent search, social bookmarking, blogs, etc.) in a way that allows us to do better and faster scholarship? How do we combine them to greatest effect so that they actually allow us to cover more material efficiently and effectively? And how do we use these tools to promote collaboration and greater daily interaction among scholars focused on similar issues (like ourselves)?
Technorati Tags: blogging, scholarship2.0
Hector Postigo at Temple University