iSSRN, our free iPhone App, was released recently. It provides instant access to the latest Social Science and Humanities research in the SSRN eLibrary from scholars around the world. iSSRN is available from Apple’s iTunes store.

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Note: This is an updated version of the previous iSSRN App and this version, not the previous one, will be updated in the future.

Access iSSRN (via iTunes)

Hat Tip: OANet, Gerry M.

Neerman says Internet filters don’t work, and that a large part of objectionable material derives from popular social networking sites such as YouTube or Facebook, or attachments to e-mail, which would not be practical for the library to block.

So until recently, the Greensboro system relied solely on monitoring by staff and its private security guards to combat pornography use.

A device called a “bandwidth shaper” is designed to identify Web sites by categories – including pornography – and allow the library to slow down access.

“It’s not filtering it,” said Tommy Joseph, manager of technology and reference at the library. “It’s discouraging it.”

Source: AP (via Charlotte Observer)

The Nielsen Company today reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for October 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 26 percent growth in total streams.

What’s most interesting is who the number three provider of streaming video is (based on total number of streams). Of course, YouTube is number one; Hulu is number two; and number three is…?

That’s right, Facebook

The complete list can be accessed here.

On a Related Note: Time Spent Viewing Video on Social Networking Sites Up 98% Year-Over-Year In October

Source: Nielsen Wire

Facebook has threatened legal action against a service that sells friends on the social networking site.

It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook’s rights.

[Snip]

Customers of USocial use it to boost follower and friend numbers on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On micro-blogging site Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. The biggest block USocial is selling is 100,000 people.

Access the Complete Article

See Also: USocial Page to Purchase Twitter Followers

Source: BBC

Today, Merriam-Webster released their 2009 Word of the Year list. And the winner is…admonish (verb): to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner.

Here’s the Rest of the Top 10:
2. emaciated
3. empathy
4. furlough
5. inaugurate
6. nugatory
7. pandemic
8. philanderer
9. repose
10. rogue

Source: Merriam-Webster
Hat Tip: L.S.

From the Summary Article:

About 20 percent of e-patients go to Internet and social-networking sites where they can talk to medical experts and other patients, says Susannah Fox, with the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

“They are posting their first-person accounts of treatments and side effects from medications,” says Fox. “They are recording and posting those podcasts. They’re tagging content. They are part of the conversation. And that, I think, is an indicator of where we could be going in terms of the future of participatory medicine.”

This reflects the growth of social-networking sites. “The Internet now is not just information,” says Fox. “There is a social life of information online. And people are using all these tools to connect with friends and family, to connect with health professionals. And people are accessing a much deeper level of information now than they were five years ago.”

The web site Patients Like Me is also mentioned.

Source: National Public Radio
Hat Tip: Jana L.

See Also: A Look at Cyberchondria (November 9, 2009)

From the Announcement:

As the nation’s job seekers attempt to find any advantage in a tight job market, more and more are turning to social networking to stand out from the crowd. However, while these sites have the potential to revolutionize the job search, they could also prove harmful for those who rely too heavily on them or misuse them, warns one employment authority.

“The job search has changed radically over the last two decades with the advent of electronic mail, the Internet, social networking, smart phones, etc. However, it is important to remember that all of these technologies simply enhance the job search; they will never replace the face-to-face connections that are critical to a successful search,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., which provides job-search training and counseling to individuals who have lost their job.

“That being said, we feel that these new networking tools are essential and now advise all of the job seekers going through our program to open LinkedIn accounts and to consider other services such as Facebook and Twitter,” said Challenger.

Much More in the Complete Announcement
You’ll also find several tips to make the best use social networking resources.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

What other words were on the shortlist?

In the Technology Category:

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Other categories with terms that were discussed can be found here.

The post also contains “Notable Word Clusters for 2009.” One has to do with Twitter and the other with President Obama.

Here’s the Twitter cluster. Check the Blog post for the Obamaisms.

Tweeps
Tweetup
Twitt
Twitterati
Twitterature
Twitterverse/sphere
Retweet
Twibe
Sweeple
Tweepish
Tweetaholic
Twittermob
Twitterhea

Executives from Facebook, Wikipedia and Google are attending a Vatican meeting to brief officials and Catholic bishops about the Internet and digital youth culture.

The symposium, which opened Thursday and runs through Sunday, also will address Internet copyright issues and hacking — including testimony from a young Swiss hacker and an Interpol cyber-crime official.

[Snip]

The symposium, which is drawing about 100 participants from around Europe, could be seen as part of that effort.

Panels will discuss social networks, the Web generation, the church’s communication strategies, and whether the Internet is changing religious practices.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: AP

+ Statement on the Report of the Task Force on University Libraries (2 pages; PDF)

+ Report of the Task Force on University Libraries (56 pages; PDF)

Here are a few portions from both documents that help to summarize the report.

Harvard’s library system now includes 73 separate libraries with 1,200 full-time employees, 16.3 million volumes, 12.8 million digital files, over 100,000 serial titles, and millions of manuscripts, photographs, musical recordings, films, and artifacts of all kinds, making it by far the largest university library in the world.

Core Recommendations of the Task Force

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure.

2. Rationalize and enhance our information technology systems.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries.

4. Rationalize our system for acquiring, accessing, and developing materials for a “single university” collection.

The Harvard University Library system needs to rationalize the manner in which all parts of the University collect and provide access to materials, and orient its focus more clearly toward ensuring access, as opposed to the current default model of building collections by acquisition.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer libraries and other institutions.

Harvard should enhance its efforts to work with other libraries and cultural institutions to build a sustainable information ecosystem for the 21st century. In some cases, this collaboration will mean building upon existing efforts to work directly with partner institutions, such as MIT. In other instances, this collaboration should include entering
into new or expanded consortial arrangements, such as BorrowDirect.

Much More After the Click

[Snip]

Having evolved organically over the centuries, the library network developed many autonomous units attached to departments, research centers, and schools. While highly distributed decision making undoubtedly contributed to the rich and varied development of Harvard’s collections, it has also contributed to dissimilar library policies and practices, to incompatible and different modes of operation, to the inhibition of flexible and forward-looking responses to intellectual and technological opportunities, to impeding the University’s ability to aggregate its buying power even in the face of monopolistic journal publishers, and to incurring increasingly unsupportable costs.

[Snip]

Even during the recent years of endowment growth, the libraries struggled to collect the books, journals, and other research materials desired by current faculty and students and to develop holdings so that future generations of Harvard scholars would have the same excellence in resources that our predecessors have bequeathed to us. The reasons for these difficulties are multiple, but include the steadily rising prices of monographs and journal subscriptions (serials), the costs of providing both electronic and paper versions of many of these resources, the expansion of the University’s intellectual horizons to new areas of study, the chronic weakness of the US dollar as the demand for international materials
continues to increase, and the explosive proliferation of both printed materials and electronic media required for scholarship now and in the future.

[Snip]

Perhaps most destabilizing to our operating model is the digital revolution. Though it is still in its early stages, it has already penetrated nearly all aspects of research and teaching. In the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences, faculty and students relate to libraries in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Indeed, all domains of academia are changing their relationship to libraries, to librarians, and to information, often involving technologies and ways of working that cannot readily be predicted from moment to moment.

From the Statement:

Steven E. Hyman, Harvard University Provost, writes:

The report of the Task Force on University Libraries is a very thoughtful document about an extraordinary system. But it is also a stark rendering of a structure in need of reform. Our collections are superlative, and our knowledgeable library staff are central to the success of the University’s mission. The way the system operates, however, is placing terrible strain on the libraries and the people who work within them.

[Snip]

Widely varying information technology systems present barriers to communication among libraries and stymie collaboration with institutions beyond our campus gates. Our funding mechanisms have created incentives to collect or subscribe in ways that diminish the vitality of the overall collection.

Libraries the world over are undergoing a challenging transition into the digital age, and Harvard’s libraries are no exception. The Task Force report points us toward a future in which our libraries must be able to work together far more effectively than is the case today as well as to collaborate with other great libraries to maximize access to the materials needed by our scholars.

Source: Office of the Provost, Harvard University

Hat Tip: OA tracking project

Photo Tagger [via Face.com], which launched to a limited group of users in July, scans a user’s photo albums on the social-networking site, then lets him tag faces it identifies. It groups multiple shots of each person, making it easy to tag large albums, and users can also adjust or remove incorrectly tagged pictures.

Once a member has been identified, the app prompts him or her to approve the tag — a crucial privacy step, since he or she may not want to be labeled in a photo. It also works with a member’s current photo-privacy settings on Facebook.

[Snip]

Face.com is also introducing a new Photo Tagger feature, dubbed Face Alerts, along with the launch. It allows members to be notified through Facebook or email when new public photos are uploaded of them or their friends. “It’s a Google Alerts for faces,” Mr. Hirsch said, and a way for members to gain more control over where their image appears.

[Snip]

Photo Tagger is free, though he said Face.com is considering fee-based services that it could provide over the system. He declined to say what they might be.

Source: Digits, Wall Street Journal

Note: Not mentioned in the WSJ article is another service (it’s a private alpha release at the moment) from Face.com named Photo Finder.

Here’s how the service describes itself, “A powerful app for finding lost photos of you and your friends on Facebook.” On another page it offers a clearer view of what Photo Finder does, ” Photo Finder scans facebook photos looking for untagged faces of you and friends.” As we said, it’s a private alpha release but you can register for a logon/password here.

Although Photo Tagger has undergone months of testing and more testing it will worth watching to see if it can handle the massive number of Facebook users who will likely use the service for the first time in the next few days.

LinkedIn Corp. and Twitter Inc. have announced a partnership that lets users instantly post status updates on both of the social networks.

The two Bay Area companies announced the deal late Monday, but the details of the formal agreement are confidential, said Krista Canfield, LinkedIn’s senior public relations manager.

LinkedIn and Twitter said they would roll out the new services “gradually over the next couple of days.”

[Snip]

LinkedIn now offers its own status updates. But as LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue explained, “The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn, you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”

Source: Seattle P-I

See Also: You can learn more and view the video mentioned in the article here (via LinkedIn Blog)

The use of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote businesses has exploded over the past six months, according to the results of a study that were released today.

People using Twitter to get the word out about their company, sales and promotions jumped more than 250% from this past spring, according to a study done by Palo Alto Networks, a maker of firewall technology. The number of companies using facebook for such tasks grew by 192%, the sudy found. The report said that workers are using social networks as promotional vehicles both with and without management knowledge.

[Snip]

Use of Twitter and Facebook both for business and personal use has definitely have been on a significant upswing over the past year-plus.

Just last month, Experian Hitwise, an Internet monitoring firm, reported that visits to Twitter, the fourth most popular social networking site, increased by 1,170% in September compared to the year-earlier period.

In the same time frame, market leader Facebook saw its already impressive market share increase by 194%, letting it easily maintain its recently attained place atop the U.S. social networking market. Facebook, which grabbed its 300 millionth user in September, captured 58.59% of all U.S. social network visits last month, compared to 19.94% the year before.

See Also: Access the Official News Release and Find a Link to the Complete Report (via Palo Alto Networks)

Source: Computerworld

Ed. Note: We posted the following item last weekend. After using Newsy for another week, we believe it deserves to be a Resource of the Week and is also deserving of your attention.

Here’s an idea we haven’t seen before. We were a skeptical at first but after a short time we can say we like what Newsy is up to. The current version of the service has been available since April, 2009 when it was relaunched. The Newsy iPhone app launched a couple of weeks ago.

The idea is as simple and and fresh. We’ve not seen anything similar available for free. Basically, take stories in the news and then bring together multiple video (and sometimes text-based) news reports from a number of sources and place them all on a single location. It’s not only a great way to see how a news story is reported but viewing the same story from different news organizations can potentially turn up facts from one source that the other source does not report on. By the way, the company likes to think to think of themselves as “news analyzer” and not a news aggregator. We think both phrases can work together Whatever you call Newsy there is plenty of value here.

Newsy can be useful in many situations. One potential use is helping to teach critical information skills by reviewing what is and is not reported on in a news story and how it’s reported. For example, how much time does each source give to the story.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to aggregating news reports on the same story, Newsy produces their OWN original video content summarizing the material from each source into a single report. For those who don’t want to view each source video one at a time, here’s a way to learn what each one is reporting in just a minute or two.

You can keyword search Newsy (you’re searching metadata) or browse by one of seven categories:

+ World
+ Economy
+ U.S.
+ Politics
+ Tech/Sci
+ Environment
+ Culture

You can also sort results by:

+ Most Popular
+ Most Recent
+ Most Commented
+ Highest Rated
+ Editor’s Picks

Let’s review how Newsy works:

1] Find a story, search or browse
We searched for “Obama” and got back 10 results.

2] Select the story; We chose “Obama Gives Donors Access to White House” from October 29, 2009 with a video summary that runs about three minutes.

3] After clicking the play we were taken to this page.

5] Immediately, Newsy’s own video summary begins playing.

6] Above the video box (which can be embedded on any web page) notice the direct links to the various news sources used in the summary.

7] In this case the sources are:

+ Fox News
+ The Hill (Text-Based)
+ CNN
+ The Washington Times
+ CBS
+ The Washington Post

A good and well-balanced selection of sources. If you click on any of them, a new window opens and the “source” video (or text) begins playing. Text sources link directly to the article. No more going all over the web to find the content.

Quick Hits

+ Newsy does not offer its services for every news story. That’s minor when you sit back and review what we think is real value in what they offer. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cover more in the future.

+ An iPhone version of Newsy is also available. It’s a free app. Here’s a link to get Newsy iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

+ If you register for the site you can comment on any story.

+ A text transcript of each Newsy original summary is available. You’ll find it below the summary video box.

+ You can share reports using direct links to many social networks or e-mail a link to the selected story.

+ An RSS feed of stories is available as well as the Newsy blog.1

We hope that Newsy continues to offer a wide variety sources and a well-balanced set of sources for each story it covers. One thing we would love to see is a source list (we’re guessing the Newsy uses more sources than listed on this page) and perhaps the expansion of this page about how news stories are selected. Another page about the news source selection process would be useful. Finally, we would be very happy if you could view stories by source. In other words, show me all of the stories that use video from MSNBC, BBC, CBS, etc.

You can learn more about the company this STLToday article. For example, they are based in Columbia, MO and have a staff (as of a few weeks ago) of 19.

Many Thanks to Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines for letting us know about Newsy.
Yesterday, Charles ran a post about Newsy focusing on the success of their iPhone app.

From the News Release/Summary:

Emerging findings from a major three-year research study into the information-seeking behaviour of doctoral students have highlighted the need for far greater understanding of the generation born between 1982 and 1994 – commonly dubbed Generation Y.

Researchers of Tomorrow was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to establish a benchmark for research behaviour, against which future generations can be measured – and also to provide guidance for librarians and information specialists on how best to meet the research needs of Generation Y scholars.

The longitudinal study will be supported by a number of surveys to establish the wider context of the doctoral research landscape. The first of these surveys has just been completed; it surveyed a representative sample of all doctoral students in the UK and yielded a number of significant interim findings.

+ Information format. Three quarters of Generation Y students – more than those in any other age group – found the information they sought in an e-journal article.

+ Emergent technology. Only a small proportion of respondents (10-30%) in any age group say they use ‘emergent technology’ – such as wikis, virtual research environments, social networking and other Web 2.0 applications – in their research, Of those that do use them, more generally find them useful in their research than not.

+ Help and advice. Fewer Generation Y students than other age groups say they regularly use library staff support to find research resources (11% of Generation Y compared to an average of 17% for other age groups), or take advice from subject specialist librarians (4% compared to 9% average). More Generation Y respondents (46%) than any other age group turn to their fellow students and/or supervisors for support in using emergent technologies.

+ Location of work. Compared to other age groups, more Generation Y researchers work from a dedicated or shared office space (or laboratory or studio) (40%), than work from their own home (39%).

[Snip]

Joanna Newman, the British Library’s Head of Higher Education, said, “The interim findings of the Researchers of Tomorrow study provide a fascinating snapshot of current research behaviour of doctoral students. [Our emphasis] It’s perhaps surprising that so few researchers in the 21-27 range really use the wide range of Web 2.0 applications for research or collaborative working. And when it comes to emergent technology, they’re more likely to seek the advice of their peers or supervisors than librarians or information specialists – a finding that could suggest a need for professionals to rethink how best to deliver advice and support in this area.”

More in the News Release/Summary

See Also: Researchers of Tomorrow Home Page

Source: The British Library

Access the Complete Report ||| PDF Version

From the News Release/Summary:

People who use modern information and communication technologies have larger and more diverse social networks, according to new national survey findings that for the first time explore how people use the internet and mobile phones to interact with key family and friends.

These new finding challenge fears that use of new technologies has contributed to a long-term increase in social isolation in the United States.

The new findings from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that, on average, the size of people’s discussion networks – those with whom people discuss important matters– is 12% larger amongst mobile phone users, 9% larger for those who share photos online, and 9% bigger for those who use instant messaging. The diversity of people’s core networks – their closest and most significant confidants – tends to be 25% larger for mobile phone users, 15% larger for basic internet users, and even larger for frequent internet users, those who use instant messaging, and those who share digital photos online.

[Snip]

Key Findings

+ Some have worried that internet use limits people’s participation in their local communities, but the Pew Internet report finds that most internet activities have little or a positive relationship to local activity. For instance, internet users are as likely as anyone else to visit with their neighbors in person. Cell phone users, those who use the internet frequently at work, and bloggers are more likely to belong to a local voluntary association, such as a youth group or a charitable organization. However, we find some evidence that use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some neighborhood involvement.

+ Challenging the assumption that internet use encourages social contact across vast distances, this study shows that many internet technologies are used as much for local contact as they are for distant communication.

+ Internet use does not pull people away from public places. Rather, use is associated with frequent visits to places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants, the kinds of locales where research shows that people are likely to encounter a wider array of people and diverse points of view. Indeed, internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces. For instance, of those Americans who have been in a library within the past month, 38% logged on to the internet while they were there, 18% have done so in a café or coffee shop.

+ People’s mobile phone use outpaces their use of landline phones as a primary method of staying in touch with their closest family and friends, but face-to-face contact still trumps all other methods. On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile-phone contact on 195 days of the year; landline phone contact on 125 days; text-messaging contact on the mobile phone 125 days; email contact 72 days; instant messaging contact 55 days; contact via social networking websites 39 days; and contact via letters or cards on 8 days.

More After a Click

+ Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party.

+ While participation in traditional social settings, like neighborhoods, voluntary organizations, and public spaces, remain the strongest predictors for the overall diversity of people’s social networks, internet use, and specifically use of social networking services like Facebook, are also associated with knowing more people from a wider variety of backgrounds.

Access the News Release/Summary

Access the Complete Report ||| PDF Version

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

From the Summary:

Information in social networks moves at an unexpectedly slow pace, with the exception of some mass events. This is one of the main conclusions of a study carried out by researchers at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) and IBM, who analyze how the behaviour of internauts influences the spread of information through Internet.

The spread of information in social networks, something of crucial importance in awareness and marketing campaigns or the spreading of rumours and viruses, for example, is largely determined by the great heterogeneity of internauts in their response time, according to the researchers. Traditional models estimated that internauts respond in approximately one day and that, as such, it took one day for information to be transmitted. However, this study, based on an actual experiment by IBM to observe and quantify the spread of business information in social networks, points out that it occurs at two speeds due to user activity. “Those who respond very quickly to e-mails, technology addicts who are always connected, are the ones responsible for spreading certain rumours or campaigns quickly via Internet,” notes Esteban Moro, professor of Mathematics at the UC3M.

Source: Carlos III University of Madrid

Today, an article from Cell discusses how some scientists are using Twitter.

Twitter needs no introduction. This “microblogging” service has gained tremendous popularity in the 2 years since its launch. Yet, most scientists are steering clear of it. Laura Bonetta speaks to some who have found value in tweeting.

One scientist who has found value in Twitter is Brent Stockwell, associate professor of biology and chemistry at Columbia University. “I use it to collect information from science newsfeeds and from various individuals,” he says. “It provides a single source where you can go to scan news and papers.”

There are many ways to stay abreast of research findings, including automated PubMed searches and Google alerts. But, says Stockwell, Twitter provides a unique way to hear about papers “tangentially related to what I am doing, so that they would not come up through my usual alerts, and not sufficiently high profile that I would read about them in The New York Times.

Much More After a Click

Disseminating scientific information is a driving mission for many Twitter users. “One thing everyone agrees with is that scientists have to learn to communicate their work to non-scientists. Twitter allows anyone to see science in a way that is more accessible, such as scientists reporting on their daily failures and successes,” says [Chris} Gunter. “In addition, many science writers are on Twitter and that is one place where they get their news tips. They can then write stories that educate and publicize science, and more accurately explain what scientists do to lay people.”

[Snip]

But short messages do pose some limitations. “It is a double-edged sword. The majority of my tweets are pointers to other resources, so there is a headline—an enticement in other words—and a link to the resource. You don’t need more than 140 characters for that,” says [David] Bradley. “However you cannot have a decent, full-blown, high-level scientific debate via text message, and Twitter is just the same.”

That limitation is one of the reasons that Jonathan Weissman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco, has stayed away from Twitter. “I could see something similar to Twitter might be useful as a way for a group of scientists to share information. To ask questions like ‘Does anyone have a good antibody?’ ‘How much does everyone pay for oligos?’ ‘Does anyone have experience with this technique?’” he says. But such discussions, he adds, could not be carried out with strict restrictions on text length

Source: Cell

Sharing small snippets of information about your daily life is a key feature of the online social networking revolution. Soon status updates and other social information could be generated automatically.

A team of European researchers are working on merging the instant sharing of social information, popularised by networking and messaging platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users’ whereabouts and activities. Combined, the two technologies promise to provide pervasive awareness, a powerful new way to stay in touch with friends and relatives, whether they live down the street or on the other side of the globe.

“The theory we developed as the basis for our work is that social connections between people are enhanced by both the number and the quality of the interactions between them. Pervasive awareness systems can support and improve this social communication,” explains Achilles Kameas, a senior researcher at the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (raCTI) of Patras, Greece.

Kameas coordinated the EU-funded ASTRA project, which brought together researchers from multiple disciplines, including psychology, interaction design, knowledge engineering and computer science, to take social networking to the next level.

Users of a social networking platform based on the ASTRA approach, for example, would rarely have to post status updates manually to let their family know what they are doing or where they are. Surrounded by smart objects and sensors in their home or office, the system continually updates their status information, automatically telling friends that they are unavailable to receive a phone call while they are busy cooking or that they do not want to be disturbed during a business meeting.

Much More in the Complete Article Including a 6:50 second video titled, “A Connected Day”

Source: ICT Results

1) About three weeks ago (10/19/2009), David Crotty posted that how scientists ARE NOT using social media.

[David] Bradley gives what I think are overly generous estimates of use of the sites, given the level of traffic one sees on most. Using sheer numbers of members is always problematic since so many people sign up, take a look around, and never return. Numbers of members actively posting in the last week/month are much more telling, but very few sites are willing to give out such data. Proponents of such networks argue that we’re still in early days and that eventually, membership will grow. Personally, I think that ship has already sailed, at least for the current set of offerings. The issue isn’t a lack of awareness of social networks–who hasn’t heard of Myspace or Facebook?–but instead is a lack of compelling reasons to participate.

2) Today (11/3/2009), Kent Anderson reports that scientists ARE using social media and in some cases social networks.

In an analysis published in the October 30th issue of Cell, Laura Bonetta quotes a number of scientists who are using Twitter to broadcast awareness of papers they find interesting while learning about papers others find interesting. Most of those quoted have 1,000+ followers. In addition, scientists Bonetta found are Twittering from meetings to help peers follow along…t seems there’s plenty of evidence that scientists are using social networks (from general ones like Facebook and LinkedIn to more specialized ones like Academia.edu and others), as well as social media tools, from blogs to Twitter to RSS.

We included just two brief passages from each post. You make the call after reading both of them.

Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

See Also: Facebook for Scientists Gets Millions in Funding, Seven Founding Schools Involved