URLs of wisdom (7th December)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. This instalment is a bumper two-week edition because things were pretty quiet over Thanksgiving.

Network analysis

• Leadership and followership – a look at how to identify leaders within an organisation based on organisational network analysis.

• Unravelling the mysteries of your Twitter network – Interesting interview by Kirk Engelhardt of Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Research Institute. Note that for the analysis mentioned, the range of the study included the NASW’s science writers conference at which at least 3 of the top 10 tweeps were presenting. Would love to see this repeated at various points througout the year to see how fluid the network is, and also to look at other hashtags to see if there are any differences in the communities formed around science communication in different countries.

• Making social media research more reliable and reproducible – “A further problem is the lack of unrestricted access to data. According to the Science paper, social media companies use proprietary algorithms to sample and filter their data streams, so researchers are given a limited selection of the total data available, but no information on how that particular data was selected. While some researchers have relationships with these companies and are given inside knowledge of how the algorithms work, they aren’t able to describe what they know about the proprietary processing or the ways they corrected for the data sampling. This flouts a basic premise of scientific research: researchers should report on all details of the method used, so that other researchers can try it themselves to see if the results can be replicated.”

Behaviour

• The fall of Facebook – “People don’t want to perform their lives publicly in the same way that they wanted to five years ago.”

• Why do I always come way from meetings feeling a fool? Great analysis and tips from Athene Donald – and relevant to different types of meetings and discussions.

• Rehumanising e-learning – Dave White considers the importance of self-expression before users will truly engage in an online learning environment.

• On the challenges of not creeping-out users of your online tool by revealing that you know too much about them “As our digital world becomes increasingly circumscribed by the machines that watch us as we work and play, we will be faced with more frequent decisions about who and what else we want to see in those spaces.”

Academia online 

• Taking pleasure in small numbers – how intimately are social media stats governing us. “Small numbers hold out to us the possibility of converting figures back into real, living humans.”
• The problem with wikis 

Blogging

• The future of science blogging – one perspective. Slides from a talk Paige Brown gave at this year’s SciLogs blogging retreat.

• How has science blogging changed over the years?

Communities 

• How to build and structure a Community Team – including the different role that a community team fills with an organisation.

• The Community Management Salary Survey report is now out.

• Discovered a new blog recently, thanks to Twitter. Jesse Hertzberg covers various topics which really boil down to good communication within organisations, and creating a culture of community.

Web/social media developments

• Web statistics ignore a billion people in developing countries “It could also lead to a misalignment of aid and effort in building the web in developing countries if the actual use is not recognised. The direct effect, though, is to make advertisers and service providers think that the internet audience in emerging economies is far smaller than it really is.”

• Facebook much less popular than dark social for sharing “Sharing activity through email, instant messaging and forum posts, aka Dark Social, is three times larger than the sharing activity on Facebook, globally. 69% of all sharing activity takes place via Dark Social globally versus 23% via Facebook.”

• Finance media’s hottest club is Ello – why do users end up where they do?

Resources

• The tips continue from the folks at ImpactStory – this latest highlights includes making the most of networking at conferences, keeping up to date with your colleagues’ work and tracking your social media impact.

• What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received? The chefs at the Scholarly Kitchen shares the tips they received.

 Upcoming events

• Next #Futurepub event on the future of scientific publishing – January 27th, 2015 in London.
• The British Science Association Science Communication Conference – June 18th – 19th 2015, at Manchester Metropolitan Uni.

Just for fun

There’s always one…