URLs of wisdom – links

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URLs of wisdom (January 31st 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Self-promotion

Behaviour

  • Why apps for messaging are trending “The most popular apps that sustain themselves day after day, month after month, at the top of the leader board, are messengers…That’s a reflection of what people do on their phones.”
  • The cultural specificity of health technologies “App designers and those who develop many other digital technologies for medical and health-related purposes often fail to recognise the social and cultural differences that may influence how people interact with them. Just as cultural beliefs about health and illness vary from culture to culture, so too do responses to the cultural artefacts that are digital health technologies.”

Academia online 

Social media/networks

  • When is a feature a product and a product a business? Interesting read about scholarly publishing and new technologies “Get three publishers into a conference room together or, more productively, at a bar and wait for the conversation to turn to something like this:  “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could [insert your feature here]?” And it would be cool. Conversations like these mostly focus on new things that would be appreciated by end-users–because we are all, at certain moments, end-users ourselves. This creative process is valuable, but it ultimately has to be married to how the new capability will be expressed in an economic context. Hence the defining question of the age: What is the business model?”
  • Reaching 4000 Twitter followers – Paige Brown reflects on what Twitter means to her: “It’s not about the followers, it’s about the friendships”
  • Facebook use and academic performance – “the relationship between Facebook and grades provides a way of capturing self-regulation skills in freshmen. In other words, the pattern of Facebook use helps us see something about self-regulation we might not otherwise be able to measure. This is also evidenced by how regular use of Facebook for students at other class ranks is not related to academic performance.”
  • Not strictly “online” – new PeerJ pre-print asking what the optimal size for a research group is – “We show that the number of publications increases linearly with group size…[further examination of the data] suggests that PIs contribute on average 5-times more productivity than an average group member and using multiple regression we estimate that post-doctoral researchers are approximately 3–times more productive than PhD students.”

Outreach

  • The latest Pew Research Center survey looks at public and scientists’ views on science and society and “marks a more formal commitment [by the Center] to studying the intersection of science with all aspects of society – from public opinion, to politics and policymaking, to religious and ethical considerations, to education and the economy.”
  • And some responses to the survey results – from Matt Shipman – “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: to protect public funding for research at the state and federal level – much less increase that funding – you need to have broad public support. And thekeys to building that public support lie, in part, in science communication. Now, do I have the answers? No. We know that the deficit model – the longstanding idea that folks would support science-based decision-making if they just knew more about science – isn’t all that effective. But we haven’t come up with anything to replace it. Yet. I think a lot of folks agree that we need to incorporate cultural mores and beliefs into our science communication efforts, and that science communication shouldn’t be confrontational. We shouldn’t start out by saying “What you believe is wrong, and here’s why.” But how do we do those things? I have no idea.”
  • …and John Besley at The Conversation: “The main thing that seems potentially troubling about the research results is the small decline in positive views about science. Such results echo through the report’s comparisons of the 2014 figures against a similar study from 2009. For example, whereas 79% of Americans thought science made life better in 2014, 83% held this view in 2009.”

Communities 

  • The Community Roundtable have opened their annual survey on the State of Community Management. It should take about 20 minutes to complete.

Social media developments

  • With the news that Andrew Sullivan, a blogger of 15 years, has decided to stop blogging, Matthew Ingram responds: “Blogging is still very much alive, we just call it something else now” –“When blogs first showed up, there was no other economical way to write and share your thoughts and hear from other writers or readers, but now they are everywhere. We can tweet and Snapchat and Instagram, and post things to Facebook or Google+ or Medium or dozens of other places.”

Resources

  • Buzzfeed shares its ethics guide “a first attempt at articulating the goal of merging the best of traditional media’s values with a true openness to the deep shifts in the forms of media and communication.”

Just for fun

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URLs of wisdom (25th January 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

Privacy

  • Privacy and cybersecurity – key findings from Pew Research – “Americans express a broad loss of control over the way their personal data are managed by companies. Fully 91% of adults “agree” or “strongly agree” that “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.”

Other news

  • How do people post important life events on Facebook? “the specific event itself did not determine how an individual would share the news on Facebook, rather whether it was positive or negative. Users tended to share positive life events indirectly and negative life events directly”

Academia online 

Social media/networks

  • The number one predictor of career success according to network science “Having an open network is a huge opportunity in a few ways:
    • More accurate view of the world. It provides them with the ability to pull information from diverse clusters so errors cancel themselves out. Research by Philip Tetlock shows that people with open networks are better forecasters than people with closed networks.
    • Ability to control the timing of information sharing. While they may not be the first to hear information, they can be the first to introduce information to another cluster. As a result, they can leverage the first move advantage.
    • Ability to serve as a translator / connector between groups. They can create value by serving as an intermediary and connecting two people or organizations who can help each other who wouldn’t normally run into each other.
    • More breakthrough ideas. Brian Uzzi, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the Kellogg School of Management, performed a landmark study where he delved into the tens of millions of academic studies throughout history. He compared their results by the number of citations (links from other research papers) they received and the other papers they referenced. A fascinating pattern emerged. The top performing studies had references that were 90% conventional and 10% atypical (i.e., pulling from other fields). This rule has held constant over time and across fields. People with open networks are more easily able to create atypical combinations.”

Outreach

  • Do 80% of Americans not know there’s DNA in food? Ben Lillie looks at a recent claim and the survey behind the headline. “We only go and poke at numbers if they seem wrong. What that means is that “80% of people don’t know there’s DNA in food” didn’t register as odd for quite a lot of people. I think that’s a problem. “The US public is incredibly stupid about science” is a hell of a seductive narrative for scientists. And for that reason it’s very much worth questioning.”

Communities 

  • Jono Bacon discusses the challenges of bridging Marketing and Community activities within an organisation: “If we are passionate about a brand, we want to play an active role in how we can make that brand successful. We want to transition from being a member of the audience to being a member of the team. Most brand managers want this. All community managers want and should achieve this. Thus, brand and community managers are really singing from the same hymn sheet and connected to the same broader mission. Brand and community managers are simply people with different skill-sets putting different jigsaw pieces into the same puzzle.”

Social media developments

  • Facebook allows uses to flag “fake” news stories – what does this mean for real publishers? – “Facebook is adding a layer of what looks like editorial accountability without actually taking on the responsibility of figuring out what’s true…So Facebook gives the impression that it is an editorial gatekeeper, but there’s still this buffer that protects Facebook from having to actually explain its thinking the way a newsroom would have to.”

 

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URLs of wisdom (January 18th 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

Privacy

  • An old fogey’s analysis of a teenager’s view on social media – Danah Boyd responds to everyone who’s been sending her a recent article by teenager, Andrew Watts. “Andrew’s depiction of his peers’ use of social media is a depiction of a segment of the population, notably the segment most like those in the tech industry. In other words, what the tech elite are seeing and sharing is what people like them would’ve been doing with social media X years ago. It resonates. But it is not a full portrait of today’s youth. And its uptake and interpretation by journalists and the tech elite whitewashes teens practices in deeply problematic ways.”

Other news

  • The tactics of collaboration – Steve Wright proposes 4 stages of collaboration, including vulnerability as the third. Compare with the 3 types of working together (contribution, collaboration, co-creation) discussed at the wikimania conference.
  • Your computer knows you better than your friends do “Computers aren’t yet as smart and sultry as the one in Her, but armed with your Facebook data, they can accurately judge your personality in a fraction of a second. Compared with humans predicting their friends’ personalities by filling out the Big Five questionnaire, the computer’s prediction based on Facebook likes was almost 15% more accurate on average.”
  • Promoting the dead on Facebook – “A page remembering someone who died acts doubly as a space for friends and family to publish memories and as one to help each other grieve. But when that content leaves the page and that network, those two uses of Facebook conflict. The page becomes context-free when it moves outside the circles of friends and family…”

Academia online 

Blogging

  • Another update from Paige Brown about responses from her #MySciBlog interviews – “I guess the other reason, the other approach to my blog that I took with that, because I have this complete freedom, to write about whatever I wanted to write about, I was going to write about subjects that I knew would NEVER get covered in the mainstream media. Because, because the organisms that I was going to write about were just too obscure, they weren’t, you know, fuzzy mammals… And so, I wanted to offer people content that they would never, almost never find anywhere else.”

Social media/networks

  • Creating effective social media networks – why it isn’t all about the numbers. Heather Doran thinks about how we measure social media success: “The problem the belief that people should use a one size-fits-all model. This will not work. Firstly, all social media networks are different so a ‘like’ on facebook doesn’t equal a follower on twitter. Interactions are subtle and hard to measure. You need to be familiar with the platform and how it works to get the most out of it and to understand what is worth measuring.”
  • Scientific societies in the internet age – Sarah Boon outlines some of the benefits of societies getting online “At the simplest level, migration to online platforms and utilization of social media is budget friendly. With science funding in decline across the board, operating costs at scientific societies can also be hard to cover. Sending out e-newsletters instead of printing paper copies, having online membership renewals instead of mailing them, connecting via email instead of in print…all of these activities reduce costs. The other rationale for a bigger online presence is to better connect society members with each other (regardless of age), to recruit new members, and to connect science and scientific societies with the broader public community.”
  • Social media and its impact on medical research – discussion of a recent paper that looked at the effect of a journal promoting half of its papers on Twitter and Facebook via a “social media campaign” of 1 tweet and 1 Facebook post per paper.
  • Frontiers launches Loop – Open Access publishers, Frontiers launched an updated version of the Frontiers Network for scientists which now includes embeddable profiles that can be included on research articles.

Outreach

  • Scientists as communicators – An interview with AAAS Fellow, Julia Moore: “We are not going to solve the problems of the 21st century unless there is better communication between scientists and the public,” Moore stressed. Unfortunately, this skill is often under-appreciated and misunderstood in the scientific community, she notes: “A lot of people in science want to lecture and not listen. They want people to be where they are, curiosity-driven for the sake of new knowledge—as opposed to where people really are, which is worried about their bills or their children’s health or the world their grandchildren are going to grow up in.”

Communities 

  • Jono Bacon shares 5 key things to focus on when hiring for a Community Manager – “The word “community” means radically different things to different people. For some a community is a customer-base, for some it is engineering, for some it is a support function, for others it may be social media. When your new community manager joins, your other staff will have their own interpretation of what “community” means. You should help to align the community manger’s focus and goals with the rest of the organization.”

Social media developments

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URLs of wisdom (January 11th 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

  • The Science Opinion Games: new conversations, same old voices? –“Scientific discourse, peer review, and internet conversations are often unpleasant, conflict-driven, and aggressive. Less tolerance and rewarding of that behavior could help cultivate a public science discussion space that’s more appealing across the board, but particularly to women as a group.”

Academia online 

  • Dark research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online. PeerJ pre-print by Ross Mounce looking at indexing of research. “This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

Blogging

Social media/networks

  • Scholarly communities face crucial social challenges in maintaining digital networks that can sustain participation – Great read on why social challenges matter as much as tech ones “this opportunity points toward a deeper, underlying challenge, for societies and scholars alike: building and maintaining communities that inspire and sustain participation. This is nowhere near as easy as it may sound. And it’s not just a matter of the “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come” problem; problems can creep up even when they do come.”

Outreach

  • Science in the words of Alan Alda – Interview with the namesake of the Alda Center for Communicating Science at StonyBrook University. “Listening is what lets things happen— whether that’s on stage, or in the classroom. Listening—really listening—to another person, even when you don’t agree with them, can feel dangerous, as if you are making yourself vulnerable to that other person. But that’s what allows a conversation to take place, rather than a debate.”

Science Publishing

Communities 

  • Great read by Cameron Neylon on the dangers of being defined as one thing and how this hinders interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving – “as I’ve become interested in tackling larger and more challenging problems its also become obvious that new perspectives are needed. This kind of approach needs positive, enriching filters, not negative ones, because by excluding certain streams you eliminate unfamiliar perspectives. This is why being labelled as “a scientist” generally stops me cold. It is a rejection of perspective, a rejection in my world view of an opportunity. It is bound up in a self identify of difference that uses difference as a way to filter and exclude – something that for me is in opposition to scholarship that is of most interest.”

Upcoming events 

Resources

Just for fun

Time for Clippy to make a comeback?

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URLs of wisdom (January 4th 2015)

Happy New Year!

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

  • To keep or ditch comments? “Still, it’s becoming more common, and more acceptable to readers, to see outlets ditching their comments. And for most sites, eliminating the section won’t result in an overall hit on engagement, though it may deter a select group.”
  • Cutting through Singer’s paradox “…this is the problem every good cause outside of your current walk to work faces. They are trying to solve a difficult problem far away. They’re working to do something that is neither close nor now. And often, because the work is so hard, there’s no satisfactory thank you, certainly not the thank you of, we’re done, you’re a hero. The challenge for real philanthropic growth, then, is to either change the culture so our marketing psychology is to donate to things that are neither close nor now, and that offer little in the way of thanks, or to create change that hacks our current perceptions of what’s important.”

Academia online 

Blogging

Social media

  • A political economy of Twitter data – “to study social media data, and in particular Twitter data, is to concern oneself with emerging economies of data and their attendant politics. Rather than considering platforms like commercial social networking systems as easy and plentiful sources of research data, they require hard work: it is hard to gain access to that data (as non-technical and non-wealthy academic researchers); and: some hard critical epistemological reflection is required upon what can and cannot be asked and/or concluded given the specificities of each kind of dataset and data source we use. The means of access, the APIs and other elements necessary to access the data, are important interlocutors in the stories we tell with these data.”
  • Social media and science communication – what are your benchmarks for success? “If you write for a blog for instance, how many reads are considered doing well? Do comments matter, and if so, how many is good? If you make videos, how many views make each hour of production worth while? And if you hang out on Twitter, what’s the quality and quantity of retweets and engagements that make your time feel well spent?”

Communities 

  • A content strategy for codes of conduct –“Codes of Conduct exist to communicate with people who may be (or have been) the target of abuse that they are participating in a community where their needs are heard, listened to, and will be met with respect and concern. It is to make clear to the community at large that we protect vulnerable people and do not tolerate abuse….There is a difference between taking steps to create a safe conference environment, and communicating to the public that steps have been taken.”

Web/social media developments

  • “The social media phase of the internet is over“ – “Messaging is the new social media … Families use WhatsApp groups instead of Facebook. Kids use Snapchat instead of Instagram. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in February of this year was the transaction that defined this trend.”

Resources

https://twitter.com/sarahwerning/status/551382777959313409

Just for fun

New emoticons for 2015!

 

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URLs of wisdom (28th December)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. Thanks for following this year – more to come in 2015!

Network analysis

Behaviour

  • How engaged time affects reading comprehension “Roughly 40% of participants engaged for less than 15 seconds correctly assessed the message of the article, compared to more than 80% of those engaged for more than a minute.”

Academia online 

Blogging

Social media

Web/social media developments

  • Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty – Facebook’s 2014 summary hasn’t been a welcome suggestion for all users. “It may not be possible to reliably pre-detect whether a person wants to see their year in review, but it’s not at all hard to ask politely—empathetically—if it’s something they want.  That’s an easily-solvable problem.  Had the app been designed with worst-case scenarios in mind, it probably would have been.”  And the follow-up post, by the same author: “…they have fallen prey to…a failure to anticipate how a design decision that really worked in one way completely failed in another, and work to handle both cases.”
  • Jay Rosen on the importance of understanding the relationship between journalism and business models based on content – “The Editor has to come to a clear agreement with the publisher and commercial staff on: a.) what the business model is, meaning: how are we going to sustain ourselves and grow? b.) exactly how — in that model — the editorial team creates value for the business, and c.) the zone of independence the editorial team will need to meet those expectations.”

 

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URLs of wisdom (21st December)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

  • Review of an interesting-sounding book: “Sharing our lives online: risks and exposure in social media”.
  • The readers we can’t friend – on reaching beyond social media communities for sharing of news content. “We have become supplicants to other platforms in order to get our readers. That’s already a problem, and it’s going to be a bigger problem. How do we increase both the broadness of reach and the depth of loyalty with our own names as news organizations and not as a brand page at the indulgence of fickle Silicon Valley trend-chasing? Do we collaborate with other news organizations to create our own social platforms? Will the answer be partnerships and memberships that draw readers into news brands by combining reporting with live events and entertainment and context?”
  • 2015 – the year we get creeped out by algorithms? Three significant factors are outlined. i) One: Our devices are becoming more and more central to our social, personal, financial, and civic interactions. ii) Two: Most digital mediation takes place on platforms and apps in which the true owner, the platform itself, keeps centralized control. iii) Three: Algorithms are increasingly being deployed to make decisions where there is no right answer, only a judgment call.”

Academia online 

  • The latest OKCast episode is an interview with @arfon about open science, citizen science and cultural change in academia.
  • The Mozilla Science Lab blog is reviewing their year – this post on prototyping for change in online research gives an overview of some of their projects.

Blogging

  • Big changes at the Scientific American blog network were announced this week with the network roughly halved in size as part of a “reshaping” process. Matt Shipman interviewed the blog editor, Curtis Brainard, while Paige Brown speculated about some of the decisions involved and DrugMonkey ponders about the life span of blog networks in general: “networks appear to have a natural life-cycle. The ones that are tied up to a traditional publishing entity perhaps are on a short burn from the start”.
  • “Internal motivations, ‘I blog for myself,’ are the motivations that keep us going when we can’t know whether we are truly making a difference or not to science literacy and broader public understanding of science.” – Paige Brown considers blogging motivations.

Social media

Science Publishing

Communities 

  • Bad community is worse than no community – thinking about digital engagement: “By coupling a format that encourages intimacy with a network design that encourages out-of-context amplification, Twitter has evolved into something fundamentally volatile.”

Web/social media developments

  • What are MOOCs good for? – “For all the hype, MOOCs are really just content—the latest iteration of the textbook. And just like a book on a library shelf, they can be useful to a curious passerby thumbing through a few pages—or they can be the centerpiece to a well-taught course. On their own, MOOCs are hardly more likely than textbooks to re-create a quality college education in all its dimensions.”
  • Buzzfeed CEO: “It’s not just a site, it’s a whole process” – “We went from the traditional media model of content and distribution to the vertically-integrated model of content distribution technology to the network-integrated model of technology helping at every level.”

Resources

  • Wikimedia produces a monthly YouTube recording of discussions of recent research on the platform. Find all the archives here.

Just for fun

Happy holidays!

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URLs of wisdom (14th December)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Network analysis

Behaviour

  • We can’t trust Uber – considering data protection in the age of apps: “Codes of conduct developed by companies are a start, but we need information fiduciaries: independent, external bodies that oversee how data is used, backed by laws that ensure that individuals can see, correct and opt out of data collection.”
  • People want safe communications – not usable cryptography “Real-world cryptography isn’t only about cryptography. It’s just as much about product design, and building experiences that work for the user—not requiring work from the user. It’s a cross-discipline problem that requires not only cryptographers but user-experience designers and developers, too.”
  • Creating connection online – Dave White thinks about it in terms of 3 factors: 1) Spaces, 2) Eventedness and 3) Conversation at scale. Really enjoying Dave’s blog.
  • Words matter – thinking about customers as people not “users”. Some interesting examples here.

Academia online 

Social media

  • Implications for institutions of a backlash against Facebook “rather that making decisions on professional use of social media services such as Facebook on business criteria such as the level of use, the audience profiles, the costs of providing the services and the estimated benefits, might there be an argument that organisations and individuals who place a high value on ethical business practices should cease making use of services which infringe users’ privacy and exploit their intellectual property from unfairly using their dominant position in the market place.”
  • To crowdfund research, scientists much build an audience for their work – new paper in PLOS ONE sharing an analysis of the #SciFund challenge “a crowdfunding experiment in which 159 scientists attempted to crowdfund their research. Using data gathered from a survey of participants, internet metrics, and logs of project donations, we find that public engagement is the key to crowdfunding success.”

Communities 

  • 17 ways to measure the value of community in Marketing teams – Marketing has 2 functions: raising awareness, relationship building and helping a customer along the way to a purchase. How can you measure the impact of community activities on these?

Web/social media developments

  • Defining quality in news has to value the user experience – “You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?”
  • News aggregators on mobile devices “Why are we in the publishing business spending so much time doing technology when what we should be doing is what we’re great at, which is finding and packaging truth.” A news company attempting to innovate within tech, he analogized, was akin to CNN deciding to build HD televisions just because it happened to be a television network.”

Just for fun

The things we do for wifi access…

 

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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

  • 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.”
  • 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 

Blogging

Communities 

  • 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.”

Resources

 Upcoming events

Just for fun

There’s always one…

 

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URLs of wisdom (23rd November)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Behaviour

  • Why do we need to have so many meetings? – asks Krystal D’Costa “Participating or being invited to participate reaffirms our place in the group. It solidifies our role and communicates our value to other group members. One of the reasons shyness has long been viewed as a negative personality trait is because it prevents the individual from participating, and participation is a type of social currency: the more people see our participation, the more important we become.”
  • Lonely natives – Dave White on more observations about why thinking of Internet users as digital natives (or digital immigrants) is unhelpful. “The influence of the digital is being framed here as entirely social, not technical. This, for me, is more evidence that we are becoming Postdigital, wherein the digital permeates everything so the focus shifts back to the human.”
  • Networked mortality – thinking about what happens to your digital life, including your passwords, after you die.

Academia online 

Blogging

  • Science blogs and online trolling – do below-the-line comment spaces help or hurt science communication? “…there is a real need for a nuanced discussion of online comment spaces: it is important to recognise the value and potential positive impact of such spaces, as well as their risks.”
  • Innovative science blogging – summarising research using infographics. 

Outreach

  • On publication and self-promotion – Liz Neeley shares some tips, and an interview, with the author of a recent paper who approached COMPASS for advice about promoting an upcoming paper “I’d get these nuts-and-bolts questions about a general recommendation and you realize, “I’m not really sure how to respond to that.” I think journalists want specific examples they can use to make their piece real. You realize during a lot of those questions you’re not the right person to be commenting on that. I’m comfortable saying things up to a certain point, but some of those very specific applications of our recommendations were challenging.”
  • Buzzfeed – a new home for research? – “Much to our surprise, that post garnered a lot of attention. ‘A lot’ is a relative term, of course, but our ’7 things’ Buzzfeed attracted about ten times as many views in the first week of its posting as a blog we put on the FHS website (albeit on a completely different topic) the week before.” [NB – “a lot of attention” was less than 700 views in a week]

Communities 

  • A conference for members of the open community, OpenCon, was held in DC last weekend. Ross Mounce has a super round-up full of useful links.
  • Round-up of the talks and related content from the CMX summit on community management.

Web/social media developments

  • Twitter is now indexes every tweet since 2006 “Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events. Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.”
  • Facebook at work “The company’s new, enterprise-focused product will be similar to the functionality of its current site, with a newsfeed, groups and messaging capability. However, it will also include collaborative tools for work on shared documents. Facebook at Work will be entirely separate from personal accounts, with no information from a user’s social profile appearing on his or her professional page, and vice versa.”
  • Facebook launches stand-alone Groups app. “the Groups app opens to a clean grid of circular Group icons. The ones you interact with most are positioned at the top of the screen. Once you enter a group, posts and images take up the full width of the screen for a more enjoyable viewing experience. As before, the option to write a post or share a photo sit at the top of the Group page.”

Digital marketing

Resources

 Upcoming events

Just for fun

  • 3D printed viruses for your Christmas tree – with money going to science outreach projects.
Contagious festive spirit! Image credit: @genegeek.

Contagious festive spirit! Image credit: @genegeek.