Quote: “Blogging is existing, tweeting is connecting”

Interesting findings given by several French students, about the power of blogging for young scientists:

“

• The transmission of knowledge is a difficult task. You need to multiply the initiatives, and that’s where the blog plays an important role
• PhD candidates have little free time, but it is probably the period in their careers when they have the most time to spend “informing the public
• blogging is about sharing findings, sharing your work, and creating a digital e-reputation
• Blogging also means improving one’s writing skills, editing speed, and scientific analysis, which are all valuable abilities when it comes to writing your thesis
• If you write and publish online, make it so that you’ll be read. Post your articles on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. E-mail your texts to people likely to read them.

Read the full article from:

Science Blogs and Your PhD. A trump card for your scientific career; Available from: http://www.knowtex.com/nav/science-blogs-and-your-phd-a-trump-card-for-your-scientific-career_40002

The NLM to archive the health-related blogs and web sites

Press release from the NLM:

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a Web content collecting initiative. The Library is selecting Web content as part of its mission to collect, preserve, and make accessible the scholarly biomedical literature as well as resources that illustrate a diversity of philosophical and cultural perspectives not found in the technical literature.

New forms of publication on the Web, such as blogs authored by doctors and patients, illuminate healthcare thought and practice in the 21st century. In launching this initiative, the Library is capturing and providing a unique resource for future scholarship.

The collection can be accessed from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/webcollecting.

With this initiative NLM has taken a major new step in its mission to collect pertinent healthcare information of today for the benefit of research in the future. Increasingly, that information is found on the Web, which is a rapidly changing environment where valuable and interesting materials can surface and then quickly disappear. The Library is working to ensure it can effectively collect new material in a Web environment, and guarantee the material’s permanence and availability to current and future patrons.

Further info on the project:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/nlm_web_content_collection.html

Young scientists: social media to boots your career

New channels for your science communication :

These nice advises are especially addressed to young scientists
Social media for your career: http://www.biggerbrains.com/dissemination

Personal branding: your own website http://www.biggerbrains.com/creating-a-simple-and-effective-academic-personal-website

Blogs and Twitter: http://www.biggerbrains.com/the-value-and-how-tos-of-blogging-and-microblogging-for-disseminating-your-research

How to “google” your article? http://www.biggerbrains.com/optimize-your-article-for-SEO

Science communication : twitter and blogs have still to achieve critical goals

The actual user numbers seem a bit disillusioning: social media like blogs or wikis are still only used by relatively few academics (particularly in Germany and some other European countries).

Yet they offer enormous potential for those that give them a try. The Conference on Science and the Internet (#cosci12, http://www.nfgwin.uni-duesseldorf.de/de/cosci12) had a closer look at these developments from different perspectives. (…)

• novel online platforms as infrastructure for research collaboration, new ways for publishing and sharing information
• new learning environments based on social media and mobile technologies
• big data from social media as a subject of research

Read the full article at:

Weller, Katrin. Will Twitter, blogs and wikis change scholarly communication? Information Today Europe, 15th of August 2012. Available from:
http://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=84361&PageNum=1

 

 

 

 

Which sort of health bloggers are you?

A classification suggested by Mark Senak:

• Non-professional, but credible bloggers – These are comprised of lay people who have started blogs that over time have gained traction.  In health care, they are usually focused on a fairly specific subject matter that may, in fact, be quite niche.  It could be about aspects of living with a particular disease or condition.   In addition to patients, they may be caregivers or advocates and perhaps even providers.  Over time, they have acquired credibility and become influential in their own area.  They are generally unaffiliated, though they could be fostered by an organization.
• Professional Non-Journalist Bloggers – These are people who have a professional specialty about which they write and have, in many respects, assumed a journalistic type role because of the following and corresponding influence that they have developed.  Examples of this category might include several of the prominent doctor bloggers but also include a range of other bloggers who really know their field and to whom many journalists will follow.
• Journalist Bloggers – There has been a hefty migration of traditional journalists into the blogosphere – a fact that has fundamentally changed the profession.   Blogging allows greater speed and flexibility in reporting and also allows a writer to perhaps develop pieces that are more granular.  Postings can occur much more often than through traditional publication.  Clearly there are some health care journalists who have emerged as major bloggers and who have influence in both the print and digital realms.  But appealing directly to them may be less effective than making inroads with other digital assets that may influence them.
• Institutional Bloggers – These blogs have become a way for institutions to related to people by either conveying news about the institution or showcasing thought leadership from their ranks.  Good examples of this are FDA’s blog FDAVoice or corporate sponsored blogs where senior leadership can provide analysis into specialized subject matter.

Senak, Mark. Blogging, Health and Journalism. Eye on FDA, 31th July 2012. Available from:

http://www.eyeonfda.com/eye_on_fda/2012/07/blogging-health-and-journalism.html

RSS Versus Twitter Versus Blogs!

Below a digest of some discussions reported in 2 blogs:

• May 2009, Rest in peace RSS: It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. (…) Suddenly everyone and their dog was convinced RSS was dead and we should all move on.
• In early 2011 RSS still wasn’t quite dead. (…) To me, anytime someone says a tech is dead it usually means that tech is not very interesting to discuss anymore, or isn’t seeing the most innovative companies doing new things with it.
• April 2012 – RSS still wasn’t quite dead (…) There’s a veritable explosion of companies removing RSS from their products … for whatever reason. Usually because it doesn’t directly benefit the bottom line – they prefer proprietary formats
• RSS will never die because of a simple reality: power users. (…) RSS is here to stay for at least a while longer – all those people doing most of the sharing? A lot of their stuff comes from RSS.
• Twitter is not a replacement for RSS. Not by a long shot. It’s too busy! (…) Consequently, RSS offers bigger exposure to your content.
• Twitter seems to be the place to have conversations now rather then on blogs. That’s not to say blogs don’t have a place in both finding information and having discussions, but it would appear they’re being used for more reflective posts, which individuals can comment on, rather then short conversations involving lots of individuals

 

Teller, Swizec. RSS will never die. Zemanta Tech blog, April 26, 2012. Available from: http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/rss-will-never-die/ [Accessed 4th of May 2012]

Mulla, James. The role of RSS and RSS readers. FUMSI, 30th of April 2012. Available from: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/68689 [Accessed 4th of May 2012]

Let’s Blog and Tweet about paper research

If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share. It’s pretty darn obvious, really:
If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads).

 

Terras, Melissa. Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict. Melissa’s blog, Posted on 3^rd April 2012, Available from: http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/is-blogging-and-tweeting-about-research.html [Accessed 18th April 2012]

Social tools for US Libraries: an update

Based on a new report by Joseph McKendrick.  The Digital Squeeze: Libraries at the Crossroads surveyed 730 public, academic, special, education, and government libraries in the US.

“Librarians report a levelling off in the use of Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with customers and the use of wikis and blogs is declining.  However, more of them are using collaborative tools including the sharing of web pages, subject guides, and the use of document-sharing, photo and video sharing web apps.

Libraries, unsurprisingly, reported an increased demand for ebooks, wireless connectivity and other technology tools and services.  More than one-third of the respondents reported that they spent more money on information technology hardware, software, and related IT services over the past year. 

More libraries are moving to the cloud for operational support and content storage.  26% of them are already offering e-readers, with one respondent stating that this activity will be an area of ‘extreme growth’.

 

Skelton, Val. Libraries, the digital squeeze and ebooks. InformationToday Europe, 12th of April 2012. Available from: http://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Libraries-the-digital-squeeze-and-ebooks-81910.aspx [Accessed 13th April 2012]

Values of Social Network for Scientists (by Comprendia)

“Here at Comprendia, we’ve never advocated that Facebook should be recreated for scientists, as there are 700,000+ life science graduates in the US already using the application,* and they are likely already connected there to lab mates and colleagues. Rather, we should broaden our idea of the ‘social network’ to include any online community of scientists, not just those which are similar to Facebook. The value of social networks for scientists lies in faster access to information relevant to their research and the communities that are made more available by new tools. Here are 6 successful examples which can be used to understand scientific social communities. (…)

1. Facebook Pages & LinkedIn Groups. Scientists have used mailing lists and forums for years. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are a ’2.0′ version of them with the benefits of centralization and easier access to participants. Life science companies, most notably Life Technologies, have fostered social networks in the form of Facebook pages centered on a topic.
2. Twitter Hashtags. Scientists use Twitter to share scientific blog posts and news, to find friends and colleagues around a topic or event, and sometimes to vent about their situation. Hashtags, which are text identifiers for status updates on a topic, allow a Twitter social network to form around it…
3. ScienceOnline
4. True Social Networks. (…) ResearchGate’s has 1.4 million users, as we know that scientists don’t have time for frivolous endeavors, especially when they’re under the watchful eye of their Principal Investigator. As we noted in our post a year ago, there has to be a value for them to participate, and the successful ones center around research publications. BiomedExperts, CiteULike, ResearchBlogging, andResearchGate had the highest traffic in our quick study, and they all rely heavily on publications. I like to say that PubMed was the first social network for scientists.
5. Publication Sharing/Open Access. Related to the last point is a subject that requires its own mention as it transverses from proper social networks to desktop applications, Twitter, and even a movement to make research publications more accessible.Mendeley is the rock star of the publication sharing/open access genre, boasting 1.77 million users who are sharing 169 million publications. When we speak with life scientists at conferences or client visits, we often hear about the application even from those who are not strong believers in social media. Additionally, these applications have whetted scientists’ appetites for more open access to publications
6. Blogs.  “blogs were one of the first forms of social media for scientists.”  Blog aggregators such as ResearchBlogging orScienceSeeker feature hundreds of blogs and likely a comparable number of communities focused around individual research topics.

(…)

At conferences and networking events today, we are seeing a transition, albeit slowly, to a new breed of scientists who understand the importance of scientific networks. We need to adjust our definition of scientific social networks to understand the next steps towards helping scientists use them to thrive.

What Is A Scientific Social Network? 6 Thriving and Inspiring Examples
Comprendia, March 12th, 2012

US Inc. 500: less blogging, more Facebooking

To read in Information Today Europe:

For the last five years the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research has been conducting a study about the use of social media in the 500 fastest growing organisations in the US (The Inc. 500.)  The first study, conducted in 2007, found that these companies were much more likely to have adopted blogs than those in the ‘traditional’ Fortune 500.

The latest findings show that the use of blogging in the Inc. 500 companies is declining for the first time. Blogging had declined to 37% from 50% in 2010. (…)

However, as blogging reaches maturity in these organisations, the use of other social media, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Mobile apps, texting, Twitter and YouTube, is growing.  74% of responding companies were using Facebook, and 73% using LinkedIn. (…)

Read further:

Val Skelton, A blog post about the decline of blogging. Information Today Europe Blog, 2nd of February 2012.

http://www.infotodayeurope.com/2012/02/02/a-blog-post-about-the-decline-of-blogging/