Call for papers for Social Media Conference on December 2, 02011

From the announcement posted to the WEB4LIB mailing list:


The new Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI), located at Tarleton State University, will hold their first annual Social Media Conference at Tarleton State University on Friday, December 2, 2011.

This conference would consist of two tracks: a research presentation track as well as a training and development track. The conference planning committee is actively seeking papers, panels, and training workshops focused on, but not limited to the following topics:

* Facebook, Twitter, Linked In (How to Use the Technologies)
* Social Media in Business (Ideas for Entrepreneurs and Large Organizations)
* Social Media in Education
* Social Media in the Non-Profit Sector
* Social Media in Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication
* Practical Solutions for Social Media Problems
* Benefits and Disadvantages of Social Media in K-12 and Higher Education
* Social Media and Generational Communication
* Social Media and Information Sciences/Library Sciences
* Social Media and Mobile Applications and Devices

Additional Information:

Possible forms of submission include: panels (including roundtables and discussions), papers/abstracts, and training workshops.

Complete the conference submission form (http://www.tinyurl.com/SocialMediaConferenceCall/) and e-mail papers/panels to Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards (texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com) no later than Friday, October 14, 2011.

If you have any questions, please contact the Texas Social Media Research Institute via e-mail (texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com) via e-mail or telephone (254-307-8211).

International Archives Day 02011

June 9, 02011 is International Archives Day around the world. This global event was created by the International Council on Archives in 2007 and the date marks the day in 1948 that the ICA was established under UNESCO.

Today archivists are using Twitter to engage their clients through #AskArchivists where you can ask them a question and hopefully get tweeted back with an answer. In the good old days we used a telephone.

RockMelt Web browser invite on its way

Information Today's NewsBreaks features an article by Jill O'Neill titled "Hallmarks of the New RockMelt Browser—Efficiency and Integration" (November 22, 02010). Turns out you can receive an invite if you connect to the RockMelt Inc. Web site through your Facebook account. When I made the connection, I got a response saying "Your spot is reserved. We'll email your invite in the next few days." The developers of RockMelt are Tim Howe and Eric Vishria. RockMelt is based on Google's open source Chromium framework that Google also used to create its Google Chrome browser.

The Twittering of the Search World by David Mattison is online

My latest article for Searcher magazine, "The Twittering of the Search World" is available for free online.

Searcher magazine cover, September 02010

Added the new Tweet button from Twitter

I read about the new Tweet button from Twitter on TechCrunch that was launched on August 12, 02010 and decided to give it a go as a gadget to replace the TweetMeme button. Tweet away!

Twitter trending topics, is this a new kind of chain letter game?

A posting to the WEB4LIB mailing list reminded me of many a chain letter I've received. This one has a library twist. It's all for a good cause, raising the profile of libraries around the world by gaming Twitter's top 10 trending topics list. Here's how Jorge Serrano-Cobos of MASmedios.com pitched it:

Let me invite you to participate in a librarian collaborative global e-marketing experiment: to make #biblioteca (means "library" in spanish) one of top 10 Twitter trending topics TOMORROW!

Yes, this initiative will happen tomorrow, Tuesday August 10, 2010 for one hour, from 10:00 a.m to 11:00 (New York), or 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. (in Spain).

The idea is to have thousands of people (librarians, patrons, readers,

everybody) around the world sharing many posts during that time, achieving (through the collective strength) that the hashtag #biblioteca to scale to the top 10 trending topics on Twitter at that time.

What to talk about? Share recommendations of books, interesting librarians sites or talk about activities occurring in libraries. In short, talk of libraries just using hashtag #biblioteca. Have fun and tell it to your friends throughout the world!

No matter if you use English in your comments, but simply use the library hashtag #biblioteca, not (or not only) #library

If you want, we can arrange the same initiative for #library another day.

Just tell us and many Hispanic librarian twitters will support it.

Thank you very much in advance, and regards from Spain ;-)

Search Amazon.com for twitter marketing such as Twitter Marketing For Dummies

Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication

According to the About page, Digital Humanities Now

"is a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.

Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.

Digital Humanities Now was created by Dan Cohen, assisted by Jeremy Boggs, and is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University."

And it's "passively edited by 350 scholars and organizations in the digital humanities and related fields."

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities official launch May 02010

The UCL (University College London, England) Centre for Digital Humanities held its internal launch in February 02010 and an official, invitation-only launch will be held on May 20, 02010. The Projects and Links pages contain many excellent resources, including on the former TEI by Example, a collaborative project to develop an online tutorial for learning TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), the gold SGML standard for marking up digitized manuscripts and printed works.

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UCLDH.

Library of Congress to archive Twitter tweets

According to this CNN Tech story on April 14, 02010, the Library of Congress announced that it will be archiving all public tweets from Twitter. No doubt some Senators will go all Proxmire over this seeming waste of taxpayers' dollars.

Twittering in the ivory tower archives Manitoba style

As announced on ARCAN-L (02010 04 09):

The University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections is now on Twitter. Follow us at http://twitter.com/umarchives and receive frequent updates on new acquisitions, descriptions, digital collections, upcoming events, YouTube and blog uploads and more.

Twitter is over capacity?

Got this error screen upon checking my Twitter account:



A whale is a great metaphor for a sinking service.

My Information Today Newsbreak published on Google Buzz

Update for 02010 03 17:

Bad, bad, bad Google chastens FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour according to PC World as cited by Matt McGee in Search Engine Land.

Original post of 02010 02 22:

My short article on Google Buzz was published today as one of the Information Today Newsbreaks titled "Google Gets Stung by Its Own Buzz."

Google Buzz was launched by Google on February 9, 2010 and immediately generated a hornet's nest of buzzing, angered Gmail customers backed by a dark cloud of consumer privacy protection organizations. Who can resist these metaphors and puns? I was asked to write up the controversy surrounding Google Buzz for an Information Today Newsbreak that should appear on Monday, February 22, 2010. I completed and submitted it on time. This is my second Newsbreak in seven years almost to the day that I've written on Google, the first back in 2003 was on its purchase of Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger and Blogspot.com. The title of that piece also had the word buzz in it: "Blooglelicious—the Buzz about Google Buying Pyra Labs."

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard according to this Information Today Newsbreaks from March 1, 02010. Version 1 of this standard, developed "with help from its first Smartwords partners, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, O'Reilly, Vook, Scribd, ibis reader, and the Internet Archive," is supposed to be released in the summer of 02010. More information is available on the Wordnik Blog about its Smartwords initiative under a post dated February 23, 02010.

Wordnik itself is I think the first online dictionary that fully engages the Web 2.0 environment. Tweets from Twitter that utilize a word you look up are displayed, along with all sorts of other contextual information, including individual comments and tags from registered users of Wordnik. Except for the fact that Wiktionary allows any registered user to directly add content about a word, I think Wordnik has one-upped Wiktionary. Wordnik claims in its FAQ that it will work with individuals to incorporate new words into its "giant databank of English!"

BC Government Web site gets social (media)

The main BC Government Web site is now offering social media services through the news releases and other access points. You can share the content through Facebook, Twitter (retweet it), Delicious social bookmarking or e-mail the content to someone. There's also a Goverment of BC YouTube Channel, three blogs, and Facebook and Twitter sites for BC Government content. It would be nice to see BC Government photos on Flickr as well.

Please Rob Me and the problem of geo-location records

Please Rob Me points out the obvious to those who have been practicing and preaching the important mantra of online privacy. Constantly broadcasting your location and activities online has the potential of alerting criminals that you may not be at home. My philosophy is it's always better to tell your online followers where you've been, not where you are moment by moment.

Attending OCLC WebJunction online conference, Technology Essentials 2010

I'm attending a two-day OCLC WebJunction online conference on technology essentials for libraries. The conference is being broadcast through Cisco's WebEx platform. The conference sessions will be archived at http://www.webjunction.org/conference-tech-essentials-2010. The Twitter hashtag is #wjconf. I'll post this as well on my Ten Thousand Year Blog and you'll see a tweet from that source.

Roundup of real-time search engines

In my latest submission on January 15, 2010 to Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals I briefly looked at work Google is doing with real-time search. Since the whole article was about a number of new (most within the past two years) Google services and products that focused on the end user, I thought I'd expand the real-time search topic by simply listing many of the other choices you have. Most of these search engines either routinely track Twitter tweets (feeds) or are solely devoted to tweaking the tweets in different ways.

• Aardvark is a Q&A social search engine, ask questions and people answer, simple and profound, maybe. Not quite real-time, but even bigger news for Aardvark was its acquisition by Google on February 02010 as part of Google's stronger engagement with the social networking world.


• Bing (Microsoft) has a special Twitter page


• Buzzzy.com launched on February 16, 0210, a week after Google Buzz launched, and billed itself as the world's first search engine for Buzz. It also searches a number of other real-time sources, including Twitter.


• Collecta, which also has a MySpace Site Search. A mobile-specific version of Collecta was launched in early March 02010


• CrowdEye lets you follow people, what's next, StalkerEye


• itpints, funny name, real-time results


• jahoot, "search the socialsphere in realtime"


• Kosmix has a Yahoo! style presentation of real-time search results and you do your own searches


• OneRiot is the search engine and the company's name and the company is partnering with Yahoo! to bring real-time search to that site


• Scoopler, another contender for the most realist of real-time search


• Sency sounds sensible doesn't it


• socialmention, "real-time social media search and analysis"


• TipTop is another Twitter-based search engine


• Topsy, "a search engine powered by tweets", that is, Twitter feeds


• Twazup is another Twitter search engine


• Tweetmeme is all about the hottest tweets and links on Twitter


• Twittorati is "where the blogosphere and twittersphere meet"


• Twingly includes a Microblog Search a la Twitter and any others that dare to model themselves on that service


• Twitter Search is Twitter's own search engine of its users feeds


• Yauba.com, "The World's First Privacy Safe, Real-Time Search Engine TM"

For a great roundup of real-time search sites and what it means, as of July 02009, see Danny Sullivan's lengthy article "What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players" on SearchEngineLand.

OSS Watch, Open Source Software Advisory Service for the UK academic community

OSS Watch, which sounds like the title of a World War II B-movie, is managed through the UK's University of Oxford and is an open source software advisory service whose audience is actually more than just the UK academic community. The service features all kinds of useful information for software developers and others in the IT (information technology) community. Good stuff made possible in large part through funding from JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee.

The OSS Watch Wiki is here.

The OSS Watch Twitter feed is at http://twitter.com/osswatch.

A number of OSS Watch RSS feeds are also available.

This is a test of the new Twitter 10KYearBlog feed

Yup, in case you didn't notice the widget in the sidebar, The Ten Thousand Year Blog is on Twitter as http://www.twitter.com/10KYearBlog. Essentially, posts made to my WordPress.com version get posted on Twitter. Carpe tweeti!

City of Vancouver Archives does Twitter

The City of Vancouver Archives launched its Twitter feed on September 3, 02009. I'm fairly certain they are the first government archives in British Columbia with this distinction.

The RSS feed URL is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/61024030.rss