Category: SocialMedia

Useful Links: power in social media, ROI, web fonts

Social Media Breakfast Leverages Two Truckloads of Tyson Food Donation for Boston Food Bank! at Beth’s Blog is another story to add to the list of amazing things achieved with social media. In this case, blog comments were enough to raise 2 truckloads of food for a food bank in just 3.5 hours. How did we ever get anything accomplished before Twitter?

Web Standards: Where the ROI is from Molly writing at MIX online explains the business reasons for web standards. (MIX online has an interesting stylesheet, by the way.)

@font-face in IE: Making WEb Fonts Work is from Jon Tangerine. He says, “What we need to encourage designers and developers to use EOT today is a good tool to create EOT files in the first place. Perhaps even one hosted remotely, where we can buy a licence, convert the font to EOT, grab the same OTF subset for complaint browsers, and get the work using the typefaces we’ve always dreamed of. WEFT is not the tool right now to enable EOT usage. In fact it discourages it.”

Useful Links: History of HTML, end of life for print?, social media and recorded history, slowblogging, and Useful Links in general

HTML History on the ESW Wiki at the w3.org site may be useful to teachers. I can’t find any explanation of what ESW means, but the wiki purpose is

for connecting the people who make the specs with the people who build on them. Pages here have no formal status but may have WikiConsensus. Questions & answers here may be misleading, or just plain wrong. Or, they may be useful.

There’s an RSS feed.

PC Magazine Goes Web Only. It started  in 1982. The last print issue will be Jan. 09. This is on the heels of similar announcements from US News and World Report and Christian Science Monitor. The times, they are a changin’.

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History by Ben Parr at Mashable talks about how the plethora of available information created by social media will change recorded history. One of his conclusions:

It’s often said that history is recorded by the victors. Now history is recorded by computers and anybody can pick up that data and come to their own conclusion. The study of history will dramatically change as more and more people use and rely upon social media for daily interaction. No diary, history book, or recording can compare to the data available through social media. My belief is that social media may prove to be as pivotal as the printing press in the study of history.

Haste, Scorned. Blogging at a Snail’s Pace about a movement toward slowblogging. Slowbloggers post less and think more deeply. One comment really struck me as significant:

Technology is partly to blame. Two years ago, if a writer wanted to share a link or a video with friends or tell them about an upcoming event, he or she would post the information on a blog. Now it’s much faster to type 140 characters in a Twitter update (also known as a tweet), share pictures on Flickr, or use the news feed on Facebook. By comparison, a traditional blogging program like WordPress can feel downright glacial.

In evaluating my own blogging habits in light of the paragraph just quoted, I thought about my Useful Links posts. These really are a kind of mental bookmarking process for me, a way to keep what I want to remember here in one place. But I’m using Tumblr to store links I know I’ll want to return to for one reason or another. I’m using StumbleUpon to share links to pages that I think are excellent and worthy of notice by others. I’m using Twitter to share links and stay in contact with people. Should these useful links posts be retired from service? Are they at the end of life just like the print magazines mentioned earlier?

Are these posts of useful links only useful to me, or do you find them helpful as well?

Digital Youth Practices

apophenia published Living and Learning with New Media: Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth with links to a summary of the findings, a white paper, and a book—all reporting on the findings. The key findings:

  1. Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities.
  2. Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

apophenia commented about her part in the study and the study itself,

For those who are only familiar with my research, I strongly encourage you to check out the report to get a better sense of the context in which I’ve been working. I focus primarily on “friendship-driven practices” but the “interest-driven practices” that motivate creative production, gaming, and all sorts of user generated content are tremendously important. I focus primarily on what happens when teens “hang out” but there’s also amazing learning moments when they mess around and geek out with one another.

You can find more information at The MacArthur Foundation, which funded the project.

Can you be won away from Google search?

Have you followed any of the links from this blog to BlogHer? Perhaps you’ve noticed that the search feature on BlogHer now has a Lijit logo in the search box. Under that, you see two options. Search blogher.com or search the BlogHer network. If you search the BlogHer network, you find posts on your search words found in any blog that is part of the BlogHer network.

The Lijit search is perfect for BlogHer. It helps BlogHer fulfill its key mission of locating and linking to the world of women’s blogs.

I’ve been looking at Lijit search ever since Amy Gahran mentioned it at BlogHer08. For the people who can make it work as intended, such as BlogHer, it succeeds in widening search results for your own writing or for the writing of a whole network of women. As a reader here, you know I’ve been going through trials of Lijit on this blog. I’m pretty sure it’s going to remain on this blog.

Lijit isn’t the type of search engine that searches the entire web, like Google. It is meant to search a specific network of information. It’s competing with Google in terms of “search my blog” searches, but not for “search the web” searches.

There are search engines that compete directly with Google. Two of them recently announced changes that they hope will help them move eyeballs away from Google to their brand of search. The two announcing revamped search this week are Ask.com and Hakia.com.

In Welcome to the all new Ask.com, Ask touts the fact that they claim to provide the best answers to your questions, faster and with fewer clicks.

Svetlana Gladkova from profy commented on the changes in Ask.com Rolls Out Yet Another Overhaul to Make Search Faster and More Relevant. She wrote,

So today we are seeing yet another attempt by Ask to achieve more impressive results in the search market by increasing speed and relevance of search results. Today’s overhaul reflects results of work that was initiated in January. Starting today users will experience reduction of search results download speed by 30% which is supposed to be the most important result of the overhaul. The majority of changes introduced today will remain invisible to users since they are about increasing the number of pages Ask indexes along with some improvements of the ranking algorithm (no additional details on that unfortunately).

But the most visible result of the overhaul is replacing cluttered 3-column view for search results with 2-column one where the largest space is given to the traditional list of links to the relevant pages while the smaller right column also offering some related search phrases that could probably help find better results. The search results column also offers a selection of tabs for user to choose what type of content is needed for the search – general web pages, images, news, or Q&A where results are served from various places that answer questions related to your search term. Searching other sections is also possible via the drop-down More menu.

According to an article in eWeek, Ask.com Sails into Semantic Search to Differentiate from Google, the differences are most noticable in searches for categories such as entertainment, health, jobs and reference. According to the article, the Ask search uses a different method of determining relevance and handling word order. I tested Ask and Google with this search: artists in New Mexico who use collage.

ask results
google results

Google did better with this search. Google listed some art schools, but actually had a New Mexico collage artist on the first page of results. Ask listed general New Mexico information, two listings for Democracy in New Mexico, and one art site on the first page of results. The sponsored results on Ask were better—art schools and art galleries. Maybe if I’d asked Ask.com about health or a job the results would be different.

The other revamped search engine trying to lure you away from your reliance on Google is Hakia.com. Vanessa Fox, at Search Engine Land, mentions Hakia’s new search twist in Hakia Relaunches site with “Trusted Results.” She explains:

Today at SMX East, natural language search engine Hakia has launched a new search experience that enables searchers to view categorized results, as well as view “Trusted” Results” from “Credible Sites”.

The Trusted Results program is an initiative Hakia has developed with information professionals and librarians. . . .

So far, these results are available for health, medical, and environmental topics and they are looking to expand coverage.

CJ, at Science for SEO, explains further in Hakia’s new stuff:

They’ve added the “credible sites” tab, where you can look at results from authorities, such as edu, gov and such sites, and they’re asking librarians to suggest sites and “information professionals” (I’m not sure who that covers). The resources must be current, peer reviewed, non-commercial and authentic (or at least fulfill most of these requirements).

For now you can only use it for the topics of the environment, health and medicine. The sites are by experts, although anyone can submit a resource.

Hakia’s search results are noticebly different. A series of tabs across the top of the results offers these topics: All results, Credible sites, News, Images, and Meet Others. (When you click Meet Others, you can open a chat room on your topic.) On the results page, you see sections of the page devoted to categories such as Web Results, News Results, and Images.

google results
hakia results

I gave Hakia and Google a test. I searched for “what prevents stomach pain.”

This time, I think the prize goes to Hakia. I especially thought the credible sites tab was valuable. There is so much misinformation and snake oil in health areas that some trustworthiness in results seems valuable. I’m not saying the results on Google were bad or less trustworthy, but I don’t know. I’d have to do the work of evaluating the links myself to decide. Hakia did the work for me.

To sum up, you might want to consider replacing the Google search on your blog with one by Lijit, and you might like using Hakia or Ask to search for information in specific categories. But I think most of us are still going to rely on Google for most things. What do you think?

Cross posted at BlogHer.

CSS 2 Reference and other useful links

I somehow missed knowing that this CSS 2 Reference was posted at meyerweb. I feel like I’ve just arrived at the party when everyone else is about to go home for the night. It’s the W3C recommendation for CSS 2 thrown into a frameset with fast navigation to each property. Handy.

I play like a girl. Which means I will pwn you If you thought the only people playing games online were teenaged boys, you need to check the statistics in this article. The gamers, they are a changin’.

Lijit

Check the comments about Lijit.com’s terms of use in this post: A Report from BlogHer08. I’ve taken the Lijit search off my blog for now, and may delete my account with them if the issues over content ownership aren’t resolved.

Since I write in more than one place, it appeals to me to have a way to pull up topics from all those places in a search on my content. I hope the terms get reworked at lijit.