Showing papers on "Microblogging published in 2008"

New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture

Abstract: This article will demonstrate how the notion of 'phatic communion' has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking profiles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of 'individualization' and 'network sociality', alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and 'connected presence' has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture.

Can we use twitter for educational activities

Abstract: Twitter is the most popular microblogging application, with almost one million users called twitterers, who can send and receive messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, and by third party applications. Posts are limited to 140 text characters in length. With a solid experience in using Web2.0 technologies in education, the authors are trying to provide arguments for using Twitter as microblogging platform / social network in education, underlining its advantages, but also possible bad points. The article presents too an application related to the Romanian Twitosphere and a Romanian microblogging platform, already used in education.

Microblogging - more than fun?

Abstract: For the support of learners of tomorrow a mobile workforce is essential in our connected society. More and more social network sites are growing up. Google launches software for mobile devices; the market is growing. But the question, which rises is: is mobile learning just a future term, or does it become reality? Can these tools be useful in teaching and learning processes? And what does mobile learning means for networks and communities of practice? Some of these questions we try to answer. We set up a microblogging community channel about our work and research topic e-learning. In shortest time we reach 23 participants. We tested our microblogging community locally in our offices and mobile from our mobile devices. In this article we discuss advantages and disadvantages from microblogging from our point of view.

Nursing education 2.0: Twitter & tweets. Can you post a nugget of knowledge in 140 characters or less?

Abstract: Can You Post a Nugget of Knowledge in 140 Characters or Less? AS YOU KNOW, I rely on many resources to write this column, including various blogs on technologies in higher education and my faithful resources from Educause. I am most interested in tools that facilitate communication, collaboration, social networking, and learning. In the communication area, digital immigrants pride themselves in using email, participating in asynchronous discussions, and sometimes even venturing into the world of online chats. But to digital natives, email in particular is so yesterday, or, as stated in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "email is for old people" (1). Digital natives tend to communicate in the moment using IM (instant messaging), text messaging, blogging, expressing themselves on social networking sites, and now sending tweets. NO, I DID NOT MAKE UP THE WORD. A tweet, a posting of 140 characters or less, is the mainstay of an online application called Twitter. This product, first introduced in 2006, is a communication tool aimed at digital natives. According to Educause Learning Initiative (2): "Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool...." Wikipedia defines Twitter as "a free social networking and microblogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts...) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific" (3). Digital natives can meet the creator and hear about the idea behind micro-blogging in a video interview with Biz Stone (http://uk.intruders.tv/Interview-with-Twitter-co-founder-Biz-Stone_al33.html). Digital immigrants may prefer to read about micro-blogging and Twitter at the PBS Media Shift site (www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/digging_deepertwitter_ founders.html). Just so you do not think I am crazy, the New York Times, the BBC, and Al Jazeera are all experimenting with Twitter, as are political figures John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. So, if you want to communicate with and update a circle of your closest friends, family members, research colleagues, clinical preceptors, or students, then you might want to explore Twitter. But you must be succinct; 140 characters is not a lot of space. So How Does It Work? After setting up an account (http://twitter.com), establish a profile and determine if you want your tweets to be public (appear on a pubic timeline page) or protected (open only to people connected to your profile). You can invite people to your account. Then, as your "friends" connect, their tweets and yours will appear on your Twitter page. To do this, you can use the web or connect to your instant messaging account or mobile device (your phone or your PDA). How Is Twitter Used in Higher Education? A quick look at various higher education blogs indicates several ways to use Twitter with your students. One idea is to communicate with students about the great ideas - the nuggets of knowledge - we glean while attending conferences (2). (I like this idea as I often attend informatics conferences.) For example, I can send the entire class a quick note about speakers or talks they may want to visit later or tell them about specific ideas I got from a talk (that would also serve as a reminder to me after the conference). I also like the notion of using Twitter like instant messaging to tell students about an important change in plans (class is cancelled/there is a change in their practicum sites) or to communicate with a large group of colleagues, like preceptors, who may not have their email readily accessible while working. On the PBS teachers' blog, there is a good example of how a teacher uses Twitter with middle school students to teach collaborative writing skills. Each student is limited to 140 characters or less and there can be only 140 posts to tell the story. The collaborative writing assignment is based on the Twittory framework (http:// twittories. …

Can Microblogs and Weblogs change traditional scientific writing

Abstract: This paper describes a follow-up Web 2.0 approach to a technology enhanced master course for students of Graz University of Technology. The lecture "Social Aspects of Information Technology" has a long tradition for using new didactical scenarios as well as modern e-Learning technologies. After using a blogosphere one year ago, this year microblog channels helped to expand the traditional lecture. Students choose (on a voluntary basis) whether they want to participate in a blogging/microblogging group instead of using conventional methods called Scientific Writer/Scientific Reviewer. This study addresses the question whether this method can change the learning outcome into a more reflective one. Furthermore, peer-reviewing groups judge the quality of essays and blog contributions. In this paper we examine if microblogging can be an appropriate technology for assisting the process. This publication comes to the conclusion that an amazing potential and a new way to work with information is opened when using microblogging. Students seem to be more engaged, reflective and critical in as much as they presented much more personal statements and opinions than years before.

Semantic twitter: analyzing tweets for real-time event notification

Abstract: Twitter, a popular microblog service, has received much attention recently. An important characteristic of Twitter is its real-time nature. However, to date, integration of semantic processing and the real-time nature of Twitter has not been well studied. As described herein, we propose an event notification system that monitors tweet (Twitter messages) and delivers semantically relevant tweets if they meet a user's information needs. As an example, we construct an earthquake prediction system targeting Japanese tweets. Because of numerous earthquakes in Japan and because of the vast number of Twitter users throughout the country, it is sometimes possible to detect an earthquake by monitoring tweets before an earthquake actually arrives. (An earthquake is transmitted through the earth's crust at about 3-7 km/s. Consequently, a person has about 20 s before its arrival at a point that is 100 km distant.) Other examples are detection of rainbows in the sky, and detection of traffic jams in cities. We first prepare training data and apply a support vector machine to classify a tweet into positive and negative classes, which corresponds to the detection of a target event. Features for the classification are constructed using the keywords in a tweet, the number of words, the context of event words, and so on. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that every recent large earthquake has been detected by our system. Actually, notification is delivered much faster than the announcements broadcast by the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The Translucence of Twitter

Abstract: Erickson and Kellogg's construction of social translucence suggests that collaboration tools can be designed more effectively by balancing elements of visibility and awareness among members of the user community to instill a norm of accountability. This paper questions whether the microblogging tool, Twitter, fits these criteria. Building on interview and artifactual data, I find that although Twitter use affords ample visibility of individuals' networks, thoughts and movements, it is less effective at supporting awareness. Despite this, evidence suggests that accountability can be achieved via indirect awareness maneuvers and around critical incident to yield a form of peripheral translucence. The paper concludes with considerations of how ethnography might best address and evaluate questions of community, accountability, and translucence in future research.

Micro‐Blogging for Science and Technology Libraries

Abstract: When text messaging and blogging meet, sci‐tech libraries win. Micro‐blogs are social networks for broadcasting news that have a very short character limit in the vein of text messaging. Increasing...

Mining social media communities and content

Abstract: Social Media is changing the way people find information, share knowledge and communicate with each other The important factor contributing to the growth of these technologies is the ability to easily produce “user-generated content” Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube are just a few examples of Web 20 tools that are drastically changing the Internet landscape today These platforms allow users to produce and annotate content and more importantly, empower them to share information with their social network Friends can in turn, comment and interact with the producer of the original content and also with each other Such social interactions foster communities in online, social media systems User-generated content and the social graph are thus the two essential elements of any social media system Given the vast amount of user-generated content being produced each day and the easy access to the social graph, how can we analyze the structure and content of social media data to understand the nature of online communication and collaboration in social applications? This thesis presents a systematic study of the social media landscape through the combined analysis of its special properties, structure and content First, we have developed a framework for analyzing social media content effectively The BlogVox opinion retrieval system is a large scale blog indexing and content analysis engine For a given query term, the system retrieves and ranks blog posts expressing sentiments (either positive or negative) towards the query terms Further, we have developed a framework to index and semantically analyze syndicated1 feeds from news websites We use a sophisticated natural language processing system, OntoSem [163], to semantically analyze news stories and build a rich fact repository of knowledge extracted from real-time feeds It enables other applications to benefit from such deep semantic analysis by exporting the text meaning representations in Semantic Web language, OWL Secondly, we describe novel algorithms that utilize the special structure and properties of social graphs to detect communities in social media Communities are an essential element of social media systems and detecting their structure and membership is critical in several real-world applications Many algorithms for community detection are computationally expensive and generally, do not scale well for large networks In this work we present an approach that benefits from the scale-free distribution of node degrees to extract communities efficiently Social media sites frequently allow users to provide additional meta-data about the shared resources, usually in the form of tags or folksonomies We have developed a new community detection algorithm that can combine information from tags and the structural information obtained from the graphs to effectively detect communities We demonstrate how structure and content analysis in social media can benefit from the availability of rich meta-data and special properties Finally, we study social media systems from the user perspective In the first study we present an analysis of how a large population of users subscribes and organizes the blog feeds that they read This study has revealed interesting properties and characteristics of the way we consume information We are the first to present an approach to what is now known as the “feed distillation” task, which involves finding relevant feeds for a given query term Based on our understanding of feed subscription patterns we have built a prototype system that provides recommendations for new feeds to subscribe and measures the readership-based influence of blogs in different topics We are also the first to measure the usage and nature of communities in a relatively new phenomena called Microblogging Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web In this study, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena and user intentions by studying the content, topological and geographical properties of such communities We find that microblogging provides users with a more immediate form of communication to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information The course of this research has highlighted several challenges that processing social media data presents This class of problems requires us to re-think our approach to text mining, community and graph analysis Comprehensive understanding of social media systems allows us to validate theories from social sciences and psychology, but on a scale much larger than ever imagined Ultimately this leads to a better understanding of how we communicate and interact with each other today and in future 1RSS/ATOM

Mobile Blogging System

Abstract: The mobile blogging system involves remotely updating a web site from a mobile phone. It represents an attempt to bring reality closer to the end-user via sending text messages to a Web site. Today in Africa communication is hampered by lack of adequate physical infrastructure this may include: poorly constructed road networks, limited access to electricity and unreliable telecommunication infrastructure. These issues affect the coverage of news events that occur in remote and highly insecure areas. With today's mobile phones almost anyone can create text messages about an occurrence in their environment in order to deliver news worthy stories in real time as they unfold. This paper documents the work done on creating a service that makes it possible to share news events with the world by allowing a user to submit, delete and edit text messages from a mobile phone and these actions are automatically reflected on a Web site on the Internet. It is noted that the outcome of the work undertaken was successful and useful. This service only deals with text messages and it is recommended that more work should be done to incorporate other forms of multi-media for example pictures, sound and video.

Twitter : viral professional development and networking

Abstract: The capacity of twitter for micro blogging makes it an excellent platform for viral professional development and networking.

A Distributed Semantic Microblogging Platform

Abstract: The application showcases the ideas of a distributed, SemanticWeb enabled microblogging architecture, providing a way to leverage this new Web 2.0 practice to the Semantic Web.