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Photo: Rows and Columns http://www.flickr.com/photos/48001773@N00/1750399718/ taken by Mark Skipper (Bitterjug) http://www.flickr.com/people/bitterjug/ This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Social ResearchInternet Librarian International 2010 #ili2010

Friday, 15th October 2010@karenblakeman

http://twitter.com/karenblakeman

Using social media and networks for research

• It is where many people spend a lot of their time– comScore: Facebook Takes Lead In Time Spent,

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=135476

• It is where people share information and ask questions

• Businesses and organisations now taking social media seriously

• Search engines incorporating social media, networks and realtime data in results

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Google – BP oil spill

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Results from Google News & blogs

Latest results - rolling feed of headlines from Twitter, blogs, discussions

Google – BP oil spill

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Images

Wikipedia article

Blog posting listing videos

YouTube video

Results from my “social circle”: Twitter, RSS feeds, FriendFeed, Google Wave contacts etc.

Google results – a person (me!)

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Latest results. Rolling feed of headlines from Twitter, blogs, discussions

About/CV page

LinkedIn profile

Slideshare profile

Google results – a person (me!)

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Blogger profile

Twitter profile

Yasni profile

Mashed Library wiki activity

Facebook profile

Your social circle

• Included in your search results if you are signed in to your Google account - maybe

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Google Social

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Your social circle

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List of direct and secondary connections

Your social circle – social content

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“Traditional” search

• centralised databases of web pages, images, video etc

• massive amount of data

• “old” information, out of date

“Real time” search

• live, real-time searching of tweets, videos, blog postings etc

• limited to “current” data & selected networks

• up to the minute but skewed view of a topic

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Earthquake: Twitter trounces traditional news sources again!http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/04/earthquake-twitter-trounces-traditional-news-sources-again.html

• Search social media using specialist tools or within the network itself

• Contribute and ask questions within your own networks – get involved!

• Facebook, LinkedIn

• Twitter

• Videos – Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Blinkx

• Images – Flickr, Compfight, Geograph, Wikimedia Commons, Morguefile

• Presentations – Slideshare, authorstream, slidefinder.net

• Use the new options on the Google results page

• Lots of other stuff going on

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Google Blogs

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Google Updates

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Google Discussions

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Google Realtime

• http://www.google.com/realtime/“Realtime Search lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world “

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Search tools for social media• Excellent presentation from Phil Bradley covers the best

– http://www.slideshare.net/Philbradley/social-media-search-engines – “20 search engines that each add something into social media

search, and they’re all worth exploring in some detail”• My two personal favourites from his list

– http://socialmention.com – http://www.addictomatic.com/

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Socialmention.com

Searching Twitter and tweets

• To use Twitter’s Find People you need to be signed in to Twitter

• Alternatively search for people or organisations using Tweepz (http://www.tweepz.com/)

• Searching public tweets – http://search.twitter.com/, http://www.twazzup.com/

• Twapperkeeper (http://www.twapperkeeper.com/) – archives on keywords or hashtags setup by individuals– particularly useful for conference and event tweets

• Who is referring to your web site, blog, slideshare presentation etc. on Twitter– Backtweets – http://www.backtweets.com/ – enter the URL of your home page or a specific page

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Twitter: search.twitter.com and twazzup.com

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Images • Copyright!• Look for creative commons but check the license

– licenses vary (reuse, commercial use, derivatives)– Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

of Compfight http://www.compfight.com/ – Flickr – beware, some images are licensed under Getty Images – Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ – Morguefile.com http://www.morguefile.com/ – Wkimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/

BUT..........

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Guardian Datablog

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Google Property

• Bus stops near properties – but where has the data come from and how up to date is it?

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http://www.livebus.org/reading/search/?q=Caversham

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WRONG!!!

Authenticity and trust

• Look at the biography or profile if there is one. Check out previous work, postings, tweets etc.

• Who else is part of their network

• Who is linking or referring to the article and what are they saying about it

• Put the posting, tweet or update into context

• Look at the whole conversation– timeline– who else is contributing

• look for clues, what isn’t there

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iPhone 4 to be recalled: it’s true – the Daily Mail says sohttp://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2010/06/27/iphone-4-to-be-recalled-its-true-the-daily-mail-says-so/

Dealing with information overload

• Set up automatic searches to alert you to new stuff• RSS feeds

– Google Reader, Netvibes, iGoogle, Outlook, Firefox extensions, desktop clients (Great News, Feedreeder, RDD Bandit)

– Be ruthless – if you keep marking a feed as read without reading it then delete it!

• Be selective in who you follow, “friend”, add to network• Twitter

– make use of Twitter apps or desktop clients e.g. Tweetdeck to manage your Twitterstream and searches

– you do not have to follow everyone who follows you– you do not have to read every single tweet in your Twitterstream

(but do make sure you keep on top of your ‘mentions’, public replies and direct messages (DMs)

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Managing your tweets

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Private direct messages (DMs) deleted from this image

Columns for people I’m following, people who refer to me or publicly reply to me, private direct messages, searches (mashliv), selected tweeters

Yet more columns

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Search on my name/company (what are people saying about me?), monitoring other organisations, follow groups or individual people

and finally....the best form of social research!

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamin2/4329193427/ Taken by Benjamin Ellis http://benjaminellis.org/