Impressions Scholarcast

We now have a demo video below of some of the early features of multi-touch coming to Windows 7. There is little that is new in terms of multi-touch itself, although the on-screen piano keyboard is cute.

Of more significance will be the new hardware that is needed. Even today’s tablet PCs aren’t useful since they don’t use touch screens but rely on wireless pens. Thus we will need to see a whole new series of laptops with touch-sensitive screens before mutli-touch becomes a reality on Windows.

Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Via Mary Jo Foley.

With other colleagues at my institution we are trying to persuade the powers that be of the benefits of social media. Sarah Perez would escalate the issue considerably into a Social Media U. She proposes eight lessons:

1. Personal Branding: buy yourname.com to secure your brand, make a video resume, start a WordPress blog, use Google Reader, participate (comment on blogs and link to them), get on Facebook and LinkedIn, network, and more
2. Know What Web 2.0 Is And How To Use It: learn about tagging and how other people’s opinion can shape our perception
3. Learn To Use YouTube To Convey a Message
4. Learn to Blog
5. Use Social Networks
6. Master Wikis
7. Learn to Twitter
8. Learn To Podcast

Well in my current class I have already mentioned lesson 1, and lesson 4 is well underway and will last through the semester. Web 2.0 will be covered as it is a series of web applications, the title of the subject. Twitter, wikis and social network applications are likely to figure in choices for practical assignments. All of my lectures are being converted to screencasts so that covers lessons 3 and 8 to a large extent.

It looks like we are well on the way to Social Media U.

According to some we are entering into the next phase of blogging inevitably named Blogging 2.0.

Duncan Riley (blogoz panellist and ex TechCrunch blogger) has recently created his own professional blog, Inquistr. He takes a cogent look at  ‘blogging 2.0′ where all of a person’s social media activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as blogs is aggregated on sites like FriendFeed. It has been suggested that this trend will weaken professional blogging through fewer page views of the original blog site.

Quite rightly Duncan argues this will be a short term effect and blogging 2.0 should lead through the other social media channels to more views of blog content. I still think this will be at the expense of page views on the blog site itself which will effect:

• advertising revenue
• reduce onlinking to sites associated with the blog such as the blogroll
• use of specialist widgets on the blog for searching, tagging, stats and the like

After all this is already happening with the single purpose blog aggregators like Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator. I probably visit the actual blog site for perhaps 1 in 50 of the posts I read on Google Reader.

Thus it is clear that the content of the blog posts themselves is the key going forward. Adverts, links and widgets need to be subtly integrated with each post. Blog post structure and design will be ever more important.

Eight months ago in a previous post about AideRSS I lauded the benefits that I had found after only 2 weeks of use. These benefits have progressed in the interim so that now 6 out of my top 20 most frequently read blogs are filtered by AideRSS. This amounts to a saving approaching 300 posts each month. Yet I still feel I see the most important posts from those filtered feeds.

Today I read in a post from Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb (coincidentally one of my filtered feeds) that the PageRank algorithm has been improved by the addition of the frequency of occurrence in Twitter. PageRank now takes into account a blog post’s popularity in Google Blog search and Twitter. Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines have now been dropped as meriting consideration.

So moves the tide of popularity amongst social networks on the web.

This influence Facebook has over the social networking of university students across the world is undoubtedly significant and probably growing. The dominant learning management system used in universities is Blackboard. However by design Blackboard is a closed system within each institution and it would be very difficult to emulate Facebook’s global reach.

It is quite natural therefore that Blackboard should seek to link with Facebook so that students can be notified of significant Blackboard information changes within their favourite Facebook social environment. Thus we now have BBSync, a Facebook application that synchronises information changes from Blackboard. To allow institutions to control which information, if any, finds its way into the potentially public Facebook network Blackboard now provide a building block. This component also monitors and logs the use of the Facebook application.

Blackboard tells us:

Blackboard Sync is an application that delivers Blackboard course information and updates through the Facebook interface to keep students in touch and engaged with their academic studies.

Blackboard Sync enables students to connect with their classmates through Facebook, thus creating social learning opportunities.

Blackboard Sync offers several options for participation to give the institutions as much control as they need.

Students will certainly want this feature. Will my institution be ready to encompass it?

Via Twitter of course, Peta put me on to Twist. This site allows you to enter one or more keywords whose frequency of occurrence in Twitter are plotted so that trends emerge.

I quickly tried it with ‘twitter’ and an unexpected trend resulted:

From memory I believe the two noticeable peaks correspond to significant outages for the Twitter service, so maybe this is a quick way to see when Twitter was down.

Try the link for this chart for the last 7 days.