Though Twitter only went public in July 2006 (according to Wikipedia, though many papers such as Java et al 2007 cite October 2006 as the launch date) quite an amount of Twitter research has already been published. Here is an overview of downloadable papers – please let me know if you find anything else.

P.S: Some of these papers can only be downloaded from a (university) library. If you have access to the network of Vienna University, you need to establish a VPN connection through univpn.univie.ac.at/. Login, select AnyConnect, establish VPN trough the browser or download the VPN client if the browser connection doesn’t work smoothly.

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Angelika Storrer, a professor at Dortmund Technical University, gave a talk about chatspeak yesterday at the Web as Culture Conference in Gießen, presenting visual evidence that LOL has meanwhile evolved into a gesture in France:

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So we have all read the story about the so-called ‘Twitter quitters’, i.e. people who do not return the following month and the percentage of which, according to Nielsen, amounts to 60%. This single month is probably not enough to conclude that users “wind up abandoning the service” – or at least that is what my (very limited sample of 17 users) suggests.

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Those Netvibes people like their spices…. Ginger, the successor to Coriander, has now been released, the new netvibes that allows users to create their own universe (an environment of widgets, feeds and websites) and publish it. Btw, one of their lead developers, Alexander Kirk, telecommutes from Vienna to Paris. He introduced Ginger at the last Barcamp in Vienna.

At the weekend I signed up for yet another social media platform: verwandt.de which seems to be available in a number of European languages – but I cannot provide the link to the English version now as the main directory seems to be defunct at this very moment. Verwandt.de allows you to creative your family tree with just a number of clicks – the application is actually so smooth and smartly running that it lured me into hacking in the names of 34 of my relations, even though I am actually quite apprehensive of social media. Even if you do not sign up for the genealogy feature: The name map tool is also pretty cool – it allows you to see where in German you can find other people with your name.

Absolute distribution of my surname in Germany:

Relative distribution:

Surprise, surprise: My surname is not thaaaat common in the country as a whole, absolutely speaking, but rather popular in the area that I come from originally (I wonder what the difference between relative and absolute distribution might be in this case though; I know it’s individuals vs. percentage, but shouldn’t the result be more or less the same?). Nice and bright – you like?

… there comes another niche that has previously eluded me (or rather: that I deliberately ignored –> information overflow).

Youtube thinks of launching Live Video in 2008 (Pop17) | Yahoo Live – Live Video Service | Ustream – Live Video Service | BlogTv – idem | Operator11 – idem | Justin TV – notable Life Caster

Godammit. How to keep track (or why)?

Sorry for the lame title. I’ve just experienced a rather dull moment of disillusionment..

For my PhD thesis I am currently doing research on web videos in collaborative environments – it’s the narrative and visual layer I am most interested in. One of the things I am currently doing to establish my own body of research is downloading and referencing the Top 10 movies in the Viral Video Chart twice a week; I plan to do this for at least half year. Of course I am aware that this covers only ONE aspect of the narrative strategies at work – there are so many micro-niches on the web 2.0 that it would be silly to assume that a chart of the most popular movies would take you to the heart of things…

Having said that… this morning I signed up for Bebo and felt a sudden pang of despair when I realized the dimensions of the Bebo video universe… it is going to be IMPOSSIBLE to cover each and everything that is going on at the moment, so many things will inevitably elude me. I’d literally have to have my own collaborative platform and invite other researchers to help map the field to do any web 2.0 phenomenon justice… One thing that I am really grateful for is the ROCKETBOOM – Know Your Meme Series – it’s more anecdotal than critical, but at least I don’t have to download each and everything myself now

Sigh… even though, I think I’ll be able to use to use some of the things I found this morning for my presentation in Weimar in (arf!) two weeks, which is going to focus on cuteness on the web, e.g. the Ultra Kawaii Channel on Bebo

That is to say: German Wikipedia is better than Brockhaus online, the latter being the German equivalent to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a comparison conducted by German magazine Stern has shown. They cross-checked 50 randomly selected entries (“Hartz IV”, “U2″, “Penicillin” or “Moses”) and gave marks for Accuracy, Currency and Ease of Understanding.

The results: 43 Wikipedia articles were “better” than Brockhaus’s, mainly for reasons of currency _and_ (surprise!) currency. Brockhaus, for instance, did neither know about Pararotti’s death nor about the Noble Prize for Doris Lessing.

Too bad the study didn’t give examples of accuracy, as it would have been interesting to know their notion of accuracy.

What I thought was surprising: Brockhaus, even though NOT written by laymen, was easier to understand. It seems as if Wikipedians like to impress with elaborate sentences and exclusive terminology:-)

Everyone! If you enter Facebook now you’ll find an announcement that your Facebook profile is soon going to be searchable for search engines like Google, etc. – and that means: visible and searchable to the whole world!

To avoid that this happens (and once the information is out there, it is for sure going to end up in some cache or greedy mirror server from which you can NEVER delete it), do the following:

_log into Facebook
_click ‘privacy’ (second option from the right in the top right corner)
_choose ’search’ (the second paragraph in the bluish list)
_edit your privacy setting by UNCHECKING the boxes below the question in blue font: “Who can find my public search listing outside of Facebook?”

You might also want to change the rest of the privacy settings to meet your privacy needs.

Not that the world’s been waiting for it, but at last, here is a brief review of my experience with Stumble upon. When my boyfriend introduced me to Stumbleupon about a year ago and after I had played with it for while, it made me realize (maybe wrongly) that the web for the first time could really be something like the new television – a medium that simultaneously instills a lean-forward AND a lean-backword attitude in the viewer.

Leaning back had in the past been particularly difficult with the world wide web. Of course you have youtube, dailymotion and Google video, which is more or less the illustrated audio track of TV crammed into the resolution of a 600 by 800 screen, and with a crappy image quality. And that’s precisely the problem about this approach to web TV.

The approach Stumbleupon takes is different. It is a listing of many different ‘interesting’ (as judged by the users) web sites, but instead of having to go through these listings, you can simply specify what your interests are ONCE, and then (and after installing the Stumbleupon bar of course) you can just lean back and enjoy. Well, almost. You still have to click the ‘Stumble’ button of you want a new suggestion, and sometimes pages don’t load promptly. But it’s still the best lean-back experience I’ve had with the web so far.

The suggestions are user-submitted and, similarly to digg.com, users can decide whether they like a website or not. I use Stumbleupon mainly for a little diversion, and my preferred sites offer optical illusions or games. I hadn’t even thought of using it for News and Politics, although it offers a much wider variety of categories in comparison to digg.com.

When, however, one of my own blog posts attracted the insane traffic of over 1,500 on the day of the French elections (because the title sounded as though it offered the results of the elections – unfortunately it only covered the first round of the voting), a few souls also clicked the ‘End Guantanamo’ banner in my sidebar. One of these kind souls submitted it to Stumbleupon, with more than 180 hits coming in in the first night. Numbers have since then dwindled to about 3 to 5 visitors a day from Stumble upon. I suppose that, when a page gets first submitted, Stumbleupon sends it to the screens of a relatively higher number of users in order to have a base according to which to assess the site.

So this has, of course, not been a major breakthrough in blog advertising, but I am happy if just one or two of these 200something visitors downloaded or forwarded the logo. I know that conversion rates (i.e. the amount of people who visited your site AND took the encouraged action, in our case: downloaded or printed or forwarded the logo) for such scenarios are very low: 1% would be a good result.

And I am actually happier about those 234 recent visitors to the End Guantanamo site than I am about the more than 1000 that were misdirected to the French elections page. I am investing my hopes in those tiny steps that might make a difference…

P.S. The one thing that I am not so fond of regarding Stumbleupon is that you can also (and of course – this is capitalism, attention is being marketed) buy screen space from them. They have a kinder word for it: Create a campaign, and once you start this process it takes a few more screens and steps until you realize that this will cost you $0.05 per visitor. I wonder how this interferes with the quality of their site listings – for the moment they should be fine, but once the subjective content to advertising ratio (as judged by the users) is suffering, they’re in trouble (and rightly so:-).

In other words: I those 234 hits that my blog received via Stumbleupon, had been generated as the result of a ‘campaign’, it would already have cost me $11,70. Interesting, isn’t it? Attention is an expensive commodity. If each hit my blog has received so far had been worth 5 cents, I would already have earned $850.

This post is part of a series: Here is part 1, and here part 2.