The World's First Map of Science

This "Map of Science" created by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists illustrates the online behavior of scientists accessing different scientific journals, publications. It's a high resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when retrieving information from online services.

Johan Bollen who led the research argues as follows:

"This research will be a crucial component of future efforts to study and predict scientific, as well novel methods to determine the true impact of articels and journals."

More information in PloS ONE

Twitter's Popularity Soars

Twitter growth surges 131% in March and is quickly revolutionizing mass communication.What are the reasons for such rapidly growing popularity among its users? Andrew McAfee discussed this phenomenon in one of his classes and they concluded on a combination of the following attributes:

• Concise
• Hyperlinked
• Persistant
• Searchable
• Asynchronous
• Assymetric
• Largely public, but with a private option
• Categorizable
• Open
• Universal
• Monolithic

Finally they were trying to understand the meaning of the combination of attributes listed above. One of his students argued as follows: "Twitter's not a substitute for anything we used to do. It's a combination about 17 things we used to do." So what are the most innovative attributes and characters about Tweet and Twitter? Is it an innovative and appropriate tool for usage in science?

Wikis

The production and usage of Wiki Websites is quite easy. Attention please, this post is still under construction. More information will follow soon.
In the meantime the following video, a commoncraft product, describes how it works.

Twitter

Twitter provides a service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of FAQs to one simple question: What are you doing?

The following video, a commoncraft product, describes how it works.



View Twitter Blog for more information.

The Third Culture

Kevin Kelly describes the Internet as a copy machine.

At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

So is there anything left that cannot be copied and maybe is better than free?


According to Kelly there exist eight categories of "intangible value", "eight things that are better than free", eight uncopyable values. Kelly calls these qualities generatives that add value to free copies, and "therefore are something that can be sold".

Eight generatives better than free

1. Immediacy


2. Personalization


3. Interpretation


4. Authenticity


5. Accessibility


6. Embodiment


7. Patronage


8. Findability
   

More ...

Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge

The Eigenfactor site is a good source for ranking and mapping science journals. It ranks journals as much as Google ranks websites. It is completely free and completely searchable.

People of Earth....

Through the Internet people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.

The Cluetrain Manifesto and its 95 theses on powerful global market conversations by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searl and David Weinberger.

Project Management

Tomorrow I will give a seminar on project management at Danube University Krems.

Adapt yourselves to the changes of transformation and simplify your projects!

Read and follow the instructions of the ePMbook.

Relaxing...finally

Have you ever wondered about relaxing in Web2.0? Yes?
Well, just go to the relaxing area (text in German) in Web2.0.

Science Blogs

Will you remember 2007 as the year Open Access Publishing arrived?

Explore the top science stories of the past year in Science Blogs.

Digital Footprints

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprints states a new study by Pew Internet & American Life Project . But most of them are not concerned about the amount of personal data available online.

And of course this raises questions such as: how much of personal data should be available online? Do we need total individual transparency for digitally managing our indentities? Which measures can be taken to avoid open access to our personal data?

More information (in German) at ORF.science.

Critical study on Google

Hermann Maurer carried out a study (PDF, 1.33 GB) on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google. There is more (in German) at ORF.science.

I'm very happy ... well, I have to say proud for succeding to get an interview with Hermann Maurer for my PhD thesis (dissertation).

The rise of the implicit

Listen to the Defrag talk on the implicit by David Weinberger. He is the author of various "fantastic and outstanding" books focusing on the way the Internet is changing knowledge acquisition, communication, human relations and society.

CitationRank

"Citations are the currency of research", argues Erik Duval in his post on citations in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning.

In this respect he raises the following questions:

• which of your papers has been cited most often?
• who has cited you most often?
• which papers cited a particular publication of yours?
• whether more and more or less and less people are citing you over the years?
• whose citing behavior is close to yours?
• which conference or journal contains most citations of your papers?
• which conference or journal contains your cites most often?

Moreover he discusses some Searching Tools for scientists:

• PubMed


• arXiv


• Web of Science


• DBLP


• Google Scholar


• Bibisonomy


• Citeseer

GMW Congress Hamburg

The motto of this year's GMW congress, 12 - 14 September 2007 in Hamburg was : reinventing learning - rethinking university.

After two brilliant opening keynotes by Prof. Dr. Beger and Prof. Dr. Boltz aspects of - didactic imagination, creative forms of evaluation and quality development, Higher Education reforms: approaches, strategies, concepts - were being dealt with from different perspectives of learning, teaching and organization.

More in German...

One of the highlights was the Medida-Prix-Award in the categories "Digital media in academic teaching" and "Academic development with digital media".

Prof. Dr. Rolf Schulmeister was honoured for his scientific work and I just did it my way. I honoured him in acryl, 120 x 90.

Cyberscience

"Cyberscience - it is already taking place - will be different from traditional science. "

Michael Nentwich, director of the Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, describes and analyses in his book the usage of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in science.

This book not only draws a portrait of "Research in the Age of the Internet", but also assesses the various impacts of the New Media on academic activity and discusses the impacts for future research policies.

So we`ve already got some answers to the questions I posed in my previous article.
But the digital world is a rapidly changing one. Isn`t it? ;-)

Science in a Digital World

In this respect the following questions arise:

• In which ways are scientists influenced by the so-called digital world?

• How do they respond to this digital world in general? Fears and expectations?

• Do they change their modes of communication with other scientists? If so, for what reasons and how?

• Which digital techniques of communication have already become part of their daily routine? Why?

• What do they consider benefits derived from the digital world?

• Do online tools meet their expectations?
  

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a service provided by Google.

It offers a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources. One can identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Concerning the ranking of articles Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do.

Features for ranking articles:

• weighing full text of each article
• author
• publication of appearance of article
• number of citations
  

The most relevant results will appear on the first page.

More on Google Scholar.

I consider Google Scholar as a highly effective searching tool for scientists. But what about scientists who are still prioritizing on non-digital forms of publication? Which "page" will they appear on? Do they have to turn into what I'd call "digital natives" rather than "digital immigrants" in order to keep or gain reputation in the scholarly world?

Google Society

Literature Tip:

This book discusses various aspects on the digital change of knowledge.

Internet and Personality

At the moment I am reading this book on Internet and personality.

It deals with a broad spectrum of issues on personality features and the different types of using the Internet.