Sphinn is the place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums, build a network and stay informed of upcoming events.
You live your life online -- and anyone can read it. Should employers be able to troll your Facebook or MySpace page? Or should everything that you put onlin...
What does a friend of a friend of a friend know about you?Video generated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart. For more in...
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
There certainly is a lot of commentary regarding the usefulness of social media marketing, as well as the numbers of people that are engaging in the conversation. According to recent studies conducted by PostRank, we have been able to illustrate what is happening in the Internet’s social community — how people are communicating, what is changing, and where people are doing the talking.
"Ajax" stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." It is interesting to know that the term was coined just five years ago, on Feb 18, 2005 by user interface expert Jesse James Garrett. The elements of Ajax were already in use, but Garrett's 2005 blog entry gave a name to a powerful computing movement. In recognition of Ajax' birthday, SearchSOA.com reached out to Ajax thought leaders who, via email, formed a virtual roundtable discussion on where Ajax has come and how it is expected to evolve.
Social bookmarking has been around for several years, and it is finally beginning to gain in popularity because it is a powerful way to organize and share information. Harvey Raybould from OfficialWire.com gives an overview of the use of social bookmarking systems in business promotion.
Marketing research firm Nielsen has some stats on the habits of UK social networking users, and it once again shows that social networks, for the most part, adhere to the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule).
Taking a page out of Facebook’s open strategy, Twitter has launched a new page which highlights the open source projects that the company has released or contributed to.
One of the leading social optimization platforms for online business, providing social sharing and registration solutions that enable online businesses to increase traffic, registrations, and engagement. Gigya’s platform aggregates and optimizes social APIs including Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpaceID, Y!OS, Google and AOL.
Want to have Buzz act like more of a regular application than a browser tab? Follow Mashable's guide to creating your own Buzz application for the desktop.
The power of collaborative effort, especially relevant to us Pittsburghers. People can report on the road and snow conditions on streets close to where they live.
Our goal is to develop a probabilistic knowledge base that mirrors the content of the web. We are developing a system that uses semi-supervised learning methods to learn to extract symbolic knowledge from unstructured text and HTML. We are exploring methods of continous learning, where our system runs 24x7, continuously learning to read better, and continuously extracting facts from the web.
Ohloh is a free public directory of open source software and people.
Ohloh is a wiki, and anyone is welcome to join our community and add new projects to our directory, or to make corrections to existing directory pages. This public review makes Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date software directories available.
Ohloh is not a forge -- we do not host open source projects in the traditional sense. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and an analytics service. We use the data from our directory to create historical reports about the changing demographics of the open source world.
Without much surprise there has been significant movement within some of the social networks over the course of the last year. Brian Chappell from Ignite Social Media has put together a comprehensive report based on data from all major social networks existing on the web.
Providing fair assessment with timely feedback for students is a difficult task with science laboratory classes containing large numbers of students. Such classes are usually assessed by short-answer questions (SAQs) centred on principles encountered in the laboratory. It has been shown recently that computer-assisted assessment (CAA) has several advantages and is well received by students. However, student evaluation has shown that this system does not provide suitable feedback. Thus, the authors introduced peer assessment (PA) as a complementary procedure. In October 2006, 457 students registered for a first-year practical unit in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester. This unit consists of ten compulsory biology practical classes. The first four practicals were assessed using PA; the remaining six practicals were assessed by CAA and marked by staff or postgraduate student demonstrators. The reliability and validity of PA were determined by comparing duplicate scripts and by staff moderation of selected scripts. Student opinions were sought via questionnaires.
The authors show that both assessments are valid, reliable, easy to administer and are accepted by students. PA increases direct feedback to students, although the initial concerns of student groups such as mature and EU/International students need to be addressed using pre-PA training.
his article describes and evaluates several peer evaluation tools used to assess student behavior in small groups. The two most common methods of peer assessment found in the literature are rating scales and single score methods. Three peer evaluation instruments, two using a rating scale and one using a single score method, are tested in several management courses to examine their effectiveness. All three instruments demonstrate acceptable levels of reliability and are found to be correlated with individual performance measures. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each instrument.
As collaborative or team-based projects become more popular in both secondary and post-secondary classrooms, instructors are looking for ways for group mem bers to effectively evaluate one another. Constructing effective evaluation tools can be a daunting task. As shown by a review of literature, best practices include (1) building a foundation in the classroom that supports collaborative evaluation, (2) creating effective evaluation tools by articulating specific criteria and ensuring honest student participation (3) implementing formative feedback during the col laborative experience, (4) formulating summative feedback at the conclusion of the experience, and (5) assessing the collaborative evaluation process.
TED Talks: While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.
C. Veres. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, том 3999/2006 из Lecture Notes in Computer Science, стр. 58-69. Berlin / Heidelberg, Springer, (июля 2006)
D. Millen, J. Feinberg, и B. Kerr. CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, стр. 111--120. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2006)
S. McNee, N. Kapoor, и J. Konstan. CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, стр. 171--180. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2006)