tigressse

Last August I posted how to Install a retweet button on Tumblr. Up to now, I was using the Microplaza RTbutton, since it no longer works, as people searching on the web and getting directed on my post I find it useful to write a new one.

The RTbutton I have chosen   has been designed by backtype*. The number 10 being the current number the link has been tweeted. To tweet a link, you only have to clic “retweet”.

Below is an updated version, how to install a RTButton on Tumblr in 2 steps.

You need to define this little piece of javascript before <div class=”post”>, it will configure the button to have the correct title and retweets count. You can also adapt it to change the leading part (ie: tweetcount_src = “RT @tigressse”) and if you want to keep the backtype attribution (tweetcount_via = true) or if you want the link to be opened in new window (tweetcount_links = true), the button size (“large” or “small”), the background color (ie: ‘FFFFFF’), the border color (ie: ‘CCCCCC’), the “retweet” text color (ie: ‘00CED1’).

<script type="text/javascript">
    tweetcount_url = "{Permalink}";
    var t = document.createElement('p');
    t.innerHTML = "{Title}";
    tweetcount_title = t.textContent ;
    tweetcount_src = "RT @tigressse:";
    tweetcount_via = false;
    tweetcount_links = true;
    tweetcount_size = "large";
    tweetcount_background = 'FFFFFF';
    tweetcount_border = 'CCCCCC';
    tweetcount_text = '00CED1';
    tweetcount_api_key = '5c3bba3f5d77a46a13453091e36dc1cde4335e9299a1edeeaa3c31d193b33fda';
</script>

Then you need to add this second piece of javascript where you want the button to appear (note that you can change the div style). A nice place to put the button is just before the title of the post, you add :

<div style="float: right;">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://widgets.backtype.com/tweetcount.js">
</script>
</div>

* For other button, see the TweetMeme button.

After couple of years analyzing the world of researchers (and one* in particular), exchanging point of views with friends , it seems like researchers** are paranoid, they don’t WANT to share their knowledge - even those fell into common knowledge heritage - due to an extreme (beyond understanding!?) fear of being scooped***?! And definitively a strong jealousy of being surpassed by colleagues (local or worldwide).

Here are my conclusion: They don’t want to collaborate, they will never collaborate. The actual intrinsic structure don’t allow that. So, stop dreaming about web 2.0 features to make that working. There is no miracle, if someone don’t share offline what is the reason he should do so online?

I am probably wrong! If so, do you want to share some real experiences of research 2.0? The debate is open…

Engineers / scientists build on others works!

* the word “community” will not be appropriate, “research lab” is suitable.

** Of course some exceptions may exists: the computer sciences area (thanks to the open-source spirit) and life science (well, generally they share database; it’s a start, it’s ok).

*** Really like the examples by scenarios probabilities from OpenWetWare about getting scooped

You too, had your Nabaztag working fine and since you are using the Apple’s Time Capsule base station to access your internet network, your Nabaztag is speechless and can’t connect anymore on the network; resulting on two steady green lights and the third light on the right blinking orange?

Well, try this and it should work

• Connect to the NabaztagXX wireless network
• Go to the advanced configuration page - http://192.168.0.1
• Change the address of the violet platform from r.nabaztag.com/vl to 62.210.186.165/vl
• Then clic the ‘update & start’ button, your Nabaztag will restart. Yooupiie it’s talking again! :))

More help, here, here and here.

Wanna meet me in November? I am attending the following events and conferences.

Pecha Kucha Night on November 6th at the BoZar. Pecha-Kucha is a Japanese term pronounced “pe-chak-cha”, from the sound of conversation (‘chit chat’, ‘blabla’). It’s a very interesting concept started in Japan in 2003 initially intended for young designers to show their work in public. The idea? Speakers present 20 images X 20 seconds each slide for a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds. For the Brussels volume 10, we will assist at 17 presentations from designers to photographers, musicians, artists, thinkers… My Man is presenting the state of NOW. Wondering what he is going to present. Let’s trust the artist!

SciTech Europe 09 on November 12th at Brussels. It’s a full day conference with a drink reception prior to the event on Wednesday November 11th. I am particularly interested in sessions about collaborative research and joint research, and about innovation across Europe in general. The conference is organized in masterclasses in 4 streams: Health, Research & Investment, Future Technologies, Environment and Energies.

How cool is that? I have got a free ticket for the conference. Thanks to Santa Clause before Christmas! That’s what I meant one day in a tweet :)

Evento Blog España on November 13th to 15th in Sevilla. I am joining the Belgian delegation gathered around the webmission.be. Evento Blog España is the 2nd most important European event about Participative Web after Leweb in Paris; over 1000 attendees. For the first time, I will not need to wake up at 6:30 am, sessions start at 10-11:00 am (and the conference is held at the hotel). I love the Spanish clock :)

Here are the sessions I am attending: on Friday, ‘the digital natives’ - ‘nativo digitales’ and ‘the real-time web’ - ‘la web en tiempo real’ roundtables; on Saturday, I am attending David Karp presenting ‘Tumbr’, the ’I own my own data’ - ‘mis datas son mios’ and the ‘state of the blogosphere: 10 years of blogs special (1999-2009)’ - ‘estado de la blogosfera: especial 10 años de blogs (1999-2009)’ sessions, and on Sunday the surprise. By the way, I am wondering what it is! And of course I will join the ‘routa de la tapa’ - ‘tapas route’ and the EBE party. The other time, I will be networking in a corner of the hall. Now, time to re-practice my Spanish after 3 years of lack of practice!

Actually I am flying just after the SciTech Europe 09 on November 12th, it’s gonna be challenging to catch the plane on time!

TEDx Brussels on Monday November 23th at the European Parliament. It’s a local TED-like event, where ‘x’ stands for independently organized TED event. For those who don’t know, TED is for Technology Entertainment Design, it’s an annual event where the world’s fascinating thinkers and doers are invited to give a talk. Here are the links to the recorded TED talks and the programme of the TEDxBrussels event. I am impatient to see these talks: “welcome to our house”, “one laptop per child”, “brussels 2.0”, “three marabouts” and “open everything”.

Hope to meet some folks there!

Now heading to Café Numérique to see friends and drink a beer. Today topic: “Google is your friend”. May be I will come back with a Google t-shirt?!

For friends following me on twitter, I have sometimes tweeted about Knowledge Plaza…

Today, let me briefly introduce you to a tool I have been using these last months. It’s brilliant and far the best knowledge management and social search platform I have ever used.

Knowledge Plaza empowers members of the same workspaces to share and manage internet bookmarks, documents, files, e-mails, contacts, as well as their own expertise.

It’s an all in one product; at the same time

• a social networking
• a social bookmarking
• a document & file repository
• a social team search engine
• a wiki

Here are the top 4 features I felt in love of

• Full text search.
• Mosaic* concept: Public Mosaics I share with others and private Mosaics where I collect and organize my knowledge, my works.
• Mosaic export: a zip file containing a set of folders (files, websites and contacts) and a pdf with an overview of the mosaic including all wiki pages, websites thumbnails and an overview of every tiles associated to the mosaic. Clic the export button and you have your report, easy and simple!
• And above all, the “I am a Search Engine”, everyone in the plaza can be used as a Search Engine. It’s more efficient and less time consuming to search info directly inside an expert’s repository (expert as a search engine).

To help me write my previous post about usage of social media and web 2.0 tools by high education institutions, I decided first to create a mosaic - University 2.0 Mosaic* in my private workspace - and started collecting and organizing info around the topic. See the screenshot below. Thus, the University 2.0 post was born.

As a science and research 2.0 enthusiast, I also share a mosaic around web 2.0 tools for scientists and researchers.

Here is a sample of websites I have bookmarked and stored in the Research 2.0 Mosaic.

Now, imagine international projects involving researchers from all over the world with a number of different expertise (or simply local projects inside a lab), it can be very hard to collaborate around a same project and manage tons of info, or write a paper involving many co-authors. Knowledge Plaza makes the collaboration between researchers easy and the lab/expert’s knowledge available for the whole community at the same time.

The following demo on the climate change can help to grab the concepts and the main features of Knowledge Plaza.

* Useful basic definitions

• A tile: piece of information. ie: emails, documents, websites, contacts, references, etc.
• A mosaic : is where you package knowledge to collaborate, annotate, share and export. A collection of tiles organized and discussed around a theme. ie: climate change, etc.

** A product from Whatever Company, see their website.

A video by  Dr. Michael Wesch and 200 students for the course “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” at Kansas State University.

This video has been realized 2 years ago, in October 2007. It’s all the more true today, even more tomorrow.

Btw, I love the song!

What is Social Media?

Social media is about collective intelligence; about communication tools, individuals and group of people who contribute together to create, organize and distribute web content.

Social media falls into

• Blogs: Org Prep Daily, Seth Godin’s Blog
• Microblogs: Twitter, Yammer
• Social Networks: ResearchGATE, Nature Network
• Collective bookmarking: del.icio.us, KnowledgePlaza
• Reference manager: Mendeley, CiteULike
• Wikis: Pure Energy Systems Wiki, Citizendium
• Multimedia sharing (audio, photos, video): Flickr, Youtube EDU
• Document sharing: Slideshare, Google
• Aggregators: FriendFeed, Storytlr, …

University 2.0

According to NACAC ‘2009 report, 88% of universities are convinced of the need to be present in social network & social media platforms.

In my point of view, they will not have the choice to join the 2.0 trend. The reasons are simple. The concept of borders no longer exist. We are moving towards an Open World. We are leaving in an era where institutions are continuously putting their workforce together to work on important research issues. Moreover, students show the need of moving in exchange programs and internships during their course’s curriculum. How do universities keep in contact with them?

Nowadays, professors and students are members of  several social networks and online communities. How can a university reach the eyes and ears of an audience that is largely responsible for over one billion text messages sent per day*? How to make them also feel to belong to the university community and even more, be proud of their university and getting them engaged in university activities?

How do universities take profit of their students and professors - abroad or in campus - as ambassadors of their brand? Don’t they have to be where their members and future students are?

How do universities and research departments capitalize the knowledge and works of their researchers? Phd students complete their study in average in 4-6 years. During that time, they use university resources, labs infrastructures and materials. Wondering, how many of them leave traces of everything they have done to benefit the youngest (tests, measurements, processes)? Instead what happens, once they have achieved their studies, they are gone with their knowledge; we can restart the cycle every time. Let’s think about the time lost and resources lost testing processes we barely know how someone else did them in the past. Or simply restart by 0? I speak from experience…

Web 2.0 addresses almost all these issues. Nevertheless, in this post I will not dwell on collective intelligence and knowledge management among researchers. This, deserves another post about research 2.0 tools. Instead, in the following lines, I will focus on universities as institutions concerned about their brand and the social impact.

Why high education institutions invest in Social Media?

Anglo-saxon institutions were the first to join social networks and social media platforms. They are far the ones who really adopt web 2.0 technologies and use them efficiently.

After some investigations, there are four main social media tools used by universities

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Twitter
• Youtube

However, some exceptions publish their slides on Slideshare. LinkedIn is used in a way to keep in contact with alumnis. Depending on if it’s a European or American university, they use Dailymotion or Myspace. Some labs use wikis to keep the knowledge.

As in every organization, the adoption starts in a bottom-up way. Firstly, individuals such as students, professors, institutions members start joining; at the moment some faculties, research departments and small units are present in social media platforms, it becomes necessary for the institution to join and shows the example. As an immediate result, an easy way to monitor the brand since famous social networks count millions of members and accessing social media platforms is costless.

Universities and high education institutions use social media tools mostly as promoting channels

• to recruit best-fitted students
• to create stronger brand image
• to create ambassadors who will talk about the institution
• to monitor the brand

But also and the most important in my opinion, to better communicate, for transparency; allowing discussions in a 2-way dialogue.

How universities and high education institutions use Social Media?

To be effective the institutions value has to meet the  value of the audience. Social media can be used in many different ways; and institutions are getting inventive.

Among different ways, high education institutions use Twitter updates, Facebook posts, Flickr, Youtube EDU channel

• to share faculty works
• to broadcast events
• to showcase professors and students of interest
• to spread news, thanks to the social media viral effect
• to communicate directly with students, alumni, future candidate, parents
• as emergency notifications channel, made possible thanks to realtime web
• as place for the community members to connect (for new students, for alumni to keep in contact each other and with the institution…)
• to link back to the institution website as a result of increasing website traffic
• …

The original use of social media goes to Stanford University Facebook Fan Page. Stanford hosts Offices Hours on Facebook (Why not?!). The offices hours consist in 2 parts. First, a description of the professor who will host the office hours and a video of the professor talking about his work are posted on the Facebook fan page. Then fans and candidates comment the post by asking their questions to the hosting professor. Secondly, an another video is posted with the professor answering questions addressing fans by name.

Thus, they connect directly with their targeted audience and engage the public in a 2 ways communication.

For other uses, read Mashable’s review.

Stanford University as an example of university 2.0

At the time I am writing this post,

• Stanford has 5,205 followers on Twitter;
• Stanford has 42,096 fans on their Facebook Fan Page;
• Stanford University has 29,601 subscribers to their youtube channel and have generated 888,721 views since September 2006 when they joined

These numbers are keeping growing; impressive for an institution of 15,000 students.

In addition, Stanford has an iTunes U channel where they podcast courses, lectures, interviews, sports… Their EdTech school of medicine has 5003 pics on Flickr.

Links of French and UK Universities on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube

• List of United Kingdom universities on Facebook (Liz Azian’s blog)
• List of United Kingdom universities on Twitter (Liz Azian’s blog)
• Liste des universités Françaises sur Twitter (Comcampus blog)
• List of United Kingdom universities on Youtube (Liz Azians’s blog)

To conclude, I have small advice for institutions who want to join the web 2.0 world. Having a social media account is not enough, update regularly and link everything. Do not neglect the profile page; adopt the theme and colors of your institution.

* NACAC

Early this week, a joint research has been announced between Kaneka Corporation, a Japanese manufacturer of thin-film silicon hybrid solar cells, and IMEC, a Belgian center in nanotechnology and nanoelectronics.

The goal of this collaboration: new industrial a-Si:H* hetero-junction solar cells with the world’s highest level conversion efficiency of beyond 20%.

Kaneka invest about 1.5 billion Yen in the project. 10 researchers of both side will be working during 3 years in the solar cells division in IMEC facilities, located in Leuven.

It’s kind of project that could excite more than one in the domain!

* Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon

These last 2 weeks I have been busy searching in the web for science 2.0 related conferences all over the world (see my previous post).

After some investigations, I have come to this conclusion, besides science 2.0 annual conferences and science barcamps, more and more scientific gatherings plan sessions about web 2.0, science 2.0 or open-science.

Among others

TELSci2.0, Science 2.0 for Technology Enhanced Learning, a workshop held in Nice, France, end of this month September 29th. The event is supported by the stellar network and organized by member of the K.U.Leuven (Belgium), Open University (UK), KnowCenter (Austria), UJF (France) institutions.

Last February, the AAAS annual meeting had some web 2.0 sessions to their program. According to Bora, they also had / have such sessions at Trieste FEST in Italy - does not exist any more - and at SRBR meetings, Society for Research of Biological Rythms.

Does this mean that the scientific community is more and more open to web 2.0 technologies and definitively adopt science 2.0 tools for their daily work?

Nevertheless, I did not find enough info for meetings organized in Africa, Asia, Latina America and Oceania (Australia). If you read this and you are aware of “web 2.0 scientific related meetings” going on over there, thanks for sharing.