With more and more social networks appearing on a daily basis, many find themselves with multiple sites to manage and not enough time to do so. Enter RebelMouse, a self-proclaimed “social front page”, that pulls in user content from social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

At first glance, RebelMouse looks like a digital newspaper, hosted on Pinterest. After you spend some time on the site, however, it becomes clear that there is more to it than that. Founded by Paul Berry, the former CTO of The Huffington Post, RebelMouse has already signed up 32,000 users since it’s launch in June.

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In response to static, neglected lab websites that have become the norm, a Princeton scientist (Ethan O. Perlstein) has personally invested in the design of a site that will inspire fellow academics to openly share their research. In addition, with his academic appointment coming to an end, http://perlsteinlab.com/ is a great way to establish a personal brand.

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For those looking improve engagement with their Facebook posts, it seems that adding more pictures and speaking in the first person is a good place to start. Social media ‘scientist’ Dan Zarrella has tracked and analysed more than 1.3 million posts from the 10,000 most-liked Facebook pages. He has created an infographic (see below) showing what kind of posts perform best on Facebook in terms of likes, shares and comments.

Photos perform best across the board, followed by text and video, according to the data. News links bring in the lowest number of likes, shares and comments. In opposition to Twitter, posts with a high number of self-referential words such as “I” and “me” get more likes .  “It’s also important to be passionate, not neutral,” which means that both positive and negative posts tend to do well. more…

You may (or may not) have noticed that having blogged every Friday for over 2 years, there was a distinct lack of activity on the BMJ Web Development blog last week. Was I out enjoying the sunshine? Absolutely not. I was in the office researching the best time to disseminate blog posts on social media networks, of course.

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A host of journal editors and industry experts descended upon BMA House yesterday to discuss the latest techniques and developments in reader engagement. Highlights included a lively debate on post-publication peer review, an inspiring presentation by Twitter Journal Club founder Natalie Silvey (@silv24), encouraging advice on developing a comprehensive journal web presence by Karim Khan, and predictions for the future of social networking by Tad Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of NEJM.

Given the central theme of social media throughout the day, perhaps the most fitting way to capture the event is by following the surrounding conversation on Twitter. According to TweetReach, the stream below reached in excess of 27,000 users – quite an achievement!
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Twitter received a major update in December and is gradually rolling out a brand-new look with a host of new features. The update is arguably the most comprehensive and wide-ranging change since the microblogging service was launched in 2006.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0qqDy5BmYKE

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PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0’), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com).  The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…

Google+ Pages were announced on Monday, allowing companies of all sizes to post updates about themselves and their products or services. Similar to Facebook, people who follow a Google+ Page can comment on or share the company’s posts, creating running conversation threads. However, businesses can also set up Hangouts where they can chat directly with potential customers.

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I recently attended the Fifth Bloomsbury Conference on E-Publishing and E-Publications, entitled ‘Social Media and the Academy: Enhancing and enabling scholarly communication’. There were a variety of talks from scientists, publishers, librarians and archivists; all assessing the role of social media in professional scholarly lives and predicting future trends.

Research life cycles and adoption curves
Professor Ian Rowlands presented the results of a CIBER study that focused on whether social media are impacting on scholarly processes and how influential age and other factors are in shaping the demand for social media. The research life cycle was shown as an 8 stage process beginning with identifying opportunities, finding collaborators, securing support, reviewing literature, collecting research data, analysing research data, disseminating findings and managing the research process. Whilst librarians and publishers tend to get involved towards the final phase of dissemination, Ian suggested that there is a broader role to be played throughout the cycle. His advice was that publishers need to get involved earlier in the scholarly workflow. Microblogging is seen as useful for opportunities, collaboration, literature review, collecting data and, of course, for dissemination. Most people use social media in only one, two or three categories of social media. There are some strong pairings – blogging and microblogging; microblogging and social networking; microblogging and social tagging. more…