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…

A junior doctor in the West Midlands and a medical student at Cambridge University have kicked off a new movement in the medical community by launching the first ever Twitter Journal Club. Heralded as a ‘revolution’ in scientific communication, it has enjoyed positive coverage from publishers and practitioners alike (e.g it was mentioned today at the ASME Annual Scientific Meeting). Now in its seventh week, the initiative has amassed over 950 followers on Twitter and last Sunday generated 448 tweets during a discussion of the following BMJ paper:  Effect of β blockers in treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a retrospective cohort study

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Google is taking yet another stab at social networking with Google+ after the past disappointments of Buzz and Wave. This time, however, they have launched a more polished product than usual and offer a solution to the problem of keeping one’s personal and work life separate. The interface and concepts are cleaner and simpler, which will make it easier for early adopters to engage, use and then share their experiences.

In its blog post to introduce Google+, Google’s Vic Gundotra said the following:

“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

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Google started rolling out the ‘+1’ recommend button across its own portfolio and third-party web sites just a day after Twitter unveiled its new ‘follow’ button. Both releases are being viewed as direct competitors to Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button.

Central to an effort by companies to stake out their claim in the social-networking domain and encourage ordinary ‘surfers’ to be more engaged with their products, the tools also facilitate the collection of detailed user behaviour data and have obvious benefits for online advertising. The suite of Web 2.0 buttons featured on most websites has grown steadily over the past few years (you may well have noticed) and sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are long-term residents. But the success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has spurred others to get in on the game. Afterall, it is said to appear on more than a third of the 1,000 most popular websites and apparently the average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic. more…