3 minutes per month? I'm bringing even those averages down :-)

Preliminary analysis of this Twitter activity in 12 riot locations shows the majority of surging social media traffic occurs after the first verified reports of incidents in an area, which could suggest that Twitter was used far more by those seeking to follow fast-moving events than to incite trouble – although it is not possible to say it played no role.

The tweets also reflect a shift in social media use during the week. Most reports place the initial disturbances in Tottenham between 8pm and 9pm on Saturday night. The number of tweets referencing the area surged in the wake of these first troubles: up from 15 between 7pm and 8pm to 15,000 between 10pm and 11pm.

Later in the week Twitter may even have helped spread warnings about trouble. On the following Tuesday Greater Manchester police gave a press conference at 2pm warning of potential issues later that day. This was mirrored by tweets mentioning the city jumping to over 1,000 an hour before trouble began, peaking at around 12,000 an hour after disturbances had started.

"Social media was used far more by those seeking to follow – or avoid – events than to incite trouble".

No big surprises here (to anyone with a brain) but I don't suppose it will carry much weight with those politicians who simply want to play the blame game.

If Twitter was to agree to comply with court orders made by English courts within their jurisdiction, then it could set up a sophisticated system to delete any tweet that included the name of a person who was the subject of an order.

I note that a Twitter spokesman told The Guardian that it does remove "illegal tweets and spam." So it has the technology to do the job.

Then again, as I write, I can see consequent problems. People may well catch on that certain celebrities/footballers/MPs had vanished from the net.

Twitter isn't the meejaa, innit!

Asking Twitter to comply with a gagging order is like asking every pub in the country to ensure that all their patrons comply with the gagging order. It's stupid.

Stupid title... but one that at least hints at where this infographic is coming from.

Ends with, "Social media is now a vital part of life, and academia needs to learn how to effectively take advantage". Err... "take advantage"... why?

Replace "social media" with "going for a drink in the pub" throughout and most of it still makes sense. So what?!

Scope of ScHTML. It’s a community-based activity, re-using best practice, but with minimal entry barriers. IOW it can apply to almost every public activity in scholarship (research, education, reference, record). It is not just for submitting publications – it can manage student essays, lab notebooks, Wikipedia entries, chemical databases, etc. See the FAQs http://okfnpad.org/schtml-faqs YOU can contribute questions or suggested answers.

Technology of ScHTML. The minimum entry is simply to be able to create modern well-formed HTML5. Everything beyond that is done by evolving agreements (“conventions”). It can, if necessary, be edited by hand, though we are obviously keen to create a flexible toolchain. In practice this is often already present and a matter of identifying current good tools and good practice.

News from Peter Murray-Rust about the Scholarly HTML (ScHTML) initiative - an activity to develop an HTML5-based markup language for scholarly communication.

Interesting...

Amongst other things, he notes the social and political aspects of this work and the lack of a packaging standard for HTML (which is given as one of the reasons for the current predominance of formats like PDF).

On the latter issue, it is worth noting that HTML5 (as with all other HTML variants) is explicitly a markup language for the Web. Scholarly communication evolved largely off the web. It is not that surprising that there is something of a tension here. This is one of the reasons why it would be nice(r) to see a discussion around changing how scholarly communication happens, given the huge changes brought by the web and social media, rather than just talking about what format is used to ship scholarly content around. In the main, packaging isn't an issue for the web because the distributed nature of stuff is just part of the way things work. It only becomes an issue when you want to talk about non-web approaches, like journals (irrespective of whether they happen to be surfaced on the web or not) that it really becomes an issue. That said, scholarly communication brings with it some particular challenges, like preservation for example, that aren't a major issue for much of the mainstream web. Discuss!

On the former, Peter cites Wikipedia as a (not very good) analogy for the community development of a technology like ScHTML. Seems an odd choice? Looking to community-led standards forums like, say, the Dublin Core, IETF or OASIS might be a better place to start?

The drive-by technorati are well-informed, curious and always probing. They're also hiding... hiding from the real work of creating work that matters, connections with impact and art that lasts. I love to hear about the next big thing, but I'm far more interested in what you're doing with the old big thing.

Wikipedia is now widely regarded as a mature project and is consulted by a large fraction of internet users, including academics and other experts. However, many of them are still reluctant to contribute to it. The aim of this survey is to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to an open collaborative project such as Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities. We hope this may help us identify ways around barriers to expert participation.

The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 min to complete. It consists of a short introduction, followed by two main sections in which we contrast shared perceptions and personal motivation, and a final section where you can tell us more about yourself. At the end of the survey, you will find a link to follow the results and the ensuing conversation.

A potentially interesting attempt to understand 'academic' attitudes to Wikipedia.

If you are a scientist, academic or otherwise consider yourself an expert, it'd be worth considering completing this survey.

But as you'll see from the detailed list of changes at wordpress.org, most of the changes fall under the heading of general housekeeping: a cosmetic tweak here, an update to an included software package there.

Matt Mullenweg declares this release 'more of a CMS than ever before' - and of course, he's right. We're definitely edging further and further into 'proper' CMS territory; but, I think, still clinging on to the 'I just want to write something' mentality from WordPress's early days as a humble blogging platform.

It's another step forward. Not perhaps the great leap forward that v3.0 represented, but that's absolutely fine. The best just keeps getting a little better.

Nice overview of new WP3.1 functionality.

The original seven words are:

• Shit
• Piss
• Fuck
• Cunt
• Cocksucker
• Motherfucker
• Tits

I think I need to work some form of analysis of the use of these words on Twitter into Summarizr :-). I'll call it a 7dw-rating.

As the popularity of SNSs continues to grow, opportunities for resource mobilization also increase. Because student participation with online social network sites like Facebook is greater than 90 percent (Felts, 2007), research has begun to concentrate on the consequences of social network site use. For example, Ellison, et al., (2007) found that using Facebook helps college students stay in touch with old and new friends. This connectivity resulted in a sense of satisfaction for users.

However, there is likely a disconnect between perceptions about access to social resources and people’s ability to actually tender these assets. The likelihood of mobilizing networked resources is likely a function of relationship strength and the nature of the request. The goal of this research is to establish a baseline response rate to modest requests for instrumental support while controlling for both the personalness of communicated requests and a range of relationship characteristics.