The NCeSS Jamboree is in full swing with lots of talking going on.  Any one got any comments on it?

The Royal Statistical Society recently hosted an interesting meeting on text mining, with one of the talks focusing on assessing an organisation’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by looking at on-line media coverage. The concept has a wide appeal for organisations wanting to perform business intelligence and monitor what is being said about their brand (what their brand is being associated with, which –if any- or the core messages projected in an advertising campaign are getting out, whether a brand is associated more or less frequently with negative stories than their competitors and so). (more…)

Google has pulled the plug on it’s lively service.  For those of you not in the know, and lets face it, that was most of us, Lively was Google’s attempt to bring virtual worlds to a website.  Coupled with this have been ‘major‘ price rises at the hirterto darling of the eLearning community, Second Life (AKA Sadville).  What does this mean for the effort educators have put into these systems?  Well.. (more…)

I’ve just attended the latest in the NCeSS Semiar series.  So far we have had ethics, R, and now webmetrics.  Mike Thelwall gave an excellent talk on blogs, links and ******g swearing. (more…)

The congestion charge mood map has been running for a while now and, as the debate around the proposed charge around manchester heats up it is interesting to note that the statistics (more…)

An innovative VRE portal, currently developed by the CREW (Collaborative Research Events on the Web) project, presents new ways of searching, recording and annotating research events and has been demonstrated at various events, most prominently at All Hands 2008 and the JISC Roadshow (titled ‘Advanced tools and technologies for collaborative research’, see link for slides) in Manchester last week. Some of the events have been used to test the prototype in recording talks and offering a live annotation feature to participants and to collect feedback (also courtesy of NCeSS’ participation in the project) from the users, evaluating the system.

More on these events and on the CREW project in general can be found on the CREW Blog and website under

http://www.crew-vre.net/

National Grid Service (NGS) Innovation Forum ’08 was held on 4th - 5th November 2008 in Manchester. There were about 120 attendees. As stated by the organizer, this two day event aims to showcase the achievements of the NGS over the last 4 years, allow delegates to find out more about using the NGS in applied research, NGS membership joining, the future developments and next phase of the NGS.

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Recent developments in Second Life have made me re-examine it as a method for dissemination, and teaching and learning.  Last week, the JISC eLearning conference had some good talks about Second Life.  For instance, care (more…)

This is the title of a fascinating article by three University of Manchester colleagues (Duncan Hull, Steve Pettifer and Doug Kell) in which they provide an overview of the difficulties we all face in using digital libraries and managing our bibliographies. They then describe various Web 2.0 tools for addressing these difficulties and making “digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places”. The article is available with open access at http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000204

Farzana and I are attending an online conference this week, hosted by JISC on innovating eLearning.  It’s a fascinating way to attend a conference – I attended the keynote in my pyjamas in my spare bedroom with a cup of coffee, (more…)