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This is an organization that publishes credible statistics and research reports on internet usage

Great place to find stats of internet use and demographics

I've seen their director Lee Rainie speak a few times as the lead keynote at Computers in Libraries. He is such an amazing speaker, I keep going even though each year he pretty much gives an update on their research into internet usage.

The TRG researches what we are trying to do here (on diigo) and what we've been trying to do all week. Create understanding across mediums.

This is data that will cause some privacy issues. Now one can really be connected.

wow, and the data persists even when you upgrade the phone! The article says "In some ways, this shouldn't be surprising. Back in June of 2010, Apple updated its privacy policy to include a paragraph that allows Apple and "partners and licensees" to collect and store user location data." But of course hardly anyone reads the fine print.

Here is the open source tool the researchers made with the location data: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

The chapters in this volume explore the theoretical, design, learning, and methodological questions with respect to designing for and researching web-based communities to support learning. The authors, coming from diverse academic backgrounds (computer science, information science, instructional systems technology, educational psychology, sociology, and anthropology), are frank in examining what we do and do not know about the processes and practices of designing communities to support learning.

This is the About Page for the ARDA, a resource whose mission is to "democratize access" to data. It contains links to national surveys, denominational histories, etc. and emphasizes accountability. Scholars and amateur researchers may submit source to ARDA, and the staff validates the findings.

An interesting article on how Google's search results can be manipulated from the Feb 13, 2011 NY Times Business section. Is our search engine research being manipulated in other ways as well?

Social Informatics Researcher, who was noted in the first week, Oosteeven, is involved in this research effort. I have not studied in detail yet, but this looks interesting.

Does anyone know about this institution? They do interesting work and seem to research the causes of the digital divide.

We have a number of links from the Berkman Center on the Digital Divide Diigo and found it really helpful in our research. You can join the group if you want to post there. Tim Wu, the lawyer who coined the term net neutrality, was a fellow at Berkman, as well as Eszter Hargittai, a scholar discussed in our presentation section, "users: race and income." We also discuss Lawrence Lessig's work, mostly known for creative commons, in the "net neturality" section. He was also a fellow there. They also have really great weekly talks that they post on their youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/BerkmanCenter

University of Oxford Social Informatics Researcher

Author finds that young people do care about privacy, but are more concerned with social privacy, rather than institutional privacy. "Contrary to much of the rhetoric in the debate around online privacy, the use of Facebook is not necessarily a choice free of coercion, nor are the reasons for sharing information on the site simply about self-obsession or exhibitionism." Rather it is a dominate expression of online identity and a way to communicate with peers. This is following one of the important points of Wesch - that there is no opting out of new media once the community starts to participate.

A repository for activities, people, and opportunities related to the field of Social Informatics. It includes foundational documents of the field and a complete bibliography of Kling's work

Interesting article from The Economist about applying distributive creativity and group piecework to journalism. "Under the rubric "My Boss Is a Robot" they are testing whether it is possible to draw on the sort of distributed creativity that the internet has made possible-and faddish-to perform the equivalent of journalistic piecework. To start with, the group has chosen to bash out the kind of article with which Babbage is all too familiar: a write-up of a newly released scientific research paper. Rather than assign the task as a whole to a single person, their system will try to tease apart and outsource different elements of analysis and production."

This reminds me of David Weinberger's discussion of the Corbis and Bettman photo archives at the beginning of his book.

I saw this article too... Although we keep statistics on how many times a file was downloaded from a web site, a digital document does not record the same info or imply use the way a physical object can. We can extract more quantitative info from it now.

interesting demographic info on users of top social networking sites

I just found this, and don't recall seeing it before. It is a peer reviewed journal aimed at MLIS students. It comes out of Buffalo. I just wanted to share, no specific article, but it looks like a good resource. Open access journal.

Thanks for sharing this Judy... I think someone once posted something about it on LISSA. I just checked the editorial team and there's two Rutgers students listed. I don't them though.

The director of Harvard University Library argues that the best digital library would be a non-commercial public digital library. Here, here!

And here's the report itself. I look forward to reading this with a critical eye.

The people that bring you Sesame Street now bring you some pretty incredible statistics on internet use by the five and under set. Doesn't Sesame Street have an on-line presence?

I posted the brief which has links to the original Google study and Nicholas Carr's underwhelmed response because the summary is nice and easy to digest plus if you wish to delve further you can. Basically Google challenged students in a library versus those using Google to answer 'random' questions- Nicholas Carr responds- " How did the University of Michigan researchers come up with the questions that they had their subjects find answers to? They "obtained a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine." Ha! Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality? That question might actually propel one into the musty depths of a library, where "time saved" is not always the primary concern".