Moving on from my qualms about delicious’ shaky future, here’s a great article about alt-metrics and how academic scholarship and publishing is changing.

In growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs.

These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero–where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks–now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository–now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace alt-metrics.

From Alt-metrics, a manifesto

Speaking of moving scholarship online, our fine institution has just migrated the unsw repository of research output to a new user interface. Unsworks now has improved functionality and a more similar look and feel to existing library services. Explore it here.

TechCrunch has reported a leaked slide from a Yahoo internal meeting which intimates the once popular social bookmarking site delicious.com (owned by Yahoo) may be shut down. It’s early days yet, only being a couple of hours since the report appeared on TechCrunch, but the online world is already responding.

At the moment, #delicious is trending on twitter, Australia – not worldwide, which is likely to be a time zone issue.  The general reception seems to be “Nooooo!” and an online petition #savedelicious on activist social media tool act.ly has been started. I have signed it immediately, because this is the one tool that has stayed the course throughout my Masters in Information and Knowledge Management, keeping track of information, issues and developements in the libraries and information sciences sector. The silver lining of this cloud is that I can share with you a global live map of all the people who have signed this petition! Social media is marvellous, until they shut it down. However, let’s be circumspect about this, as there is no official communication confirming this from Yahoo.

Obviously, though, people like to be prepared, and there are already alternatives to delicious being passed around, evernote, for example, and zotero are two that come to mind. A list of other alternatives is available here. I’ll be keeping my ears open for more news about this, because this has pretty big ramifactions for not only the daao blog, but also designing research capabilities into the daao. It just goes to show that software / application dependency for collaborative research tools must be addressed, and that future-proofing is built into any strategy.

Further resources:

How to export delicious tags html

How to export delicious tags to spreadsheet

Recently, inventor and writer Mark Pesce blogged about web 2.0 and underlying motivations for why people engage collaboratively on crowdsourced web projects. What I like about this post is how he has grounded design theory in a number of social behaviours that drive web 2.0 and social media: sharing, connecting, contributing, regulating, and iterating. It is a very good discussion of value in today’s standards of web content, where relevance and currency is dependant on the openness of your data.

When you think about your design – both technically and from the user’s experience – you must consider how open you want to be, and weigh the price of openness (extra work, unpredictability) against the price of being closed (less useful).  The highest praise you can receive for your work is when someone wants to use it in their own. For this to happen, you have to leave the door open for them.  If you publish the APIs to access the data you collect; if you build your work modularly, with clearly defined interfaces; if you use standards such as RSS and REST where appropriate, you will create something that others can re-use.

Mark Pesce – The Soul of Web 2.0 (Nov 2010) (read the whole post)