Use of Smartphones

Business Insider's SAI (Silicon Alley Insider) summarizes a report from BI's business intelligence unit about what people are doing with their smartphones (iOS and Android). (The full report is a few hundred dollars.) 

"BII REPORT: Here's What Smartphone Users Are Doing With Their Phones" 

• ". . . mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans' media consumption time, triple its share in 2009."
• "Time spent on apps dwarfs time spent on the mobile Web, and smartphone owners now spend 127 minutes per day in mobile apps." 
• Gaming is driving monetization and use of time. 
• Nearly half of smartphone users manage social networks; mobility is critical to the continued success of Twitter and Facebook. 
• Mobile video is the third most popular smartphone activity (which is starting to stress mobile network infrastructure). 

Relative Strengths and Weaknesses of Leading Social Networks

Via PCMag.com's Stephanie Mlot, a summary of and infographic about the leading social networks' -- Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin -- comparative growth, monthly visitors, and marketing ROI. 

"Infographic: Which Social Networks Make the Grade?" 

January 14, 2013 

Social media hit the roof in 2012, but how did each individual network compare to its rivals? 

Now that the dust has settled on the year that gave us Pinterest, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition, and even the news that MySpace is resurfacing, marketing software provider Pardot has graded Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

"With so many social networks to manage and likely more on the way, it is important to understand the growth rates, visitor counts, optimal uses, and strengths and weaknesses of the major social networks to determine where to exert your limited time and resources," Pardot said in a blog post. 

Based on each network's growth, monthly visitors, and estimated marketing return-on-investment (ROI), Twitter comes closest to earning straight A's. The micro-blogging site scored a B-minus in terms of growth, but took home an A-minus in monthly users and a solid A for ROI. Boasting 37 million monthly visitors, Twitter is second only to Facebook's massive following, but its 13 percent growth over the year beat Facebook's 4 percent drop. 

Summary continues and full infographic at link. 

Higher Ed IT: Hot or Not?

Via Campus Technology, David Raths collects experts' opinions about trends in higher education IT. One of the "futurists" is Lev Gonick, VP for IT and CIO at Case Western Reserve and a tremendously bright guy.  

"What's Hot, What's Not 2013"

As we embark on a new year, CT asks five IT experts to pick the winners and losers among the trends swirling in higher education.

01/24/13 llustration by Graye Smith

With the exception of a plague of locusts, it seems as if the past five years have thrown every imaginable challenge at IT--from the incredible shrinking budget to BYOD and now the MOOC monster. For those of a superstitious bent, these were probably just appetizers to the crises that will inevitably accompany a year featuring the number 13 (cue sinister music and black cat). For those of a more sanguine disposition, this New Year's (like any other) was simply a chance to drink champagne and pontificate about the future. While no champagne was harmed in the making of this article, we did persuade five experts on IT in higher ed to offer their predictions of the winners and losers of 2013--trends that are, well, trending, and those already past their sell-by date.

No surprises, really:

• MOOCs, badges (certifications), social media, learning analytics, and mobile technology are hot;
• print textbooks are not; and
• "open educational resources," flipped classrooms, augmented reality, and 3D printing are meh. 

Google Search

By Jon Mitchell at the inimitable readwrite (ReadWriteWeb), a good, basic description of "How Google Search Really Works." 

Among the things that caught my eye were the following:

• "Today, with real-time search, that can happen in some cases in less than a minute." Back in the day, it might take search engines weeks to find and index your pages/site; there were actually facilities to submit your pages/site to an engine for higher priority indexing. 
• "16% to 20% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before." I would never have supposed it was that high -- I would have guessed 5% or so. 

As I come across additional pieces concerning how search works, I'll post them at follow-ups. 

List of Hundreds of Search Engines

Phil Bradley's weblog (a new one for me -- "Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development") collocates a comprehensive list of "370+ Search Engines to explore," both categorized and with a "Which Search Engine When" page and pull down. 

. . . There's more to search than Google. If you have time, please take a look, and consider trying out some new ones. You can access them all via my 'Which Search Engine When' page and pull down menus, but here's an overview.

• Key search engines - Free text, Index, Multi, Visual, Categorised, Blended. (41)
• Site based engines - Comparisons, Re-ranking, Site information, Similar (30)
• News search engines - News, Trending (33)
• Types of data - Thumbnails, Overviews, Factual, Hidden, Fileformats, Local (41)
• Types of user - Children, Trusted sources, Academic (48)
• Multimedia - Image, Sound, Video (63)
• People based - People search, Blogs, Forum, Social, Moderated, Bookmarks (82)
• Miscellaneous - Spelling, words, really odd (38)

Alternatively, or as well, I have a general collection of 170+ web search engines that is a bit of a miscellany, and most of them are available in the other lists, but not all. . .

See story link for individual links above.