The Distant Librarian

Survey on the use of IM Widgets

Danielle Dennie at Concordia University asks for your assistance in a survey she's running on your use of Instant Messaging Widgets:

Dear all,

I will be conducting a study to learn about and compare usage of IM widgets on online subject/research guides from different North American academic libraries. I would like to see the types of users that use IM widgets on a librarians subject guide and the type of questions that are asked. The survey is short (it should take no longer than 5 minutes to complete). Here is the link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Lk5nkzDRP_2bUOh2NEdgU2YQ_3d_3d

If you (or someone you know) have an IM widget on your subject guide, I would appreciate it if you could take the time to fill out the short survey.

Thanking you in advance,
Danielle Dennie


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Danielle Dennie
Biology, Chemistry & Biochemistry and Physics Librarian
Concordia University
Vanier Library Building
7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montréal (QC) H4B 1R6
Office: VL-127-3
Tel: 514.848.2424 ext. 5237
Email: danielle.dennie at concordia.ca

Technorati Tags: IM, Reference, Widgets, Surveys

Relais products go Open Source

This is interesting, at least to those of us who are using Relais for our Document Delivery system:

For Immediate Release
April 22, 2008
Relais products go Open Source

Relais International is excited to announce that we will be moving all or part of the Relais software to an open source model.

Why are we doing this?
Open source software has been a buzzword in the library community for several years now. There’s no doubt: open source is exciting. But many still don’t understand why.

Reliability
Open source software is peer-reviewed. It is exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. This peer-review process results in a code base that’s more reliable than closed proprietary software. Mature open source software is as bulletproof as software ever gets.

Security
With proprietary software, source code is “closed,” and support and future development of the product rely on the success and resources of a single vendor.

In contrast, open source solutions rely on stable code bases developed and supported by many providers worldwide. As a result, libraries using open source products typically have more support options than those using proprietary software.

User Driven
Proprietary software vendors must focus on providing functionality improvements that meet the needs of the majority of their customers in a large and diverse market.

In contrast, open source software features emerge from the community of users that have paid for or developed and contributed them. This makes open source software user-driven--you decide what features are important and deserve attention rather than a vendor.

Innovation
When the code is open, users are free to innovate and improve the software to meet their needs. They can accomplish this either by joining the development process directly, or by using companies such as Relais International to develop their ideas. Free innovation also means that open source software has much faster development cycles when compared to proprietary

What are the implications for our customers?
Relais International will review all existing contracts and agreements; we will then provide customers with options for converting to a service agreement that incorporates support, maintenance and custom development.

Our aim is to make this transition with minimal impact to our existing customers with the exception of providing more options and flexibility for those customers who are interested in adding to and modifying Relais as you work to address the needs of your user community.

When will this happen?
The first modules to be moved to an open source model will be available before October 1, 2008.

There are a number of key decisions to be made as this process moves forward, including the selection of an appropriate license under which the Relais software (or part of the Relais software) will be available.  We will keep all customers informed of our progress and invite your comments and suggestions.

“We are fully dedicated to Relais, the company and the product” says Clare MacKeigan, Chief Operating Officer of Relais International.  “Our customers are the basis for our success to date and we want this to continue.  We anticipate that this decision will result in an even stronger more vibrant user community.  Each of our customers brings a unique perspective to the table, and by giving more options to capitalize on this we know that all of our customers will benefit.”

    

Nice arguments in favour of Open Source!

Oddly, I couldn't find this press release on their website...

Technorati Tags: ILL, Relais, Open_Source

Tagging Baby Wipes (an interview with LibraryThing's Tim Spalding)

I'm about halfway through another excellent Interview with Innovators podcast with Jon Udell interviewing Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. The title comes from a throwaway comment Tim made about why people care to tag books, but why they don't tag so much at Amazon. I've never heard Jon laugh like that before :-) I don't use LibraryThing 'cause I don't tend to actually buy a lot of books, but I think I may have to give it another go, even if it's just to generate recommendations on what to read next. A good interview, give it a listen.


Technorati Tags: LibraryThing, Libraries

Podcasting in Plain English

Another CBC Podcast to recommend, or at least a specific episode: Spark podcast.  In the most recent episode they interview Lee Lefever, part of the creative force behind the ...in Plain English series of screenpapercasts.  The title of this post comes from the end of their interview where Lee is put on the spot to explain the concept of podcasting but w/o his usual props.  He did a good job.  Common Craft's latest papercast is Twitter in Plain English, and I think it does a really good job; I'm only on Twitter because other people I care about are on Twitter, and I'm curious to know what they're doing in their day-to-day lives...

CBC To Release Program DRM-Free Via BitTorrent

Cool! Not a program I would've watched ordinarily, but I'll be giving it a shot. Michael Geist points out that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation plans to freely release a high-resolution version of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions. And in a Naked Conversations moment, Tessa Sproule, CBC's Executive in Charge of Digital Programming, weighs in with a comment.

On a side note, I haven't visited the CBC's home page in a while - check out all the links for podcasts and oooh, the archives. Here's a piece from December 1979 - a Buyer's Guide to Digital Watches (one model even has an alarm!)


Technorati Tags: CBC, Bittorrent

Provide feedback on the development of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio for the Mac

Techsmith is currently running a couple of brief surveys to find out what folks think are the most important features for their under-development-versions of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio for the Mac.  Why not take a couple of minutes to let them know what you think:

• Camtasia Studio for the Mac survey (Camtasia is for screen recording as video)
• SnagIt for the Mac survey (SnagIt captures screenshot images)

Technorati Tags: Techsmith, OSX, Screencasting, SnagIt, Camtasia

OSX Screenshot Showdown - Jing vs Skitch

I almost didn't bother with this post after running a quick Google search on Jing vs Skitch and finding nearly 1,000 results, but I went through a fair number and couldn't find anything that actually compared them side by side, so I went ahead.

Both Jing and Skitch are free (currently) programs for Mac OS X that allow the user to take and then annotate a static screen shot.  But they each do a whole lot more as well.  Here's a chart comparing some of the features of each:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Feature		Jing	Skitch
Remote Hosting		Free	Free
Save locally		X	X
Upload to:
	Flickr	X	X
	FTP	X	X
	.Mac		X
Send to Bluetooth			X
Send to Printer			X
Attach to Email			X
File Format Outputs
	PNG	X	X
	JPG		X
	TIF		X
	PDF		X
	SWF	For video
	SVG		X
Video Capture		X
iSight Capture (still)			X
Annotation
	Text	X	X
	Arrows	X	X
	Highlight	X	X
	Boxes	X	X
	Circles		X
	Pencil		X
	Line		X
	Erase and Cut		X
	Fill Area		X
	Undo	X	X
Effects
	Shadow		X
	Flip		X
	Rotate		X
Customized hotkeys		X	X
Resize after capture			X
Drag snapshot into application			X

So on options, Skitch is the clear winner, but that ability to record quick video with Jing is a damn good reason to keep it around.  Plus it's important to note that I'm kind comparing apples and oranges here, as Jing never set out to be an all-inclusive screen capture product. 

There's another important thing to consider too, and something a table can't capture (ha!) is the usability of each product.  You know I can't resist a quick screencast, so here's how I use each one:

 

Technorati Tags: Jing, Skitch, OSX

CANHEIT 2008 Call for Participation

The Canadian Higher Education and Information Technology Conference (CANHEIT) is a unique event, focusing on those IT issues that are of Canadian significance and of primary interest to universities and community colleges. This annual conference brings together senior administrators, managers, and staff who are responsible for the management and evolution of their campus information systems, learning systems, and infrastructure.

This year, the University of Calgary has the privilege of hosting the sixth annual CANHEIT conference to be held in Calgary, Alberta from June 15 to 18, 2008. "On the EDGE" is the theme for CANHEIT 2008.  It allows for fellow technological trailblazers to share their adventures, and help each other to safely traverse new frontiers in the field of Information Technologies.  It is our hope that “On the EDGE” will encourage innovative thought and discussion among IT colleagues at CANHEIT 2008.

We invite you to present at the CANHEIT 2008 conference. There are three presentation formats to suit your topic and style: standard presentations, panel sessions, and "birds-of-a-feather" (BoF) forums. First-time presenters are always welcome!

The program streams are:
- Security and Infrastructure
- Innovative Technologies and Methods
- Support Models in Today’s Environment
- Management and Strategy
- Research and Learning

To submit your proposal, please visit the CANHEIT 2008 website: http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/proposalsubmission

To review the proposal guidelines see http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/guidelines

The deadline for submitting your proposal abstract (maximum of 100 words) is Friday, February 29, 2008.

Additional Conference Information

- Conference Registration will begin on March 15, 2008.  Check the website for further details: http://canheit.ucalgary.ca/registration
- If you are interested in volunteering at the 2008 CANHEIT Conference, please send an email to canheit.2008@ucalgary.ca

Thank you, from your CANHEIT 2008 Program Committee.

EZProxy and OvidSP Round 2 - Removing the Tip Box

Last month I wrote about how to use EZProxy's find and replace feature to change the unhelpful text on a database tab to something more helpful:EZProxy Find and Replace: when the vendor says they can't...  Well the Medical Librarians at U of C had another request; to see if we could get rid of that Tip Box that appears after a slight delay.

The tip box is annoying because the delay in its appearing seems to contribute to the jumpiness of the screen - which is the real problem. There's a delay somewhere and I've seen my students use the system and boxes they tick, or in entering the search strategy, keystrokes don't register as something happens behind the scene and the whole screen jumps around. Tip box or not, they'll have to fix that. I'm hearing it as the #1 complaint on the med librarians' listservs.

I asked Ovid tech support if it could be removed, and they said sorry, nope, even though that's requested even more than the tab name change was!

So again, EZProxy to the rescue.  This one's not quite as elegant, as I was trying to wrap it up on Friday afternoon, but I did some hunting and pecking and learned that there's a javascript being called (after a delay) that's responsible for the Tip Box.  Break that script, and voila, no more Tip Box.

So this time in your EZProxy config file you can use:

T Ovid (or whatever we're calling it)
U http://www.ovid.com (whatever)
DJ ovid.com  (whatever)
Find advertising.js   tips01342.js
Replace advertisin.js   tips0134x.js

Told you it was kinda ugly, but basically we're renaming the called javascript to one that doesn't exist, and thus it doesn't get called.  We tried replacing it with a blank (nothing) but it didn't work, so as soon as we found something that did, we stuck with it.

Here are the before and after pix:

Before:

After:

And no more screen jumping.

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #5 - Aardvark Firefox Extension

The other day I came across a Firefox extension called Aardvark that makes it really easy to clean up websites to print, or even to read online w/o lots of advertisements and fluff around the text.  Here's a quick demo of it in action:

5 web-based file-transfer solutions

The Wired Campus has collected a list of web-based file transfer solutions - you know, for when you want to send someone a file that's too big for an email attachment...


Technorati Tags: transfer, attachments, files

KBPublisher FAQ database at our library

Today we launched our new FAQ database here at the U of Calgary.  We're now using KBPublisher, an open-source product introduced to me by Chad Boeninger at Ohio U.  In addition to being searchable, and thus way better than one of those long lists with anchor tags, the neatest feature in the whole thing is that should someone decide they do want to go ahead and submit a question, as they're typing in the form KBPublisher watches the words they type and before they can hit the submit button, suggests answers that might actually already exist to answer the question.  If it's wrong, they can still go ahead and submit.

Here's a quick overview of our implementation:


Technorati Tags: KBPublisher, FAQs

Alchemist author increases sales by pirating his own book

Neat stuff!

"Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.  He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales."

Full post at TorrentFreak.


Technorati Tags: P2P, Books, Sharing

An update on the ANTS project

Hey, remember the ANTS screencast-sharing project?    I've stepped way back from it since assuming my new duties here at the U of C, but it's still going strong, and has undergone some major changes / improvements.    Here's an update that was sent to the COPPUL Distance Education group:

As many of you are aware, we updated our Wiki last spring and we notified this group.  Since then, we have been publicizing it outside of COPPUL and as a result we now have over 50 people registered on the ANTS Wiki.  One reason that we are atracting more and more attention is the contributions made by  our DE group (thank you very much!). Another reason we are growing is due to new contributions coming from outside of COPPUL.  Each time a new tutorial comes up, we are posting them on the ALA Information Literacy Listserv in order to generate interest in the project. It seems to be working.

Interest in the Wiki is also increasing due to many of the Wiki's features
that we are marketing as well.  They allow allow us to create more of a
community on the Wiki.  In particular individuals can:

1. Create individual profiles.

2. Send messages to individuals when they view their profiles

3. Take part in a Discussion Forum.  (It is hoped that the Forum will be used by people interested   in the uses of Shockwave Flash and Building Tutorials... that it will be a community of people who share what they know with others.)

4. Set up their profile to recieve notifications via E-mail and updates about Site activity (by setting up a Watchlist).

5. Encourage others to participate by using its Invite Others feature.

6. Post to the Wiki any time they want to Adopt a Tutorial, update our list
of tutorials for development, etc.

If you have not already done so, it is a good time to register for our new
Wiki and set up a profile.  I have recieved messages from about 4 new members.  Two of them were Distance Education Librarians.  So it is a good community to be a part of.

Both our old ANTS team members, as well as new team members, are also busy
working on several new innitiatives including:

1. A wonderful new site to host our tutorials with a lot of push technology
and sharing technology.  We will tell you more about it as it nears completion.

2. Paul Betty (at Regis University) is experimenting with using Google Analytics to measure Captivate Tutorial use and he will be discussing this at the OCLS conference in March. So look for it if you are attending.

3. Richard Baer (of Camosun College) is having students view different tutorials and provide feedback about what works well and less well.  He is just starting, but already we are getting some interesting feedback that we will share with the group when we have more data.

4. Bill Badke is now focusing on doing Information Literacy Tutorials. He also has agreed to oversee a working group devoted to working on Information Literacy within the ANTS project. It would look at what needs to be created, issues related to Information Literacy and Tutorials, etc.  A second group (focused on the Technology) will oversee the Wiki, Dspace, and the New site. This will allow us to bring specialized knowledge to different aspects of the project.

In December we also added a third new member to the group:  Duncan Dixon of Trinity Western University. Duncan created our CINAHL tutorials and is (along with Paul Betty and Richard Baer) helping with the new site. So we would like to welcome him and thank him for assisting with the project.  We would also like to thank Paul Betty and Richard Baer for the time and energy they have devoted to the project thus far.

As you are aware, the project team did grow this fall. I would like to say that we expanded it for two reasons:

1. To help with many technological develpments that require more hands. In particular, we needed people with expertise in Captivate, Camtasia, Wikis, and Broadcasting sites.  This expertise is important and whenever someone clearly had it, we felt it was important to include them in the project (be they a COPPUL or non-COPPUL Librarian.)

2. We are a project that is now open to non-COPPUL members, and having non-COPPUL members on the actual team, was a way to reinforce that we are more than just a COPPUL project.  This in turn encourages others to participate in this project via contributions.

More works still needs to be done and more help - and ideas about how to improve the project - is always welcome.  To begin however, do take the time to register for the ANTS Wiki (http://ants.wetpaint.com/ ) and post if you have issues related to online tutorials.

Cheers,

Carmen Kazakoff-Lane

Bibliography on Mobile Devices in Distance Education

Michele Reid posted the attached bibliography from the Midwinter Discussion Group session to the OFFCAMP list, and it's reposted here with permission.

 

Incorporating Screencasts In Online Teaching

From The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 8, No 3 (2007),   ISSN: 1492-3831 - Incorporating Screencasts In Online Teaching by Elaine Peterson.

I'm linking to the abstract page instead of the full text because from there you can choose HTML, PDF, or to listen to the article as an mp3, which sounds surprisingly good to me - neat option!

Abstract
Despite success in teaching the class ‘Organization of Information in a School Library Media Center’ (EDCI 545) online, one component continued to be a problem for students, the Dewey Decimal Classification System. To supplement the instruction, a set of simple screencasts was developed to assist distance education students. Benchmarks were established and a beta test conducted. It is expected that the next online class of students will have increased success because of the addition of screencasts. It is suggested that screencasts be considered as an additional tool for online learners across other disciplines, particularly when using databases that have layered sets of information, requiring multiple mouse clicks.

Interesting to me that while the author used links to the websites of the products she mentioned, the literature review only looked for traditional print literature, despite the fact that there's plenty of evidence in the blogosphere of libraries using screencasts for instruction...



Technorati Tags: screencasting, distance_education

Running Meebo as an application (no web browser needed!)

OK gang, the biggest strength of Meebo, that it's web-based, has also been the biggest strike against it.  For those of us who are using it as a service, it's a bit of a pain to remember to fire it up, and to have the web browser open.  Accidentally shut down the page or have a browser crash and you lose the service.

Worry no more, here's how you can run Meebo completely independent of your web browser, as a desktop application!

You need to download a small application from Mozilla called Prism.  Did I mention it's available for Windows, Mac AND Linux?  :-)  Prism allows a web service (any website) to run in its own window, available with a desktop or startup menu shortcut.  Because it's in a separate window, you don't even have to have a web browser open to access Meebo, and because it can launch as an application,  you can add it to your startup routine so it starts with your OS, just like Trillian or Pidgin can.

It's incredibly easy to install and run; I'll be using it heavily starting tomorrow at the office.  Here it is in action (email and RSS subscribers will have to click through to view):

While this should run on Leopard, there's another application specifically built for the newest OS called Fluid.  Someone try it out and let me know how it works, kay?

How to embed a MeeboMe widget on a Mac desktop

Yesterday I posted a screencast about how to embed a MeeboMe widget right on the desktop using ActiveDesktop.  While surfing around to see who else had made use of this, I found a link to a Flickr page from late 2005 where someone was using ActiveDesktop to show their Meebo account, and in the comments was a suggestion for a Mac application called WebDesktop that does more or less the same thing on OS X.  It's not quite as good, IMHO, in that upon minimizing your active windows you have to click one more time to make the webdesktop become operational, but still, you don't have to have your browser running, and this could easily be made to run upon startup (though of course the Mac won't be starting up nearly as often ;-).  Just something else to experiment with.

Here's your screencast (aggregators and mail subscribers will have to click through to view):

How to embed a MeeboMe widget on your desktop

Hey, I'm excited about this one!  At a meeting yesterday we were considering additional places we could stick our MeeboMe widget (you may recall we've had it embedded in our catalogue since the beginning of October, 2007).  Someone wondered if we could embed it on the desktop, and I recalled that Microsoft has something called Active Desktop that allows websites to be displayed on the desktop.  So this morning I did some quick checking and it works! 

So first you'll need to create a MeeboMe widget, and then you'll need to create a basic html file on your hard drive, OR you can point to a live website.  Just remember that folks will still want to use their desktop icons, so if you do use a live webpage, make sure it's not too cluttered.

Information on how to turn on Active Desktop is here.

And, um, that's it!

Here it is in action:

 

I don't know if there might be any security or other implications for this - haven't yet checked on that...

Update: My colleague David pointed out that we have over 200 machines in our InfoCommons, and wonders what having them always connected to our Meebo account might mean.  Good question - does anyone have any idea if there's a limit to the number of folks who can be simultaneously connected to a Meebo account?  I'm going to check their FAQ's and maybe send them an email.  Still, the above should work well for a small library...

Update #2: The Meebo Wiki says 100 people can be simultaneously connected via widgets:
"How many people can talk to me at any given time? Is there a limit?
Right now we have set the limit to 100 people who can see you online through your widget. In the future, we may make it a preference to help you do some crowd control. If you’ve got 100 peeps IMing you at any given time, you’re pretty popular and might wanna hit that Invisible mode! You can also disable a widget in the meebo pref pane."

Watch how Molly McDonald makes a screencast

A neat post from Molly McDonald of DemoGirl.com showing exactly how she creates a screencast using Camtasia Studio 4.

Call for Proposals for Access 2008

Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Date: October 1-3, 2008 (Hackfest: Oct 1; Conference: Oct 2-4)
CFP Deadline: Friday, February 22, 2008
URL: http://access2008.mcmaster.ca

Access is Canada's premier library technology conference, featuring a single stream of sessions that deal with technology planning, development, challenges and solutions. We are now accepting proposals for prepared talks on the following topics (other ideas are more than welcome):

    * customized web applications and search interfaces
    * open source software
    * national and provincial/state-wide consortia technology initiatives
    * information policy
    * digital and social media
    * library catalogue innovations
    * digitization projects
    * institutional repositories
    * end-user searching behaviours
    * protocols and metadata

...or anything else suitably geeky, innovative and/or awe-inspiring! Sessions are usually 45 minutes or 1 hour in length. Proposals should include:

    * your name, title, institutional affiliation, contact information, blog/website URL
    * 100 word (max) abstract describing your proposed presentation
    * co-presenters you will (or hope to) present with

Submission Procedures:

    * deadline for submission is February 22, 2008.
    * send your proposal to Amanda Etches-Johnson, Program Chair, at etchesa AT mcmaster.ca
    * each submission will be acknowledged and all presenters will be notified of the status of their proposal by April 15, 2008.
    * if you'd simply like to recommend topics and/or speakers (other than yourself), feel free to get in touch!

Depending on the number of submissions, we can't promise that every proposal will be accepted. However, we will have sessions set aside for Lightning/Thunder talks, which provide an informal opportunity to share your ideas with your peers.

For more information about Access, see the Access 2007 website. Alternatively, feel free to get in touch with the members of the Program Planning Committee:

Amanda Etches-Johnson
User Experience Librarian, McMaster University
etchesa AT mcmaster.ca

Jenn Horwath
Virtual Branch Manager, Hamilton Public Library
jhorwath AT hpl.ca


Technorati Tags: ACCESS2008, Access2008, Access08

David's Favorite RSS Resources and Tools

David Rothman just posted a wonderful list of his Favorite RSS Resources and Tools.  You'll get links on

• explaining RSS,
  
• Resources to help you choose a feed aggregator,
  
• RSS Plugins for Outlook,
  
• Google Reader Tips and Plug-ins,
  
• RSS-to-Email tools,
  
• Publishing RSS content on Web Pages,
  
• Web-Based RSS-to-Web-Page tools,
  
• Hosted RSS-to-Web-Page Tools,
  
• Feed mashing and filtering tools,
  
• Creating feeds for pages that don’t offer them,
  
• Creating feeds from PubMed,
  
• Creating feeds from LibWorm (/MedWorm).

Great list, thanks David!


Technorati Tags: RSS

EZProxy Find and Replace: when the vendor says they can't...

Earlier this week we switched to the new interface for OvidSP (an attempt, I believe, at integrating the Silver Platter (SP) platform into Ovid).  It's nice, but the default configuration includes a Basic Search table, an Ovid Syntax tab, and a SilverPlatter Syntax tab.  Ovid Syntax and SilverPlatter Syntax don't mean anything to our users, and in fact we didn't even include the latter in our configuration.  But we wanted Ovid to change the text so the Ovid Syntax tab instead read Advanced Search.  We were told that it was a popular request, but that they couldn't do it right now.

Meh.  That's no good at all for our users.  I remembered that EZProxy has a Find and Replace feature, but hadn't really explored it yet.  Found this page on the Unofficial EZProxy Support Wiki and was off to the races.  Making the tab say what we wanted it to say took all of two lines of code to be added to the EZProxy configuration file for Ovid:

T Ovid (or whatever we're calling it)
U http://www.ovid.com (whatever)
DJ ovid.com  (whatever)
Find Ovid Syntax
Replace Advanced Search

So if you can find the T, U, and DJ lines in your Ovid (now or soon to be OvidSP for you too) you can stick in the two lines of red code and find that all is magically well.  Of course this means you can rename the tab whatever you want, and can rename other parts of the page as well.  Could be fun come April Fool's Day!  The other neat thing about this fix is that should Ovid change the tab themselves, our display will simply revert to their true and native display because EZProxy simply won't find the text string "Ovid Syntax" to replace!

So here are the before and after shots:

Have fun!

NewsGator now free

"...NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services."  Full press release here.

Might have to give them a looksee - I seem to recall that one of our databases only allows RSS feeds to work within Newsgator - maybe Factiva?  I'll try to follow up on that, but right now I'm out the door.


Technorati Tags: NewsGator, RSS

Followup on Facebook Advertising

A month ago I offered my initial thoughts on the University of Calgary's experiment with placing social ads within Facebook.  Here are the results of our second round of advertising, where we switched the content of the ads to see if students seemed to be responding more to the type of ad or the content of the ad.

As a quick refresher, we were trying to generate interest in our subscriptions to ebrary and Refworks.  Check the first post for all the background on the two types of ads and the bidding process.

Based on my experience with the first round, I set my initial bids at $1.00 per CPM and CPC and left them there the entire run (Dec 1-12).  We ended up spending a little more money this time, $40.61 vs $30.66 last time.

Once again, we paid about 3 times more for the ads on the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad type than we did on the CPC (cost per click) ad type.  This time we got more clicks on the CPC ad than we did on the CPM ad, which is opposite what happened the first time around.  This suggests to me that students may have been responding more to the message of the ad, which is a good thing.  They seemed to like the ebrary message more than the Refworks message.

Average cost per click was significantly higher on the CPM campaign - it cost us $3.51 for each click, vs $0.60 for each click we got while displaying the CPC ad.  In both our campaigns, the CPC ad type was more cost effective.  However, we got in front of more eyeballs with the CPM ad type - 80,000 vs 55,000.  Interesting to note that these numbers are almost identical to the numbers we got when running the first ad campaign, even though with that one I had started out much lower on the bid amounts.

I don't seem to be able to access the fancy graphs now that the campaign has been over for a few weeks, which is too bad.  I see no way to back up the timeline for that type of report.  I made my own in Excel, but they're not quite as pretty.  This is the number of clicks received on the Refworks CPM campaign:

And here's the number of clicks received on the CPC campaign:

You may recall the reason for that big spike on Dec 5th is that I actually forgot to set the initial bid amount to $1.00 until that day, so we received a big jump in the number of times the ad displayed (we'd gotten 1,600 displays on the first 4 days of the campaign, when I inadvertently left the CPC bid at $0.10 and then 20,000 displays on the 5th, when I set it at $1.00, where I'd originally intended.)

You can see that the clicks do tend to tail off over time when the bid amount remains constant.  It seems that in order to ensure your ad continues to display often over the entire course of your campaign (and thus generate the clickthroughs) you may need to up your bid every 4 days or so. There's a definite correlation between how often the ad is displayed and how many clicks were generated, as one might generally expect.

Here are all the numbers in one place: (click through for bigger size)

So would we do it again?  Sure, why not?  Grand total spending on about a month's worth of advertising for our roughly 10,000 students on Facebook was just over $71.  For that money we displayed the two ads over 270,000 times, and generated a total of 55 clickthroughs. Certainly not a huge success ratio, and more than $1.00 per click, but we got our message in front of the online students we wanted to reach. I haven't yet compared stats on the two products to see if general usage went up during the campaign periods.

What do you think, was it worth the money?