Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008
in internet, research and reference.
The Internet is an accepted place to turn for research, and nowhere has this become more apparent than in the fields of medicine and health care. A veritable explosion of available medical information seeks to meet the needs of both professionals and the public. In fact, many professionally-oriented health care sites have evolved to meet consumer needs, and consumer-oriented sites often include professional literature. Although sites for consumers and support groups make up an important and extremely useful segment of health care web sites, I will concentrate on the needs of the professional researcher. For example, legal researchers, who often have to consult medical sources, usually do not have a medical library at hand. We can appreciate that the Internet provides free access to a great deal of the medical literature, either in full text or citation/abstract format, and that it offers relatively good search capabilities. Medical journals, dictionaries, textbooks, indexes, rankings, images – all can be found on the Net, and much of it is free. The sources include publishers, government agencies, professional organizations, health libraries, and commercial entities. The following is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather notes on databases that I have found to be reliable and useful.
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Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008
in online resources, internet and reference.
The September 2008 V6N9 issue is available. The Awareness Watch Featured Report this month features World Wide Web Reference. These resources and sites bring you the latest information and happenings in the area of reference resources that are about the World Wide Web. This extensive report lists hundreds of reference resources that deal with the world wide web on a daily basis that can be used for research as well as for the creation of new world wide web entities using the latest technology available.
Awareness Watch Newsletter
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in information, internet, research and health.
WebMD and similar sites are in great shape. Visits to health information Websites have climbed 21% during the past year, according to comScore. The company said that health information site visits grew four times as fast as Internet visits overall.
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in information, internet and research.
As US Internet users ages 16 and older gain experience on the Web, the Internet becomes a more-important source of information, according to recently released data from the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. In time, the Internet surpasses even personal sources of information, and all media except the Web stay at the same levels of importance or drop.
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in demographics and internet.
Among US affluent heads of household surveyed, those with annual household incomes of $250,000 and over spend the most time online, according to a study conducted from March through July 2008 by Ipsos Mendelsohn. The researcher found that the average number of hours logged weekly increased with income, and that users in the top income tier spent nearly 6 more hours online per week than those whose incomes ranged from $100,000 to $150,000.
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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008
in internet, search, Google and history.
I started using the Internet in the 1970s. It didn’t look anything like it does today, and our search tools were, well, awful. Still compared to what we started with, they were great. Before I ever turned my hand to writing, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online database systems: NASA RECON, Dialog, and OCLC. These systems, which are still around, are part of what’s called the Matrix, and, no, I don’t mean the movie. The Matrix, as defined by John S. Quarterman, is the superset of all interconnected networks. Now, unlike then, you can get to these networks over the Internet, but you’ll find yourself blocked from getting very deep into them without permission. As for the Internet itself, it didn’t really have search tools then. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the Internet became searchable. For example, today, if you want to find a particular file, Google is your friend and sites like Mininova make finding BitTorrent files easy. When I started, we had to go through ftp file directories screen by screen and hope that the file was in there somewhere.
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Published by rwatstein September 7th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
The era of the American Internet is ending. Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States. Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
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The Nielsen Company released the first comparable U.S. figures showing video and TV usage across the ‘three screens’ – Television, Internet and Mobile devices. Nielsen’s findings show that screen time of the average American continues to increase with TV users watching more TV than ever before (127 hrs, 15 min per month), while also spending 9% more time using the Internet (26 hrs, 26 min per month) from last year. At the same time, a small but growing number of Internet and mobile phone users are watching video online (2 hrs, 19 min per month), as well as using their cell phones to watch video (3 hrs, 15 min per month).
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Virtual worlds can seem walled off from the rest of the Internet. Many, including Linden Lab’s popular virtual world Second Life, can’t be accessed through ordinary Web browsers: they require separately downloaded software. A Web link embedded in Second Life will open an outside browser window, pulling a user out of the immersive experience that is one of the virtual world’s main draws. But Linden Lab is now adjusting its technology to make it easier to bring data into its virtual world from the larger Web and from users’ desktops.
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in future and internet.
The world is running out of Internet Protocol addresses, the numbers that denote individual devices connected to the internet. The available addresses have already been allocated, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011. Every day, thousands of new devices ranging from massive web servers down to individual mobile phones go online and gobble up more combinations and permutations.
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in internet and censorship.
Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won’t eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.
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Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008
in innovation and internet.
Vint Cerf said recently that he never intended to seriously propose that the U.S. government should nationalize the Internet. But he does think the Internet is seriously broken, with an economic system that discourages competition and innovation and encourages harmful monopolistic practices. He argued that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which governs Internet service providers, is obsolete and needs to be revised.
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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008
in future, innovation and internet.
Technology Review magazine asked technology innovators, luminaries, and users what the Web might be in five to ten years.
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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008
in internet.
An obscure blogger films his three-year-old daughter reciting the plot of the first Star Wars movie. He stitches together the best parts–including the sage advice “Don’t talk back to Darth Vader; he’ll getcha”–and posts them on the video-sharing website YouTube. Seven million people download the file. A baby-faced University of Minnesota graduate student with an improbably deep voice films himself singing a mind-numbingly repetitive social-protest song called “Chocolate Rain”: 23 million downloads. A self-described “inspirational comedian” films the six-minute dance routine that closes his presentations, which summarizes the history of popular dance from Elvis to Eminem: 87 million downloads. Video is clogging the Internet. How we choose to unclog it will have far-reaching implications.
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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
Nearly a quarter of the world’s population – roughly 1.4 billion people – will use the Internet on a regular basis in 2008. This number is expected to surpass 1.9 billion unique users, or 30 percent of the world’s population, in 2012, according to IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast. “The Internet will have added its second billion users over a span of about eight years, a testament to both its universal appeal and its availability,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. “In this time, the Internet has also become more deeply integrated into the fabric of many users’ personal and professional lives, enabling them to work, play, and socialize anytime from anywhere. These trends will accelerate as the number of mobile users continues to soar and the Internet becomes truly ubiquitous.”
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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008
in internet and film.
The nonprofit Tribeca Film Institute in New York is creating a digital marketplace for films and videos that have been stuck in archives with limited circulation or have been otherwise unavailable through conventional retail and web outlets. The service, called Reframe, launched June 9 and offers some 500 features, shorts, and documentaries, although it plans to provide about 10,000 over the next year or so. The service will act as a nonprofit clearinghouse for digitizing elusive works while giving rights holders a mechanism by which they can sell or rent downloads or DVDs through Amazon.com.
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JCMC is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on social science research on the Internet and wireless technologies. Find archives back to 1995 (most recent issues at a linked site). Topics include online social networks, blogging, types of fantasy sports users, social and economic dimensions of search engines, and more. Sponsored by the Indiana University School of Library & Information Science and School of Informatics. An official journal of the International Communication Association.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) website
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in demographics, internet and research.
Most Internet users worldwide use the Web primarily for e-mail and search, according to a global survey conducted by Gartner during the fourth quarter of 2007. Online banking is the third most popular use of the Internet (except in emerging markets), while sharing photos, videos and files is the fourth.
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Nearly all US teens ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a September-November 2007 Pew Internet & American Life study. The 94% of teen respondents who reported accessing the Internet are doing so frequently. Two-thirds of teenage Internet users (63%) reported going online daily, while 35% use the Internet multiple times per day.
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in innovation and internet.
Friday, April 25, was the first of the two-day ROFLCon, an event featuring the people behind current memes of pop Internet culture. The conference, organized by Harvard students and taking place at MIT, was a high-energy crowd of mostly college-age attendees touting signature red ROFLCon lunch boxes.
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In this technologically savvy society, students seem to be relying more on electronic resources and less on books when it comes to research. According to circulation statistics, from July 2006 to June 2007, University of Rhode Island students and faculty members checked out 53,227 books. Twenty years ago, students alone checked out more than twice that amount. In fact, students were checking out more and more books each decade until the mid-1990s when the use of the Internet became more widespread. The decrease, according to David Maslyn, dean of University Libraries, can be attributed to the convenience and wide scope of electronic resources available. URI subscribes to more than 100 electronic databases that allow students access to almost unlimited topics.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in demographics, children, internet and MySpace.
A generation of children are effectively being “raised online”, spending most of their free time on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, a report warns today. It says that many under-16s spend more than 20 hours a week glued to the internet, three times higher than official estimates. With millions left to surf the web on their own, 57 per cent of children have seen online pornography, most of it accidentally in the form of “pop-up” adverts.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in China, Pew Research, internet and censorship.
Many Americans assume that China’s internet users are unhappy about their government’s control of the internet, but a new survey by Chinese researchers finds most Chinese say they approve of internet regulation, especially by the government.
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A new Tufts University study sees the emergence of a “digital skills divide” based on socioeconomic status. The study, published in the March/April issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, finds that wealthy, educated Americans are more capable of identifying untrustworthy information about child-rearing on the Internet than poor, uneducated Americans.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
As of January 2008, the US accounted for 21% of Internet users worldwide, or 173 million Internet users according to comScore. This figure does not include users accessing the Internet from public computers or mobile phones. While growth in the Internet audience has slowed in the US and other developed countries, it has accelerated in other regions of the world, particularly Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in internet and gaming.
The experience of surfing the Internet could be improved if users were given more guidance and camaraderie, says Merci Victoria Grace, COO and cofounder of the startup GameLayers, based in San Francisco. Users surf alone, wandering through piles of data without enough chance to interact with it, or with each other. To make surfing the Web a more social and lighthearted experience, Grace and the company’s other designers are grafting a massively multiplayer online game on top of ordinary Web browsing. Players rack up points as they visit sites, devise themed missions that lead other players through sets of websites, and leave notes for one another–all of it invisible to nonplayers.
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M:Metrics says 85% of iPhone owners searched the Web for news and information using their phones in January. “The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype,” Mark Donovan, senior analyst for M:Metrics, said while releasing the figures. “Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video.”
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in innovation, information and internet.
A future where “technology and human become one” is fast arriving, according to Nils Müller , CEO of TrendOne, a German microtrend analysis firm. Passive entertainment such as standard television embodied the 1.0 era, Müller said Tuesday during a panel discussion at the Cebit show, going on this week in Hanover, Germany. Web 2.0 saw a rise in audience-generated content like blogs and podcasts. The ongoing 3.0 period represents a deeper level of engagement, where users “jump into” media such as virtual worlds, he added. But evidence of the ‘4.0′ era — an “always-on” world where humans can “self-upgrade” through technology extensions — is already nigh and being driven by the youngest generation, according to Müller.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in internet and trends.
We’re well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we’re starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360). What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? As NatC commented in this week’s poll, the biggest impact of the Web in 10 years time won’t necessarily be via a computer screen - “your online activity will be mixed with your presence, travels, objects you buy or act with.” Also a lot of crossover will occur among the 10 trends here (and more) and there will be Web technologies that become enormously popular that we can’t predict now. Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”That may no longer be true.A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more than ever about the gritty details of what people search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in demographics, internet and Canada.
The idea that Canadian teens are Internet-savvy, constantly-wired early adopters may not be true, according to a study by Ipsos Reid. The online survey of Canadian youth (ages 12 to 17) found that teens spend an average of 13 hours per week online, compared with 19 hours for adults.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
2007 was another boom year for the Internet in the United Kingdom. Almost 37 million people went online in an average month—that’s over 60% of the population. This year looks like more of the same, and by 2012 eMarketer estimates that the Internet will reach roughly 70% of all UK residents.
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Published by rwatstein February 9th, 2008
in internet and India.
When the Internet suddenly collapsed early last Wednesday across the Middle East and into India, it provided a stark reminder of how the Net’s virtual spaces can still be held hostage to real-world events. lmost simultaneously, two separate undersea fiber-optic cables connecting Europe with Egypt, and eventually with the Middle East and India, were cut. The precise cause remains unknown: experts initially said that ships’ anchors, dragged by stormy weather across the sea floor, were the most likely culprit, but Egyptian authorities have said that no ships were in the region.
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Published by rwatstein February 9th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
By the end of 2008, Russia will be the second largest Internet market in Europe. eMarketer predicts that Russia will have more than 40 million Internet users by the end of the year. In Europe, only Germany will have a larger online population.
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Published by rwatstein January 20th, 2008
in internet and security.
CA, Inc, in its latest Internet Security Outlook Report forecasts the top Internet security threats for 2008 along with the trends pursued in 2007. This study, compiled by CA’s Global Security Advisor listed online gamers, social networks and high-profile events to be high-risk targets for online security attacks in 2008. The Security Outlook Report aims at predicting the threats for the current year in order to help individuals and businesses take preventive measures to secure their computers from possible attacks. Based on the report, Bots will dominate the threats this year while mobile phones will be relatively safe. Trends in 2007 indicated that malicious spyware was the dominant form unlike Trojans, which had dominated the scene in previous years.
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