the worth of information what the dot-com crash teach us? if you build it...... they do not come
TRANSCRIPT
The Worth of Information
What the dot-com crash teach us?
If you build it...
... they do not come.
Meta Dataand
Links
The worth of information
• Two ways to turn information into wealth– Stop other people having access to that information
– Promoting favourable information
• Sometimes the two combine– Information found near the top of search engines is seen as
more authoritative than information found later on.– (87% of respondents, survey size 1091, bigmouthmedia)
Growing interest in meta data
Links (citations)
• Take 100 chemistry papers and don’t bother to read them.
• Skip straight to the citations.
• Calculate which paper is cited the most often.
• Is that your chemistry authority?
• Google thinks so.
Some Google results
• For the search [postdoc placements]1. Imperial College2. Bristol3. London School of Economics4. Leeds5. Sanger6. Oxford7. “TipTop Jobs” (A physicist mailing list)8. Brunel9. The Foundation for Science and Technology10. Trovit Jobs
Some Google results
• Which Universities rank for [EPSRC funding]?– Manchester
– Bristol
• With ease of publication comes the concept of “personal branding”.
• In the commercial world it can be hard to prevent a company spokesperson becoming synonymous with the company.
Press Release
Press Release
• A Press Release is generally a single page of information• It is designed to spread selected information as widely as
possible.• For example;
– Company X appoints Manager A– Company Y buys Company X– Company Y launches Product B
• This is not marketing. This is the process of putting the facts and figures into public domain.
Press Release Case Study
• Took 25 “Company Y launches Product B” press releases• On average:
– 2.4 hours to write the press release– 0.5 hours to apply any tags / meta data– 6.4 hours to distribute the PR across the internet
• Average total cost: £1, 250• Ratio of 2:1 in favour of promotion over creation
• Reviewing how many times the press release was accessed?– On average; 1.8 hours
Google on the Press Release
Repository APIs
• Ologeez is designed to make the discovery of papers easier and to facilitate the discussion of papers.
Influencers
The Flow of Information
BlogTopic A
Major BlogTopic A
More BlogsTopic A
Time
The (media) Guardian’s Social Network
Del.icio.us (soon to be www.delicious.com)
• Community bookmarking / meta tagging
What Would Google Do?
Crawl and Index
• Google makes little use of meta tags.
• Google does not access databases; it reads webpages.
Sitemaps.org
Google Scholar
• [Edinburgh]: 1,210,000 matches
• [Glasgow]: 747,000 matches
http://scholar.google.co.uk
The Worth of Information
Your Personal Information
• $15 billion valuation– Facebook is not a very good advert
platform.– Raises most money from virtual gifts.– It is a huge database of personal
information.
Anonymous Legal Clients
• Legal Firm A– Personal Injury lawyers
– Every “whitepaper” download is worth £125
• Legal Firm B– Business and Celebrity Reputation
– Every case study download is worth £10,500
Flickr photo credits
– http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-s/2152798588/
– http://www.flickr.com/photos/amulligan/255741975/
– http://www.flickr.com/photos/strangebehaviour/373515759/
