An example of Mailchimp mailing list clustering by readership overlap — “Fantasy sports! Guns! And flowers, for what I can only assume are apologies for doing something stupid with the first two.”
I sometimes forget what a powerful tool network analysis is. Mailchimp, a popular email newsletter provider, used several standard network analysis tools to look at subscribers to mailing lists using their platform, to calculate similarities between both subscribers and lists.
Read more:
Here’s an article with an overview of online products out there for research social networking; the big gap in the article is that no institutional products are included such as Profiles, VIVO, etc. This is noted in one of the comments at the end, by Titus Schleyer.
That aside, there are interesting opinions in this piece, a few clipped below, and perhaps pointing to the current status of the space, where the sweet spot has not yet been found.
“After six years of running Zotero, it’s not clear that there is a whole lot of social value to academic social networks,” says Sean Takats, the site’s director, who is an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. “Everyone uses Twitter, which is an easy way to pop up on other people’s radar screens without having to formally join a network.”
Scholars aren’t interested in sharing original ideas on such sites, [Christopher Blanchard, an adjunct professor of community and regional planning at Boise State University] now believes, “because they’re afraid they’ll be ripped off” and because they simply don’t have the time.
“We have thousands of new discussions taking place every day—scientists helping scientists without getting anything for it,” [Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate] says. “Three years ago, people were smiling at me and saying that scientists aren’t social. They won’t share information. They were wrong.”
Eric, Leslie, and I from CTSI at UCSF’s Virtual Home team spent the past three days at the AMIA 2012 Joint Summit in San Francisco.
Here’s some of what was happening on the researcher networking, social networking, knowledge representation fronts, and public search front, via Twitter:
Other tweets that caught my eye from the rest of the conference:
Organizers host the five-day conference (February 13-17, 2012) simultaneously in London, Berlin, New York, Toronto, San Francisco and São Paulo. 
The event will explore the impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.
Among the topics:
More at http://socialmediaweek.org/
Three of us from the Virtual Home team at CTSI went to this year’s AMIA (American Medical Informatics Assoc) meeting in DC and presented on a panel with Griffin Weber of Harvard University. The panel was called “Four Steps to Using Research Networking Effectively at Your Institution”
Griffin spoke on cutting edge features of research networking tools, such as linked open data and social network analysis.
Eric Meeks of UCSF spoke on standard APIs, such as OpenSocial, to leverage a community of developers, I spoke about incentivize usage and understand your audience, and to round it out, Brian Turner spoke about using data, tools and strangers to improve user interfaces.
The panel presentation was a 90 minute break out session and we were happy to have a good turnout and an engaged audience. I think that the work that UCSF has put into the ‘social engineering’ of the tool has really paid off. Our usage and engagement numbers are on the rise and comparatively speaking, Griffin mentioned that our traffic is about 5-times that of what Harvard Profiles is currently getting.
In addition, Eric also had a poster session at the meeting!
The UCSF presentations will be up on Slideshare, available on the CTSI channel and via our individual UCSF profiles:
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=5333232
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=4621800
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=5333232
After working on a grant proposal with Tanu Malik and others at UChicago (and others at UCSF), Tanu found an interesting blog on Social Capital in Networks. Interesting posts.
Some argue that as technology advances it turns into a barrier and prevents essential human interactions, such as at the bedside. Even though this is a concern that we need to address, the Medicine 2.0 Summit 2011 provided a lot of examples that showed how technology can turn into a powerful mediator.
For those interested who did not get the chance to attend the event, here is a list of the main topics and initiatives presented that use social media, mobile computing applications, as well as Web 2.0 in healthcare and medicine to create new ways for people to connect. Please feel free to add your impressions and ideas of the summit and conference. Thanks!
1. If you are interested in learning from ePatients on how to build and leverage communities of practice and participatory medicine, you might want to explore the following blogs and platforms: 
2. Patients have been connecting for some time. However, how can we help connect physicians and patients in a meaningful way? During the session “The Healthcare Transformers”, the panelists presented their views on personalizing healthcare and new ways for physicians and patients to communicate. 
3. “The Knowledge Revolution”: If you are interested in using innovations in Medical Education, you might find the following projects of interest:
4. The panel on “The Interconnected Life” discussed social tools and platforms such as Epocrates, Google Correlate, which finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends, and Quora.
5. During the panel “The New Scientist”, Michael Conlon presented VIVO , an “open source semantic web application”, a tool that is – like Profiles, Loci and others – used or being implemented by universities across the nation to enable and support scientific collaborations and expertise discovery. 
6. Dennis Boyle, IDEO Founding Member and Partner, gave an interesting closing keynote on “design thinking” and “a human-centered approach to innovation.” He highlighted some of their recent projects… worth exploring….
More information:
Recently, a researcher told me that he’d be interested in learning more about using social media and
networking sites to recruit participants for research studies. Here is an example that the Mayo Clinic shared this week.
Through patient-run websites dedicated to heart conditions and women’s heart health, a team of cardiologists is reaching out to survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection, also known as SCAD, a poorly understood heart condition that affects just a few thousand Americans every year.
The study landed 18 participants in less than a week, six more than could participate in this pilot of 12 patients. The remaining volunteers are eligible to participate in a new, larger study based on the initial study’s success.
The new research seeks patients through conventional and social media outlets and aims to build a virtual registry and DNA biobank of up to 400 SCAD survivors and their relatives. The database will help physicians conduct more detailed analyses of treatment strategies and factors that affect prognosis and better understand the possible genetic basis of some SCAD cases.
“Patient leadership in this is huge,” says study co-author Lee Aase, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. “Designing research protocols to study rare diseases and then recruiting enough patients to participate is extremely difficult for busy physicians, but patients with rare diseases are highly motivated to see research happen.”
Ending the ‘tyranny of the lecture: At an educational technology conference in Boston July 27, Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur explained how he uses “peer instruction” to help …
What used to fit ...
Shift Happens
This site is interesting because it helps researchers perform a variety of tasks and supports their online community. At the same time, it provides clear paths to access more information without overwhelming the user. And btw, the goal of the site is easily comprehensible.
LabLife is free for academic labs. We recently learned that UCSF postdocs are using it frequently. And they’re not the only ones, according to LabLife over 1800 labs from 1200 institutions world-wide are using the site.
Here are a few examples how the site supports several aspects of a researcher’s lab life:
What do you think?
BioMed 2.0 