One of the pleasures of Feedjit is you sometimes get to see patterns upfold that are missed in the vast quantities of data you collect with an analytics service such as Google Analytics. Today I spotted this one:
The above information shows me that not only did someone find my post about programming for Flickr in Python, but they found the page useful enough to visit each of the links I had placed. Not merely glancing at the linked-pages, but spending time reading, and probably acting, on them: It was 40 minutes between the visitor’s arrival and their final leaving.
Obviously it’s nice when a user finds plenty of interest on my site, but I am just as happy to know that I have pointed someone in the right direction.
Whenevever I get a new phone my girlfriend decides that she needs one too. Yesterday she picked up her new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic:
It wasn’t long before I was coveting the 5800. Whilst by no means as powerful as my recently acquired Xda Serra (or even the N95 which we both previously had), it has the usability (and price tag) that will appeal to the masses.
Every day I seem to find something to curse about the Xda, but to a certain extent that is the consequence of choosing phones which are moving ever closer to the computer end of the appliance-computer spectrum. Whilst I momentarily contemplated exchanging my Xda Serra for a Nokia 5800 (I still have a few days to return the phone), the truth is that I am the sort of user who will take advantage of the Xda Serra’s qwerty keyboard and the included Microsoft Office.
The Nokia 5800 is the better phone; the Xda Serra is the better computer. Maybe the N97 will be the best of both.
One of the hundreds of posts in my feed-reader this morning was about the British Library electronic theses service (via SCIT blog). As my own thesis should be included I decided to indulge in a bit of vanity searching. Result: EThOS has a long way to go.
I would expect my thesis to turn up for the term ‘webometrics’, in fact it is about the only term for which someone might actually want to read it. Unfortunately the only webometric thesis belongs to Xuemei Li:
My thesis does however turn up for the wholly inappropriate ‘bibliometrics’:
Seemingly the reason for my appearance under ‘bibliometrics’ and not ‘webometrics’ is that ‘bibliometrics’ appears in my abstract whereas ‘webometrics’ does not. Whilst this may seem reasonable at first, theorectically the University of Wolverhampton are taking part in the project and their record includes a number of keywords carefully selected me, including ‘webometrics’. The British Library also fails to provide a link to my thesis, despite it being scattered over the web like confetti: “Not yet available for download”.
Young academics brought up on Google Scholar, with full text searching and links to the numerous copies on the web, are unlikely to see the value in EThOS and its traditional OPAC style. Whilst I’d like to see an electronic thesis online service that seperates the wheat from the chaff, with full text searching and links to the documents, and believe that librarians could aid in retrieval with classification of such documents, this is not what EThOS is currently offering. It’s still in Beta, and likely to improve, but it has a frighteningly long way to go and you do wonder whether they should have buddied up with one of the big search engines to produce a more user friendly version.
I didn’t immediately warm to the Xda Serra, but today I finally found something it could do that my N95 couldn’t: Sketch Messaging!
No longer will my friends suffer random photos in their inboxes, instead they will suffer little sketches by the world’s worst artist:
Whilst Microsoft’s Notes application allows you to draw pictures with the stylus, it only sends any text and drawings as an attachment in the obscure .pwi format. However with the MiTo Team Paint application you can use the stylus to knock up a little picture, save it as a bitmap, then just insert it in a multimedia message and send it off to anyone with a camera phone!
nb. In case you wondered…it’s meant to be a cat.
