While Asus Eee PC and other so called minibook’s or “mini laptops” have been sold for months in for instance the UK, the boom seems to have hit Finland just after summer. First to arrive was the Eed PC 700 series, soon to be followed by Acer, MSI and HP. Today these rule the list of the most popular searches in the price comparison page maintained by (one of) the top computer magazine(s) in Finland.

Seven of the top ten searches for laptops are so called “mini laptops”. The only problem is that currently only one or two of these are actually available in stores… Hurry up with the shipment of the Eee PC 901′s!

TechCrunch posted an interesting entry about recent data from HitWise about the traffic the two candidates for the presidential election in the US have had to their Web sites. Although the data can hardly be used for any predictions of the outcome of the election, it is still interesting to see different ways to use and analyze data collected from and about the Web.

The “traditional” webometric measure for visibility is the amount of inlinks to a site. This battle is won by Barack Obama (Google: 60 700 000 hits, Live: 2 660 000, Yahoo: 388 000 000, Ask: 25 170 000) against John McCain (Google: 40600000 hits, Live: 3 570 000, Yahoo, 262 000 000, Ask: 20 860 000) on every search engine except on Live. Does this mean Microsoft supports republicans?

Another interesting measure is how much people have blogged about the candidates and the tool to use is BlogPulse. From the graph below we can see that Obama’s constant lead over McCain during the last six months just shifted yesterday. A quick look at a fraction of the blog entries indicate that the postings have been very mixed, both for and against the respective candidate.

Although these measures can’t probably be used to give any educated predictions about the outcome of the election, it still gives an indication about how the candidates use the Web and with that, maybe how they might be able to attract certain groups of voters.

Looks like Aaron Sorkin (author of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the first four seasons of The West Wing among many others) is planning to make a movie about how Facebook was invented. I think he will have a tough time trying to beat the best Facebook movie/music video ever. It has it all; drama, action, love. You name it!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSnXE2791yg]

(PS. I know you’ve all seen it before, but I think it’s still as funny as the first time I saw it. Try to beat that Aaron. )
(PPS. More from Rhett and Link at http://rhettandlink.com/)

While Facebook has taken over the position as the largest social networking site in the world (if not counting some Asian SNS) there seems to be an increasing number of educators experimenting with the educational benefits of it. In Maryland, US, Dr. Jen Golbeck is using Facebook in all her classes. According to Golbeck, using Facebook helps the faculty and the students to better know each other and each others interests. She continues by writing that about a quarter of the students adds her to their friends list. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the potential of using Facebook in education, but so far I haven’t used it. Mainly because I see more issues with it than benefits.

I’ve had some talks about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 and I’ve sometimes used Facebook as an example. I’ve asked the audience how many of them have a profile on Facebook and probably about 80 percent usually has a profile. But then I’ve asked how many have read the 15 page long Terms of Use before registering on Facebook and sometimes a single person has read it, usually nobody has done it. There is something in the Terms of Use that have hindered me from using Facebook on my classes:

“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.”

 What this basically means is that Facebook owns whatever you publish in Facebook. Earlier, according to the ToS, Facebook could use your content even after you had removed it, but now they have changed their ToS saying that the license granted to them will expire if you remove the content. Still, I have an ethical dilemma in demanding that my students have to register in a commercial service in order to take a course. Especially when that commercial service can do what ever they want with anything published in the service.

The second issue that I have with using Facebook in education is the fact that I do not want my students to know what I’m doing outside the university and who my friends are, and I’m sure they do not want me to know what they are doing outside the university either. I do not want to know them that well. I would never accept a friend request from my students either. I think there has to be a line between the teacher and the students.

But there are some great online service that provide tools, similar to Facebook, that can be used without mixing everyones private lives into the education. In NING for instance you can create closed groups for classes and everybody can publish as much (or as little) as they want about themselves. In that context I wouldn’t mind if the students sent me friends requests (can’t see that happening, but still ), because the context would be purely educational.  Also, something that I think is important is that the group and the content published in the group would only be visible to the group members, should the group want that. If there is something we want to share with others outside the group, we can open up those parts or write about that in a blog or open a wiki for that.

Facebook may have features that are useful in education, but so does a lot of other SNS too, and on these you have a lot more control of the content you and your students publish.

With Google being synonymous to searching on the Web, it is difficult to imagine what the competing search engines should come up with to increase their share of the market. Read/Write Web wrote about three rather new search engines that are trying to get the attention of information thirsty Web surfers. These search engines are SearchMe, Viewzi and Rollyo.

SearchMe is a search engine that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time because I find it quite “neat”. I especially like the possibility to “stack” the pages of interest for easy access later. SearchMe gives you the opportunity to kind of bookmark and organize interesting sites. And by using screenshots of the sites it helps the users to remember the sites better. You can immediately tell if you have already visited a site earlier or recognize another site you have found useful earlier.

But viewzi is another matter. I don’t think it gives any improvements to current search engines. It provides different ways of viewing the results but it is not the most user friendly of the new search engines. But I have to say that I find their Timeline option to be quite nice. Apparently a fellow webometricians site is among the first sites about webometrics:

It is however interesting to see how more and more 3D elements are emerging on the Web as we know it. Are these the first steps of a truely three dimensional Web where the users can move from site to site with their avatars?

What search engine do you use? Most of you probably answered: Google (I wonder if anyone answered something else?). Although Google dominates the web search services, there are some efforts to convert some users to other web serch engines. One such effort is Cuil.com.

Cuil tries to make its mark with the size of its index: “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages”. Cuil is going for quantity, rather than quality? The results page doesn’t follow the “standard” of web search engines, as Cuil gives the results in three columns with apparently 11 hits per page. The classic “webometricians search” for webometrics returns 2404 pages, but what annoyes me is the way Cuil presents the results. On the first page of results you find 3 pages from webometrics.info, 2 to the Wikipedia entry on Webometrics and 2 to eprints.rclis.org. Cuil doesn’t group the pages in any way, which means that you get resulting pages from the same domain over and over again when you go through the list of results. Another thing that I actually don’t know what to think about are the images Cuil places next to the results. The images seem to be chosen at complete random, as stated by a fellow webometrician earlier.

If you don’t wanna use Google you can always go for Yahoo, Live or maybe Ask, as a friend of my did when he stopped using Google. But no single search engine can cover the whole web. So to get the best coverage for any search one should use several search engines or a service that pulls the results from several search engines at the same time. Scour does exactly that, and then some.

Scour pulls results from Google, Yahoo and Live and shows the ranking of the pages in these search engines. It also brings elements from the social web by giving the users the opportunity to comment and read other peoples comments on the results. You can also vote on the results. The webometricians test query gives some interestin results.

Scour only gives 20 hits as results for the “webometrics” search, and some domains appear more than one time in the results. I don’t know how Scour filters the results, but it might be a good thing to not show all of the “about 145000″ pages that Google finds for the same query, or 414000 from Yahoo and 72100 from Live. My own domain for instance appears 4 times among Scour’s 20 results and I have to say that I like a search engine that gives me a high ranking and Scour does that

Another peculiarity of Scour is that you can earn money while searching the web. From every search you make on Scour, you earn Scour Points (1 point/ search) and when you refer Scour to your friends you earn points from their searches. When you have received 6500 Scour points you can “cash them out for a $25 Visa gift card”. Although you have to make a lot of searches to get that $25, it’s still more than you are making from your searches now. Isn’t it?