Olen tänään Hämeenlinnassa HAMKin järjestämässä seminaarissa ”Mobiilioppiminen, oppimispelit ja –simulaatiot ammatillisessa opetuksessa”. Itse osallistuin pitämällä esitelmän otsikolla ”Avattaren kiitoa, mielen kiitoa – Second Life oppimisympäristönä” ja vetämällä aiheeseen liittyvän työpajan.

Tässä tosiaikainen striimi tilaisuudesta Qik:n kautta.

Kari A. Hintikka herätti aamaulla ajatuksia työstä ja työpaikasta joka ei aina enää ole jokin fyysinen paikka jonne aamuisin kaikki ryntäävät kilpaa ehtiäkseen hyvissä ajoin jonottamaan kaupunkeja ympäröiviin liikenneruuhkiin. Työtä voidaan nykyään tehdä lähes missä vaan. Kari itse kertoi työskentelevänsä toisinaan hyvin paljon junissa matkalla jostain jonnekin. Pitääkö työn takia poistua kotoa vai onko työ jota ei voi tehdä kotona etätyötä?

I know this has nothing to do with webometrics or web 2.0/library 2.0 that I should blog about, but I found this story so interesting (and hilarious) that I just have to comment on it.

This mornings newspaper Turun Sanomat (also found on Times Online) reports that the Chinese state owned news agency Xinhua published a story about how successful the Chinese space flight was. Quotes from the conversations between the taikonauts (that’s Chinese astronauts) were published on Xinhua’s web site. The story reported applause and cheers as the space flight started successfully. The only problem with this story was that at the time when the story was published, the crew were still on earth and the space rocket had not yet been launched. The story could be read on Xinhua’s web site for a couple of hours before it was removed and its appearance was described as a technical error.

Of course it was a technical error. The technical error was that it was published too early. I wonder if the stories about the taikonauts’ space walks have also been written already? Can we trust those stories?

Currently the top story on the english version of Xinhua is that the taikonauts are preparing for a space walk. Really? Are you sure this time?

I wrote a post about mini notebooks a while ago and I asked Asus to hurry up with the shipments of Eee Pc 901s to Finland. At that time I was quite sure I would get a 901. Asus 901 has the new Atom processor, very long battery life because of the 6 cell battery that 901 comes with and it looks just great. After carrying my “old” Acer Aspire 3690 around for a couple of years I wanted something that had a long battery life and that would be light to carry around. Asus seemed to offer precisely what I wanted. But while waiting for the first 901′s to arrive to Finland I looked at the other candidates. Asus of course have a lot of other models also; 4G, 8G, 701 and 900. But these do not have the features I’m looking for.

HP’s candidate to the competition are the 2133 models, but those have a price range of about 460-700 euros. These do not come with the Intel Atom processor, but with VIA C7 Mobile 1.2GHz instead. This is the only mini notebook that comes with Windows Vista instead of the lighter XP. Aluminium frame and a 6 cell battery might be very appealing but the prices are far too high me.

MSI Wind 100 comes with a 10 inch screen and has the power saving Atom processor. It’s a bit pricy with a price tag of about 450 euros. But the thing that disturbes me is that it doesn’t look very nice. To me it seems like MSI has not had very much time to design the Wind. It also comes with a 3 cell battery only, which should give about 2-3 hours of working time.

What do we have left? Acer Aspire One. The One looks good. It has the Atom processor. XP versions can be yours for as little as 350 euros. It’s light, as are its competitors. The battery is a 3 cell battery, but you can get a 6 cell battery for about 90 euros. That would give a battery life of about 6-7 hours. After reading some reviews online I found a detail that tipped the scale for Aspire One’s benefit: it has a larger keyboard than Asus 901. Even with a larger keyboard the One isn’t much larger than the 901 and it weigths about the same. For me, the competition was over: I got an Aspire One from Bulldog NetStore. And what do I think about it now? Stay tuned

Some time ago another blogging webometrician and I started a competition (did we make a bet of any kind? We should.) to “conquer the world” as Webometric Thougths so eloquently put it. That is, we wanted to see whether we could attract visitors from certain countries by targeting the blog entries somehow. While I tried to attract traffic from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova, Webometric Thoughts welcomed visitors from Belarus and Georgia. After almost three weeks I can now proudly say that I have received new traffic from…. Costa Rica and Guyana??? While I welcome the new visitors from these new countries, I’m still waiting for the first Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian and Moldovian to enter my site.

Inspired by my last entry about the co-inlinking between different countries I thought I’d try to predict the co-inlinking to Finland and some other countries based on the Internet penetration of these countries.  In my previous entry the co-inlinking values (allthough only few of them) show a tendency of a long tail:

The Internet penetration is not as clear, but could this still be used to predict the co-inlinking if we assume it will follow a long tail?

We know the Internet penetration of a set of countries and we also know the co-inlinking to Finland and some key countries (marked with red dots in the figure above). Can we use this to predict the co-inlinking to Finland and the rest of the countries assuming the gaph will follow a long tail?

The Internet penetration of these countries is as follows (according to Internet World Stats):

Benin, 1.8%; Burkina Faso, 0.5%; Central African Republic, 0.3%; Chad, 0.6%; Congo, 1.8%; Gabon, 5.5%; Guinea, 0.5%; Liberia, 0.0%; Madagascar, 0.5%; Mali, 0.8%; Mauritania, 0.9%; Sierra Leone, 0.2%; Somalia, 1.0%; Togo, 5.5%; Uganda, 6.4%; Western Sahara, (no data available); Zimbabwe, 10.9%.

From this we can try to predict the co-inlinking:

Again, we have the four points that we already know. The most difficult part is probably to try to predict where the curve will turn to a tail. Should Botswana be higher with its Internet penetration of 10.9% or is the tipping point at say 11%?

In the following figure we can once more see the predicted co-inlinking (blue line) and the actual co-inlinking (red line) as measured using AltaVista search engine:

This analysis used visual estimates rather than exact mathematics to predict the co-inlinking and as we can see the prediction is quite close to the actual figures. But the question is, does the co-inlinking really have something to do with the Internet penetration or are there some other reasons for South Africa to be often co-inlinked to together with Finland? Zimbabwe has a rather high Internet penetration, almost as high as South Africa. Shouldn’t it therefore be more often co-inlinked together with Finland or was the tipping point just between these? Please, feel free to comment and share your opinion.

Next week I’m going to Cape Town, South Africa, as part of an exchange program. I’ll be giving a talk about Library 2.0 there and demonstrating softwares for bibliometric (BibExcel) and webometric (SocSciBot) analysis. I’ve never been to Africa before, so I’m very excited about the trip.

Inspired by the trip, I did a simple webometric analysis between Finland and some African countries. I used Altavista (Google and other search engines do not offer this search feature) to analyze how pairs of countries are co-inlinked to (the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group maintains a list of search engine queries for webometrics). The queries entered had the form:

 linkdomain:D1 linkdomain:D2

With this query I didn’t exclude pages within the analyzed country level domains, so sites and pages in Finland that have links to Finland and the analyzed African country are included. I measured how Finnish sites are co-inlinked to with sites from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Democratic Republic of Congo. And here are the number of pages that had the analyzed co-inlinks:

• Finland – South Africa: 740 000
• Finland – Namibia: 13 300
• Finland – Botswana: 10 200
• Finland – DR Congo: 2 280

I would have guessed that there are stronger relationships between Finland and South Africa than with the other countries, but that the difference is this clear is a bit suprising. There are 56 times more co-inlinks between Finland and South Africa than between Finland and Namibia, and even more compared to the other countries.

If the pages and links from respective countries are ignored, we will get the co-inlinks from other countries, kind of a outsiders view on the relationships between the analyzed countries. The queries in Altavista have the form:

 linkdomain:D1 linkdomain:D2 -site:D1 -site:D2

These queries gave the following results:

• Finland – South Africa: 735 000
• Finland – Namibia: 12 600
• Finland – Botswana: 10 000
• Finland – DR Congo: 2 260

Not a huge difference then. Looking at the results in both sets show that the queries are working and that links that were searched for can indeed be found on the resulting pages. Next step would be to do a content analysis on the results to determine what this relationship or connection means. Is it an indication of cooperation, tourism, education, or something else?

The Internet penetration (users of population) might explain some of the results:

• South Africa: 11.6 %
• Namibia: 4.8 %
• Botswana: 4.3 %
• DR Congo: 0.3 %
• and
• Finland: 68.6 %

The co-inlinking follows the Internet penetration perfectly. A mathematician might be able to count the probability for the existence of co-inlinks between two countries. There’s a challenge for you mathematicians out there.

Google Analytics is a nice, free tool to monitor your Web site’s traffic, but… it can be highly addictive. A feature that I’ve been going back to over and over again is the map layout of where my visitors come from. And rather annoyingly, there are a couple of blank spots on the map. I wish to fill them. Besides getting a more unified color on the map, it will interesting to see whether I can get people from a certain country to visit my blog and what does it take to get them. Is it enough to just write the country’s name in a blog entry, like: Ukraine or Belarus or Georgia? Should I use it in conjunction with something popular, like: Facebook or Google? Do I have to link to blogs and sites in these countries to attract traffic from there? What gets people’s attention? Is it enough to write in English or should I try to translate something? Expect some entries about these three and some other countries in the near future

UPDATED: As requested, below is a map of the visitors to this blog. To start with, I’ll try to attract traffic from the eastern parts of Europe. I’m hoping to attract visitors especially from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and maybe even Moldova.

Hopefully we will see other maps from other blog owners soon. It would be very interesting to compare where the traffic comes from.

There seems to be a minor incompatibility issue with Google Chrome and Worpress. Previous entry was written on Chrome and everything looked fine until I published the page. Chrome didn’t understand any of my ENTER-hits in the posting and it showed everything together in one big paragraph. So I had to enter the BR-tags in HTML to get the entry into several paragraphs. 

I’m using WordPress Mu 2.3, which is a bit older version. The current version is 2.6 and it may work better with Chrome. Have anyone noticed the same with other WordPress versions? I wouldn’t want to upgrade my WordPress and notice that it didn’t change a thing, because, “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”.

Man, it’s fast! TechCrunch and others have already reported how fast Google’s new web browser is, but I have to give you my two cents on the topic. Well, it’s fast. There you have it. On two sites the new speed class of web browsers is especially noticeable: Google Reader and Facebook. 

I use Google Reader to keep track on my feeds and sometimes it can be very frustrating to wait for the browser to load more feeds from the same source. This of course only happens when I have a lot of unread feeds in the list, which actually is… always. Chrome doesn’t even pause when loading new feeds. It’s like Chrome would be optimized for Google Reader. Hhhmmm… I wonder how that is possible?

The second site with a noticeable differen is Facebook. I’ve stopped viewing the profile pages of those of my friends that have a lot of apps on their page. It has usually taken ages to load those pages that Chrome now loads in the blink of an eye.

On a sidenote I have to say that I like the way google guys name the menus and buttons in Chrome. Like the link for more advanced statistics of Chrome’s performance: “Statistics for nerds” (At least in the Swedish version of browser.  What does it say in the English version?).  

After Google (apparently by mistake) announced it will release the new open source web browser Chrome, the race to be the first to get the information out to the public went on. The blogosphere is holding its collective breath while waiting for the release of the century (?), or so does it seem. While I can’t get overly excited about something I haven’t had a chance to test yet, I will not wait in front of my computer for the release. In stead I’m taking my dog for a walk.

But before I do that I have to say that events like these that get worldwide publicity are interesting also from a research-point-of-view, and with this I especially mean following the dissemination of information. Take Wikipedia for instance. 18 hours before this blogentry, an article about Google chrome was first publish on the English version of Wikipedia, to be followed within the hour by the French version. Then Wikipedians in the Netherlands and Spain awakened and posted their articles 11 hours ago. And so on to other language version.

And apparently there are fast people using Flickr as well:

photo credit: Randy Zhang

photo credit: bradybd

photo credit: bauchidgw

UPDATED: Here’s a 38 page cartoon by Google about Chrome (Google guys have way too much time on their hands…:-))