I guess the first question is, why would someone want to fake the date on their blog entry? Well, perhaps to show that they have been active and that they haven’t missed a single months or week in X number of years. However, the important question from a webometric point of view, is whether it is ethical to fake the dates? Faking the dates may mess up some poor researcher’s work, as the date may be of some significance in some studies. Anyway, as you can see I’m just rambling to get a post done so that I can fake the date and see what happens. My guess is; nothing.

My PhD thesis, Webometric network analysis : mapping cooperation and geopolitical connections between local government administration on the web,  is now published online at: https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/52528?locale=len&author=

Here’s the first paragraph of the dissertation:

“The World Wide Web, or the Web, is a network of interconnected sites andhyperlinks between them. New structures can be added to this web bycreating hyperlinks that have a source and a target. There are no regulationsor quality control and links can be created to target any Web sites. Without any control of the hyperlinking the Web could get very tangled, chaotic even,but could there still be some structure in the chaos? Could hyperlinks reflectsome offline phenomenon? Webometrics is a research field that tries toanswer these questions among others and tries to find patterns and structuresin the anarchy of hyperlinking on the World Wide Web.”

Today I’m flying to Dalian, China, to attend the Fifth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics (WIS) & Tenth COLLNET Meeting. I’ve never been to a WIS conference or a Collnet meeting before, so it will be interesting to see.

I’m presenting a paper titled “Linking to a bilingual Web space”. More about the conference later and more info about it at: http://www.wiselab.cn/collnet-dalian/ (which interestingly according to Google “may harm your computer” ).

In the midst of writing up the thesis and with the approaching deadline I find myself more and more neurotic about what I’m doing. I’m questioning whether I know what I’m doing and turn to Web search engines for guidance, because we all know that they know everything, even where you have left your car keys when you can’t find them.

First I turned to Google to find more about webometrics, and to my big surprise I’ve got it completely wrong. I thought webometrics started in late 1990′s with a paper written by Almind and Ingwersen (Almind, T.C. & Ingwersen, P. (1997). Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to “webometrics”. Journal of Documentation, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 404-426.). But boy did I get it wrong. It was a lucky fluke that I checked with Google and can correct this error in my thesis now. Apparently webometrics have been around since 1526.

Now that I got the correct date I turned to the new search engine that has an answer for everything, Wolfram Alpha. I asked Wolfram: “What is webometrics?” and after a few microseconds I got an answer:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

My thoughts exactly. And what a relief, because if Wolfram doesn’t know what webometrics is, then I don’t need to know it either. Phew, I’m glad I turned to search engines for help. Now I can happily continue writing my thesis and write about all these new things I’ve learned about webometrics.