We present a brief introduction to the phenomenon of "social networking" and its potentially powerful use as an astronomy outreach and educational tool. We briefly discuss the development of applications for websites and facebook and the use of web trackers e.g. Google Analytics to analyze your audience. Finally we discuss how social bookmarking can be used to promote your work to unexpected audiences.
Deep Dive into Social Networking: An astronomers field guide.
We present a brief introduction to the phenomenon of “social networking” and its potentially powerful use as an astronomy outreach and educational tool. We briefly discuss the development of applications for websites and facebook and the use of web trackers e.g. Google Analytics to analyze your audience. Finally we discuss how social bookmarking can be used to promote your work to unexpected audiences.
Social networking is simply a way of keeping in touch with other users and sharing multimedia web content with friends and acquaintances via the internet. Over the past 5 years, social networking has becoming increasingly popular. Previous incarnations consisted of users subscribing to an email list, where the user would need to actively select a topic of their interest (often highly specialized) and then passively sit back while all the traffic from the email list filled their inbox, usually never to be read again. There is still a place for this type of network structure, but to be truly effective in a social context and as users become more technologically sophisticated, a more interactive approach is necessary to fully engage users with a real social experience.
Recently, social networking has seen a huge increase in popularity thought to be due to the novel sharing aspect; it provides people with a way to share interests with a self-selected group (commonly called ʻfriendsʼ, irrespective of whether they are relatives, colleagues or casual acquaintances). Users connect with others based on relationships or common ideals. Most social networking sites do not discriminate and are used by millions; consequently they can be an extremely powerful medium for educational purposes. In this article we discuss the power of social networking and bookmarking for astronomy outreach.
According to the internet surveying organization, comScore, the internet has 890 million users worldwide, 550 million of which are members of a social networking site; 62% of the total global users are clustered around a relatively low number of these social network website, mainly facebook, Bebo and MySpace. By taking advantage of these pre-existing media you can massively increase the traffic to your website or educational tool. Thus, if you want to promote your astronomy or education project more widely, this is a good place to look for a large audience.
To promote your information/site effectively, it helps to know a little about the system. The propagation of information across your social network can be limited by many factors. Mainly, the number of friends you have and the likelihood that they will pass information on to non-mutual friends. For example, you have an educational video you wish to promote so you send it (or share) to all your friends. If you only have 5 friends and they are not regular users, your venture will not meet with much success.
Although the sites are non-discriminating, not all represent everyone equally; the median age of social networking sites is 21 but many users are much younger particularly in the popular MySpace site. Class divisions are also obvious in different social networks with facebook users tending to come from white middle class backgrounds, often under 35 and are people who value higher education. An analogy is that of newspaper readership; some people look for current affairs, others prefer gossip columns, and many flip straight to the sports pages. Knowing your audience is very impor-tant, and once you have identified your target audience, it is important to choose the relevant network(s). One advantage to the sites is that users can select their groups according to the simple criteria of whether a particular person is known to them (and usually whether they like them or not), and not because of a highly specialized interest (as with email groups and forums), which allows educators/scientists to reach out to larger communities.
Social bookmarks also allow users to share interests and materials but in some senses the “network” part of social bookmarking is the exact opposite to that utilized by sites like facebook and MySpace. A social bookmarker will nominate categories which they are interest in (e.g. astronomy, politics, 17 th century costume etc.) and the websites ʻdeliveredʼ to them will reflect these choices. The delivery mechanism requires the bookmarker to visit the bookmarking website; Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Reddit are some examples. Ways to nominate content to be bookmarked come in two main varieties: via a web browser toolbar or via links directly on your webpage.
Many social bookmarking sites also provide a small application plugin which can be installed into your favorite web browser. This allows you to nominate any webpage to be bookmarked, and this website is then promoted on the bookmarking website for other users to see. The more often users bookmark a particular site, the higher its page rank becomes and the more prominently the bookmark site will promote it, and the more users will see it.
Some examples of the bookmarking websites available are:
• Digg -provides just the number of distinct times a site has been bookmarked. If people do not like a site but still bookmark it, the site will rise to the top, regardless of opinions on the website itself. • Del.icio.us -this was originally founded to provide a way of allowing web users to have an online rec
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