1. Roger Martin
IT Coordinator
School of Journalism and Communication
Carleton University
Data Construction with Online User-Generated Content
RESEARCH 2.0

2. WEB 2.0 Enter Social Media…
Internet Technologies + Publishing + Social Interaction
The web has evolved with the development of rich internet
applications based on open-source, interoperable
technologies such as MySQL, PHP, XML, Ajax, and RSS
to name a few
What does this all mean?
It’s now easier and faster (and cheaper!) for the masses
to share content and facilitate discussion online
As A Researcher Why should I care?
Because the game has changed — Web 2.0 has removed
the barriers to open communication and people are
jumping on the bandwagon in droves

3. WHY SHOULD I CARE?
18 million WordPress publishers world-wide as
of Nov. 2009
On an average day, WordPress.com users
publish 200,000 posts — their users respond
with over 300,000 comments
Source: WordPress.com
220,000,000 people visit one or more
WordPress.com blogs every month
and they view over 1,000,000,000 pages
on those blogs
Source: Quantcast

4. WHY SHOULD I CARE?
350 million active Facebook users
In one week, Facebook users share
3,500,000,000 pieces of content
An average Facebook user as 130 friends
An average user spends 55 minutes on
Facebook each day
An average user is a member of 12 Facebook
groups
Source: Facebook.com

5. WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Over 22 million unique Twitter visitors in
December 2009
Twitter use is on the rise: There were 4 million
unique visitors in December 2008
Source: Compete
Of all internet users, more women (21%)
use Twitter than men (17%)
Internet users who already use social networking
sites are more likely to use Twitter
Mobile users are more likely to tweet
Source: Pew Internet

6. NAVIGATING THE BLOGOSPHERE
The blogosphere is the entire collection of all
inter-connected blogs on the internet
Different types of Blogs: Personal, Professional,
Organizational, Political, Media
Top four blogging sites: WordPress, Blogger,
Movable Type, Typepad
Blog content (posts and comments) is
syndicated and organized — Therefore, easy
to share and easy to find
Blog content is organized using categories
and tags

7. NAVIGATING THE BLOGOSPHERE
Technorati aggregates blog content on the web
— you can search at technorati.com
Even Google has a blog search (no surprise
there!)
WordPress.com has its own blog search and
allows you to search related tags
Blogger does not — no worries, you can find it
on Google, which owns Blogger

8. NAVIGATING THE BLOGOSPHERE
Google has the best blog search online
(my humble opinion) blogsearch.google.com
Results can be sorted by relevance or date
You can even set the date range for the search
and do other advanced blog searches using
the Advance Blog Search feature

9. IN A TWITTER
@jtechieguy
A Twitter Avatar, or username
Tweet
A micro-blog post (140 characters or less)
RT
A retweet of an existing tweet
http://bit.ly/18Uw1A
A shortened link — because you only have 140
characters
#keyword
A hash tag — used to organize tweets into
categories and to search Twitter

10. TWITTER AND RESEARCH
Do
Identify who you are
Explain you’re a researcher conducting research
Follow other Twitter users — so they may follow
you
Tweet , tweet, and retweet — to give people
something to follow
Organize your followers into lists
Pose questions to your followers — to generate
data
Don’t
Hide your identity
Spam your followers — you can get kicked off of
Twitter if you do

11. FACEBOOK
Facebook groups present real potential for
collecting data & conducting research