Daniel Lieberman

Peer reviewed journals in the humanities are experimenting with Web tools to re-engineer the process of deciding what is and isn’t scholarship. The traditional peer review process developed in a particular technological and social environment as a way to screen new research for quality and draw the borderline between amateurs and specialized experts. Of course it is prone to “[c]lubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud…”, and it is slow. But up to now it has been the essential gatekeeper and is crucial in how universities make tenure decisions.

Open review has been experimented with for some time already in economics and science.

Money quotes:

“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”…

“Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete”…

“The traditional process is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field. It represents a settlement for a particular moment, not a perfect ideal.”

This would represent a huge change. It’s another example of how Internet technology disrupts every entrenched, privileged group in society.

Even “liberals” in academia are terrified of this one. I have had several heated discussions about this in the past few years. A system that accommodated a particular time, social order, and technological culture has come to be accepted as nature, especially by the people that it privileges. Rethinking it seems like a good idea to me.

What do you think? If you are opposed to Open Review, can you explain why Peer Review is better, given the availability of much more powerful tools for collaboration and discussion?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

The photo is from an exhibit of early Italian printed books at the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, RI.

With 500,000,000 members, Facebook is a phenomenon none of us can ignore – and an opportunity none of us should pass up! Come find out what Facebook can do for you and your business.

Registration is $10.00 per person, and includes the workshop as well as hot appetizers at a pre-workshop networking session. A cash bar will also be available. To register, email Ted Guglielmo at Ted@teamhogan.com. Seating is limited and is offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Reserve today to guarantee your seats.

Daniel Lieberman, Internet Coach, will lead the workshop. People are baffled and overwhelmed by the Internet. Daniel helps them take advantage of the Internet to get creative and adventurous.

Western Massachusetts Sales Professionals Group is dedicated to helping everyone in sales. We support our members by presenting workshops, holding regular networking meetings and providing a forum for on-line help.

CONTACT: Ted Guglielmo Hogan Communications 81 East Street Easthampton, MA 01027 (413) 779-0066

If you have a blog and use Twitter, you need a way to publish your blog posts to your timeline.

The Twitter Tools plugin lets you tweet a link to any Blog Post. You can choose a custom prefix for your tweets (the standard one is “New Blog Post”).

By default, you have to choose to tweet your post (there’s a radio button). A setting  reverses the default, i.e., you have to choose not to tweet.

The Twitter Tools bit.ly extension helps, too. It shorten the URLs of the blog posts your tweets are sharing. This has two great Social Media advantages: it leaves room for comments when people retweet you, and bit.ly gathers statistics on the number of clicks your links get, which helps you learn what links work best for your readers.

Visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ to download the plugin or read more about it.

How do you spread your blog posts?

If you are running Chrome and use Gmail (isn’t everybody?), you can now drag any file attachment right onto the Desktop.

Does this work on Macs, too?

If you’re not using Chrome, what browser are you using? What do you like about it?

The Web IS the modern world. You have to know how to use the Web to prosper, like in the 20th century you had to know how to drive a car (I’m talking about the developed world).  I make my living helping people use the Internet better, and do a lot of volunteering, too. I realized that everything I’m working on is intended to help our region thrive in the 21st century.

My activities, why I do them, and what they’re for:

1. Consulting. I’m a generalist. I was a software developer and have a knack for computers. If I don’t know something, I know how to find out enough to be helpful to my clients. Tasks that baffle people come easily to me because of experience and comfort with technology. I’m also very system-minded, so it’s pretty easy for me to help people think about their businesses and see how to improve how they get things done.
2. Speaking. I’m really, really excited about the Internet and Social Media. I started doing workshops because I needed to share my enthusiasm. Professionals and business people find my workshops useful because I show them what the tools are and how to use them. I don’t talk down to the people, and I don’t condescend to the tools as many software professionals do. Putting Facebook down is a favorite activity for developers with skills past their sell-by date and a sense of entitlement.
3. Volunteer work.
   1. Local business association. What keeps me engaged is the opportunity to work hands on with municipal leaders on economic development and get involved in local and regional planning. Also, it’s another chance to evangelize for the Internet and Social Media. There are huge, easy wins for local businesses who learn how to use technology better.
   2. Local Cable Board. We deal with the incumbent cable company, which also provides high speed Internet service. As our region is woefully underserved, the towns have entered into discussions with
   3. WiredWest, a group which is planning to build and operate a high speed fiber optic network which will serve all of the residents and businesses in the region. I’m an appointed delegate from my town. I’ve volunteered to help with online communications and public speaking.
   4. Shelburne Falls Memorial Hall association. A non-profit group which operates the historic Memorial Hall Theatre. SFMH brought the Metropolitan Opera Live HD Video broadcasts to the area. We have an enthusiastic and growing audience – people from many miles around as well as local residents. Visitors get exposed to the charm and beauty of Shelburne Falls. Residents of the community get world class opera.
   5. Open Space Committee. This is a committee of the town, established to deal with land use and land preservation issues. This is a predominantly rural town with a relatively unspoiled environment and lots of open space. Helping preserve it for the future is an important mission.

I’ll go into more detail on each on in future posts in the series, some ideas about the future of the region.

This is an amazing offer for some very good cloud based business applications, two of which I use and really like. 50% of every sale goes to the National Wildlife Federation to help clean up the Gulf oil spill.

Freshbooks is a terrific time-tracking and billing application. MailChimp is one of the premier email management tools today. Batchbooks is cloud based CRM software (I don’t use it, but it has an excellent reputation). Nor do I use Formstack (for building webforms) or MOO (makes business cards). I know you can’t go wrong for $55.00 if you are a freelancer or solopreneur. Click the link below to learn more about the deal and the applications on offer.

AppSumo Bundle of Joy

I’ve been exploring the new features that linkedin.com has added to Groups. So far the one I like the best is how easy it is to add an RSS feed to the Group discussions tab. You can add up to thirty feeds to a Group, and they’ve made it easy to see what new posts are coming into your discussions from the feeds you’ve selected.

I’m always trying to get people interested in the wealth of information they can access from RSS feeds (with little success, I’m afraid), so it will be interesting to see how it works on the Groups that I administer.

Lunch yesterday with Mary Serreze, publisher of NorthamptonMedia. She’s building – no, she’s built – a vibrant hyper-local news website. I’ve been watching the project since I met Mary at a Hidden-Tech social in Northampton in the spring. NorthamptonMedia gets out and reports about Northampton and environs. It’s professional,  colorful and well-written.

Mary has a background in regional planning – ideal for a reporter on the local government beat (zoning, development, water, refuse, etc.).  She has geek cred, too, as a former network administrator for the Hampshire Gazette. Mary makes you think of the reporters in His Girl Friday: fast-talking, wised-up and loaded for bear.

By the way, with homage to Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Vile Bodies
here’s my gossip columnist’s take:

Mary Serreze, well-known publisher of NorthamptonMedia, seen lunching with Daniel Lieberman, popular blogger and man about town, at the Coolidge Park Cafe Tuesday. Mary was wearing the ultra-fashionable green bowler – Chicken Caesars (with anchovies!) all around.

There are no silver bullets to getting well-known on the internet. At the end of the day, you have to do it the hard way: provide great content, find your community, share, link and grow. Tricks will not get you anywhere that you really want to go, unless your life’s ambition is to be a successful spammer.

But Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about working smarter with Google, Yahoo and the rest, not about trying to game the system and jump the queue to fame and fortune. It’s the study of how the search engines, which are the dominant sources of traffic for websites, operate and what they’re looking for.

I’m working my way through http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization from the website http://www.seomoz.org/, a very well-respected source for information and products related to SEO. If you have a website and you care about getting traffic for it, give it a look, even if you’re not actively working on your site: you’ll learn a lot about how search engines work and how page ranking is done, and what works and doesn’t work on the web.

I’ll be writing more about what strikes me as interesting as I get further into it.

What do you do to improve your Google-Juice?

Jeff Grader (http://www.flybyfrog.com/) showed us the brand new storybook Changes last night at Kevin Parsons and Kathy Young’s July 4th Party in Shelburne Falls. It’s a story about a beautiful young snake who must learn to embrace change.

Jeff is a talented artist and designer and the illustrations for Changes are gorgeous and look great in the printed book.  http://www.changestorybook.com/Change/Home.html