SNEEP 0.3.2 has been released. (See the project page for more information on the Social Networking Extensions for EPrints.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SNEEP is a set of EPrints plugins that provide "Web 2.0-ish" features such as the ability for users to annotate eprint abstracts with shared Comments or personal Notes, and to categorise them with Tags.

SNEEP 0.3.2 adds out-of-the-box support for version 3.1.2.1 of EPrints, but the main change is that, for the first time, SNEEP is now distributed with an automagic install script. Where previous releases required a rather lengthy manual process, in the majority of cases installation should now be quick and painless.

Fred Benenson has released a Creative Commons License Facebook application.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed.

This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.

JISC has released Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people whose medium and metier it is. They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate. It has also led them to impatience—a preference for quick answers—and to a casual approach to evaluating information and attributing it and also to copyright and legal constraints.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.

The impetus for change will come from students themselves as the behaviours and approaches apparent now become more deeply embedded in subsequent cohorts of entrants and the most positive of them—the experimentation, networking and collaboration, for example—are encouraged and reinforced through a school system seeking, in a reformed curriculum, to place greater emphasis on such dispositions. It will also come from policy imperatives in relation to skills development, specifically development of employability skills. These are backed by employer demands and include a range of ‘soft skills’ such as networking, teamwork, collaboration and self-direction, which are among those fostered by students’ engagement with Social Web technologies.

Higher education has a key role in helping students refine, extend and articulate the diverse range of skills they have developed through their experience of Web 2.0 technologies. It not only can, but should, fulfil this role, and it should do so through a partnership with students to develop approaches to learning and teaching. This does not necessarily mean wholesale incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. Rather it means adapting to and capitalising on evolving and intensifying behaviours that are being shaped by the experience of the newest technologies. In practice it means building on and steering the positive aspects of those behaviours such as experimentation, collaboration and teamwork, while addressing the negatives such as a casual and insufficiently critical attitude to information. The means to these ends should be the best tools for the job, whatever they may be. The role of institutions of higher education is to enable informed choice in the matter of those tools, and to support them and their effective deployment.

Birmingham City University is offering an M.A. in Social Media.

Here's an excerpt from the program description:

This MA programme will explore the techniques of social media, consider the development and direction of social media as a creative industry, and will contribute new research and knowledge to the field. . . .

The research-based nature of this MA draws upon the expertise of the Interactive Cultures research unit based in the Birmingham School of Media (http://interactivecultures.org/). Our established and innovative work with music and radio industries, policy, cultural entrepreneurship as well as the practices of social media will inform class work and the directions of individual scholarship.

Teaching takes place in small groups. There will be a mixture of lectures, seminars, research workshops, presentations and field-trips. In exploring and innovating in research in social media you will work with other students and engage with professional practitioners, interacting and disseminating ideas through websites, blogs, Twitter and other social media as well as at networking events.

The taught postgraduate phase of the course will comprise modules that explore social media from a cultural studies perspective and explore political economy, social enterprise and social media organisations. The Masters component entails a substantial piece of independent study and the origin of either a social media production project of an original piece of research in the form of a 15000-word dissertation.

Omeka 1.0 alpha has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This version of Omeka includes:

• New helper functions and updates current helper function;
• Enhancements and fixes bugs throughout the admin panel;
• An autocompleter to the tags field for items;
• Filtering for the users list in the admin;
• An upgrade notification to admin dashboard if you're version of Omeka is older than the latest stable release.
• A "Remember Me" checkbox to the login.
• A global view page and helpers for file metadata, which will allow you to edit file metadata and display it in public themes.

Scriblio 2.7 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from "Scriblio 2.7 Released":

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses. . . Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections.

In "Wikipedia Bolts Its Open Door," Giles Hattersley reports that Jimmy Wales will propose that changes to popular Wiki pages (e.g., biographies of living persons) be screened by "core users" prior to publication on the site.

Wales is quoted as saying:

One of the great misconceptions about us is this idea that Wikipedia is anti-elitist. That’s just wrong. We are actually extremely snobby . . . . These core users really manage and enforce our standards. If it weren’t for them Wikipedia would be chock full of rubbish.

EDUCAUSE has released a podcast of a presentation by Beth Cate, Associate General Counsel for Indiana University System, called "The Law and Policy of Web 2.0: Much Old, Some New, Lots Borrowed, So Don’t Be Blue."

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies offer rich tools for creation, collaboration, and community building. As such they have generated great excitement among faculty, staff, and students as they explore incorporating these technologies into their teaching and learning. Some of the most compelling features of these technologies—how quickly and easily materials can be shared and repurposed, how large and fluid Internet communities tend to be, how many cheap third-party services are available—are the same ones that raise questions about whether and how law and policy affect how we use these technologies in support of learning.

In this session, Beth Cate reviews and answers questions commonly asked by faculty, staff, and university attorneys. She also talks about why, although technologies are continually evolving, the relevant legal and policy principles are generally quite familiar and not scary. She highlights a few new wrinkles and some unknowns and offers practical strategies for maintaining good communications with your campus counsel as you and your institution navigate these promising new technologies and look ahead to Web 3.0.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released "Adults and Social Network Websites."

Here's an excerpt:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years—from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.

Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.

Christian Hauschke, Nadine Ullmann, and Sarah Lohre have edited a book about the global blogging efforts of librarians, LibWorld—Library Blogs Worldwide. It is available in print form and as a free PDF download.

Here's the abstract:

On April, 23rd 2007 a series of postings started on Infobib.de, where guest authors from all over the world introduced the library and library related blogs of their own country. This book is a collection of 30 revised LibWorld articles, accompanied by a foreword by Walt Crawford. Included are articles about the blogosphere of: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Malawi, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, USA.

Digital New Zealand has released its Coming Home Memory Maker, which allows users to remix historic digital media.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Memory Maker is an interactive online video remix tool, that lets people mix historical film footage, digitised photographs and objects, and music/audio clips into a 60 second video that can then be saved, shared, and embedded on other sites.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10b.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Omeka 0.10b incorporates many of the changes you asked for: an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema and fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability with digital repository software and collections management systems; elegant reworkings of our theme API and plugin API to make add-on development more intuitive and more powerful; a new, even more user friendly look for the administrative interface; and a new and improved Exhibit Builder. While the changes are extensive and represent a next-to-last step forward toward a 1.0 release in early 2009, existing users of Omeka should have little trouble switching to 0.10b. New users should have even less trouble getting started. Meanwhile, visitors to Omeka.org will find a new look, a more intuitive information architecture, easily browsable themes and plugins directories, improved documentation and user support, and new ways to get involved in the Omeka community.