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WebWebWebWeb2.02.02.02.0For Academic ResearchersFor Academic ResearchersFor Academic ResearchersFor Academic Researchers
A brief guide by Gavin D. J. Harper
www.gavindjharper.co.uk
Be Social!
The web is now full of social networks thatcater to every branch of society; within themthe full diversity of the human condition andinterests thereof are captured in virtual com-munities that transcend the ether to link like-minded folk from Aalbourg to Zanzibar!Social networks can also be a great forum topromote you research; many allow you topost content items such as photos or videos;and link to other documents on the web; forexample, documents that you host on Scribd,or Slideshows that you host on Slideshare.
The chances are you will have friends on thesenetworks that share your research interests.
Beyond The Ivory Tower...
PC’s have now moved into shiny black cases and es-caped the ivory tower. Web 2.0 changes the rela-tionship between consumers and producers of infor-mation—and has the potential to help you get yourwork much more widely read and communicate withdifferent and enlarged audiences.This guide aims to show you how you can use “Web2.0” to promote your research and make the mostof your outputs.
http://blogs.voices.com/thebiz/web1vsweb2.png
Web 2.0 Explained.... Visually
 
1.02.0
Academia.edu is a social network geared up specifically to-wards researchers and people working in universities. It al-lows you to upload your papers and get involved withgroups of people working in your research area.
 
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Slideboom lets you keep your custom animations.
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Slideboom allows you to play animated *.gif’s within your presentation.
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Slideboom will not deal with flash animations at all, whereas Slideshareconverts them into static pictures.
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However, Slideboom only supports files up to 30mb.
Vs.Share Your Slides!
If you are routinely creating presentations for lectures,conferences, seminars e.t.c. Then why not considersharing content using an online presentation-sharingtool. Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) and Slideboom(www.slideboom.com) are two sites that allow you toupload content that you have produced in MicrosoftPowerpoint. This is a useful backup in the event thatyour memory stick dies when you go to deliver thepresentation! Also, you can then grab a snippet of codethat Slideshare generates, and embed the presentationinto a webpage. You can also easily share presentationswith people on your social networks.
Top Tip!
If you are struggling with graphics orembedded fonts in your presenta-tion, convert the file to a *.pdf first,and upload this to the converter!
Share Your Pictures! Using: /
If you generate lots of images in the course of your research, then a really great way to share them is with aphoto sharing service such as Flickr / Picasa. These services allow you to bulk upload your photos and thenorganise them into groups and sets. This can be really use-ful, as it provides somewhere where you can store you pic-tures that can be accessed from home or university com-puters. It also provides a measure of resilience in the eventthat your PC hard drive fails. You can permit people theshare your images for example, by embedding them in theirblogs. This is a useful way to drive traffic to your content;and hopefully through exploring your pictures—they willwant to learn more about you; read your profile and thendiscover more about your research.
Share Your Documents
Anyone in the world of academia is routinely creat-ing documents—whether that be course notes, pa-pers, or working reports. Scribd is an online servicethat you can use to share such documents. You up-load your files, and Scribd converts them to it’s ownproprietary format “iPaper”, which is easy to viewon any browser that has the “Flash” plugin installed;without needing to load up an external applicationsuch as Adobe Acrobat. With Scribd; you can sharedocuments by distributing the link to your document; allowing you to post to social networks and sites suchas Twitter; however, if you host your own website; you can also “embed” documents within the page; Scribdgenerates a snippet of HTML code for you, that you can grab and paste into your site. You can specify thedimensions of this box to fit in with your site layout. Within this box, your document can be previewed, withthe option to click on it, and “pop it out” in its own window.
 
Publish It Yourself!
If you’ve got to produce a short run of documents;say for a brochure for a course, or a hand-out orcourse book; then Lulu could very well be the an-swer to your prayers.Banish visions of badly photocopied sloppily pre-sented reports amateurishly bound with tacky plas-tic comb binders and say hello to professionally per-fect bound reports in hardback or softback!Lulu is what is known as a print on demand pub-lisher. The traditional publishing model is that anauthor writes a book for a low percentage of therevenue, whilst the publisher takes on distributionand marketing activities.Lulu turns the publishing industry model on itshead, by putting the content creator in control.Lulu have very advanced flexible printing machinesthat are able to produce short runs or even singlebooks very cost effectively. It works thus; you up-load your document to the Lulu server in the formof a *.pdf with a cover image, and tell Lulu whatquality paper you want to print on, what size of book you want to publish, the type of binding andwhether you want to print in black and white orcolour. Lulu wil then give you a base price for pro-ducing this type of publication. You can then buy atthis price, sell your work at this price, or choose tomake a profit over and above and market yourbook on the Lulu site.You can also add an ISBN and market your book more widely through conventional distributionchannels and booksellers such as Amazon.com.Lulu provides a number of free features to help youget your book published including an online coverdesigner.The quality of the printed documents that Lulu pro-duce is second to none; however, it should be re-membered, that unlike working with a professionalpublisher—Lulu does not copyedit, proofread orlayout your work—so ultimately the quality of theoutput is highly dependent on your own DTP skillsand the effort you put into producing what you up-load to the Lulu server.Once uploaded to Lulu, Lulu also gives you the facil-ity to produce a “Widget” that can be embedded inyour website to market your book!
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