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Amplify’d from www.clarin.com

Aumentan los casos de miopía y apuntan al uso de la computadora

Para una creciente cantidad de personas, la vida es algo borrosa. Un estudio realizado en los Estados Unidos muestra que los porcentajes de miopía -dificultad para ver objetos que están lejos- están aumentando. La tendencia se repite en muchos otros países, lo que lleva a los oftalmólogos a preguntarse qué es lo que estaría causando esta declinación en la visión de los seres humanos. Algunos sospechan que se debe tanto a un aumento en el tiempo en el trabajo frente a la computadora como a una baja en la cantidad de horas que se pasa al aire libre.Read more at www.clarin.com
 

Twitter: el 10% de los usuarios publica el 90% de los mensajes

Twitter repite los mismos parámetros de participación que otras herramientas de publicación en la red.

Amplify’d from news.bbc.co.uk

Twitter hype punctured by study

Micro-blogging service Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it, according to research.

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found.

Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network.

However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found.

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.

“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the team wrote in a blog post.

Silent crowds

Twitter is a social networking website where people can post messages of up to 140 characters - known as tweets - that can be seen by other users who subscribe to their feed.

Its growth has been described as “explosive” and it has become the poster child of social networking sites, particularly among media companies.

Recent figures from research firm Nielsen Online show that visitors to the site increased by 1,382%, from 475,000 to seven million, between February 2008 and February 2009. It is thought to have grown beyond 10 million in the past 4 months.

By comparison, Facebook - one of the most popular social networking sites by number of visitors - has 200 million active users and grew by 228% during the same period.

Research by Nielsen also suggests that many people give the service a try, but rarely or never return.

Earlier this year, the firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month.

“The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently,” Mr Heil told BBC News.

‘Super user’

For example, it found that men had 15% more followers than women despite there being slightly more females users of Twitter than males.

The Harvard study took a snapshot of 300,542 users in May 2009. As well as usage patterns it looked in detail at gender differences.

It also showed that an average man was almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman, despite the reverse being true on other social networks.

“The sort of content that drives men to look at women on other social networks does not exist on Twitter,” said Mr Heil.

“By that I mean pictures, extended articles and biographical information.”

However, said Mr Heil, the most striking result was that so few people used the service to publish information, preferring instead to be passive consumers.

“Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends,” he said.

“It looks like a few people are creating content for a few people to read and share.”

For example, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.

Some “super users” can have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers.

Currently, the most popular person to follow on Twitter is the movie star Ashton Kutcher who has more than two million followers.

However, the service bills itself as a way to “communicate and stay connected” with “friends, family and co-workers”.

“The Twitter management need to decide if this is a problem,” said Mr Heil.

“And if they decide it is, how they will tweak Twitter to become more acceptable to the average user?”

Read more at news.bbc.co.uk
 

Fotonauts se transforma en Fotopedia

Fotopedia busca transformarse en una enciclopedia de fotos.

Amplify’d from www.techcrunch.com via Google Reader

Fotonauts Emerges From Its Cocoon As Interactive, Web-Based Fotopedia

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the public beta launch of Fotonauts’ encyclopedia for photos, Fotopedia. TechCrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld reviewed the preview of Fotopedia that was released a few weeks ago. A startup that debuted at TechCrunch50 last year, Fotonauts turns your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts, which was in private beta and will officially be known now as Fotopedia, is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed.

The brainchild of Jean-Marie Hullot, former CTO of NeXT Software and Apple’s Application Division, Fotopedia was born when Hullot was helping his children with reports for school. He was using Wikipedia for background information but couldn’t find a comprehensive site that provided relevant photos to Wikipedia entries. Thus the idea for Fotonauts was born and entered private beta last year. But Hullot and his business partner, Gilles Samoun, wanted to create a web-facing product, which will serve as a complete photo encyclopedia, alongside the desktop client that focused more on the encyclopedia part of the concept.

Fotopedia is supposed to be a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, serving as an archive of “images for humanity.” The beta launch of Fotopedia lets you to turn any photo album from your Fotopedia desktop client into a Web page entry on Fotopedia, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google Map information where available. You can also add relevant photos from other Fotopedia albums and from photos licensed under creative commons on Flickr. And you can post your album on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.

Web albums can also be built collaboratively. Photographers can add photos and other data on specific places and topics, all tagged and organized by Fotonauts. And as in the private beta version, the photos in Fotonauts are synchronized with existing photo services like Flickr and Picasa.

A new feature that was added lets you choose if you want your album be presented for consideration for the Fotopedia photo encyclopedia, under the corresponding index or title which you file it under. So if you create an album from a trip to Bali, you can be a contributor by submitting the entire album or certain photographs to be considered for the Fotopedia entry on the encyclopedia entry for Bali.

On the Fotopedia web site, anyone can access albums for a variety of topics, places, people and more. There are over 150,000 high-quality photos already, organized into 4,501 “articles.” Each article is a Web slide show, along with the associated Wikipedia entry and Google Map. Each photo contains a good amount of metadata making it search-engine friendly. The encyclopedia tab on the site lets you access a indexed archive of photo albums on topics like geography, history, art and more.

It’s important to note that in order to be a contributor to an encyclopedia entry, you need to have downloaded the desktop client. But users who don’t have the Fotopedia desktop client can also use the “community” tab on the site, to view albums, vote for photos to be included in encyclopedia entries, comment, and follow users, pages or albums. A photo officially enters the photo encyclopedia by reaching 5 positive votes. Users are allowed 50 votes every day to decide which photos make it and which ones don’t. Users can also create widgets of albums to embed on on blogs, web sites and social networks. Users can pick single photos or complete albums to add to a widget.

Here’s an example of an embedded widget for the Bali entry:

Bali on Fotopedia

Below are two screenshots, first of the desktop client, and second of the Website. Both are very similar, except the desktop client has more features, including a photo stream on the right-hand columns of all the people and albums you are following.

Read more at www.techcrunch.com
 

Nueva version de Trillian

¿Le importará a alguien que haya una nueva versión de Trillian? Cuatro años atrás, era mi mensajero instantáneo favorito. Hoy no uso ninguno, la mensajería te hace perder demasiado tiempo.

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com via Google Reader

Trillian Astra Enters Public Beta: Does Anyone Still Care?

Read more at www.readwriteweb.com