What is it about?
This was an early (2007) guide to social networks: what are they, who uses them, how do they intersect with higher education / scholarly publishing, what are the potential pitfalls.
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Why is it important?
It's a fascinating reminder of "boom and bust" - some sites that were big players in 2007 had disappeared only 2-3 years later; meanwhile Academia.edu and ResearchGate (which have since become the big players in terms of social networking for academics) had yet to come into existence. The article is important because it shows, that despite this fluidity in terms of how and where people network, the core issues have not changed: codes of conduct, cultural variations in engagement, and the challenge of calculating ROI (which of course Kudos can help with by better mapping social media activities to publication performance!)
Perspectives
It's always a relief to look back at your older work and be assured that it has stood the test of time. Considering how quickly the landscape of social media has evolved I think this is also a useful record of some of the conversations and uncertainties along the way. I've continued to be fascinated by how social media is used by researchers and those around them but it was to be five years from when this article was published to when I participated in the first conversations about starting Kudos. It makes me smile to see this early stake in the ground, both from a personal perspective, but also in terms of the credit due to the publisher, UKSG, for quickly picking up on the potential of social media and commissioning an article on what has turned out to be very much a key issue for our community.
Charlie Rapple (Kudos)
Kudos
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Key issue, Serials The Journal for the Serials Community, November 2007, Ubiquity Press, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.1629/20240.
You can read the full text:
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