New Media Med Blog

The Irish Times just did a article on the online community which New Media Med built for University College Cork. The online community called “Lose the Blues” is aimed at students experiencing depressive symptoms. The website is designed specifically for 18-24 year olds, who may be experiencing low moods. The community allows users to share their experience and offer peer support to each other within a safe environment.

The website was developed by Aine Horgan, and is part of a research study being undertaken at UCC by Ms Horgan and supported by Dr John Sweeney and Prof Geraldine McCarthy in the School of Nursing and Midwifery. The aim of the research is to see if the website can help improve one’s mood.

By building this online community,  New Media Med gives UCC complete control over their own data which was very important to ensure a safe environment. Having all the data also allows UCC to produce the reports needed for their research. New Media Med provides all the infrastructure for reliable trusted online communities where you control your own data.

Just went to a really interesting lunchtime talk in DIT entitled “research internet tools – benefits and pitfalls”. Interesting discussion on wikipedia, especially since Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales is in Dublin at the moment. There was a general agreement that wikipedia could be a great place to start and also had many topics (such as Jedward) that academics would never cover. But Wikipedia wouldn’t be something which could be cited in research papers.

What I found interesting is that the universities are coming out in the open now also. So you can find a huge amount of published research online. Various colleges have open access repositories. DIT’s is arrow.dit.ie.

Another example is Open Doar – a directory of open access repositories. So now researchers can find each others research much more easily.

Another big takeaway for me was the advice that we should think outside the Google box when searching. While it’s important commercially to know where things sit in Google, we have to remember that they make their money from advertising rather than through the search engine. Google has an excellent set of tools for analysing search rankings and for buying adwords but there are other search engines out there which are worth googling with.

Here are a few:

http://www.hakia.com/

http://www.chacha.com/

http://clusty.com/

http://www.kartoo.com/

http://www.mahalo.com/

Their approach is more semantic webby than being at the mercy of the keywords you happen to choose. I’m looking forward to using them for my research on Market Research Online Communities (MROC). – Maybe I don’t have the right keywords for that – but I’ll soon find out.