This study is an analysis of the spread of information through Twitter contrasted with the reporting through a major Norwegian news network (TV2 Nyhetskanalen) during the terrorist bombing in Oslo and the massacre at Utøya July 22nd, 2011. The paper explores the impact of individual Tweets immediately before and after four key events: (1) the bombing of the governmental buildings in Akersgaten, (2) the first official reports of shootings at the Labour party youth camp at Utøya, (3) the arrest of the terrorist and (4) the publication of the identity of Anders Behring Breivik. Through tabulation of the potential audience for each re-Tweet received by the Tweets during these intervals, the goal is to determine the potential impact of Twitter as a social sensor and message bearer during dramatic events such as terrorist attacks. Through an extensive crawling of over 60.000 interactions, each Tweet's individual impact is shown to have reached audiences of several hundred thousand potential readers, often ahead of public reporting. This may be read in contradiction to earlier research, stating Twitter's prevailing tendency of being a reactive medium. The results also point to a changing relationship between eye-witness accounts and the public audience without media as an intermediate moderator.

Innovation is widely recognised as essential to the modern economy. The term knowledgebased innovation system has been used to refer to innovation systems which recognise the importance of an economy’s knowledge base and the efficient interactions between important actors from the different sectors of society. Such interactions are thought to enable greater innovation by the system as a whole. Whilst it may not be possible to fully understand all the complex relationships involved within knowledge-based innovation systems, within the field of informetrics bibliometric methodologies have emerged that allows us to analyse some of the relationships that contribute to the innovation process. However, due to the limitations in traditional bibliometric sources it is important to investigate new potential sources of information. The web is one such source. This thesis documents an investigation into the potential of the web to provide information about knowledge-based innovation systems in the United Kingdom. Within this thesis the link analysis methodologies that have previously been successfully applied to investigations of the academic community (Thelwall, 2004a) are applied to organisations from different sections of society to determine whether link analysis of the web can provide a new source of information about knowledge-based innovation systems in the UK. This study makes the case that data may be collected ethically to provide information about the interconnections between web sites of various different sizes and from within different sectors of society, that there are significant differences in the linking practices of web sites within different sectors, and that reciprocal links provide a better indication of collaboration than uni-directional web links. Most importantly the study shows that the web provides new information about the relationships between organisations, rather than just a repetition of the same information from an alternative source. Whilst the study has shown that there is a lot of potential for the web as a source of information on knowledge-based innovation systems, the same richness that makes it such a potentially useful source makes applications of large scale studies very labour intensive.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka nutida sociala rörelsers aktiviteter på World Wide Web och ta reda på om det finns något sammanhängande informationssystem för dessa rörelser där, hur det ser ut och hur viktigt det är som informationskälla. Inom ramen för denna undersökning företogs först en teoretisk genomgång av begreppet sociala rörelser för att definiera undersökningsobjektet. Därefter introducerades den webbometriska metod som sedan användes för att analysera ett antal svenska nutida sociala rörelsers webbplatser. I samband med presentationen av den webbometriska metoden diskuterades också diverse problem rörande material och materialinsamling samt tidigare forskning på området. De webbometriska analyserna visade att det finns kopplingar mellan webbsidor som gör att de kan ses som sammanhängande informationssystem. Dock gick det inte utifrån analyserna att se hur detta system används. En intervju med en inom rörelserna aktiv informant bekräftade och fördjupade resultaten från de webbometriska analyserna. Studien avslutas med diskussioner kring möjligheter till fortsatt forskning på det webbometriska området och användningen av metoden.

Local governments have been developing online services, aiming to better serve the public and reduce administrative costs. However, the impact of this work, and the links between governments' online and offline activities, remain uncertain. Using a new full-population dataset of the UK government web, this thesis directly analyses the structure and content of government online. It argues that recent digital-centric public administration theories, typified by the Digital Era Governance quasi-paradigm, are not empirically supported by the UK local government experience. Instead, it argues for a positive but critical attitude to the value of technology in public administration. New methods are developed for full-text empirical analysis of government web crawl data and the use of machine learning approaches for adding attributes to full-population data. Webometric and content analyses of the .gov.uk web are conducted, together with a time-series panel regression of English local government cost, service quality, satisfaction, and an expert assessment of web provision. English local government online is highly heterogeneous and there is remarkably little intrinsic structure to the .gov.uk web. Geography is weakly visible in online government structures, but there is little evidence that online structures closely reflect the offline activities of government. Empirically, English local governments' web development levels are found not to be associated with improvement in the cost of, quality of, or satisfaction with council services, challenging the merit of online approaches to service improvement. Overall, the importance of digital-centric approaches to local government service improvement is challenged. A more nuanced theoretical approach to online service delivery is advocated, which discards utopian enthusiasm and focuses on concrete service improvements. It is recommended that full-population quantitative analyses be used more broadly in political science, with awareness of both the opportunities and the challenges associated with them.

<p>Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka nutida sociala rörelsers aktiviteter på World Wide Web och ta reda på om det finns något sammanhängande informationssystem för dessa rörelser där, hur det ser ut och hur viktigt det är som informationskälla. Inom ramen för denna undersökning företogs först en teoretisk genomgång av begreppet sociala rörelser för att definiera undersökningsobjektet. Därefter introducerades den webbometriska metod som sedan användes för att analysera ett antal svenska nutida sociala rörelsers webbplatser. I samband med presentationen av den webbometriska metoden diskuterades också diverse problem rörande material och materialinsamling samt tidigare forskning på området. De webbometriska analyserna visade att det finns kopplingar mellan webbsidor som gör att de kan ses som sammanhängande informationssystem. Dock gick det inte utifrån analyserna att se hur detta system används. En intervju med en inom rörelserna aktiv informant bekräftade och fördjupade resultaten från de webbometriska analyserna. Studien avslutas med diskussioner kring möjligheter till fortsatt forskning på det webbometriska området och användningen av metoden.</p>

A problem common to all current web link analyses is that, as the web is continuously evolving, any web-based study may be out of date by the time it is published in academic literature. It is therefore important to know how web link analyses results vary over time, with a low rate of variation lengthening the amount of time corresponding to a tolerable loss in quality. Moreover, given the lack of research on how academic web spaces change over time, from an information science perspective it would interesting to see what patterns and trends could be identified by longitudinal research and the study of university web links seems to provide a convenient means by which to do so. The aim of this research is to identify and track changes in three academic webs (UK, Australia and New Zealand) over time, tracking various aspects of academic webs including site size and overall linking characteristics, and to provide theoretical explanations of the changes found. This should therefore provide some insight into the stability of previous and future webometric analyses. Alternative Document Models (ADMs), created with the purpose of reducing the extent to which anomalies occur in counts of web links at the page level, have been used extensively within webometrics as an alternative to using the web page as the basic unit of analysis. This research carries out a longitudinal study of ADMs in an attempt to ascertain which model gives the most consistent results when applied to the UK, Australia and New Zealand academic web spaces over the last six years. The results show that the domain ADM gives the most consistent results with the directory ADM also giving more reliable results than are evident when using the standard page model. Aggregating at the site (or university) level appears to provide less consistent results than using the page as the standard unit of measure, and this finding holds true over all three academic webs and for each time period examined over the last six years. The question of whether university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year is important from the perspective of interpreting the results of academic link analyses, because changes in link types over time would also force interpretations of link analyses to change over time. This research uses a link classification exercise to identify temporal changes in the distribution of different types of academic web links, using three academic web spaces in the years 2000 and 2006. Significant increases in ‘research oriented’, ‘social/leisure’ and ‘superficial’ links were identified as well as notable decreases in the ‘technical’ and ‘personal’ links. Some of these changes identified may be explained by general changes in the management of university web sites and some by more wide-spread Internet trends, e.g., dynamic pages, blogs and social networking. The increase in the proportion of research-oriented links is particularly hopeful for future link analysis research. Identifying quantitative trends in the UK, Australian and New Zealand academic webs from 2000 to 2005 revealed that the number of static pages and links in each of the three academic webs appears to have stabilised as far back as 2001. This stabilisation may be partly due to an increase in dynamic pages which are normally excluded from webometric analyses. In response to the problem for webometricians due to the constantly changing nature of the Internet, the results presented here are encouraging evidence that webometrics for academic spaces may have a longer-term validity than would have been previously assumed. The relationship between university inlinks and research activity indicators over time was examined, as well as the reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings indicate that between 66% and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research. Surprisingly however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research, underlining that webometric results should be interpreted cautiously at the level of individual universities. Therefore, on average since 2001 the university web sites of the UK, Australia and New Zealand have been relatively stable in terms of size and linking patterns, although this hides a constant renewing of old pages and areas of the sites. In addition, the proportion of research-related links seems to be slightly increasing. Whilst the former suggests that webometric results are likely to have a surprisingly long shelf-life, perhaps closer to five years than one year, the latter suggests that webometrics is going to be increasingly useful as a tool to track research online. While there have already been many studies involving academic webs spaces, and much work has been carried out on the web from a longitudinal perspective, this thesis concentrates on filling a critical gap in current webometric research by combining the two and undertaking a longitudinal study of academic webs. In comparison with previous web-related longitudinal studies this thesis makes a number of novel contributions. Some of these stem from extending established webometric results, either by introducing a longitudinal aspect (looking at how various academic web metrics such as research activity indicators, site size or inlinks change over time) or by their application to other countries. Other contributions are made by combining traditional webometric methods (e.g. combining topical link classification exercises with longitudinal study) or by identifying and examining new areas for research (for example, dynamic pages and non-HTML documents). No previous web-based longitudinal studies have focused on academic links and so the main findings that (for UK, Australian and New Zealand academic webs between 2000 and 2006) certain academic link types exhibit changing patterns over time, approximately two-thirds of outlinks remain the same year on year and the number of static pages and links appears to have stabilised are both significant and novel.

O objetivo deste estudo consiste em interpretar o uso dos links nas postagens dos blogs de pesquisadores brasileiros. A investigação tem início através da análise dos links dos blogs inclusos no Anel de Blogs Científicos. Sua efetivação ocorre a partir da composição dos aglomerados das redes de links oriundas dos blogrolls, dos blogs de ciência circunscritos ao Anel de Blogs Científicos. Em momento posterior, foram categorizados os 640 links inclusos no conteúdo das postagens de acordo com as categorias de funções e motivações obtidas de estudos precedentes, e de categorias que emergiram do fenômeno estudado. Por fim, a compreensão das motivações para a inserção de links na composição das postagens dos blogs e as funções que esses links cumprem foi inferida através da Análise de Conteúdo dos contextos aos quais os links estavam inseridos, considerando os espaços aos quais o leitor é remetido a partir de sua ativação. Resultados indicam que o conceito de diários pessoais, em que as mensagens têm um número reduzido de caracteres e são apresentadas em ordem cronológica inversa, só se confirmam em relação a essa última característica, decorrente dos softwares de composição que assim a condicionam. A pouca incidência de links em relação aos blogs de pesquisadores permite afirmar que há uma baixa conectividade por parte dos blogs compostos por diferentes atores que compõem a amostra relativa ao Anel e às áreas as quais pertencem, reforçada pela baixa existência de links entre as postagens e os comentários. Reforça essa questão a ausência de links trackbaks entre os comentários das postagens selecionadas. A primeira das hipóteses que guia o estudo foi refutada, na medida em que as postagens não indicam rearticulações através de seus links de interlocuções entre pesquisadores, leigos e jornalistas científicos, não permitindo reordenações e maior amplitude dessas interlocuções junto à sociedade. A segunda das hipóteses foi confirmada por se basear no fato de que os links colocam em evidência que os documentos e fontes de informação relacionados a partir desses dispositivos (links) são um híbrido de uso e socialização de informações, estas tanto circunscritas às fontes e documentos científicos quanto a fontes e documentos que não se caracterizem tradicionalmente como parte do ciclo de produção científica. A terceira hipótese que guia este estudo foi refutada, pois os dados analisados indicam que o uso dos links por pesquisadores brasileiros não se baseia em funções e motivações que objetivam agilizar processos de produção e comunicação dos resultados de pesquisa através de blogs. / The aim of this study is to interpret the use of links on the blog postings by Brazilian researchers. The investigation begins by examining the links of blogs included in the Anel de Blogs Científicos (Ring of Science Blogs). Its effectiveness is based on the combination of clusters of link networks coming from the blogrolls restricted to the Anel de Blogs Científicos. Afterwards the 640 links included in the content of the posts were classified according to categories of functions and motivations obtained from previous studies and from categories that emerged from the phenomenon studied. Finally, understanding of motivations for the insertion of links on the composition of the blog posts and the functions that such links fulfill were inferred by Content Analysis of the contexts to which the links were inserted, considering the locations to which the reader is referred from its activation. Results indicate that the concept of personal journals, in which the messages have a limited number of characters and are presented in reverse chronological order, is only confirmed through this latter feature, as a result of the software used for composing the posts. The low incidence of links in relation to blogs of researchers allows us to state that there is low connectivity by blogs composed by different authors who form the sample relative to the Anel and the areas which they belong to, reinforced by the low availability of links between posts and comments. What reinforces this point is the absence of trackbak links among comments of the selected posts. The first hypothesis guiding the study was refuted, in that the posts do not indicate rearticulations through its links of dialogues among researchers, lay people and science journalists, not allowing rearrangements and higher amplitude of these dialogues with society. The second hypothesis was confirmed by relying on the fact that the links give evidence that the documents and related sources of information from those devices (links) are a hybrid of using and sharing of information – this information being limited to the sources and scientific documents as much as to sources and documents that are not traditionally characterized as part of the cycle of scientific production. The third hypothesis that guides this study was refuted because the data analyzed indicate that the use of links by Brazilian researchers is not based on functions and motivations that aim at streamlining production processes and communication of research results through blogs.

Com o aumento constante dos eventos científicos realizados surge a necessidade de se ter uma ferramenta para auxiliar na avaliação desses eventos de maneira rápida e precisa a fim de evidenciar a sua qualidade. A tarefa de avaliação atualmente em uso tem alta probabilidade de falhas e geralmente envolve muito trabalho humano afetando o custo. Assim, este trabalho apresenta um estudo das principais métricas para avaliação de conferências científicas utilizadas. Essas métricas foram separadas em dois grupos. O primeiro, estuda as características internas, os chamados indicadores bibliométricos, e o segundo grupo analisa a perspectiva externa, ou seja, os indicadores de visibilidade na web. A partir deste estudo, apresenta-se um modelo para avaliação de Conferências Científicas, na área de Ciência da Computação, com o principal objetivo de gerar um indicador de qualidade, analisando múltiplos critérios, tais como a quantidade de citações dos artigos daquela conferência e a quantidade de links que a apontam e utilizando as tecnologias web disponíveis para obtenção dos dados. Este modelo tem o objetivo de contribuir para o processo de avaliação de conferências de uma maneira mais transparente. O resultado do ranking indicado pelo modelo é gerado a partir de dados obtidos das conferências científicas. Nos experimentos, foi possível observar o novo ranking dessas conferências baseados na visibilidade na web como uma nova maneira para medir a qualidade das conferências, podendo demonstrar que este método é adequado. / With the steady increase of the number of scientific conferences it is necessary the existence of a tool to assist the quality evaluation of these events in a quick and accurate manner. The manual assessment task presently in use has a high probability of failures and the huge human work needed affects its cost. For that reason this work presents a study and the application of the main metrics for evaluating scientific conferences. These metrics were separated into two groups: the first studies the internal features, the bibliometric indicators, and the second group analyzes the external perspective or the visibility indicators in the web. From this study, we developed a model for the evaluation of Scientific Conferences in Computer Science with the main objective of generating a quality indicator, analyzing multiple criteria such as the number of citations of articles that conference and the number of links that point and using the web technologies available for data collection. This model is intended to contribute to the evaluation process of conferences in a more clear and explicit way. The result of the ranking is generated from the obtained data of the scientific conferences. In these experiments, it was possible to verify the new ranking of these conferences based on the visibility in the web as a useful way for measuring the quality of the conference and thus demonstrating the suitability of this method.

O objetivo deste estudo consiste em interpretar o uso dos links nas postagens dos blogs de pesquisadores brasileiros. A investigação tem início através da análise dos links dos blogs inclusos no Anel de Blogs Científicos. Sua efetivação ocorre a partir da composição dos aglomerados das redes de links oriundas dos blogrolls, dos blogs de ciência circunscritos ao Anel de Blogs Científicos. Em momento posterior, foram categorizados os 640 links inclusos no conteúdo das postagens de acordo com as categorias de funções e motivações obtidas de estudos precedentes, e de categorias que emergiram do fenômeno estudado. Por fim, a compreensão das motivações para a inserção de links na composição das postagens dos blogs e as funções que esses links cumprem foi inferida através da Análise de Conteúdo dos contextos aos quais os links estavam inseridos, considerando os espaços aos quais o leitor é remetido a partir de sua ativação. Resultados indicam que o conceito de diários pessoais, em que as mensagens têm um número reduzido de caracteres e são apresentadas em ordem cronológica inversa, só se confirmam em relação a essa última característica, decorrente dos softwares de composição que assim a condicionam. A pouca incidência de links em relação aos blogs de pesquisadores permite afirmar que há uma baixa conectividade por parte dos blogs compostos por diferentes atores que compõem a amostra relativa ao Anel e às áreas as quais pertencem, reforçada pela baixa existência de links entre as postagens e os comentários. Reforça essa questão a ausência de links trackbaks entre os comentários das postagens selecionadas. A primeira das hipóteses que guia o estudo foi refutada, na medida em que as postagens não indicam rearticulações através de seus links de interlocuções entre pesquisadores, leigos e jornalistas científicos, não permitindo reordenações e maior amplitude dessas interlocuções junto à sociedade. A segunda das hipóteses foi confirmada por se basear no fato de que os links colocam em evidência que os documentos e fontes de informação relacionados a partir desses dispositivos (links) são um híbrido de uso e socialização de informações, estas tanto circunscritas às fontes e documentos científicos quanto a fontes e documentos que não se caracterizem tradicionalmente como parte do ciclo de produção científica. A terceira hipótese que guia este estudo foi refutada, pois os dados analisados indicam que o uso dos links por pesquisadores brasileiros não se baseia em funções e motivações que objetivam agilizar processos de produção e comunicação dos resultados de pesquisa através de blogs. / The aim of this study is to interpret the use of links on the blog postings by Brazilian researchers. The investigation begins by examining the links of blogs included in the Anel de Blogs Científicos (Ring of Science Blogs). Its effectiveness is based on the combination of clusters of link networks coming from the blogrolls restricted to the Anel de Blogs Científicos. Afterwards the 640 links included in the content of the posts were classified according to categories of functions and motivations obtained from previous studies and from categories that emerged from the phenomenon studied. Finally, understanding of motivations for the insertion of links on the composition of the blog posts and the functions that such links fulfill were inferred by Content Analysis of the contexts to which the links were inserted, considering the locations to which the reader is referred from its activation. Results indicate that the concept of personal journals, in which the messages have a limited number of characters and are presented in reverse chronological order, is only confirmed through this latter feature, as a result of the software used for composing the posts. The low incidence of links in relation to blogs of researchers allows us to state that there is low connectivity by blogs composed by different authors who form the sample relative to the Anel and the areas which they belong to, reinforced by the low availability of links between posts and comments. What reinforces this point is the absence of trackbak links among comments of the selected posts. The first hypothesis guiding the study was refuted, in that the posts do not indicate rearticulations through its links of dialogues among researchers, lay people and science journalists, not allowing rearrangements and higher amplitude of these dialogues with society. The second hypothesis was confirmed by relying on the fact that the links give evidence that the documents and related sources of information from those devices (links) are a hybrid of using and sharing of information – this information being limited to the sources and scientific documents as much as to sources and documents that are not traditionally characterized as part of the cycle of scientific production. The third hypothesis that guides this study was refuted because the data analyzed indicate that the use of links by Brazilian researchers is not based on functions and motivations that aim at streamlining production processes and communication of research results through blogs.

Com o aumento constante dos eventos científicos realizados surge a necessidade de se ter uma ferramenta para auxiliar na avaliação desses eventos de maneira rápida e precisa a fim de evidenciar a sua qualidade. A tarefa de avaliação atualmente em uso tem alta probabilidade de falhas e geralmente envolve muito trabalho humano afetando o custo. Assim, este trabalho apresenta um estudo das principais métricas para avaliação de conferências científicas utilizadas. Essas métricas foram separadas em dois grupos. O primeiro, estuda as características internas, os chamados indicadores bibliométricos, e o segundo grupo analisa a perspectiva externa, ou seja, os indicadores de visibilidade na web. A partir deste estudo, apresenta-se um modelo para avaliação de Conferências Científicas, na área de Ciência da Computação, com o principal objetivo de gerar um indicador de qualidade, analisando múltiplos critérios, tais como a quantidade de citações dos artigos daquela conferência e a quantidade de links que a apontam e utilizando as tecnologias web disponíveis para obtenção dos dados. Este modelo tem o objetivo de contribuir para o processo de avaliação de conferências de uma maneira mais transparente. O resultado do ranking indicado pelo modelo é gerado a partir de dados obtidos das conferências científicas. Nos experimentos, foi possível observar o novo ranking dessas conferências baseados na visibilidade na web como uma nova maneira para medir a qualidade das conferências, podendo demonstrar que este método é adequado. / With the steady increase of the number of scientific conferences it is necessary the existence of a tool to assist the quality evaluation of these events in a quick and accurate manner. The manual assessment task presently in use has a high probability of failures and the huge human work needed affects its cost. For that reason this work presents a study and the application of the main metrics for evaluating scientific conferences. These metrics were separated into two groups: the first studies the internal features, the bibliometric indicators, and the second group analyzes the external perspective or the visibility indicators in the web. From this study, we developed a model for the evaluation of Scientific Conferences in Computer Science with the main objective of generating a quality indicator, analyzing multiple criteria such as the number of citations of articles that conference and the number of links that point and using the web technologies available for data collection. This model is intended to contribute to the evaluation process of conferences in a more clear and explicit way. The result of the ranking is generated from the obtained data of the scientific conferences. In these experiments, it was possible to verify the new ranking of these conferences based on the visibility in the web as a useful way for measuring the quality of the conference and thus demonstrating the suitability of this method.