Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

For its third consecutive year, the Personal Digital Archiving conference took place at Internet Archive in San Francisco , CA. Ahmed and I attended a diverse range of fascinating sessions on how people think about creating and preserving personal digital archives. The environment was very nice, and friendly (there were a baby and a dog in the second day ^_^). The conference was held on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25, 2012. The first day started at 9:00 am with a keynote and welcome intro by Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive and personal archives. Brewster gave a quick intro about Internet Archive history and asked an important question, “what would we want out of the Internet Archive in terms of preserving stuff that individuals are creating?”, which should be solved by knowing how to collect materials and make them useful for the people from this conference. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress gave a talk entitled “Personal Digital Archive Advice for the General Publ...

The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media . Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution . Several books were even published documenting the 18 days . All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0 . As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10% of this digital content is already gone. Websites like Twitter , YouTube , Facebook , Storify , 1000Memories , Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or video...

Superbowl 46 is today and whether you love football or if you just watch for the commercials you are in for some entertainment tonight. Tonight's game is one of the closest games in recent history. There is no doubt that New England has a great offense led by Tom Brady. New England has an Offensive Passing Efficiency of 7.65 yards per play compared to a league average of 5.97. The Giants led by Eli Manning are not far behind with a Passing efficiency of 7.32 yards per play. Both teams are in the top five for offensive passing. However the differences are more dramatic on the defensive side of the house. The Giants have given up 5.97 yards per play which is the league average. The patriots have the 29th worst pass defense and have have given up an average of 6.68 yards per play. Running the algorithms the same way we have all year has the Patriots winning the Superbowl. The predicted margin of victory matches the Vegas Line exactly so this will be a close game. Because this is Sc...