Without evaluation and usage data it is impossible to judge the effectiveness of these web 2.0 tools and your ability to make good decisions about which tool to use for which audience and for what purpose is limited.
Interestingly, many web 2.0 tools have excellent built in statistics (such as Flickr pro accounts). There are also free web based analysis tools such as Google analytics which are very useful for blog, wiki and website statistics. Many wikis also have useful built in statistics as well, so there is no shortage of data which is available.
Google alerts
Google alerts are a way of seeing what people are saying about your organisation (or you) The British Library used blog posts (by other people) as part of their evaluation of their exhibition Sacred. This can be a useful way of seeing how people are talking about your organisation. You will need to set up a separate alert for each different name or phrase.
You can set up an alert through google alerts and have it sent to your e-mail address or google reader (select the options which suit you best)
Survey monkey
Survey monkey is a web based tool which you can used to construct surveys. It is both a free and a fee service.
We used survey monkey to help in the evaluation of the learning 2.0 course. You can read the paper we wrote about it and the results of the nine month follow up These papers contain data which we obtained via survey monkey.
Flickr pro
You can obtain statistics on the use of your Flickr account if you have a pro account including views, tags added, favourites, and contacts. For an example of some of the statistics available here is an extract from the Public Library Services Tweet reach is a way of finding how tags are being used and twitter counter looks at a few statistics for Flickr accounts.
Google analytics
Google analytics is a way of analyzing your website or wiki. It is being used on ref-ex and you can see some of the data which can be obtained by using it.
Adventure
Set up a google alert for your organisation or the area where you live. Feedburner
Feedburner is a way of analyzing the use of your blog. Set up a Feedburner account for your blog.
Sign in using your gmail address and password.
Click claim your feed.
Enter the url for your blog, and select the feed you want to use.
You are given the following instructions
Set up a short survey using surveymonkey or zoomerang
Blog writing prompts
- Did you find out something you did not know about through your google alert? If so what?
- What is your experience of using web 2.0 evaluation tools?
Ellen, Leanne and Mylee
10 comments:
I'm sorry, I may have missed something but I don't think this was a very well explained module. The reasons for signing up for Google Alerts and Feedburner were not clear - do we do both or only one? I've done both and will wait for results before commenting more.
Thanks for your comment.
I am sorry you did not find this post very clear. I have added a little clarifying text so that hopefully others will find it a bit clearer.
Google analytics is for wiki and web site analysis and feedburner is for blog analysis. We only mentioned a few tools people could use to evaluate their use/their use library use of web 2.0 tools. This is a rapidly growing area.
Ellen
I enjoyed this week and found setting up Feedburner straightforward. As with most things Web 2.0, if you don't like it you can always delete it!!
It is vital to use these tools to justify why use. Not much point putting time and effort into something if no one "out there" is interested.
Just set up a feedburner on my blog, no problems with that. Don't expect that to gain much interest so thought I might add one to my Facebook, but that didn't seem to work for me. Why do you think?
I found this week really good. I have set up feedburner and created a survey for my blog. My only problem is that I have had no visits to my page. The content only relates to this training. Is there something i am doing wrong?
twisnplusone76 - I have had a look at your blog and it looks nice, but I could not find the survey.
Hopefully this visit will contribute some statistics for you.
Ellen (PLS)
I really checked this topic out. It was fun to see where it took me. I can see it working for people who spend heaps of time on the internet and who have a need for it, like the library, councils and businesses.
Great to hear that you enjoyed your discovery - and that evaluation can be fun. I find it really interesting what you can learn from the different evaluation tools.
Ellen
I've just added feedburner to my blog but I'm not expecting muach because I'm so late doing this learning.
Now I'm off to create a survey on surveymonkey
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