Using Twitter uring an Academic Conference : The # iswc 2009 Use - Case ∗

We recently addressed a survey to Semantic Web researchers, in which Twitter was ranked in the top three services used in order to spread information and reach peer researchers, students, as well as a broader audience. In order to figure out how Twitter is really used by this community, we conducted an analysis of the Twitter feed of the recent 8th International Semantic Web Conference (#iswc2009). Semantic Web Researchers and Web 2.0 Figure 1: Analysis of favourite services From the 8th of October to the 22th of November 2009, we set up an online survey to figure out the habits and motivations of the Semantic Web community for sharing content online. We advertised the survey via five mailing-lists1 targeting the Semantic Web community and also using social media services such as Twitter and Facebook and through the DERI blog2. Our main motivation was to observe how this community tries to spread its research to a broader audience, a need discussed by ”Message in a Bottle or: How ∗The work presented in this paper is funded in part by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Lı́on 2). Copyright c © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and the internal mailing-list of our institute, see http: //lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/ 2009-October/009820.html for details. http://blog.deri.ie Can the Semantic Web Community Be More Convincing?”3. We received 61 completed answers, the user set being distributed as follows: 35% were Ph.D students, 15% research assistants, 7.50% research fellows, 7.50% M.Sc students, 6.25% postdoctoral researchers, 6.25% professors, 5% lecturers, 5% senior researchers and 2.5% CEOs, while 10% did not provide this information. The respondents were mostly from Europe (82.91%). Finally, the average number of years using Web and Semantic Web Technologies among our respondents are respectively 12.57 years and 3.97 years. The average experience in Web and Semantic Web Technology being quite high, we can say that our respondents are early adopters of these technologies. One outcome of this survey is that 92% of the respondents set up an account on Twitter, and Twitter was quoted as their favourite service (Fig.1). We were also interested in the motivations for and habits associated with publishing content online, distinguishing academic and non-academic material, as well as content from other sources. Academic material refers to, for example, publications or slideshows made for a conference while non-academic one refers to some material created for research projects, such as blog posts, screencasts and videos. According to the results, detailed in (Letierce et al. 2010), we notice a general goal shared by a majority to ”always” publish academic material online and ”sometimes” non academic material. Then, respectively they ”sometimes” and ”usually” use additional Web 2.0 services to spread information about it. Furthermore, they also ”sometimes” communicate about academic and non academic material from others, showing a wish to interact with the community. We then observed a real aim and willingness to disseminate scientific information. According to the survey, personal email, Twitter, Skype and project mailing lists are the most popular applications used for disseminating information. Interestingly, while personal email and Skype imply pre-defined recipients, Twitter addresses a public and open audience and is thus the only one that can be used to achieve the initial wide-spreading goal mentioned in the study. The motivations for publishing and sharing content (multiple choice) were identified for 86% as ”to share knowledge / study / work about their field of expertise”, 79% ”to comhttp://tinyurl.com/iswc08-decker d 279 Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media