Comments on: Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Little Bird wants to be your new “robot librarian”

By: Jay M

Jay M — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 02:24:10 +0000

I agree with the previous posters. This app does nothing short of promulgate the bandwagon of privilege, presumption and popularity – not a reliable source of credibile or factual information. You cannot ‘aggregate’ the type of information you’re purporting until those who ‘tag/follow/like’ others become reliable (in this manner) to a greater cause – which Facebook, Twitter, and many blogs will never aspire. That’s not ALL blogs, but too many for this to be reliable.

Good luck with your investment Mr & Mrs Kirkpatrick – your app will do as well as those who believe in its credibility: probably pretty well – till it ceases to impress those it was designed for and caters more to those caught up in the power of hubris.

By: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:13:58 +0000

Caitlin, your objections are noted and your defense of knowledge is appreciated. As the CEO of Little Bird, I can tell you – our intention is to create a social media system similar to counting academic citations via peer reviewed journals. Except in this case, we look at who a group of specialists has decided they want to subscribe to updates from for their own reading, and we find patterns in aggregate.

By: Caitlin Bronner

Caitlin Bronner — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:16:57 +0000

Why???
The main method of evaluating the reputation of an author or publisher is based on the quality of his or her past publications, quality of content, and/or number of citations and the quality of the journals (impact factor) where the author publishes. Because “LittleBird determines which people are most influential on any given topic based on their personal connections, rather than on the content they create,” it’s basically irrelevant for our purposes (unless someone is writing a paper on Twitter as a professional tool).
This sort of ‘social media impact factor’ has no correlation to the quality or importance of a person’s work, it only indicates how active he or she is on these sites, which, if anything, could be indicative of how seriously they take their work: the more present they are in the virtual world, it may be argued, the more absent they are from contributing something of substance.

Although the idea of a person’s social media presence being used as criteria for evaluation of his or her work is intriguing, and certainly a zeitgeist of sorts, the idea that the service provides a “robot librarian” is completely off base. First of all, how often has a patron asked, in the course of a reference interview, who is the best astrophysicist? And better yet, “My professor wants me find something by the astrophysicist who has the most friends on facebook.” That’s what I thought. Thank goodness we are still able to do one thing robots can’t: decide for ourselves that just because something is created, doesn’t make it useful, no thanks LittleBird.

By: joe

joe — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:37:49 +0000

What a terrible idea. Link anaylsis is what it is and can be useful for general information, but the ignorant leap of logic to associate ‘I tweet a lot’ ergo ‘I am the greatest expert in neuroscience’ is almost criminally stupid. Not even Google makes such a silly claim. Most experts don’t even use tweeter or Google+ or other such things.