Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

An outstanding undertaking, beautifully captured on video MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy shared a remarkable experiment, from the day his son was brought home from the hospital the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. For Five Years!

The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word–like “water”–was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.

“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.

The clip below shows the evolution of the word ‘ball’.

Via Slashdot – worth reading the full article on Fast Company.  The images themselves are compelling, and from what this article says this will soon be seen on TED.com.

More excellence from Pew Internet – this time on teen trends using social media. Adults (18-29) still more likely to use social networking sites but only just.

What I really like about these slides is the girl scout case study (over 1,000 girls aged 14-17) – it looks at how they feel about, and use, social networking sites.

Pew Internet/Girl Scout Joint Webinar on Social Media

Complied from Facebooks Ad platform, in January 2011, this slideshow give some interesting stats – check out slides 14 and 15 for example – slightly more male than females (which surprised me) but the next slide shows the distribution of said genders.  Quite a different picture, that said stats are difficult to compile and interpret, so always have a big pinch of salt to hand.

You can now visualize your LinkedIn network with InMaps.  Smart Move LinkedIn.

Here is what my LinkedIn network looks like – the larger the circle the larger that person’s network and influence. Now I’ve just got to figure out the labels.  This is still in the LinkedIn Labs – but great idea.

More here at Mashable LinkedIn inMaps

Do you remember the doubt, uncertainty, ‘it will never take off’, ‘how do we know the content is good’, ‘Wikipedia is dodgy and students should avoid using it at all costs’ that was around when Wikipedia was first launched Jan 15th 2001? The whole concept that anyone could contribute anything and it still be quality information was revolutionary.

It now describes itself as the “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project”, and as a resource (a good one in my opinion) it’s well an truly here. Take a look at this:

The percentage of all American adults who use Wikipedia to look for information has increased from 25% in February 2007 to 42% in May 2010. This translates to 53% of adult internet users who use Wikipedia

Education level continues to be the strongest predictor of Wikipedia use. The collaborative encyclopedia is most popular among internet users with at least a college degree, 69% of whom use the site.

Those are some nice stats on Wikipedia from PEW

Happy Birthday Wikipedia!

Google does take into account your twitter profile and impact. Once again Hubspot have come up trumps with their article on the affect twitter has on search rankings.

Here is their summary of the article in Search Engine Land on whether using ‘social signals’ help rank search results, which it seems it does, in particular your twitter ranking could help influence how a page ranks in web search.

How Twitter Influences Search Engine Rankings