Understanding the Limits of Altmetrics: Slideshare Statistics « UK Web Focus

" ... As I described in a post on “What Can Web Accessibility Metrics Learn From Alt.Metrics?” there can be a danger in uncritical acceptance of metrics. I therefore welcome this recognition of the need to explore the approaches which are currently being developed. In particular I am looking forward to the sessions on Altmetrics beyond the Numbers and Assessing social media impact which will be held at the Spot On London 2012 conference to be held in London on 11-12 November.  In a blog post entitled Altmetrics everywhere – but what are we missing? #solo12impact Alan Cann touches on the strengths and weaknesses of some of the well-known social analytics tools: 'It astounds me that Klout continues to attract so much attention when it has been so thoroughly discredited - Gink is a more useful tool in my opinion The best of this bunch is probably Kred, which at least has a transparent public algorithm. In reality, the only tool in this class I use is CrowdBooster, which has a number of useful functions.'  But beyond Twitter analytics, what of metrics associated with the delivery of talks about one’s research activities? This is an area of interest to the Altmetrics community as can be seen from the development of the Impactstory service which 'aggregates altmetrics: diverse impacts from your articles, datasets, blog posts, and more'. As described in the FAQ : 'The system aggregates impact data from many sources and displays it in a single report, which is given a permaurl for dissemination and can be updated any time.'  The service is intended for: [1] researchers who want to know how many times their work has been downloaded, bookmarked, and blogged [2] research groups who want to look at the broad impact of their work and see what has demonstrated interest [3] funders who want to see what sort of impact they may be missing when only considering citations to papers [4] repositories who want to report on how their research artifacts are being discussed [5] all of us who believe that people should be rewarded when their work (no matter what the format) makes a positive impact (no matter what the venue). Aggregating evidence of impact will facilitate appropriate rewards, thereby encouraging additional openness of useful forms of research output. In addition to analysis of published articles, datasets, Web sites and software the service also aggregates slides hosted on Slideshare... following a tweet in which @MattMay asked “Why does everybody ask for slides during/after a presentation? What do you do with them? I’m genuinely curious” I published an updated post on Trends in Slideshare Views for IWMW Events. In the post I suggested the following reasons for why speakers and event organisers may wish to host slides on Slideshare: [1] To enable a remote audience to view slides for a presentation they may be watching on a live video stream, on an audio stream or even simply listening to the tweets (and a provide a slide number on the slides to make it easier for people tweeting to identify the slide being used. [2] To enable the slides to be viewed in conjunction with a video recording of the presentation. [3] To enable my slides to be embedded elsewhere, so that the content can be reused in a blog post or on a web page. [4] To enable the content of the slides to be reused, if it is felt to be useful to others. Note that I provide a Creative Commons licence for the text of my slide, try to provide links to screenshots and give the origin of images which I may have obtained from others. [5] To enable slides to be viewed easily on a mobile device. [6] To provide a commentable facility for the slides. [7] To enable my slides to be related, via tags, to related slideshows..."  My interest in metrics for Slideshare date back to December 2010 when I published a post which asked What’s the Value of Using Slideshare? In August 2010  Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth) tweeted that: 'Ironically there were 15 people in my audience for this Web 3.0 slideshow but >12,000 people have since viewed it http://bit.ly/cPfjjP' As can be seen, there have now been over 58,000 views of Steve’s slides on