Search results

This chapter investigates the impact of policy interest rate news from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) on stock returns and volatilities of U.S. NYSE and German DAX listed commercial banks. We find that Fed news has the most influence on both U.S. and German listed bank stocks and an unexpected policy rate increase (decrease) lowers (raises) returns and raises volatility in the majority of cases. On the other hand, ECB news generally increases bank stock volatility in the United States but has little impact within its own domestic banking industry. While our results for the U.S. listed banks confirm that their stock prices are more responsive in bad economic times and also during periods of monetary tightening, we find disparities for German banks suggesting that U.S. and European banking industries respond heterogeneously to monetary policy news but the Global Financial Crisis increased the sensitivity of all banks to monetary policy news.

This analysis, being part one of a two‐part study, aims to illustrate the attitudes and patterns users are being habituated to through the functionality of Facebook, relate them to information literate practices and behaviors, and speculate their application to information literacy instruction within an academic context. It also aims to lay the groundwork for part two, which is to be reported on in a later issue of this journal.

For this first part of the study, the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education have been aligned with common behaviors on Facebook, examining each standard, performance indicator, and outcome for possible parallels in common Facebook tools and behaviors. These behaviors have then been connected to the process of conducting research in an academic context.

Three Facebook functions – Feeds, Share, and Comment – emerged as the primary means by which information literate practices and behaviors are developed and exhibited on Facebook. In addition, information literacy in the age of social media requires a “meta‐literacy”: a critical awareness of why we do what we do with information.

This analysis (part one) presents the conceptual framework on which the data collection portion of the study (part two) is based. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a reexamination of what it means to be information literate in light of social media practices and behaviors.

This paper is valuable to information literacy instructors and researchers because it offers the first extended analysis that deliberately reads Facebook through the lens of the ACRL Standards.

Recent years have seen “really simple syndication” or “rich site summary”(RSS) syndication of frequently updated content become ubiquitous across the internet. RSS's XML‐based format allows these data to be stored in a semi‐structured format but, despite the presence of online aggregators and readers, and the related work in clustering feeds and mining subjects by keywords, much potentially useful information present in RSS may remain undiscovered. This paper aims to address this issue in an experimental setting.

This paper presents two distinct technologies which employ the semi‐structured nature of RSS content to allow users to mine information directly from raw RSS feeds: occurrence mining counts occurrences of text strings in feeds, whilst value mining mines structured ticker tape numeric data. It describes both technologies and their implementation in an experiment, where 35 students mined small numbers of RSS feeds and visualised the data mined.

This paper analyses the results of the experiment and cites examples of data mined and visualisations produced. The subject matter of data mined is also explored and potential applications of the technologies are considered.

The mining technologies proposed in this paper have been developed to mine textual and numeric data directly from feeds, but can be extended to mine other data types present in RSS and to include other variants like Atom.

These technologies are seen to be applicable to data mining, the role of data and visualisations in social data analysis, issue tracking in news mining and time series analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which the news is discussed in social network web sites.

This article reports a quantitative analysis of the text of 26,953 Windows Live Spaces from September 2006 to February 2007 using a heuristic designed to detect news discussions. In addition, a comparative link and page analysis of 20 popular general social network environments (e.g. MySpace and Facebook) and 11 popular blog environments (e.g. Typepad and Blogger) is presented.

The text analysis suggests that news plays little role in most Windows Live Spaces, but the link and page analysis suggests that the key difference is less between social network environments and blog environments than between free standardised environments (e.g. MySpace and Blogger) and professional or semi‐professional blogs, with the former tending to carry relatively little news‐related content.

The methods used are exploratory rather than giving definitive conclusions.

Those interested in public reactions to the news should focus on blogs and blog‐like social network sites rather than general social network sites, and should expect only a tiny proportion of the discussions to be news‐related.

Although the role of blogs in reporting, discussing and making the news has been analysed frequently, this is the first study about the extent to which general social networking sites engage with (mass media) news.

To describe new features and functionality of blogging and share a range of applications in the library environment.

Demonstrates the range of applications and suggests that this is a new information medium that is likely to have a keen presence for a long while as more users engage in the related activities and depend on Blogs and RSS for their sources of information.

Implementations in ways librarians never expected are now becoming common and the role of blogging and the challenges associated with tracking content on blogs remains of great interest. The wide spectrum of information sources and functionality of blogs proves to be ever‐changing.

Provides library community new ideas in how to implement blogs that will serve users in creative, positive and meaningful ways.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the application of Rich Site Summary (RSS) in academic and public libraries emphasizing characteristic features and purposes of use. It seeks to highlight the degree of adoption of RSS in different regions and also between different types of libraries.

Convenience sampling method was followed to select four samples of population, one from each of four continents. Data were collected, using the content analysis method, along the checkpoints developed after consulting various literature and web sites. Data analysis was performed using Microsoft Excel.

The findings highlighted the basic features of RSS applied in libraries and the specific purposes of its use around the globe, underlining the areas where RSS is most effectively implemented. Disparities were revealed in RSS adoption between academic and public libraries, which may be attributed to diverse user profiles across different social spheres. Though there is little difference between libraries in North America and Australia with regard to the extension of RSS implementation, its adoption is considerably higher in North American libraries. However, the disproportionate use of RSS may be attributed to the differential internet penetration rate across the continents.

The current study was restricted to four continents – North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and the survey was completely internet based, conducted on library web sites accessible to all and available in English. Content analysis, combined with questionnaire and interview method may enable future researchers to focus on other aspects, such as the impact of RSS on users' and librarians' attitudes and perceptions. This, in turn, may help measure how far library web sites using RSS are capable of motivating and engaging users in harnessing web‐based library facilities and services.

Being an exhaustive assessment of one of the most viable library initiated net‐based functionalities; the findings provide concrete evidence of the applications of RSS in libraries across the continents. The findings will guide future librarians toward using library web sites effectively to provide web‐based information services, enhancing sustainability and service values.

Aims to report a novel method of filtering RSS feeds for obtaining more precise and related information without having to browse through all the incoming feeds.

Improve relevance ratio of incoming RSS feeds with configurable filtering phrases on feed title and feed page content. More relevant RSS feeds are obtained when additional semantically related synonym filtering phrases are used.

Finds that filtering leads to more precise RSS feeds and extending the filtering phrase with synonym semantic can increase the number of relevant feeds by 3‐5 times.

The system documented here has been found to be able to help RSS feeds subscribers to browse fewer items with higher matching rate.

The number of library‐related RSS and Atom applications is increasing daily. But, as yet, the formats and technology involved are far from stable. This article looks at the current state of the field, discusses future developments and considers implications for the library.

Seeks to demonstrate how, with regard to viewing video on the internet, the delay experienced, whilst the stream is being buffered, can be virtually eradicated.

Documents a scheduled rich site summary (RSS) multimedia prototype which utilizes idle computer time (at night) to subscribe to media RSS channels in order to download audio and video content.

Finds that, a part from involving zero display, the quality of the operation is controlled only by the size of the hard disk not by the capacity of the connection.

The system documented here will serve users at either end of the RSS feed chain.

This paper describes how information professionals can keep up with current technology news by incorporating podcasts, RSS feed readers, and the social messaging service Twitter into their daily routines.

A general review of technologies and news sources.

The rapid pace of technology innovation requires librarians to look for simple ways to monitor new trends that may affect library services. Podcasts, RSS readers and messaging networks like Twitter each represent low‐threshold tools that can serve as resources for breaking news, reviews, and technology journalism.

The tools offered in this article provide simple strategies for information professionals to stay abreast of technology innovations as the revelations first emerge. Provides descriptions of technologies and reviews several technology podcasts, blogs, and journalists worth following.