Medical information and advice on demand 24/7. The internet is many things to many people, but for people who are sick or have a medical condition, it is a first-line medical adviser on-call. It has been estimated that almost 80% of Internet users have searched for health information on the web. Among web 2.0 applications, …

As part of our ongoing research on how Twitter is being used by scholars and the general public for networking and information dissemination, I am happy to announce the publication of two new papers which I co-authored with my collaborators at the University of Toronto, Dr. Barry Wellman and Dr. Yuri Takhteyev. (Update: the “Geography …

Dalhousie University School of Information Management faculty member and Director of the Social Media Lab, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, has been awarded a Leaders Opportunity Fund (LOF) award in the amount of $150,000 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust (NSRIT). This new infrastructure grant will allow Dr. …

“A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make.” WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports. Here at the Social Media Lab, we are also in the midst of developing and testing various web-tools that can help …

Political Polarization in Social Media: A Case of Twitter and the 2011 Canadian Federal Election (Social Media Related Research Initiatives) During the 2011 Canadian Federal Election, a lot was written about the influence of social media on the election. On some level this is not very surprising; in just a short period of time, social …

Gender-driven Institutional Change: Advancing Women at Historically Male Dominated Technological Organizations Through Collaborative Research Networks (Organizational Networks Research Initiatives) – Funded by a $478,147 grant from the National Science Foundation of the USA – Consultant, 2010-2012. The Social Media Lab is collaborating with the ADVANCE Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) to …

rDmap is a web-based “Research Discovery Map” application which visualizes existing and potential research connections among university researchers. The rDmap connects each faculty member to his/her research topics and their peers within their university.  The rDmap is designed to help faculty members quickly and easily identify potential collaborators and students to find potential supervisors for …