Library clips

I’m so addicted to podcasts lately, I can’t walk to and from work these days without listening to my own personal radio station.

Yesterday I listened to an On The Pod episode with Kathryn Greenhill about Library 2.0.
Kathryn has the blog Librarians Matter and is also part of the multi-author blog Libraries Interact (anyone is welcome to register and become and author, just like a Cit J site like Perth Norg, infact I think they both work on the WordPress Multi-user platform).

Anyway, it turns out that I followed Kathryn on Twitter, but not her blog (I am now a subscriber of her blog being impressed by the podcast). A couple of weeks earlier I also found another aussie librarian blog the same way, I was following HeyJude on Twitter and now have subscribed to her blog.

This is quite a refreshing experience for me, over a year ago I moved from Libraries to Document Management, so I’ve lost touch will all things library 2.0, dropping 50 or so blogs I used to read. I’m subscribed to only a handful now, but I don’t really read them that often, but now with two cutting edge aussie library blogs I’m happy to know what’s happening on a more local scale.

Out of interest the library blogs I read nowadays apart from the two already mentioned are Tame The Web, The Distant Librarian, Information wants to be Free, and ResourceShelf.

My blog posts used to be library oriented, as you would expect coming from a blog called Library clips, but now my posts are more about web 2.0 tools, the user generated web and the participative culture…also knowledge management. Check out the Library category on my blog.

Since I’m doing a personal trip down memory lane, here are a few library posts from the past:
OPAC in a blog and library 2.0 (includes links to all my library related bookmark tags)
Library 2.0 Reference
SLE feeds for Library OPAC’s
OPML for OPAC
Library Reference blogs
Internal Library blogs

Back to it…

The podcast was not just on Library 2.0, it also touched on the modern library and librarian in general…plus an extensive portion on a library’s experience on SecondLife.

Kathryn mentioned it all started with RSS and then she was thrown into a new world, where she adopted social tools such as blogs, Flickr, wikis, and toolbars such as LibX for FireFox (search your catalogue from the toolbar or right-click, click articles in Google Scholar that are available in your library, or click on an ISBN to see if your library has that book).

A few interactive web 2.0 ideas were patrons taking photo’s on library event days and tagging them so they appear on the library website…and photo blogs where people can leave comments.

Other web 2.0 tools not mentioned that some libraries are using are Twitter, Meebo (IM), Squidoo (Topic guides), OPAC 2.0 (user tags and RSS…actually I here moreso Museums experimenting with user generated tags), podcasts, startpage widgets, etc…

As far as a librarian community, the biblioblogosphere was mentioned, which Crawford at large tackled at one stage. Librarians networking through the blogosphere sharing advice on new tools and library methods, it astounds me that this enigmatic way of sharing of intellect has not caught on like wildfire in the enterprise, why the snail pace. Maybe it’s culture, and as Kathryn mentions librarians are web savvy, so it’s natural they adopt blogs in a big way.

BTW, I like the term the biblioblabosphere for librarians that tweet.

Also a mention of librarians using wikis for best Practices and documentation eg. Library Success.

And I totally identify with the librarians perpetual nature of finding things for people, almost like everyone’s personal information agent…I know being a librarian didn’t shape me this way, I’ve always been of character to be excited about the latest and share it with everyone.

I guess part of the job is evolving to less personal agent and more helping people construct their own news radars…personalisation and customisation.

The librarians role as facilitator is more than ever cemented as a guide and perhaps gardner in the, using the old school term, information highway. Librarians organise information to make it more usable, and the web has so much more information that a librarian now has a bigger job.
Some say the difference is people don’t need to go to the library as they can navigate the web themselves. But not all people:
- do they have a computer
- do they know how to use a computer
- do they know how to search for content and sources
- do they know of websites that specialise in a topic
- do they know how to determine authoritative sources
- do they have access to research sources like journals, etc…

The library itself is also changing, I now hear that some public libraries are ditching Dewey (DDC) for more bookshop like topics, other things:
- Community space and information
- Coffee shop and food
- Fast Track
- Couches
- PC’s
- Laptop area
- Learning centre (social space)
- Print/Bind/Photocopy
- 24 hr access

And the old things like:
- Record History (archive newspapers, books, etc…)
- Deposit library (local heritage)
- Borrow instead of buy

The question was also asked is Library 2.0 augmenting the social captial in an online social space, maybe a Facebook group, or a MySpace page, a meebo room, a Ning network, etc…in Perth I see local social networks like Loconut in a similar space.

Another question was asked will you be able to browse the stacks in SecondLife, is the idea to mimic a physical space. I tell you what, it sounds like a fun experience to visit a virtual supermarket like Kinset, pick things off the shelf and read some metadata about the product, calculate the cost. I suppose you could just look at your previous shopping receipts and select things so the present trip auto-fills up your trolley, but that may take out the fun.

Direct Download

Just listened to an excellent On The Pod podcast by Duncan Riley (of TechCrunch) interviewing Bronwen Clune and Myles Eftos from the local startup Norgmedia (Norg stands for News Organisation).

As mentioned in the podcast and on TechCrunch this two person team have expanded from their beginnings as PerthNorg (which I posted back in Jan) to other Australian Capital cities, and they plan to take on the world.
They even have a brilliantly layed out Election07 topic page.

Now that they have a home page for Australia, their next move is to be able to cross post to all sites.

Just a recap a Norg is a citizen journalism type of site where you register a profile, from there you can post your own stories or write a blurb and link to a story, photo’s, video, just choose a category for your story. It reminds me of a news version of CommonGate, as you don’t have your own blog with it’s own name, well you kind of have a blog but it’s more a profile where all your posts can be seen (as well as a feed), your posts can also be seen on the category page you file it in (can’t remember if they also have tags).

There is also an active user ladder: Cadet, Level 1-5 Journalist, Top Level Journalist…not sure if this is based on frequency of posts, most commented or voted, but I like the idea of a type of authority and seriousness.

So this is an entirely user generated news site, I wonder in the future if there will be any resident blogs (actually I noticed they do eg. PerthMusic)

Anyway the homepage looks great, you have: Top News, Just In, Top Picture, Recent Comments…people can also vote for a story.

The podcast also mentions that you could have a Norg for the enterprise and education sectors…this isn’t quite an enterprise social network, but it is multi-user blogging, with a focus just on “news” not general stuff like social networks or usual blogs. But imagine the news part of a global companies intranet being a Norg, that’s just awesome.

A few other thoughts I had that was also mentioned in the podcast is mobile interaction, posting would be easy enough, even sending text, photo, video by email, but viewing a mobile version is a hard game. Not long ago when Australian footballer Ben Cousins was arrested it happened a couple of metres outside my work, I noticed this as I was walking to my car…this would of been an opportunity to capture some video or photo’s, write a blurb and post it to PerthNorg as it happens.

Once they are mobile, presence news would be a good feature (ala Twitter), being able to post a 140 character story by SMS.

A good idea to drive participation is competition’s or encouraging young journalists to go out on their local streets and do video interviews, etc…I’m not a journalist type person, but there a a cool bunch of skateboarders on my walk home that have actually got great moves, they band together in the local carpark. I read in the local paper about a skate competition in a near by suburb, this would be an ideal oppotunity to do a feature. This sort of thing might be bordering on current affairs or magazine type features, but it generates interest and has a stickiness value.

For more here is an interview with Bronwen Clune that also has a link to a newspaper article.

Other similar sites:

NewsVine (review), NowPublic, Wikio, NewsCloud, , Sweeble

Change.Org (a topic based Cit J site on social activism)

Lifeat (review), StreetAdvisor (review), YourStreet (review), FatDoor (review), Outside.In (review), Placeblogger (review), socialight

There was mention to bring back a more happening Classifieds section, I’d love to see this, especially a job hunting section. insiderPages and Yelp are a more general version, but a localised version would be great, as they mention in the podcast so far no-one in Australia has done this seriously. The only competition I see so far is, Loconut, the Perth local social network (kind of like a Facebook for Perth). This is kind of what Norg does, but is not focused on news, and more focused on community social networking, great for business and local community information…others are OnMyCity, Smalltown, BackFence, Baristanet, WickedLocal and H2otown.

[ADDED 23/11/07: Now get updates on latest news items via Twitter]

Direct podcast link

[ADDED 5/06/08: Roundup : EveryBlock, Nouri.sh, Twiddla, LinkBunch, PdfMeNot]

A comment on my DailyMe post has prompted me to take another look at FeedJournal, which I posted about a while ago.

The good news is that it’s a web-based service now, and they also have a widget via Widgetbox.

Simply enter your blog feed to deliver a newspaper version of your blog.

Pity it doesn’t have OPML import, otherwise I could create a newspaper for my 10 or 20 favourite blogs…I guess I could splice them all into one feed…aha now I see that the free version only allows one feed.

The paid membership enable sections, logo, font choices, scrapping full-text from summary feeds and more.

My DailyMe post has lots more on personalisation and customisation; I’d like to see like memetracking, tags, personalisation, list of links as an appendix/footnotes, etc…like I said this could be a feature of an RSS Reader.

Here’s a link to the Library clips FeedJournal.

This is really late for Blog Action Day, but better late than never.

Experimenting with communities and blogs at work, so I have joined our Sustainable Development group and started a blog…not that I know much about this topic (yet but I figure if I post a couple of times a week I’ll get the momentum going, perhaps some discussion, ie comments, or better still others posting on their own blogs in response. Plus it means my blogging will help contribute awareness about the environment.

If I keep up this championing and persuade the CoP team to nuture key managers to blog, then I’d hope to see a viral thing happen where a blogosphere will manifest, let’s see.

This is opposed to a formal roll out, telling people they must share, here’s our latest tool (verion 2.0 conscription), eeek!

The idea is for it to happen naturally, people will have a place to read announcements and publishings by their managers and peers, and perhaps a knee jerk reaction can be augumented by offering them their own blog to post those complementing, opposing, and insightful thoughts, ideas, and arguments.

I just realised that as well as blogs within an OpenText CoP (ppt), you can also blog outside of a CoP, this way you are not limited to a topic blog (but then you can’t send or tag a blog post to appear in a CoP). I also successfully posted via email, along with subscribing by email, this is a plus as this is a familiar place for people…pity you can’t comment on a blog via email (you can do this with the discussion forums).

While I’m at it, the OpenText blogs used to have RSS output, suddenly I don’t see this anymore.
The other thing is that permalinks are buried, you have to click on an action menu and choose “view entry”, now who’s gonna do this…What results is that people will blog about a post someone wrote and point to their blog homepage instead…not good!
If they do successfully point to one of your posts, I wonder if you will be notified, as you can’t run an ego feed…there is a blog post metadata field called “references”, but I think this is for Shortcuts, not inlinks.

Whoa, I got carried away, I’ve hijacked the purpose of this blog post with my tech banter…so here is my contribution to Blog Action Day, or moreso my finding that I’d like to share.

Interesting argument about Global Warming using Uncertainty.

The proposition is that when faced with the uncertainty of global warming happening or not, the safest thing to do is to take action. The case in this clip is; whether it is really happening and whether humans are adding to it doesn’t really matter, that fact that we are uncertain leaves us no choice but to take a safe approach of “action”.

There are 2 possible situations nature is presenting:
- Climate Change is True or False

There are 2 choices that humans can make:
- Take or not take action

If we take action and eventually find global warming is false we have spent lots of money resulting in global economic depression.
If we take action and find global warming is true then it’s money well spent and we are helping save that planet, instead of helping its destruction.

If we don’t take action and eventually find global warming is false then we are happy.
If we don’t take action and find global warming is true, then this is the worse possible scenario, we will not only have a global economic depression, but a global catastrophe.

So when you do the maths; if you don’t take action the worst cast scenario is a global catastrophe, and if you do take action the worst case scenario is a global economic depression (still I wouldn’t say bad money spent).

So the arguement is that when it comes to the uncertainty of global warming, taking action is the safest bet.

The following clip has had over 12,000 views on YouTube and over 1400 diggs, I’d thought I’d spread this further.

Link

Here’s a diagram to tie you over incase you can’t watch the clip:

There is movement in the social graph space…bringing “social awareness” to your email (and perhaps IM, VOIP), it’s being labelled Inbox 2.0, see posts by TechCrunch and Collaborative Thinking.

Generate tag clouds of friends associated with keywords or friends you most correspond with, etc…doesn’t sound too different than email mining to match experts (see my post from a while back on Microsoft Knowledge Network).

Using your social graph are the kind of things you can do with your social network buddies using apps like Socialistics or the Fuser Leaderboard.
Well now this social awareness is going to be applied to other buddy lists like email contacts.

NOTE: Your social graph extends beyond your immediate social network, it’s something I’ve mentioned before on “groupings”. Slice any data within the greater social network and find people and content by common interests eg. show me all the people in, eg. Facebook, who live in the same city as me, and use similar photo tags to me. This is using your social graph (actually using you) as a filter to discover. A good way to limit this would be doing the same graph mentioned above limited to just your friends network (ie. all your friends friends)…exclude/include mutual friends.

NOTE: the only social graph page I see in Facebook is the Network feature eg. I’m in the Australia network, you can’t create your own based on other commonalities you have with other Facebook users eg. a page on people with the same star sign, a page of people who use similar photo tags as you, a page of people who comment on the same comment walls as you, etc…

So it seems we will soon be getting social networks around email, which just means that it will be like Facebook, but the private message widget (a la email) is the focus. Once this takes off, then email will become just a component and other components will be added, which will eventually be a digital dashboard within a social network (kind of what Facebook is now).

I’ll never understand why Hotmail didn’t go beyond email, into a startpage and then connected into a social network.

This is all happening now and Facebook are leading, but their private message feature really isn’t as robust as email, they should look into buying out someone to bring real email into Facebook…not a 3rd party email widget, but an inhouse full featured email client.

We all know all of the above is going to happen with Google’s various components, they have everything in place. The difference here is that all the Google components are robust products not just lightweight widgets…they have an RSS Reader, email, IM/VOIP, documents, photo’s, calendar, blog, wiki (soon), video, notes, toolbar and various other products. These all come together as widgets on the Google startpage, but they are more than widgets, beyond the startpage dashboard view all these widgets are their own fully-fledged products, as I have mentioned above.

So we have components or products (and their widget versions), some of these like Gmail and IM have buddies (contacts list), then all of these are accessible on a digital dashboard (startpage), and lastly these startpages are connected in a social network (Google have some experience with this with Orkut, their social network product).

Google are going to be a competitor to Facebook, Netvibes and PageFlakes, but with each widget being a robust product on its own.

As we know your Google digital dashboard social network isn’t just about Google widgets, it’s open to 3rd party products from anywhere, as does iGoogle now, and even the more easier with the OpenSocial movement.

Actually I mentioned a while back that Google could be a greater Facebook, and is SocialStream perhaps this whole holisitic view.

The next step is how to cope with information and activity in a social network world…the answer to other tools like RSS Readers is we have our trend stats, personalistion/attention filters, and even social network RSS Readers that are helping with link sharing, feed recommendation, and connecting/communicating with your network. Lifestream services also fit into this picture, as do other multi-inbox services like Fuser who are taking a different approach.

The way Facebook copes with friend and greater network activity is via the mini feed and news feed, which doesn’t provide an RSS feed funnily enough.

This in effect is what RSS does, it keeps you updated on activity, only with blogs it’s more explicit, we publish and a new post is in the feed, in a network we publish but we also interact and action stuff (engaging with our network), all this clickstream is documented in your mini feed and an aggregate of all your friends in your news feed. So it’s updates for your publishings and your actions, and there is no reason why it couldn’t have RSS output. But they don’t seem to see this as a necessity as you don’t need an RSS Reader…soon enough when all networks have a news feed or mini feed, then I’d want to aggregate these to read them all in one feed…now that’s an idea for a product. Just like Lifestreams, we could have Activitystreams (maybe a clickstream service like Cluztr could get into this) across social networks and other websites you use. Infact Ziki and Plaxo Pulse, both lifestream services have an activity feed across all your services (but this is only your Ziki or Plaxo Pulse friends). Fuser, the multi-inbox attacks the same space of aggregating your social network friends into one central spot, so aggregating news feeds would be in the same realm.

Another movement in this space is not just your aggregated data, but moving it around, this means it needs to be free and portable. Widgets kind of enable this, but it’s more a window view of your data that lives elsewhere.
Chris Saad, in a recent podcast alludes to or speculates that social network and other personal web data (just like APML attention) will be portable via OpenID, your ID will be you on the web, not just for login authentication, but you and your data…that’s the ultimate goal for the social web ecology.

Things brings us full-circle back to social graphing which is being able to graph the groupings (or slice data) that you belong to in your immediate network and the social network service at large, or perhaps across the social network ecology of the whole web.

The reason we would social graph, is to discover who in my network or the whole network:
- lives within a 10km radius of me…in case of emergency I could blast them a message, video or a presence (tweet) about a fire in the vicinity.
- do I email (private msg), IM, SMS the most (similar to Fuser Leaderboard)
- have a status update with the term fire in the last 3 days
- are an expert in “cars” (via analysing how frequent they use this term, or perhaps by an explicit tag on their posts, or interest profile).

You can slice data anyway you like, to analyse social behaviour; but this is fun because it revolves around you. Not only that but we make inferences from this data and we can action things, just like your local council does a census and uses that data as statistics as a basis to help with urban and social planning. Only in a population census, it’s mostly close-ended data (where you have to fit into a box), so sometimes the analysis derived (and then actions) don’t correctly represent.

Anyway, now we can analyse network data, and make actions and decisions…via the network effect all this individual data is in aggregate, so why not let the people use the aggregate information to analyse the social ecology. It is essential to filter and see patterns to be able to understand more about our environment.

[ADDED 27/11/07: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters)…this seems to mention OpenSocial is not only about an open widget platform, but it’s also about open data eg. your activity, and your friends activity.]