New Producers,New Markets, New Tastemakers, Oh My!

How do libraries/librarians fill these roles? Well, first of all, they give ANYONE access to the tools to be producers. At the Princeton Public Library we have a great tech lab where anyone can learn to how to build websites, use digital video cameras and any tools that our web 2.0 world can come up with. Public libraries in particular play an important role by making sure everyone can have this access. Librarians also create New Markets and can be Tastemakers with creative and effective use of technologies like blogging and wikis, creating that word of mouth and buzz that Anderson talks about. Tools like podcasting also extend a library's reach far beyond the folks who physically come to a particular program. Its easy to spread the virus. It all goes back to the democratization of the web that Anderson explains so clearly...libraries play a big role in that by providing all that access and education.

Analytics stats

Interesting stats! 79% of the folks coming to see me use Firefox. 15% use Internet Explorer, and heck there is even a Chrome user! As far as the connection speed, 62% use a cable connection, and only 3% use a DSL line, 17% are checking in from work on a T1 connection.

Flickr

Why this picture? Because this is how SCILS makes me feel sometimes. Usually its my own damn fault. Most of the time I was overthinking something, or psyching myself into believing an assignment was much harder than it was. When I took 550 with Steve, he talked me off the ledge several times by saying, "Calm down doofus." He was like Cher in Moonstruck, slapping Nicholas Cage and saying, "Snap out of it!". Somtimes, it was simply the volume of work, which can be A LOT. My set is simple and to the point, these pics are how I get by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommyhnj/sets/72157608404042709/


Here is what the whole class would show you: http://www.flickr.com/groups/scils598f08-edexperience/pool/ All in all, SCILS is worth every trip to my back yard port a potty!!!!

Pbwiki and Wetpaint

Ok, so I am in love with the concept of wikis. They make feel capable of building a really effective website. I have ZERO interest in coding. I dont want to go to a lot of effort and frustration in creating a website. I am very creative, I think I have good ideas, but I need to be able to implement them quickly and easily. I like Pbwiki's ease of use and creating a Wiki for this project was fun and pretty easy. I find Pbwiki to be very straightforward and simple to figure out.....Wet Paint is taking me a while to figure out. I decided to try and use Wet Paint to design a new website for my band, and they offer templates for "band" sites, but using the templates has gotten convoluted. I need to start over using blank pages. I also found that the editing tool bar took a while to get used to, and overall WetPaint doesnt give me the same level of comfort as pbwiki...I am getting frustrated more easily with wetpaint. It seems less obvious.

Google Docs

I'm biased. There is no way around it. I have been working towards my Masters Degree completly online fo almost 2 years now. Online collaboration has become a way of life for me. I'm all for it, willing to try anything that makes life easier. I've already convince my band that we should run our website from a wiki. For any students, online or on campus, Google Docs is a home run. Group projects become SO much easier. Everyone has access to the project all the time. No saving a file in Microsoft Office and emailing it out for approval...throw it into Google Docs and let me people tweak and change it as the project moves along! I think students will embrace this. Faculty, I am not so sure. My guess is that faculty become really wedded to their comfortable ways of doing things, and will offer more resistance. With faculty I can see the concept of who owns which ideas or which parts being an issue. It wont be an easy thing to wean everyone off of the "old way" of doing things: it never is. I agree with Steve when he says in 5-10 years, this is how people will be working, as opposed to the way we do things now with all the needed programs on our computers. Let it be on someone else's computer! Get rid of the software, free up more space so gametap.com will run really fast!

Libraries,the Long Tail, and ILL

If any industry is set up to take advantage of the long tail, its the library world. It is one of the fields which clearly deals with and swims in the often odd and esoteric land that is the key to the long tail, that area where hundreds or thousands of users searching for one or two unique items create their own tiny niche markets and bring the long tail to life. As a matter of fact, there is a way in which libraries have been taking advantage of the Long Tail for years. It's called Inter Library Loan, or ILL. ILL is a necessary component of most libraries simply because no one library can carry every book in the world. Nor could they afford to pay to add all these books to their collections. In a public library setting, which is where I lay my head, it is not financially feasible to buy every book a patron requests. Many of the ILL requests are often of a quirky and arcane nature, and in all likelihood would never be used by another patron. With tight budgets, these kinds of items are not going to be purchased. In the world of public libraries, as the great librarian Mr Spock once said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one". By collaborating with hundreds of other libraries to borrow books from each other, my library is in essence able to expand the collection far beyond the items that physically reside in the building. This allows us to serve the Long Tail effectively without incurring a huge financial burden.

Virtual Introduction via Delicious

This is a GREAT idea! What I love about it the most is that it is likely to be a brand new form of introduction to most students...instead of just the usual posting on an ecollege class site, this little project would be fun for most people, and the class tags would make it very simple to find out who shares similiar interests. This would be a great way to get folks enthused and comfortable at the beginning of a semester. Once again, we have another example of why the three greatest teachers in human history are Confucious, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Steve Garwood. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go wipe the brown off my nose.

LibraryThing

I am totally digging LibraryThing. Set up my personal favorites in an online library, create tags and groups, find friends, a great tool to help users find book related events in their area...this is a highly literate Web 2.0 application. One of my favorite tools on this site, from a purely amusing standpoint, is the Unsuggester tool, which you will find within the Reccommendations link. It is exactly what it says it is, the opposite of Amazon's "if you like this, then try this" feature. It looks at my library and comes up with a list of books that are unlikely to ever appear in my library. My library is small right now, so as I add to it I will be curious to see how my "unsuggester" changes. Great fun! I also enjoy the Tag Mirror, which essentially takes a look at my library and creates a tag cloud based on how other users tag my book selections. Again, great fun! I could spend hours playing with LibraryThing, and I fully intend to!

Delicious and Ma.gnolia

Ok...these are both cool, and useful. However, my gut and intuition tell me to go with Delicious. Delicious seems more streamlined to me...I really like the simple navigation bar at the top of the Delicious home page....Home, Bookmarks, People, Tags. Thats delicious in a nutshell. Everything I need to know can be found in those four categories. I like seeing the most popular bookmarks right there on the home page. I get a sense immediately of what Delicious is all about. With Ma.gnolia I dont have that sense. Nothing on the Ma.nolia home page jumps out and tells me what I can do here. Nothing grabs me even though it somehow feels busy. The nav bar on Ma.gnolia, even though it appears to be the same size as the one on delicious, doesnt grab my attention. I am new to both of these services, and I have to say I will be definitely using delicious for my bookmarks. When something makes sense and feels easy to use, I will always go with it.

Brown & DuGuid & Education, Oh My!

Brown and DuGuid are turning out to be an easy, fascinating read. I like how they make the point that "Despite predictions about the end of the campus as we know it, we suspect that the university of the digital age may not look very different. It will still require classrooms, labs, libraries, and other facilities. Nonetheless, we are sure that organizationally it will be very different". This makes sense to me, in the respect that technology now offers more transparency and quicker response time in dealing with the administrative aspects of university life. I do think that human beings are inherently social creatures, so the brick and mortar facilities are in no way on the verge of extinction. I liken this to the debate over books, and whether or not the printed word will still be around in 100 years. Of course it will. There are simply some things that people like and are comfortable with, like the smell of paper and the turning of a page, that technology cannot replicate. So it is with people needing social contact with others, it is wired into our collective DNA.

In regards to distance education, I have to disagree with our esteemed authors a tad. I think they underestimate the potential and ability of such education to enable "stealing" of knowledge, and constructing of knowledge. As a distance education student in my fourth semester working on my Masters, I can unequivocally state that the ability to obtain both knowledge in both ways is readily apparent and available, and at least in my case, those opportunities are not "designed out" but are encouraged and supported, via instant messaging, email, blogs, wikis, online collaborations, online class chats, and much more. I also find as a distance education student, working asynchronously and fitting in study when I can, greater ownership of my program if study, precisely because my fellow students and I are in the same boat and have to work together to get the most out of the program. We are also given opportunities through our university several times a year to meet in person and compare notes, and meetings are often also set up independent of the university. Distance learning, given the right level of university support, enhances collective learning and makes it easy to share and pass on knowledge.

Indispensable Web 2.0 site (for me anyway)

Craig's List. I use Craig's list to search for aboslutely everything I can think of. Apartments, jobs, Wii games, televisions, platform beds...talk about an appplication bring buyers and sellers together. No one makes it as easy as Craig's List. SO many folks are using it, I always find useful listings right in my own town. Structure is very simple and easy to understand, posting a listing is fast and easy to do, and it is very easy to contact people to ask for additional information with an anonymous craigs list email address that redirects to the poster's personal email, protecting their privacy. I started using Craig's list about a year ago when I was looking for speakers for my band, and I quickly became addicted. I can find bargains right in my own neighborhood and pick up my prizes the same day! I've seen apartments I found thru Craig's list, bought a great TV for my daughters room for 40 bucks, and yes, I got the speakers!

RSS: TOMMY LIKEY!! or ODE TO CHRIS FARLEY

Tommy Boy is one of the funniest movies ever made. There, I said it. If you dont know why I call this post ODE TO CHRIS FARLEY, get thee hence to netflix and order Tommy Boy. I defy you not to laugh out loud!


Ok, on to RSS. I am completely new to RSS. Still feeling my way around, especially the producer part. But as a heavy internet user, I love the ability to organize all my pertinent information and resources in one place, regardless of the website that information originates from. RSS is truly a fantastic system of organization. Listen, old habits die hard, I am still going to ALL my websites each day to check the information I need. I am set in my ways and it is hard for me to change. In this case however, it is going to happen as I get more accustomed to using RSS. The convenience and ease with which I can access all my info is too apparent, and it will take me a while, but I will be a regular.


On the producer side, well, I still find it a little daunting and confusing. While each individual step I need to take is simple enough on its own, putting it all together and using FeedBurner and Feed Informer with my blog and tracking usage with Google Analytics and getting a chicflet from Add This and wait dont forget Feed2JS....I am still getting used to all of this. In my personal life I have no need or desire to do any of this. In my professional capacity, certainly in public libraries, I can see the usefulness and how the combination of all these tools can do a tremendous job in getting your library front and center. I get it. I just have to get use to it.

FEED PART DEUX

• How close are we to the the society of Feed? Are our present systems (Google tracking, single accounts into multiple services...) a simple precursor?
• What struck you most about the society of Feed? (e.g. acceptance of lesions, twist on the Digital Divide, people don't know how to write...)

We are certainly close to the society of Feed, as I talked about in my previous post about the book. I think we will get even closer...and that is frightening. However, maybe there is some hope that people dont want it to get to that point, hope like in this article from FoxBusiness. Maybe we will all come to our senses and realize we dont want Google to know everything. Look, the technology is going to be there for a Feed society. Its going to be up to all of us to refuse it. Perhaps up to those of us in the library industry to take a lead and make sure folks know what we could be getting into. Making sure people always, always understand that when we stare into the great abyss of the internet, the abyss stares back.

I think the aspect of the society of Feed that scared me the most is one that I see happening already: people not knowing how to write. I use write to mean more than the physical act of taking pen to paper. THAT aspect is being lost already. Have you seen most folks signatures lately? I mean young people, healthy people, people without physical conditions that might preclude them from writing better. We all type or text everything these days, and the art of physical writing is most surely being lost. I mean the ability to read, comprehend, analyze and express an opinion on a poem, and article, a piece of music, a work of art. In Feed, everyone is TOLD what they need to know, they are given information, and any independent analysis is superficial and torn apart and lost by the constant barrage of media going on in one's head. I think Google and Wikipedia are steps in that direction. People use these tools to search for information, find it quickly, and thats it. There is very little analysis and evalution that goes on for most people. How much less will there be when the Web is inside us????