Facebook vs. MySpace

In my library, I look at the computer screens to see what the students are using. The first two weeks of the semester, there seemed to be about 3 MySpace users for ever Facebook user. Then, I think just before the brohaha about the privacy/stalking change at Facebook, I was suddenly seeing 3 Facebooks for every MySpace.

Order, if that is what it is, seems to be restored: there are now more MySpace users again.

Was it the new features that got people to LOOK at their Facebook again? It seemed to me that the shift happened before the news broke in the media, but the student underground runs faster than the media.

All informal, all unscientific.

for what it's worth, I haven't read Michael Stephens latest Library Technology reports yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/web-20-and-libraries-best-practices-for-social-software.html

Keeping up with Web 2.0

It's a moving target, and things are probably going to change more before they settle down.

Here are some places you might want to use to keep up.

For academics: Educause's 7 Things You Should Know about ____ series http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=7495&bhcp=1

For keeping up with multiple blogs: an RSS reader like bloglines http://www.bloglines.com You tell bloglines which blogs you want to read, and it aggregates the content into one place, and gives you chances to email/clip the information.

Don't know why you would want to keep up with blogs: check out Google Maps Mania where people are adding information on top of a map to create interesting resources http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Interact with the news: The venerable BBC has infused their web site with discussion boards, so you can not just read the news but react to it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Three (or four) sites you should start with

So, with the stunning array of things that are out there, where should you get started?

1) www.myspace.com/ is the first place you should go. It has gotten a lot of bad press, but nothing else is quicker and easier to get in touch with a lot of people. It is also easy to start a blog, add pictures, etc. etc. Most college students, and many high school students have already done this. It is very easy to network with people using myspace.

(optional - some college students use www.facebook.com more, and that would be the place to go. My observations is that I see about 3 students using myspace for every one that uses facebook)

2) http://del.icio.us/ is the place to save bookmarks. Don't remember whether you saved a book mark at home, at work or somewhere else. Get an account at del.icio.us and save all your bookmarks there. Then you will always have them, and you can see how often other people have bookmarked them as well.

And, you can "tag" your bookmarks as whatever you want to "travel", "eng101", "toread", etc.

Then, the tagged items can become a live URL for you to give to people to see what you are interested in. I'm working on a brownbag about web 2.0 things, so you can see what I'm pointing to at http://del.icio.us/queequeg83/brownbag/ where "queequeg83" is my user name (can you guess I was an english major?) and brownbag is the tag.

3) http://www.flickr.com is the place to share visual images. Not necessarily pictures, but screen dumps, power point slides, maps, scans, etc. etc. You can also "tag" pictures with your own phrases to make them easier for you, and everyone else to find. Don't know where to start, look at the most "interesting" pictures of the last 7 days http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ or search for a topic of interest "kentucky" or "transylvania" or "saxophone".

What makes all of these more powerful and interesting is that you don't just look at things: you interact with them. You can leave comments on people's myspace pages, or suggest new web pages to other del.icio.us users, or tell people they have great pictures on flickr.

Take some time now to set up an account with at least one of these three. Or all three (or four).

Want to go further? Visit http://30boxes.com for an online shared calendar or http://www.writely.com to write collaboratively online or vist http://web2.0awards.org/ for more sites.

What is Web 2.0?

In the early days of the web, people made web pages, and surfers came to look at them. Web 1.0. But, some web pages realized that they could use the collective wisdom of the visitors to make more information available.

The Internet Movie Database http://us.imdb.com is one of the earliest examples of this: people could vote on which movies they liked best. Real people, not critics. The IMDB was then able to give you a "top 250 movies" (and bottom movies as well) as voted on by real people.

The best known example of the participatory nature of the evolving web is probably Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org and I won't try to explain it, I will leave that to Steven Colbert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmHm0rGns4I

For more about Web 2.0, I think I am legally required to point to Tim O'Reilly's discussion of web 2.0 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

To see a list of interesting web 2.0 sites, visit some "best of web 2.0 sites" at: http://web2.0awards.org/

Web Sites for Academics, and their Students

(annotating the sites I have put on my list at http://del.icio.us/queequeg83/brownbag/)

Non Web 2.0 sites
Places to find topics for papers:

www.publicagenda.com - presents a few issues in depth, with statistics, and multi-sided views of issues (not just pro- and con- by more nuanced)

www.stateline.org - points to articles in newspapers from around the country to show what all the different states are doing about different challenges. Use in conjunction with http://www.bugmenot.com to minimize needing to sign up with multiple newspapers.


and, for more web sites about everything, how about Time Magazine's 2006 list: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1222769,00.html

Virtual Self

I started on "virtual steve" to try and put together some ideas that might help people find good information (or possibly other things I think I know how to do) http://inform8.pbwiki.com/VirtualSteve/

If you aren't using del.icio.us yet, you should. You can tag things, and then tags become URLs, so since I'm working on a brownbag, you can look at the things that I'm thinking about talking about in the brown bag at http://del.icio.us/queequeg83/brownbag/

Steve

Roll your own:

If you like Dogpile, but wish that you could tell it which search engines to search, you just got your wish - http://rollyo.com/

I need to tell them that they should add http://www.lii.org to their list of "reference" searches.

Book chapter progress

I think I am making some progress on my book chapter. I'm looking at challenges for librarianship, and I told them I would write about technology.

I've been looking at bloglines skimming about 29 feeds, to see what I can see (for the past 4-5 months), and I am starting to sort through all the things, and I am seeing some patterns.

I have identified some challenges, and some reactions to "library 2.0" Maybe I'll put some here someday.

Plagiarism
I'm also working with Tiana French on something for plagiarism, and that includes probably making a web site, and probably writing something for somewhere. I am taking a research methods class, and I am using a "find out whether first year college students understand what plagiarism is" as my topic. The class does not require you do a live survey, but I'm thinking that I might as well try.

Student success
I'm also working on a way to help students realize where they are in the semester, and to remind them of the appropriate bits of orientation at the appropriate times.

"Good" folder

Seeing this post http://www.librarystuff.net/2006/06/hundred-dollar-folder.html, I'm reminded that there are so many little good ideas out there. I started a "good boy" folder back at Bradley University in 1991, when I started my first professional job. Now I just call it "good", and this year, I added the innovation of calling it "good 2006" so I don't have to go through the whole folder when annual review time comes up.

From the Kept-Up Academic Librarian - http://keptup.typepad.com/academic/2006/06/dependence_on_t.html

An article complaining that students are becoming too dependent on text communication. Wasn't the worry less than 10 years ago, since students were always watching TV, that they would be unable to communicate in print? Which way do you want it?

Or, do worries about young people always sell more newspapers? Or, did the worried stories sell newspapers back when people had to pay for them?

This smacks to me, having not read the article, in good blogger fashion, of people from one paradigm looking incorrectly at people in the new paradigm. Okay, I went and read it, and I still think the same thing. A few anecdotes from a few people (including, of course, Lindsey Lohan) make a disturbing new trend.

I was on vacation for a couple of days, and I'm trying to read through everything that accumulated in blogspot.

I was struck by two contradictory articles (to which I do not have the links). One looked at economics Ph.D. graduates, and attempted to determine if an academic career was based more on the student's own intellectual prowess, or the luck of what the job market held that year. Guess what? It's the luck of the draw: graduate in a good year if you can.

The other article was also looking, I believe, at business and finance students, and was remarking that a person's institution no longer mattered as much. The Internet had flattened out patterns of collaboration, and now people from less well regarded schools could co-author with others from high-prestige schools.

So, that's the view from the dismal science: timing is everything, geography no longer matters.

eating my own cooking 2.0

You might be interested to see http://www.myspace.com/inform8 or possibly http://www.myspace.com/67156854 (myspace for my library)

and I'm starting to get confused with all the bloglines, google notebook, writely, camfire, etc. stuff I've looked and and sometimes signed up for

Library 2.0 - Like the idea, hate the term

I like the idea of "library 2.0" - that libraries need to evolve along with the changes in technology. That we are now in a new age where we can engage in lots of conversations, and technolgy can facilitate that (if we aren't destroyed by constant distractions).

But, I hate the term "library 2.0". It seems to say that libraries are just now getting to their second iteration. So, from the Library at Alexandria to Franklin's lending library to the Carnegie libraries and everything in library history until 2005 just counts as "library 1.0"? It would be more realistically library 12.4 or some such. Web 2.0 I don't have any problem with: from the first time I saw Mosaic until 2005, I can count as one version, but it is a slap in the face to millenia of library history and experience to just call it "library 2.0"

That said, no one outside libraryland will ever use the term "library 12.4" or whatever we calculate it to be. So, as a shorthand, "library 2.0" will suffice, and I will probably use it. But like "baby boomer" and "generation x" and "millenial", it is a term that grates on the nerves just a little bit.

So, until someone has a better, catchier term, I guess library 2.0 is it.

I really need to write more. So, summer is a good time to start.

I am working on a book chapter about Library 2.0. The book is about challenges of the next "millenial" generation and libraries, and I suggested that someone write something about technology, so the editor said "okay, how about you?"