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.