Facebook

Today’s Third Thursday Tech Talk (t⁴) showcased facebook.com and our library’s contribution SwemTools. I embedded the Facebook Presentation, but most of the links are below:

Video:

Fred Stutzman’s Our Lives, Our Facebooks – given at one of Google’s TechTalks

Facebook Groups for Librarians

• Library 2.0 Interest Group
• Librarians and Facebook
• Libraries and Librarians
• American Library Association Members
• NextGen Librarians
• Digital Reference in Facebook

And of course, SwemTools.

If you’ve got comments about SwemTools specifically, please post them on the application page.

Social Software Staff Presentation

Mack’s Desk

Originally uploaded by Max46. This image was sent to the blog as an example of how applications are sharing information. The original image was uploaded to Flickr for inclusion in the Librarian’s Desks group then sent to this blog.

Here are other links for the presentation. We expect to add an mp3 file later.

UPDATE: Audio of August 7 Social Software Presentation now available
I added an introduction and Troy cleaned up the audio of the presentation using Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. It was fascinating to watch. He removed the audio that preceeded the start of the presentation, the shuffling, scraping noises as people came in and found seats. After I recorded an introduction, Troy added music tracks that play under the introduction and come up at the end.

Listen to it here — Social Software mp3

Zohoshow slide presention

Zohowriter notes for presentation

Diigo links used in the presentation

Get More Out of del.icio.us

If you’ve not signed up yet, you seriously need to get over to del.icio.us and create an account to start tagging the web. If you’ve already started, you may enjoy Sean Tierney’s post on “6 ways to pimp your del.icio.us.” I’ll provide a brief summary:

1. Create a “toRead” tag that you can access offline (software like Avantgo can cache these to your phone/pda).
2. Use the “Private Saving” feature to conceal bookmarks you don’t want to share with the world (in settings > experimental>private saving).
3. Follow what you’re “mentors” are tagging. In the del.icio.us world, a mentor is a person that writes and thinks like you do…you can subscribe to an RSS feed for these tags to see what they’re finding that’s interesting.
4. Expose your tags through your blog or other online media
5. See what other people have bookmarked.
6. Create an open public dialog (freedbacking) on your site.

To practice what I preach, I just started an account for techview at del.icio.us. So check us out (ok, wait a little bit so we can get some stuff in there first).

Skills for the 21st Century Librarian

I ran into this post on skills for the 21st century librarian over at librarian.net. One of the items they mention is a knowledge of PHP and MySQL. While I’m not a fan of PHP (C style languages confound the Java programmer in me), I think it would be useful for folks to take this is step further and learn how to implement frameworks like Symfony, CakePHP, or PHPonTrax. I myself (a ColdFusion user) like Model-Glue:Unity that actually writes most of the boring, repetitive code needed to implement a web application. One of the biggest issues you’ll face once you’ve gotten the basics of any programming language is code maintenance. Using frameworks like these, while they may have a bit longer learning curve, really do pay off in the long run since they force you to code in a specific way and be consistent in team development environments.

One addition I would make to this (at least in listing web languages) since AJAX has become such a buzz word over the last year is JavaScript. Some of the AJAX libraries that have been developed are truly amazing (see prototype, moo.fx, dojo, Spry, script.acul.us, rico, the entire Yahoo! UI library).

I’ve seen a lot of books on PHP, and I figured this would be a good one for my four-month-old to get her started…PHP and MySQL for Babies.

Demographics Prediction

According to Microsoft’s new adCenter Labs Demographics Prediction tool, this blog is male-oriented with a predicted audience in the 18-24 year old range.

When we started this blog we were not targeting this demographic at all. I would predict that the majority of our audience is quite a bit older than this.

I also ran Swem’s website through the demographic prediction tool:

To me this is about right (at least the ordering), though I would probably swap the under 18 and 25-34 brackets (I suspect we have more graduate students in this bracket than we do high schoolers using our site).

What else is on my desktop

Since I posted on what can be found on my desktop I’ve thought of four more services that I use fairly regularly. One I know you’ve heard about. The others might be interesting to explore.

digg.com — The content of digg comes entirely from its users who post stories they think are interesting. Other users vote on the the stories. You don’t get to apply tags but you can leave comments and the comments are often informative in and of themselves. According to John Dvorak it has a greater readership that the New York times on-line. You can narrow the stories you see by some broad categories such as Technology and Science. Not surprisingly, I look at the technology stories first. With thousands of people combing the Internet for interesting stories you have a much better shot finding something that you would have missed. Just today I found an article on one of my interests, RSS (RSS: The New Internet Protocol?) that appeared on a blog of which I wasn’t aware.

dailymashup — The Daily Mashup is another popular link site that I try to scan at least once a day. It has hard core techie stuff interspersed with sites such as this one that helps you predict when airfares will go up or down. I’ve found useful sites on web design including techniques for using CSS effectively and a discussion on how people read a web page. If you are interested, the article is F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content. Why is this important? It will help you place the important informaiton of your web page.

skype — Skype is a voice over IP (VoIP) service. That includes the Internet. They are offering it free until the end of the year. With Skype, from your PC, you can place phone calls. You need a microphone and speakers but a headset works better. Skype supports Skypecast, a large, hosted call, in an on-line session supporting up to 100 participants. I’ve used it myself in an on-line meeting and I thought it worked well.

MySpace — Unless you have been cut off from all news for a while, the chances are you have seen a story about MySpace. Currently it is the largest social network with nearly 90 million subscribers. I signed up out of curiosity but never did anything with my account until I read a couple of posts on Bill Drew’s Baby Boomer Librarian blog. On Monday Bill posted:

I am in the process of searching for other librarians on MySpace so I can send them requests to be added as a Friend. I am hoping to start up or find a MySpace group about using MYSpace to reach our users. If you only accept invitations from people you know, send me an invitation via MySpace.

He also referenced an interesting article from PC Magazine, MySpace Nation. Social networking is not just for kids is the gist of the article. So I became Bill’s friend and started looking around. I checked out his friends and found people whose blogs I read as well as a friend I normally see only at the SirsiDynix Superconference. I also discovered that there is a noticable library and librarian presence in MySpace. I’m getting a better idea of just how big this social network really is. I’ll keep you posted on what comes of this.

You might have noticed the absence of any reference to Google in writing about my desktop. I started listing the services offered by Google and am up to 17 and am not yet finished. Google is a discussion unto itself.

LibraryThing in the WSJ

I’ve mentioned LibraryThing in past posts.  There is a good article about it here in the Wall Street Journal.  The developer, Tim Spalding is on a listserv to which I also subscribe, NGC4LIB (Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries).  Tim is interested in exploring how LibraryThing can work with traditional library services.

Don’t be fooled that the WSJ articles appears under Time Waster.   I think you’ll come away seeing that it isn’t a toy.

What’s On My Desktop

With all writing we have been doing on social software and web 2.0 I though I would share what I’m actually using on my desktop. This list changes often and I’ll update it periodically. I hope you will leave comments if you have a favorite that I didn’t include or I left out some important feature/disadvantage in my descriptions.

del.icio.us & tag del.icio.us — Before del.icio.us it was a chore for me to remember where I found a website. I would bookmark the site then promptly forget where I saved it. With del.icio.us, I can add tags to identify key subject areas. When you add a site to del.icio.us you get a screen where you can add tags and a description. del.icio.us tells you how many other people have bookmarked a site and you can see what tags they used. When you click on the link saved by nn other people you will see the tags they used for the web site as well as their comments. I have used this social aspect of del.icio.us to locate related web pages. There are many ways to use this social aspect of del.icio.us. A professor told me recently that he applies a class tag to sites he wants his students to visit. He give them a URL to his account with the tag filter in place and they get, in effect, a citation list. Librarians could do the same for subject guides. Your list is in last-in-first-out order which may be annoying if a site you visit frequently was one of the first added. You can filter by tags so it is managable. There are alternatives such as ma.gnolia.com. I am considering a switch to Magnolia. This service carries the social software aspect further along by allowing you to join and create groups. I also like the screen layout in Magnolia. del.icio.us does have a larger number of users so the social network is larger. I plan to use both services for a while. If you really want to look at social bookmarking, WikiPedia has a nice article and a Google search for “social bookmarking.”.

bloglines/subscribe to bloglines — for me, blogs are a major source of information about library and technical issues, trends, problems, concerns, and news. RSS feeds and RSS aggregators are an effective way to manage subscriptions. Before I discovered the beauty and efficiency of RSS, I would bookmark a site in a FireFox folder. Every day I would work my way down the list. A good aggregator will tell you if there are new posts and how many new posts. Your list of subscriptions is fixed in one panel and the blog posts appear in another. No more going back and forth between the website and your bookmarks. Your subscriptions are stored on a Bloglines server so you can get to them from any PC. Bloglines works well for me but you might also look at alternatives. Here is a nice RSS compendium. You’ll find both web-based and PC based reader/aggregators.

Gaim — Gaim is an open source instant messaging client available from Sourceforge. It supports multiple protocols inlcuding AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber. It is a good, solid client for IMing. Like other single front-end clients, you don’t get the bells and whistles that you would have with a service specific product such as AOL. It really depends on how you use IM. there is nothing to say that you can’t have multiple clients installed. Trillian is another single front-end IM client. It has some features not present in Gaim such as automatically saving a chat session to disk.

CiteULike and Connotea — These two services are citation managers. One of their primary finctions is to store links to articles with bibliographic information. I still testing both of these services.

CiteULike is marketed to academics and helps “academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.” As with other social software, you can apply tags and see the articles to which other users have applied the same tag. CiteULike has supported sources. this means that if you find an article on one of these supported sites and post it to your account, it will carry over the journal citatioin with it. The supported sites include Amazon, JSTOR, HighWire Press, Nature, Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Wiley Interscience. If you post an article from another site you have the opportunity to fill in the citation information.CiteULike also has a feature to export to EndNote

Connotea is a bit more like del.icio.us in that it also markets itself as a service to bookmark websites as well as articles. As I write this I tried to go to connotea and got a message that it is unavailable due to very high load. That’s annoying. Ah, it’s back. Connotea also has sites that it recognizes and will autumaticall pull in the bibliographic informaiton. The list isn’t as extensive as CiteULike but I imagine that will change. Connotea would like to be your one-stop reference center. Right now I am leaning towards CiteULike but I recommend you try both services.

Flickr — Flickr is a hugely popular site for storing and sharing your photographs. As with other social software you can tag your images and search for other images with the same tag. A handy little Upload to Flickr client is available. You can also create and join groups. As Wayne snarkily pointed out in a comment to another posting, I failed to mention that Swem has a group on Flickr. Take a look at it here. There are other library related groups. For example, Libraries and Librarians Group Photo Pool. Google has just introduced Picasa Web Albums which has some of the same features as Flickr. It uses the desktop Picasa application to upload web albums.

ZohoShow — This is in my try-it-out-sometime group. zohoshow allows you to create, edit, and show presentations. You can load existing PowerPoint and Open Office presentation. There is a 1 Mb size limit for uploads which might limit this feature. You can also import pictures from your Flickr account. You can invite participants to view and control the show remotely. I can see it as a handy tool for for committees with distant members. You could combine it with voice over IP or IM chat to make it interactive.

LibraryThing — This is a service for cataloging your personal library materials. Right now it is in my fun group of services but it has larger potential. You can tag you books, search for other items with the sam tags, find another user who seems to have similar tastes and see what he/she has in his/her library, write reviews. The folks at LibraryThing are intersted in reaching out to traditional library services.

StumbleUpon — This is a fun site for idle moments. You can select a category then stumble through random web sites. Tag a site as being of interest, see who else is interested in the site. I’ve found some gems this way.

This has gone on long enough so I am going to stop here. The problem, for me, is that I start looking at a web service which leads me to a similar web service which I then have to try by creating accounts on those new services. Remeber what I said in and earlier post about developing a standard naming convention for user accounts. It comes in handy.

Qube2 Desktop Client

While most browsers integrate search engines into the browser in some way, I ran across Qube and thought I'd give it a try. So first, what is Qube? Their site calls it "a third generation desktop client providing instant, browserless access to information from the collective index of traditional search engines." To me, that business speak for a browserless search client (I think this is a bit misleading, but more on that later) that allows you to perform one-click searches and has a built-in "previewer" (so you can view the web page…sounds kind of like a web browser to me ;))

I decided to put the search engine through it's paces. The first thing I noticed was the fact that there's auto-completion…nothing new or exciting there (see Google Suggest). The speed was pretty fast, but I don't think it's necessarily any faster than any web engine out there. With that said, let's get down the nitty-gritty.

I did a few searches…first "american colonial architecture." I got a decent number of results back, the first being a page from the Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute. I'm really more interested in Virginia colonial architecture, so I did that search. Looking over the first screen of results, I notice (incorrectly I might add) that there are only five results. The preview pane has taken over the bottom of the screen. The results are reasonable, with the first result "Virginia Colonial Vernacular Architecture in Historic Chatham."

I took a look at some of the other features. One of the cooler "gee-whiz" things was the search history. It shows you the search you performed (with permutations of the search) with the pages you visited from the search. I could see this being useful , but it sure would be nice to be able to search that history also. I next checked out the RSS Reader. Again, there's nothing really new here as it only allows you to add/remove feeds. The fact that you can't search the feeds you aggregate in an application that is a search engine is, well, lame.

While I think this is a neat little program with a couple of cool tools, I don't see this as a replacement for my tried-and-true Firefox/Thunderbird/Google combination that allows me to do everything the Qube does, but also search my RSS feeds for that one entry someone wrote a few months ago about that thing I need to do now. Anyway, this will probably get uninstalled here pretty quick.

Social Software

Social Software: A Survey of Web 2.0, Michael Stephens' third session in the Library 2.0 Extravaganza, is available at the OPAL Library and Information Science Archives. Make sure you use Internet Explorer. It is 59 minutes of viewing/listening pleasure.

I won't try to summarize Michael's presentation except to say that it further reinforces the community building and productivity enhancing aspects of the Web 2.0 applications that are springing up with increasing frequency.

Let's look at a few examples:

• Bloglines — I use Bloglines to manage the RSS blog feeds that I read. The advantage of Bloglines is that it is a web application so I don't have to try to keep my aggregator on my home computer synchronized with my office computer. Productivity. I can also share my RSS feeds with others. If someone asks, "Mack, what blogs do you find helpful to read?" I can point them to my Bloglines account. I could also export my Blogline entries as an OPML file which another user could import into their Bloglines account. Community and sharing.
• del.icio.us — del.icio.us is a web service that allows you to bookmark a web site. Have you ever arrived at a website and thought "I need to remember this." On your office computer you can bookmark it in which case you have to remember where you put it and you're out of luck if you are at a different computer when you want to revisit the site. If you are away from your computer you scramble for a piece of paper, write the URL, then leave it your pocket when you wash your clothing. del.icio.us gives you a central place, available from any Internet accessible computer, to store bookmarks. Plus, you can tag the links to provide organization and make them findable later and add notes for additional information about the site and why you bookmarked it. Productivity. del.icio.us also introduces the possibility of serendipity. I can see how many other people used the same tag to describe the website AND I can also see what they bookmarked in their accounts thus opening the possibility of locating related sites. If you want to see the sites that I have tagged web2.0, I can point you to my del.icio.us account filtered by the tag. You will see the links to which I have given this tag as well as other tags that I related to web2.0. I see considerable professional and educational possibilities. Community and sharing.
• LibraryThing — is a web service that, at its most basic, lets you catalog your personal library. You categorize your books with tags. It is a nifty tool for keeping track of your books, when you got them, when you read them, what you thought about them. You could use it as an on-line journal of your reading habits. LibraryThing as a company is very interested in finding ways to hook their service to the library catalog. Productivity. Similar to del.icio.us, you can see other books that were given the same tag. You can see the libraries of other LibraryThing users. You could see if anyone has written a review of a book. If you want to see an example, take a look at my LibraryThing account. It isn't up-to-date and I haven't been good with reviews but I think you'll see the possibilities. Community and sharing.

There are many other examples of social software: Flickr (for pictures); MySpace and FaceBook (lots of press about MySpace lately); calendars; personal organizers. All of these tools can be used by you as an individual as well as in your professional life. Our students are using these tools and we should explore ways that they might help us connect with them.

Someone commented on an interesting side-effect of the widespread adoption of social software: it might be lowering the expectation of privacy among its users. People, particular millennials, are putting their lives on the web for all to see. There can be consequences. That picture of you doing a keg stand might not go over that well if a potential employer finds it while searching applicants in FaceBook.

At this point, you might want to take a moment and think about account names. I subscribed to the three services above at different times. I have three different account names; malundy, Mack42, and Mack46. In retrospect I wish I had standardized on one account name with variations used only if the standard name was used by someone else. You can decide if you want to use a variation of your own name or come up with an alias that describes you — acelibrarian for example.

The phenomenon of social software is one I find very interesting and I will return to it in later posts.