The final post…

Well I suppose this is better late than never!  After a few bumps with my computer melt down and internet ups and downs I think I’m ready to conclude my thoughts on Social Software.

It’s hard to say which tool I enjoyed the most because they each have their purpose and are useful in their own ways.  On a personal and professional  note I throughly enjoyed Blogs, Wikis and Social Bookmarking.  In terms of Blogs I think I really liked its purpose for a distance course and would like to see more courses make use of them, though I’m not sure I recommend wordpress, due to its speed and strange frusterating quirks.  I’m eager to get blogging with my collegues at work as we have a large group of individuals interested in the use of Social Software Tools in our corporate environment.  As for blogging on a personal level, like an online journal, not so much for me! 

As for the wiki, again I am very excited to get this off the ground at work and start making use of it.  We focus alot of our work around policy and standards development and I think using a wiki as a stomping ground for SME’s (subject matter experts) to collaborate and work on specific policies there are many benifits to using wiki technologies.  Further, we are continuously creating glossaries, and acronym lists and this again would be a great forum to conduct this sort of develompment work.

As for Social Bookmarking, this is something I’ve already got people hooked on and I’m quite excited about it!  I’ve got them using delicious as a piolot experiment at the moment.  Many of us are constantly doing research and often our topics overlap.  Now we’re sharing resources in a much more condusive way (no long sending random links via email).  The meta tagging or folksonomy ability has been my biggest selling feature.

As for what could have been done better in terms of this course, i have tried to think of something but I simply can’t.  I was very pleased with the way we incorporated all of the tools we talked about and put them to use in a practical way.  The case studies along with the readings really grounded the topics for me.

All in all this was a fantastic couse and I would most certainly recommend it to upcomming students!

 Thanks everyone for a great term, interesting comments/discussions and an opportunity to try all the things I wanted to but didn’t have time to test before this course.  I think I now spend 25% more time on my computer now though! hahaha  But I believe its for the greater good of communication in the new age!

Happy Holidays! 

Cheers!!

Week 12 Case study & Reply to Week 12 Comments — thx for the chat!!

I’ll start with the case study stuff then go from there

How libraries are using Library Thing  - this was the case study I jumped to first!  I believe I’ve already ranted about the fun I’ve had with this on a personal level (even added the blog widget to my blog J ).  I think it’s fun to see how libraries are making use of it.  I think it’s a great way to advertise new books.  It’s subtle but fun.  The Atlantic Public Library shows the book pic along the left (which links to Amazon) and the hyper-linked title beside it goes to Library Thing showing the rating, other books with similar tags, etc. – all the fun stuff library thing offers.  I think this is exciting because it’s just another way libraries are getting on board with social software where appropriate!! 

Why do I say where appropriate?  I’ve been catching up with my commenting and reading of our classmates blogs and I’ve noticed some questions concerning the appropriateness/usefulness of libraries jumping into my space.  In terms of the whole “meeting the teens where they are” stuff, I think I agree with many of my colleagues, and that is to say libraries may not be able to jump that far from the boat to meet the teens on their turf, it’s kinda like a parent “cleaning” a teens room to be nice, it’s not perceived as nice it’s perceived as annoying and intrusive.  In fact I ran this discussion by my sister to see what she’d think of this whole my space + libraries discussion and she said and I quote “not interested” yet she’s only interested in IM reference.  Oh and that reminds me in response to the IM reference and my sister, I confirmed with her that it was 99.9% quick reference questions – Good question Shauna-Lee.  Anything requiring in-depth research she did herself through the website J As for the close – she said she says thanks for the help lol and good bye when she’s done.  99% of the time she closes not the librarian…interesting!! 

Okay since I’m already doing it I’m also going to address Heather’s comment to my last post regarding the lack of use on the corporate IM system at work à  I too find it hard to believe that they don’t use it.  In fact, it’s driving me so crazy I’m now working on a Lunch and Learn presentation to promote its use, and I’m working with another team member to build a list of guiding principles (no body likes the word rules) and some “best practices” to set the comfort level.  As for the policy that’s a whole ball game of its own but I say lets use it if we have it, even if it’s as Heather said to plan lunch lol

Random post — 28 Days Till Christmas!! – Online Xmas Lists

This is somewhat random yet somewhat relevant (and I apologize if someone else has already discussed this as I’m a little behind on commenting but working my way towards catching up!)

Okay so: Your Christmas List online – social networking for Santa?  My sister who is rather addicted to social software tools has recently circulated her online xmas list to our family so we are ever so prepared for her xmas needs this year J (Recall my sister is the one who only uses the library reference service through IM and only as a absolute last resort uses the archaic form of communication called the telephone!)  Anyway, I think its kinda fun and thought I’d toss it out there for those of you who are interested to take a look and comment if your up to it! 

Back to catch up & final paper for me!

Cheers!

Week 12 Reading Post: Let the Blogging Resume – Podcasting, Flckr and lots to say!

My thoughts on Podcasting…At first I wasn’t sure what the big deal was, but after reading the excellent presentation from this week (really clearly laid out and in my opinion much easier to get into than the wikipedia article – well done!!) and the first two articles I can see what the hype is all about.  It is definitely an interesting way of disseminating information I like the idea of mixing up traditional broadcasts, etc and trying new and innovative things like the lawyer described in the second article from this week.  My first reaction was how different is podcasting from traditional radio broadcasts, etc., but now I see there is so much more that can be done with podcasting aside from the recording capacity.  Not to mention the fact that the potential continues to grow at rapid speeds in the library and academic worlds.   

I was thinking about uses in the library and the idea of bringing more and more of the traditional in library services to the virtual realm and I started to think about the story telling class I took last summer.  Storytelling is such a fantastic way to engage the kids.  However, the reality is that not everyone can bring their children to the library as often as they’d like, in fact I can only imagine how many kids a hard time getting to the library to participate in the live story telling event.  Similarly I recognize that some children do not have the internet at home, but I still see podcasting married with storytelling and new innovations to bring it further ahead than traditional stories on tape as a huge step towards serving more and more of our untapped populations in the public library world. Further we could get the tweens and teens involved in volunteer programs where they create the pod casts, learn to use the audio equipment, and practice their story telling, skills to the benefit of the younger library population.   

My thoughts on IM…in the work place we have it and don’t use it and I don’t understand why!!!  We have SharePoint 2003 and it has IM capabilities but nobody uses it, some claim its because we lack policies surrounding it, however, its internal not external, policies are out there and can easily be manipulated to suit our needs.  Policies exist regarding MSN or IM to the outside world, and their quite simple it’s not allowed, perhaps this is a contributor to the inhibitions we have with our internal IM, I’m not sure.  Yet another “low buy-in situation” in the corporate world where I work…strange!  

In contrast my younger sister’s generation lives and breaths IM.  She avoids the phone like the plague and is rather grumpy when MSN is not the answer to our communication needs!  She has only ever used reference services at her university through IM and probably always will.  To her this is the answer to library services.  In fact, I’m not even sure she’s set foot in the library, but is about to embark on post graduate education.  Thankfully she is quite proficient in the world of electronic research and communicates regularly with the library through IM.  

Since I’m on about IM now I loved the best practices section in the “IM me” article (definitely worth adding to our own collection of Social Software “best practices”).  The second article on IM, the AOL case study at first seems like a really good plug/marketing attempt for AOL – but I like the idea of using what they already know and I like that you can target students with dial up or without the ability to make a long distance call etc.  As for the being away bit – showing away with a message makes the most sense.  To me it isn’t any different than the “back in 5 min” sign left at the desk if a reference library isn’t available.   

My Thought on Flickr (almost done! Sorry for the lengthy post I’ve been away 3 weeks!!
Reading week and then two simultaneous blog breaks for my move…I just have so much to make up for  

My thoughts on Flickr begin on a personal note: it’s so great for my family to keep in touch and up to date with pics!  My sister, and I are all over the place with school and my mom is a photo fanatic!  I introduced her to Flickr a few months ago and every month she uses her monthly limit to keep me up to date on babies in the family, her spoiled Chihuahua Trouble (who recently had his pictures professionally taken), and recently we’ve been using it for her to show me samples of wedding “things” she’s preparing for me from a distance.   

As for the uses in the library the first Flickr article from this weeks readings does a great job outlining the possibilities and again I think the “policy heads-up” section is another great contribution to our best practices work for this course.  I also thought the 16 Ways to Use Flickr @ Your Library blog post was great!  I particularly liked #14 “Create a VIRTUAL TRAVELOGUE of your city or town.”  It’s a fun twist on a typical travel blog and it highlights your own town.  Just having moved to
Whitby I would have loved to check something like this out to get acquainted with my new place! 

Okay I’m done for tonight and I’ll resume with the case studies/catching up on my commenting this week once I can say I am officially unpacked and settled in!  Thanks everyone for you nice posts regarding my move!!  Cheers!

Week 11: Second blog post break…

Well the move went as smoothly as any move can be expected to go!  Thanks for the comments and best move wishes   We’re still working the kinks out of the internet connection at home so I’m at a friends posting this quickly on dial up if you can believe it!! haha  With that being said I’m using this as yet another perfect opportunity to take my final blogging break.  Sorry they were consecutive!!  We hope to have the net back up again asap so I will post my comments and catch up hopefully by the weekend.  I’ll be back next week for sure now that I’ve run out of breaks!  Thanks again for deciding to implement them they were truly life savers!!

 Cheers

Week 10: Blogging Break you say?

Finding that we are able to take blogging breaks couldn’t have come at a better time.  My fiance and I are in the process of moving from London to Whitby this comming weekend so things have been a little hectic.  That being said I will take this week for my first blogging break!  Be Back Next Week!

Week 8 Reading Response

Having already read the Wikipedia Folsonomy article before this class began, I almost didn’t revisit it.  However, I’m glad that I did because it now makes so much more sense after the discussions on the topic and especially the group presentation (well done!!) on Social Bookmarking, Tagging and Folksonomies.  The external links and the see also section are endless, but all worth checking out at some point.  Some of this weeks readings are listed there. 

Info Tangle’s article, by Ellyssa Kroski, is one of those listed in the Wikipeidia article!  I enjoyed the part where Kroski quotes del.icio.us’s Joshua Schachter who says social bookmarking is, “basically a way to remember in public.”  This is it!  This is exactly why I’m falling in love with these tools! Kroski follow’s Schachter’s quote with “for taggers, it’s not about the right or the wrong way to categorize something and it’s not about the accuracy or authority, it’s about remembering”.  Even as a librarian that’s exactly what it’s about for me J. 

The article itself was a great summary of the variety of tools you find in the social bookmarking realm.  While reading this article I finally took the time to check out the 43Things site and it was quite interesting as the article states, it’s a global to-do list and records all the things you want to do and mean to do and you can see who else has the same goals.  It’s worth checking our for fun if you haven’t already. 

èFolksonomies = Inclusive & Current AND Taxonomies = Exclusionary & Hierarchical àWhile each has it’s purpose, pros and cons, are associated with both Folksonomies and Taxonomies.   Kroski’s article does a great job at highlighting the differences. 

The Folksonomies: power to the people article, was good, a bit dense, but good.  This line stuck in my head: “The point here is that we have gone past a critical mass of connectivity between people that introduced a new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate and share goods online.” 

The white-paperish thing article, was pretty interesting, to see the way we were thinking about “sharing goods online” in 2003 and where we are with it now.  It would have been even more interesting to see what they would have done with this idea if they’d had the resources to get it off the ground. 

Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the Corante: Many 2 Many article as I kept getting an error message L.  Hopefully some others were able to and I can read their feedback!

Week 7 Tools: blinklist, citeulike, & connotea

I started to take a look at these social bookmarking tools in the order they were posted.  My initial response to BlinkList, was ‘WOW this seems easy’.  It told me right away what it can do, it gave me a brief idea of how exactly it worked and it offered a more in-depth tour showing in greater detail how it works.  I thought it was great that it had a specific section geared towards those teaching classes and “what BlinkList can do for you!” and your class.  They made getting started quite easy but if you weren’t sold on its ease, they show you samples of Resent activity, and let you click on some popular tags to see what it will look like.  I checked out the link to the Web2.0 tag from the main page, and I liked how it was sorted by tabs for “most recent”, “Hot Now”, and “Popular”.  I also liked how it shows you a star rating, based on votes, and a screen shot of the actual website.  Sign up was as easy as it said it was, and importing my browser favorites easy.  The step by step “how to” was straightforward, clear and appreciated.  I haven’t imported my del.icio.us files as yet, I want to give BlinkList a test run before I make any decisions to import everything and choose one bookmarking tool. 

The main page of CiteULike wasn’t quite as appealing as BlinkList, however it clearly stated the purpose of the tool, what it can do for you, and really focused on citation aspects, as well as the academic community.  It felt more serious, more professional, and a little less fun, but it seemed like a worthy enough tool for a test run.  Just like BlinkList it gives you a list of the most popular tags in the right hand tool bar.  Their presentation of tags was quite neat, as it displayed the tags in a random scattering, with the most popular sized accordingly, the way extisp.icio.us did for our own del.icio.us tags.  Further because of its rather professional tone and appearance, the tags seemed quite academic and relevant.  The site, while it was not wild and crazy and terribly exciting, it did have reasonable navigation and it was quite obvious and easy to use.  Just as BlinkList it provided sample posts and articles so you could get a taste before you signed up.  Once I signed up I was disappointed to find (at least from my quick investigation) that I could not import/export from my del.icio.us or browser favorites quite as easily as I could from BlinkList.  From my quick browse through, it seemed that I could only easily import/export from BibTeX (free) or EndNote (commercial).  However, that aside posting an article was quite easy, and searching an article was even easier.  I like the ability to mark it “very likely to read” or “might read”, etc. on its way in, and I like the ability to let the article posted be public but to keep the notes portion private if you so choose.  I think this tool definitely lends itself well to academic research because of its compatibility with BibTeX, etc. and it defiantly makes obtaining citations quite easy.    Connotea’s site was a little livelier than CiteULike, and a little busier than BlinkList, however it was straightforward and walked you through the steps of registering and how it works relatively well.  I like that it listed the top 5 reasons to use Connotea, but you have to click separate tabs to read about Connotea, latest news, site guide, community pages, etc.  I think I would have liked to taste a few more of its features right from the main page.  As for the registration process it asked for more personal information than just a user name and email address.  This site wants to know your first and last name (which will “not be seen by other users”)…hmmm interesting…I wonder why they need/want this when the others don’t….   

Connotea also made you wait for the verification email before you could log in and start using it.  The others didn’t require that you wait for it they let you get started but told you everything you need for future log in would be in your email.  So far I’m not nearly as impressed by Conntea as I was with BlinkList and CiteULike.  Even once I got my registration email and I logged in, I didn’t find the navigation of the site was as intuitive as the others.  I’ll keep the account for now but it will definitely be on probation. My final vote goes to BlinkList for easy navigation, straight forward explanations, and it was even a little fun.  However, CiteULike is a close second due to its implications for academic research and easy citation.  And unless in the next week or so Connotea captivates me it’s not ranking so high J.

Week 7 Reading Response: Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Folksonomies

As always, Wikipedia, was a great place to start understanding Social Bookmarking. I always find the external links section of the Wikipedia articles to be quite useful.  In addition to Hamond’s “Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review”, that was on our reading list, you find links to icekin’s Sn’B site which provides an article on searching for the ideal social bookmarking service,  a list of social bookmarking resources and a link to the “7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking” article, along with some others all of which are worthwhile reads. Back to our class readings for this week, I really enjoyed Hollenback’s article “Even tastier del.icio.us”, which lead me to finally check out extisp.icio.us.  Extisp.icio.uw, allows you to sign in with your del.icio.us user name and it displays a “random textual scattering” of your tags, which are sized according to how frequently you use them.  The link provided above provides a dual window for extisp.icio.us and extisp.icio.us images.  The latter displays a random Yahoo image search of all your tags and displays a collage.  Both are quite fun and worth the 2 seconds to generate. 

Almost all of the articles, when dealing with tagging, said the same thing, we tag for ourselves and if someone else can benefit from it that’s great, but we tag for ourselves first and are not restricted by structured classification.  I think I liked the way Porter’s article put this:   “The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.”  

Once again it was great great timing for this weeks topic.  Over the weekend I actually had a few minutes to sit down and read September’s issue of Information Outlook (SLA’s membership publication) and it the “Websites Worth a Click” section it listed Librarything.com as an interesting site for book geeks.  I’ve heard it in passing, seen the link here or there but I never really took the time to sit down and play with it.  Well, I am glad I finally did this weekend as it was quite neat.  It allows you to “catalogue” all the books on your shelf, tag them and share them with the Librarything communities, etc.  You can write your own review and rate the book using the 5 star system.  It’s neat because you search the book title and retrieve the information form Library of Congress or Amazon, and I believe you can select the source where you book information comes from.  I haven’t given it all the time I’d like but I did get a chance to purpose the discussion groups and read a few reviews and it was quite fun.  I thought it was rather appropriate considering all the talk of the Amazon reviews lately, and the fact that this week we are talking about tagging. However, going back to tagging for yourself, I realized, as I was tagging the books from my self for my new Librarything account, how personal some of my tags were.  Some were straight forward and likely used/useful for others like “Historical Fiction” but for personal use I tagged it with my name, my fiancé’s name, or both.  The only reason for doing this is to see who’s read what, so really it serves no purpose for anyone else except for us.  I loved the freedom to do that!  While I respect the necessity for structured classification I truly appreciate the freedom of personalized individual tagging.   

I also I really like del.icio.us for this reason, freedom.  When I am able to tag articles, etc. according to my own needs, I am more likely to find them again.  I’m no opposed to using the “suggested tags” that del.icio.us provides so that the articles I’m tagging are useful to others, but the ability to give a random tag that for some may be completely unrelated is quite useful.  As you’ve all probably noticed when I’m tagging articles with the “lis757” tag you will often see “BMO” as a tag, which allows me to kill two birds with one stone when the articles I’m finding are relevant to the course as well as work.  This saves me so much time when I don’t have to sift back through the “lis757” articles I saved just to find the ones that were relevant to work.  I now have a few of my colleagues using del.icio.us and it is making collaborative research significantly more doable.  A few of them that I have hooked were still using the archaic method of printing an article and circulating from desk to desk, or forwarding the link to everyone via email.  Further, many of us spend time at various locations, by using del.icio.us I can get the articles from anywhere (with an internet connection of course) whereas before I was stuck if the links were only saved in my browser’s “favorites”.  I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me when working from home.  I knew I had an article saved but I couldn’t use it until I was at work next unless I wanted to search for it again, because it was stuck on my office computer.   Knowing from experience the difference using a tool like del.icio.us can make in terms of distributed research, I see this utility becoming more and more necessary and valuable for distance education.  After using it for this course, I can’t say there is much I don’t like about it, however, I do that I might miss something someone has added if I don’t intuitively know the “right tag” to search.  So far I think I’ve done okay, but because it is open ended user tagging, there is no way to know for sure right?

Week 6: The readings, the case studies and the back end of wikis…

Since I was one of the presenters this week I don’t have much to add in terms of comments about the readings or have any additional comments about wikis just yet!  But I will say that if you don’t get to play with all the links we provided I think the bit on blikis are quite nifty and is worth checking out.  I think they are particularly interesting because our group used both a blog to present and a wiki to collaborate, so why not have one tool?  There are obvious reasons for having a blog and a wiki as separate entities but what do we think about having a new manifestation of them combined?   (I look forward to upcoming conversations about them.)  I also really enjoyed the Wikipedia: TourBusStop, and thought it was a neat way to “explore”.  I also think you will enjoy checking out wikis from the back end by playing around with our group wiki, lis757wikimania.  At first it was a little scary because there’s a little more to it than just copy and paste.  You have to know the “wiki language” a bit to be able to make your links work (my great challenge — thanks for the help Tamara!), however once you found your grove it was as easy as pie! As for the case studies, I’m particularly fond of the Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki and the this take on library research guides.  I also am interested to follow the Wiki WorldCat (WikiD) Pilot to see where it goes, because as Heather said in her comment to our presentation it is great to read the Amazon & Chapters reviews but you never know when they are coming from a publisher, so it will be interesting to read patron reviews and to see how the WorldCat deals with publisher posts.