social software

Making the Most of Conferences Via Social Networking
Presenters: Crystal Fulton, Julie Hesberger, Kate Johnson (absent), Ophelia Morey, Ruth Vondracek

[Sessions at this time were only given an hour instead of 1.5 - 2. Seems like poor planning to me. Was OK to run over because there are no sessions again until 2pm, but still, you have maybe 15 minutes extra before people start to leave.]

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My So-called Life on the Web
Presenters: Allison Brueckner, Gary Marchionini, Catherine Marshall, William Jones (moderator), Marcia J Bates

[Came in late, so I missed most of the first presenter, Fred someone-or-other. Sounds like he talked about privacy on Facebook. Sat on the floor in the back of a full room & couldn't really see the screen. Marcia J Bates was listed but isn't here – missed intros so not sure what happened, guessing Fred took her place.]

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The other night, I noticed a little link on my Flickr homepage — did I want to upgrade to the new interface? Why sure. I have to say, I like it. Given that there hadn’t been any big announcements that this was coming (a ala the new Facebook) I figured it probably wasn’t going to be that much of a change. But in some important ways, it is.

Now, the first thing I see when I hit my Flickr homepage is recent activity. That’s both on my photos (who’s commented, favorited them, tagged them, added a note, etc.) and on photos on which I have commented — that means I can more easily follow the developing conversation around a video that a friend took of new dining spaces at my library school. This information was available previously, but this change really puts the social aspect front and center. Of course, there are those of us who were already using it as a social tool to a certain extent, but I think this will make it more obvious to other folks. (The social aspect of Flickr is something that seems to puzzle people when I am explaining what it is and why it’s so much better than whatever online service is provided by your camera manufacturer.)

I can also see a small line graph of daily views of all my photos, and when I click through on that I get a more detailed breakdown of which photos have been viewed recently. Again, this was available before (I believe) but it wasn’t front and center. Now I know that a photo I took of a Loyola building in January was viewed 7 times yesterday. (Welcome, freshmen.) And I also know that this photo of a ballband dishcloth has been viewed more than 14,000 times since I uploaded it on 11/18/06. (I blame Ravelry, and also the incredible popularity of this pattern among a certain type of knitter.)

When I scroll down on my homepage, I can still see the 8 most recent uploads from my contacts (I believe previously on the homepage you only saw 6; that or the thumbnails were smaller). And below that, the four most recent photos from one of my groups are displayed. (Not sure how the group is picked - randomly? Last one I added to?)

There’s still a small box highlighting a recent post on the Flickr blog, and there’s another little box with a rotating announcement. The really neat thing is that I can manually refresh that little box and cycle through a handful of announcements and helpful info. I know this is not really an unusual feature, but I like the little icon they’ve made to indicate that you can do this. (In nerdspeak — I am fond of this design pattern.)

Anyway, that’s that. Flickr users should keep an eye out for that little link (not sure if they are slowly rolling it out or if it’s available for everyone). Oh, I should mention that there’s an entertaining little interlude while your homepage rearranges itself, too. I thought it really captured Flickr’s friendly/funny vibe.

This was news to me, but apparently del.icio.us is being redesigned, and that redesign is about ready to debut. One thing to note: they’re asking that everyone make note of their login info, as when they update with the new design, everyone will be logged out and will have to log back in. So, go check on that.

Also, my MacBook is here. “Here” as in sitting in my office right behind me here and I have only opened the shipping box and peered inside. A cute FedEx guy brought it this morning. I have things to do at work now, so Willpower is currently set at “iron” in order to avoid throwing the rest of my workday off track. (Normally it is set at “silly putty,” all the better to take advantage of any passing cupcakes.) I cannot wait to get home and I am psyched that tomorrow I work the evening shift — that means I can play all morning. (So much for that bike ride.)

So, I just listened to a free online webinar through OPAL — Online Marketing for Libraries, by Sarah Houghon-Jan, the Librarian in Black. (Here’s a link to the archive page this is listed on. I can’t figure out if there’s a way to link directly to the entry without just linking to the files, not that I tried very hard. Yes, the files are already posted. OPAL is fast.)

This was really cool. I’ve never heard Sarah speak before, and I thought it was a great presentation — and that’s saying a lot since I couldn’t see her, and we were stuck just looking at PowerPoints (though it was a good PP, as these things go!). The gist of it is that she covers a ton of ways, many free, that you can build your online presence aside from your library website. This includes things like blogging and social networking sites. But she also had a ton of great tips: making Wikipedia page for your library, or adding a link to your library from appropriate pages on Wikipedia (like a city or college entry, for example). Where do you come up in search engine results? Do all the various domains your users might type in to get to you point to your website? Are you listed in places like Google Maps and Library Thing Local? What about websites listing free WiFi hotspots? (Well, if your WiFi is free and not password-protected.) Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Michael at BPL emailed this morning with an update on the BPL’s Flickr project. They’ve loaded a bunch more collections (including some awesome old New England postcards), and enabled tagging & commenting.

Jessamyn beat me to the punch* and posted the whole rundown (Michael emailed the two of us because we both posted it — Jessamyn originally picked it up from me, which is weird but cool) so I’ll just link to her post.

I just think this whole project is so cool, and I’m psyched that I know the librarian responsible! The images are just fantastic and it’s so exciting that the number of people who will see them is just going to explode because they’re up online in such an easily accessible way.

I’m already scheming about what sort of project I can make with the images of these postcards. I think it’d be cool to frame a little series of them or something. Go here to check them out.

* I was on the reference desk when I got Michael’s email, and just afterwards got three simultaneous questions through our virtual chat reference system. Three! At once! That kept me busy for a while.

I have a friend who works at the Boston Public Library, and he recently emailed several of us to let us know that a project he’d been working on has come to fruition. In his own words:

I’ve been working on a Flickr API application that will take a bunch of the items in the Boston Public Library Digital Collections (not yet online) and push them, with full metadata, to Flickr.

This is pretty cool, if you ask me. The collections that he’s gotten online so far include a bunch of cool WWII propaganda posters, some old posters from Boston Brewery, and a cool collection of early Boston baseball photos.

I know there are still some skeptics who don’t see the use in putting this kind of stuff on Flickr — why not put it in your own digital library, or just up on your website? — but I think it’s really neat. It gets these things out into a pre-existing community, and makes it super easy to link to them, blog them, and the like. In this case, the metadata is included, which means you can see all of the important information, like the accession numbers, description, subject headings, etc. Currently they haven’t enabled tagging & commenting, but once they do it’ll be really neat to see what other information the community can add to this.

For those who may have missed it, the Library of Congress is doing something similar.

I ate my words (they were quite tasty) and now I’m on Twitter (I’m sure you can guess my username). Nothing like moving out of state to make you want to embrace any and every way to stay in the loop!

Doesn’t this sound great?!

The First Annual ASIST Social Computing Summit will bring together researchers and practitioners of social computing for two days of discussion and exploration in Miami, Florida . . . This summit aims to bring together thought leaders, developers, and scholars working in this rapidly changing area, facilitating the conversations required for tomorrow’s innovations.

They’re soliciting abstracts for poster sessions until Monday, Feb. 25.  The conference itself is a couple of days before the Information Architecture Summit. No doubt they will make a great combination!

For a while, I was kind of into Facebook apps — weird little things you can add to your profile that give you another way of interacting with other users. Most of them are just for fun and have no real use.

But I started to tire of them because they clog up the site and interfere with the way I like to use it — to keep in touch with people I know in real life and enjoy talking to when I happen to see them in person. I don’t really care if they have added an application, or if they have taken some action using it (”Joe attacked a pirate! Add Pirates vs Ninjas now!”). I want my newsfeed in Facebook to carry information about the people I care about and what they’re doing or thinking, not that they added an application and are now inviting me to add it. Repeatedly.

My exasperation with this peaked at the same time I decided that I was going to take the big step of de-friending some people (gasp!). These were folks who I hadn’t talked to or interacted with inside of Facebook, let alone outside of Facebook. Yes, I knew them at one point in my life. No, I don’t think I need to know that they are “sleeping late,” “dreading Monday,” “thinking about taking a vacation” or “going to the movies with Joe!”

So, I de-friended those folks, and I removed some apps from my profile. I have been pondering removing a few more applications, mainly because they clutter up my profile and I’m hard-pressed to believe anyone actually looks at them (I don’t look at my friends’ apps on their profiles). So I found a post from yesterday on Read/Write Web particularly interesting: Have Facebook apps peaked in popularity? By the numbers, it looks like I am not the only person tired of the constant barrage of applications and attendant invites.

What would make an app slide from over 165,000 daily users to 24,000 in just a couple of months? It’s hard to say, but perhaps users have begun to grow tired of noveltly apps that don’t do much else except spam their friends with invites to join the application.

It’s a pretty quick post to read, and I recommend going through and taking a look at it. I like that Facebook has all this fun stuff you can use to interact with your friends (sure, using Superpoke to virtually vote for my friend & former housemate doesn’t really accomplish anything in actual life, but to me it sort of fills the void of saying “hey” when he got home from work). What I don’t like is that it’s hard to control what you’re forced to look at. Sure, I can x-out or give a thumbs up to actions taken by my friends that are posted to my newsfeed, but the newsfeed isn’t learning fast enough for my taste. I hope that Facebook can continue working on allowing users all these fun, different ways to interact, but I hope they are also working hard to improve the privacy settings and customizations for what you’re forced to look at. I suppose we’ll find out.