Thing 12--Social Media Websites

Like a lot of things Web 2.0, I've dipped my toes in the waters of social media websites without getting in too deep. I've been reading Digg, Techmeme, and Slashdot (until they started using a script that forced me disable it with each and every visit) for some time now without joining any. Having seen this Thing, though, and how I can tailor what I'm seeing, I'm finding it a brave new world that I want to join. More than any other Thing this one has impressed me with just how fast the Internet is changing and how profound that change is. My only question is how am I ever going to find the time to keep up, much more take advantage of, the opportunities being offered?

Prompts:
Not sure if these are so important at the library, except to keep up on certain kinds of news. But on a personal level they are useful as long as they are configured correctly to deliver the information I want to read and not used to browse topics endlessly. It's useful for finding the kind of information useful to me rather than the information that publishers want to spoon feed me. The danger is that I will filter out everything I don't want to know about but I think most people do that anyway when they sift through a newspaper's headlines.

Thing 11

I've been using delicious for a while now and have never taken it past the "bookmark" phase. I knew there was more horsepower there than I was using but, eh, who's got the time? I'm now better aware of the "social" uses of the bookmarks and have already used that aspect to explore subjects of interest. I'm also intrigued at the potential of using it as an alternate search engine and as a way of sharing with a group of like-minded people (the Henry Clay Admiration Society, for example.) Tagging is another thing I've grown to like and am very frustrated at the inability of Windows to use tags. Files would be so much easier to find over time if I didn't have to search through various folders trying to remember where I've left them. Saving bookmarks and being able to use them anywhere is useful, and exploring weird or obscene words is good for a laugh, too. Using delicious, or some other social bookmarking tool, at the library is a natural and should be considered as a dandy alternative to the pages of links we maintain when the Website redesign occurs later this year.

Thing 10

Wikis are a great way of collaboratively developing a website, but they are not suitable for every web-based project. While some websites might benefit from the insights of the community, others function better under tighter control. If you are looking to develop content that requires input from people outside of the library, a wiki is a the ideal tool to solicit that content.

A wiki is a great format for a subject guide. Because it can be edited by anyone, patrons can add to the collection of useful resources and can prune away the dead links. The librarian can moderate the wiki and decide what websites can stay in the guide, or he or she can let everyone contribute freely. It’s a great way to develop a subject guide that really represents the interests of its users and doesn’t put the entire burden of finding websites on the librarian.

These first two paragraphs are plagiarized from one of the references Phil sited. I used these unattributed quotes to make a point about the wild west nature of wikis, although the fact that they are used successfully by many organizations shows that this is a manageable problem.

Wikis are only as good as the people who make them. The corillary for this is that a wiki can be dragged down by trolls quickly without constant maintenance. One of the selling points of a library wiki is to take the workload of maintaining a site's links off the librarian but if said librarian has to spend time making sure no one has slipped four letter words into the middle of a book review where is the savings in that?

Enough complaining. I found Joyce Yukawa's links especially interesting on how wikis are used by other libraries. (Although the PBWiki update notice was very annoying.) Like many of the 23 Things I'm glad to have this opportunity to learn about these products even if I don't have an immediate use for them.

One last thing, while reading the "Cosmic Variance" website I ran across this statement by Sean Carroll: "What I really found interesting was that Ebert, after giving up on Wikipedia — and rightfully so, their physics articles are uniformly useless for someone approaching the ideas as an outsider - turned next to YouTube for edification!"

This resonated with me because I'm reading a biography of Martin Van Buren and like to fill in the details by checking Wiklpedia. I noticed that the Wikipedia had simplified, to the point of being wrong, Van Buren's involvement with the Free Soil Party. Subtly incorrect information is worse than obvious misinformation and this may be the wikis' Achilles heel.

Darned Interesting