Happy Halloween!

So, if you want some Halloween fun, head on over to Lifehacker where they have some Halloween tips and tricks.

It’s Friday! Yahoo! So glad it is Friday. In California, we are getting the first major rain of the season which is wonderful, but makes me awful sleepy. I just want to curl up with a good book and hot chocolate! Hopefully it doesn’t rain on our trick-or-treaters.

Anyway, on to some library goodies for your digital Halloween bag of tricks!

So excited to get a feed yesterday about a Google Labs project. It is an accessible web search for the visually impaired! How great is that? As librarians, we are always trying to provide access to information without any barriers and this definitely helps. I’m always happy to see large companies making products that promote accessibility.

And, since we are on the topic of Google, here is a really cool article from Wired about how to use Google more intelligently. Some tips you might already know, but a lot of good stuff to share with people you know who use Google. (And, honestly, who goes on the Internet and doesn’t end up at Google at least once?)

Last up for the day, but definitely not least is Scott Brown’s article, Facebook Friendonomics also from Wired. The article is a very interesting look at how social networking sites are changing how we keep in contact with people we might otherwise not. Something to think about while you are simultaneously twittering away while you’re webcasting your life.

Have a great weekend!

What's Hot in RSS & Social Software: IL2008

What’s Hot in RSS & Social Software
by: Steven Cohen

tinyurl.com/ILwhatshot

Readers:
Not much new for readers
Being advanced, added some things, but no new readers

Feedly:
add-on to Google Reader
added stuff on, different format to feeds
can tweet right from the reader

Firefox reader: just didn’t work out

Google Reader and Bloglines are the two big readers

Google Reader is becoming the more popular reader now
Notes feature–can share feed with others and a note who subscribes to your shared items
Email feature too
Trends feature: fun statistics, can see how much reading done on the mobile, “most obscure”=what you subscribe to and no one else does
Search your reader items–pretty cool, like searching your own little newspaper
Can also read off-line through Google Gears

Cool stuff now: Lifestreaming
Bringing it all together
Tumblr
can RSS the feed from Tublr, allows you to use any URL you own in addition to using a tumblr domain

friendfeed
made by same person who did Gmail (rock on!)
another lifestream application

RSS Tools
Feed Sidebar (Firefox extension: reader on the left side of your browser)
Libworm (database of library oriented feeds, blogs–so cool! can get the feed of your search)
Techmeme
YouTube (can RSS to feeds from YouTube; good to see how libraries are marketing themselves)
Twitter Search (can RSS the feed too–IL2008 is on the top of twitter search right now)
OpenCongress (track any federal legislation, congressmen, etc. through RSS)
JustiaDockets (can see federal filings, anytime a company is sued get through RSS–push it out to your clients)
Ebay (use a third party site to get RSS feed)
delicious (subscribe to tags, other users) follow tag “tools”
Google Blogs Search (can run your blog URL through it)

No RSS? Get a feed from a page
Page 2 RSS (use to get an RSS from any page–really any static page–rock on, only updates once a day)
Update Scanner (Firefox extension, allows you to keep up to date with any page, will scan for updates (you set the scanning settings) highlights new stuff–cool!)

Use RSS to let people in organization know that you are around

Staying Current
WWWhatsnew (keep up, but in Spanish–can get it translated)
Database RSS feeds for your search (I love these)

Know who your FLOs are (Friends of the Library): they are the best marketing for your library

Screengrab (Firefox extension–screencap only part of the screen that you want)

Missing Auctions (now at Invisible-Auctions.com–looks for all the misspellings of a word on ebay)

Note: This was a totally fun session. Great presenter and very funny! People videoing it and twittering it live!

Take Home Message:
RSS can be used for more than you think! Check out some of these cool tools that you can use in your work and for fun!

Keynote by danah boyd: IL2008

Keynote: Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights

by: danah boyd

Web2.0 is part of the hype but a lot of people don’t know what it is

Technology crowd: see it as a shift in technology and deployment “perpetual beta” users affect the cycle of technology creation, reshaping, user-generated content

Business crowd: web2.0 is about hope, came after the technology bubble burst, venture capitalist

Reshaped how everyday users interact with technology and what they use it for

Very topically driven, interest driven

Reshaping of what public spaces online look like, it is now about friends and your community, organized around being social= rise of social network sites

Social Network Sites Characteristics: 

Profile–create identity online, formally making your identity known in a particular context, expresses who you think you are to people in the community, you can recreate yourself online, “decorating” young people’s profile look like bedroom walls in chaos

Friends–have to publicly articulate who your friends are, it is awkward, the term friends mean different things to different people

Patterns of friending: 1. people connect with those close with (20-50 friends) 2. most have a couple hundred of friends 3. people who try to collect with as many people as possible (14year old boys, musicians, politicians) 

MySpace: makes you list best friends in order, so awkward and horrible, tricky to navigate, young people find tricks to deal with this, bands are the safest things to put in your top friends, have social rules

Comments/Wall–majority of content there is not that great–not much information exchanged, social grooming, public performance, keep relationships going 

Facebook: status updates, update what you are doing, peripheral awareness of what is going on, very similar to Twitter (microblogging)

 

Microblogging–use in many ways, use in businesses, etc. creates peripheral awareness in digital environment, 

Why are people spending so much time on these sites?

Using for social purposes, sharing information, flirting, etc. Very critical for young people–free time to socialize like the digital mall, area to socialize because kids are not allowed outside with decreased mobility of young people, fear, overstructuring of kids’ lives, lack of mobility because no public transit, etc. makes digital social spaces important 

Must have presence on social network sites in order to exist 

Continuum of use–use all the time or post artifacts if you are able to meet with your friends often

 

Social Network Sites are digital social, public spaces properties:

1. Persistence–what you say sticks around, every ephemeral acts are now persistence, traces are now permanent 

2. Replicability–can copy and paste information, take from one context to another, don’t know the copy versus original, if it has been modified, young people bully each other through this

3. Scalability–average blog is read by 6 people, Internet has scalability issues–potential to reach millions but reality of reaching no one, attention-driven media

4. Searchability–you are not searchable when you are walking around physically, but online you become searchable often by those you don’t want, most deadly by teachers, bosses, etc. how do you become not searchable? change characteristics of profile

Invisible Audiences–audiences are invisible, an unknown online, you don’t have a sense of who is seeing it, you don’t know who will get there eventually, “imagined audience” 

Collapsed Contexts–we are used to distinct contexts defined by space, example weddings are very scripted events, online no walls–can be awkward

Public=Private–convergence, try to have control over space online, now about control, marking who can see things, public is completely out of control

What does this mean?

Radically change through information ecology

Same kind of structures in information technologies being created 

Examples: tagging in del.icio.us, everyone organizes information now in different ways 

Young people contribute to creation of knowledge ex. Wikipedia (most transparent creation of knowledge ever created), and questions of who has voice, authenticity, etc., but we are not teaching people about wikipedia and creation of knowledge, media literacy 

Breakdown of traditional authorship and ownership, ex. mashups, remixes, etc. (fan videos, fan fiction) need to harness this kind of passion 

Traditional ways of information organization and access can be modernized, happening in a broader sense 

This is an attention economy, what comes up is what gets the most attention not what is necessarily best, now we have to deal with it

Need to understand what is going on and how to use it

Lawrence Lessig talking about changes:

Social Norms

Market

Architecture of technologies

Law–conservative 

Intervention:

Net Neutrality–all bits are created equal, do you have the equal right to look at every page, how do you deal with this? need to figure out a way to protect net neutrality, need it for equal playing field

DRM–all about control of information, (defectivebydesign.org), if information is locked down you can’t consume, produce and play with content, this is about sharing and creating culture, DRM can kill off ability to engage with texts, need to balance original efforts of copyright with rights of consumer

Fair Use–need to figure it out in the media world, have publishers saying you can’t take more than 10 words, fair use is only a defense, form of terror online (note: check out chillingeffects)

Always positive and negatives 

Mobile is going to change everything, web2.0 will come into the mobile world, going to expand, cluster effects are key: can’t talk to each other if on different carriers, need to have same standard to get cluster effects, no standards in mobile space yet

(de)locatability–regardless of where you are in physical world you can bring your friends through the mobile world, also you can take what you are doing in the physical space into the online world ex. GPS uses in mobile phones 

Technology radically reshaping public as we know it, take properties in play and contend with them and how we want to shape information, technology and how people are interacting 

Take Home Message: 

Technology is here to stay, we must determine what we are going to do and how we are going to interact with everyone and educate them.