Web 2.0

I explored a few of the award winners, and some I was already familiar with, such as Craigslist. I was not clear about what makes them "web 2.0" as opposed to "more-cool-things-you-can-do-on-a-website."

The awards website had a link to follow, which I did, and found this definition: "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform ... 'architecture of participation,'... ". Well, that certainly obviates obfuscation, doesn't it?

More research nudged into the area of Web 2.0 sites being enriched by the users, such as the Threadless site which sells T-shirts using pictures of people who have already bought the T-shirts and sent in their photos.

It's an interesting thought. I'm not sure it works. It's based on the premise that the group as a homogenized whole is more knowledgeable/influential than individuals. This is not true, as you know from general election results, or the fact that fear of peanut allergies is now driving what's happening in most school cafeterias and airline terminals, even though for the past 50 years or more, it hasn't been an issue anyplace. Very vocal, highly politicized individuals and narrow interests effectively and frequently enslave the majority, who are too worried about being politically incorrect to speak up for themselves. But I digress...

The other issue is that if Web 2.0 content is shaped by my input and interests, how do get input about things I never knew I had an interest in? I was listening to NPR this morning (I love NPR) and I heard featurettes about things I would never have imagined existed, no less were fascinating. Web 2.0 is the anti-NPR.

Bottom line: it's irrelevant exactly what Web 2.0 is. It's new, some of it is very interesting, some of it is dumb, but it's not going away. Who cares what you call it?

Online collaborations

This is a beautiful thing. I created a test document which I was able to post to my blog, and it appears below. I summed up (in my test document) my thoughts on the technology. It has exciting possibilities.

This is a test document written by me with an online word processor. It is pretty intuitive, and works much like the standards. Why would I need to do it?

I probably wouldn't if I were working from my desktop. But it paves the way for editing documents from a handheld, or easier online collaborations. Of course, it puts all the pwoer int he hands of the teleconnectors, but that's another issue that speaks to my level of paranoia.

Social Networking

I have had previously bad experiences with Facebook and MySpace. Following the current wisdom about what potent professional tools they are, I set up business-like pages for networking purposes.

However. I have a fairly common name. When you search it, you get a whole crop of near-pornographic postings. Obviously, if you know me, you know those pictures aren't of me. But if you don't know me (and that would be the whole point of the social networking), you would be horrified and all professional contacts would be unthinkable. So I removed my pages and cancelled the accounts. I haven't been brave enough to try to figure out a work-around since.

The apps in the articles seemed useful, but duplicative. First we have bookmarks. Then we have delicio.us to compile our bookmarks. Now an application in Facebook to facilitate our delicio.us stuff. It's a bit much.

I suppose eventually the market will "shake out" and only the best of these will survive. For the time being, this is more than I need. I don't need/want a daily sunshine, picture of cute kittens and I sure-as-heck don't want to hear from anyone from high school. I am glad to learn about it, though, and will try to find a benign way to make my presence known in this sphere.

Wikis

It is my job to keep the QL page in Wikipedia updated, so it's a technology I'm familiar with. In our setting, it would be excellent for any collaborative project, especially those that involve input from people in different locations.

One excellent use would be the annual Tri-Li collaboration over summer reading lists, that inevitably involves multiple editors in multiple locations from multiple systems. Another might be collaborations that the I-team or WorldLinQ teams work on.

That's the good news. The not-so-good news is that I got interested in a book description on one of the wikis in the discovery exercise, and immediately went to Amazon to buy yet another book I don't have room in my house or my budget for.

Library 2.0

I am not a librarian. I apologize in advance to all my librarian colleagues and friends but here it is -- the library profession has done a really, really lousy job with the technology of library science up to now and I doubt it will get better with the "advent" of Library 2.0. There is nothing customer-centric about it. "Keyword" searches force --really, "attempt" to force me, but I don't do it -- to search in terms that are your words, not mine, and follow somebody else's thought processes. I can't ever find anything in the catalog. I am forever telling whoever will listen that it isn't apparent to a non-librarian that a keyword search is different from a subject search, both of which are different from a google search. But they just tell me I'm not doing it correctly.

So what? Many library science people SAY they are going to make it a more customer-centric experience but in reality, I expect it will become more and more eccentric, just as the online catalog is more eccentric than the card catalog was.

Decades ago, I spent a short, miserable period of my life as a teacher. I was tutoring a young child in phonics, who had recently immigrated from the West Indies. Her teacher said she was below grade in reading, but that simply wasn't the case.

I showed my young pupil a cartoon drawing of a rug, and asked her to put a circle around the letter representing the initial sound. She circled "M." I asked her why. She said, it was a picture of a "m-m-m-mat." From her point of view, she was absolutely correct. I was not serving her needs, but trying to force her to look at the world through my eyes.

If 2.0 is building on the supposed 'successes' if 1.0, it is going to be very dismal, indeed. You can't be customer-centric if you do it on librarians' terms and not the customers'.

Technorati

Interesting. I am amazed-shocked-incredulous at the sheer numbers of people out in the blogosphere. I am still a little confused about what Technorati mean by "authorities" on the site, but after I am done with this posting, I will go back and play with it a little more.

This site is so interesting, it has the potential to suck up every waking second I will ever have. You could spend lifetimes reading boing-boing, and wondering why anybody would invent such things, write about them, and then I will spend more time reading about them. This is probably a very dangerous introduction.

I don't understand how people are making money from these sites/blogs, and if they aren't making money, how are they affording to sink so much time into them?

I have conducted severeal keyword searches, including Library Learning. Certainly, I get many of the posts from our little project but an awful lot, as well. I want to see what happens if you put "quotes" around your keywords. How is Technorati different from Google Blogs? I have to search side-by-side and see what I get.

Intriguing...

delicious

Delicious didn't blow me away. I can see where it would save some time in finding frequently-used bookmarks but I could locate them anyway by googling them. The networking features, on the other hand, have a lot of potential but you need an awful lot of time and curiousity to follow up where the various threads are going. An awful lot of stuff published seems to be the random ravings of either schizophrenic or very high individuals, who are spewing random words out there with very little intent to communicate concrete ideas.

Or maybe it's the verbal equivalent of abstract art. It's certainly not up to me to judge what's art or not but it takes a lot of blog-mining to find anything I'm really interested in reading.

In the meantime, I located a new mash-up site that I spent some time with, putting my photos on Rubik's cubes and seeing how they looked in museums. Clearly, mash-ups and generators have been my favorite discoveries so far.

I don't get Rollyo

I have a daughter who lives in Mount Maunganui NZ (yes, New Zealand, believe it or not) so I created my search roll about Mount Maunganui with the idea that it was narrow enough that I would be able to know if I got good hits or not.

Rollyo doesn't seem to be much better than Google or ask.com. Maybe it's my non-librarian brain. It strikes me as a filtered Google or something like that. I'm not getting the Eureka! moment.

I got good results but its basically the same list of sites. Of course, since I input the source web pages, it's not designed for me to discover other, great sources of info but I suppose that has its uses, too.

Everything can't be as maravelous as generators, which I was really jazzed about. Sorry, "about which I was really jazzed." Grammar, grammar.

Here is the link to my scrollsearch for Mount Maunganui NZ (that's a 'zed,' not a 'zee', and not to be confused with Mount Wanganui, which is on the other side of the country): http://www.rollyo.com/search.html?q=mount+maunganui&sid=324725.

Library Thing

This is an interesting tool, I can easily see its appeal, especially for library people. I especially liked the ability to generate suggestions from my reading list. Amazingly, although I only put in my five favorite books for lack of time, the list generated several of my other favorite books. If I could really spend the time to put in a big list, I'm certain I would get exceptional reader's advisory. On the other hand, knowing how many people ALSO enjoy what I enjoy makes me feel less special. :-)

Link to my reading list if you like...www.librarything.com/catalog/jking958

It's Friday night, I should be doing other stuff. Sayonara for now...