23. Reflect on your experiences

I think I've already done a lot of reflecting and commenting on the experience as I've been going but maybe I can summarize a few central issues as a way of wrapping things up.

I think this has been a good experience and very worthwhile. I've been surprised in quite a few cases by things I didn't know or didn't appreciate sufficiently before I started this program. I'd number Flickr and del.icio.us as two highlights of the 23 things and I feel that I gained some appreciation for blogs (as a communication medium, not as an information resource) along the way. I also learned about some tricks and tools that I could apply to known quantities, adding feeds to my Yahoo! page or spinning off info from my LibraryThing collection.

A couple of things could use rethinking. It doesn't feel like there were really 23 things and I think there are more things we could be looking at than those described. It seems that blogs, feeds and kindred resources were really the same thing repeated several times. And I'm not sure that it is possible to get much out of some of these things by sitting alone at our computers. I didn't attend any of the drop-in sessions, so maybe this was addressed in this way, but a few items might have profited from a demonstration or maybe some sort of group activity. Further, the program could have benefited by substituting some newer things for some of the more tired ones. Finally, more library-related examples of how to apply some of these resources would have brought the lessons home more.

Beyond the program itself, I had a few thoughts about issues about where we, both the UCSC Library and libraries in general, can go from here. One lesson I took away is that this is a continually shifting landscape and it will take constant vigilance to keep up with developments. Tools and programs for keeping up-to-date are needed. we can't stop here. I hope through a couple of services I signed onto that I'll be getting updates about new developments but I think something programmatic needs to be put into place, perhaps an updated 23 Things every summer.

How do we decide which tools to adopt and which to pass by? I think the answer lies in developing a good sense of balance. We need a sense of playfulness and adventure. with the slack to forgive wrong turns and dead-ends, but we also need a sense of responsibility and an understanding that at some point we need to settle on certain solutions in order to build reliable, stable services. We also need to balance easy, one-off solutions that work for specific cases and in the short-run with the deeper, organization-wide developments that require institutional commitment. Putting some of my work on an outside blog-hosting site may have little service implication for the organization, but we may need eventually to select a blog platform to support library-wide. The short-term and long-term solutions come with entirely different considerations. We need a development model that leaves room for the first but provides a structure for the latter.

As a last consideration, I think balancing past and future is going to be critical to the survival of libraries. So much of the talk about where we are going appears to be completely dismissive (and sometimes ignorant) of our past. And there is also much foot-dragging that misses what in the new technology is integral and supportive of our traditional roles. We need to embrace the future with respect for the past, and not adopt what is new simply because it is new and not hold onto what is old just because it is old. Here the balance comes from a better and deeper understanding of what makes libraries libraries (and not Amazon or Blockbuster) and then select those services and the related tools that move us in that direction.

So, I'm done. Where do I pick up my gift certificate?

#22. Explore Web 2.0 Award winners

I decided to focus on the winners that we hadn't already seen, starting from the top.

Findory: seems ok, but only really useful if you don't already have a home base that will allow you to add live content from other sources. My Yahoo! page let's me do this, so this isn't interesting to me.

http://ma.gnolia.com/ : another social bookmarking site that seems similar to del.icio.us but it doesn't appear to have the same integration with desktop browsing. Interestingly, I did a search for "library" and it came up with the "Curious Expeditions" site that was posted to libstaff recently, plus "Kids Click", "The Open Library", "Podiobooks" free serialized audiobooks (per our last Thing), and another "Library 2.0" site. That's pretty impressive.

Furl: another social bookmarking site, this one managed by LookSmart. Not as good in terms of content as the others I've seen. It does have desktop tools including a bookmarklet, as well as toolbars for IE and Firefox, and a Firefox extension.

Clipmarks: this looks really interesting and a bit different than anything else I've seen. It allows you to mark parts of pages that interest you. It has private and public marking and it appears to integrate with del.icio.us. I may be burning out on new things, because I'm not willing to join or load another service right now, but I will get back to it later.

Under "Books:"

Lulu : a self-publishing sales/sharing site; when they say books, they mean ink on paper. Hmmm? This won a Web 2.0 first place award. Seems like they are going the wrong way.

Biblo.com : a used-book meta search, but not a good one. (It found only one copy of Summer at Buckhorn for sale while AddAll found several.)

LibraryThing: the only real Web 2.0 tool in the pack and it comes in 3rd place. I think the Web 2.0 are so removed from the book world that they are easily wowed.

Reader2 : honorable mention reading list version of LibraryThing. It looks like a worthwhile social-networking site/tool.

I skipped the Business section ...

"City Guides & Reviews"

Yelp: is a local directory with review which provided mixed results. I searched "taco" in 95060 and retrieved 50 items. A sponsored link for Los Gatos Brewing Co. was at the top. It appears to rank by star ratings, with El Palomar first, then Tacos Moreno... oh, well.

Judy's Book : a bargain hunters' directory with local focus; searching 95060 got some local sources (Bocci's, Bruno's BBQ, and Star Bene) scattered amongst mostly online (non-local) sources.

Yahoo!Local came in 3rd and Google Local, Live.com, Menuism and Citysearch got honorable mentions.

Under "Classifieds" I looked at oodle which was, again, a mixed bag. It occurs to me that the key to any of these sites is content. That's why eBay was a winner, it got a lot of listings. That's why Amazon works, there is a lot of stuff there. That's why Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and iTunes are successes If you check a site and can't find what you want because there isn't much there, you'll go somewhere else. If you get there first and gather a lot of stuff, it often doesn't matter that someone comes along later with a better service. First=biggest=winner.

I'm burning out on this exercise and I think I've done what was expected.

#21. Audio eBooks (week 12)

I don't get what's Web 2.0 or even Library 2.0 about audio books. In fact, I'm worried that we're adopting terminology like "audio ebooks." Have we been so mesmerized by the technology ("ooh, pretty shining things") that we've lost all our critical thinking functionality?

Ok, I'll get off the soap box. I like audio books. They've gotten me through a rough patch and some long car trips. Back in my early career as a media librarian, I even reviewed about a dozen audio books for library publications. And I'm glad to learn that there are ready sources, free ones no less, for these.

I am a little disturbed to find that we're having format wars in cyberspace, that proprietary software is required and standards are being eschewed. I do use a Mac at work and at home and my only means of carrying audio recordings with me is my iPod. I find this a challenge. Unfortunately, I can't find my SCPL card, or I'd be trying to hack the format issue.

Instead, I headed over to Project Hindenberg. I'm interested in what Hart is trying to do (I hosted him during a visit to this campus in the 1980s), but skeptical of his absurd claims and I thoroughly disagree with the way he's chosen to go about this work. It's an enormous collective labor pointed in the wrong direction, on the whole. The books produced are useless for any sort of scholarly work and, personally, I could never see the use of large ASCII files for recreational purposes. Quality control also has been an issue. At one point they released an edition of Moby Dick missing a whole chapter.

Hart's main merit, as far as I can see, is that he's been at it a very long time. However, even this merit is diminished by the fact that he hasn't adapted his core vision to any of the changes in the online world. Check out some of the better conceived and better managed etext projects that have emerged in the meantime, such as the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts where there is better quality control and more forward thinking about established standards. Or, better yet, he should be moving to something like a LOCKSS-type implementation.

Having said that, my visit to the Gutenberg site was a pleasant surprise. The search interface was intuitive and effective. I was pleased with the range of titles that came up and I even liked the fact that, though I started with a search for audio books, the results list mixed print and audio formats. I'm very grateful that they use accessible MP3 format. However, all the audio titles I looked at were of the computer-generated sort and, downloading a sample, I can say that you'd have to truly desperate to make use of these.

I think I will continue to explore titles here, dig out my SCPL card, as well as those available through other sources. A Google search for "free audio books" discovered Librivox which seems like a well-managed collaborative collection worth noting. (I'm listening to a good version of Daniel Deronda as I write.) There were other promising sources which I haven't explored yet.

#20. Podcasts (week 11)

For some reason this technology has never grabbed me. I appreciate that audio and video are important and any technology that makes it easier to get to these and use them is a good idea. But for reasons that elude me, podcasts are up there with flossing and tire rotation in terms of excitement. I've downloaded plenty and rarely have listened or viewed more than 30 seconds. Several sites I check regularly use podcasts to distribute information and I almost never listen and never all the way through. I have listened to recorded books, hours and hours at a stretch but for some reason this is different.

I realize what I like or don't like isn't the point of these exercises but for some reason I felt like it was important to mention this.

On the other hand, I think using podcasts for distributing course information makes perfect sense. Well, almost perfect. I've noticed in a lot of cases that audio alone doesn't always convey all the content -- chalk talk or PowerPoint presentations -- and that many video presentations don't capture the presentations well when things are happening in more than one place. The fact that it is technically easy to produce a podcast doesn't mean that it is easy to create good ones.

#18. Firefox Add-ons and Extensions (week 10)

This is very, very cool. (Yay Open Source! Need I say more?)

I didn't know about the search add-ons and I've added several, in addition to the CRUZCAT module.

I've added a couple of extensions in the past without really knowing I was doing it. Another colleague turned me onto Zotero a couple of months back, I installed it but I haven't ever gotten into it. Maybe there are just too many other toys (er... tools) out there that are easier to get going. Under other circumstances, I might be doing more with Zotero.

I also added the del.icio.us extension as part of starting up with this service. I like the extra buttons it has added to the control bar but I'd like to get rid of the extra "recently bookmarked" bar it added. I can't find settings that would allow me to do remove this.

There is quite a list of add-ons, many with intriguing descriptions, at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1
But I'm loathe to start adding things until if I can't remove them again later.

p.s. Removal turned out to be simple once I found the answer searching the "KnowledgeBase". From the Firefox menubar, Tools > Add-ons. You have a choice of disabling/enabling or uninstalling add-ons from there. Disabling the del.icio.us add-on disables all of it. I haven't figured out how to remove the annoying extra control bar without losing the useful buttons. Oh, well...

#17. Online Applications & Tools (week 10)

I tried Zoho. It feels like there is a bit of a learning curve but nothing fatal. It looks very useful.

#19. YouTube (week 11)

Blinx seems to work better than Dabble. I tried a couple of searches in Dabble ("skateboarding dog" and "library" - separately, not together) with no hits while Blinx found numerous items with the same searches.

#16: Library 2.0

From the tools we've seen in these exercises, I think the most salient feature of Web 2.0 is the social aspect, specifically a democratization of creating, selecting and evaluating resources. Opposed to traditional library modes, Library 2.0 would seem to indicate a shift to more public participation in areas where we have had near-exclusive control. What, if any, control of these traditional library functions would libraries be willing to relinquish? Which could we relinquish and still feel that we are true to our mission as libraries? Or, does our sense of what is core to being a library need to change?

Of the other articles I read, the points that I feel are most realistic to our situation are about ways we can be "out there" or engaged and participating in the Web 2.0 world. I think of examples like the tools created by librarians to work with browsers and Web 2.0 services. I also think we could have more of a role in adding content or tags to Web 2.0 services. Couldn't librarians be editing Wikipedia articles or at least adding notes and links giving authorative sources? Shouldn't we be adding authorative content to del.icio.us?

I contrast this perspective to suggestions that we fit existing library functions within the more constrained online environments. What I've seen of online "libraries" is that they are all poor substitutes for the real thing. For instance, in the one demo I've seen of Second Life, "books" were kept in trunks and your avatar had pass nearby in order to see the titles contained there. A text- or Web-based catalog is so much more powerful than these constrained virtual worlds. Should we settle for such shallow solutions just because they are the current thing?

Instead I think we should be trying to raise the quality of Web 2.0 resources. For instance, I've been adding bookmarks from my user guides to del.icio.us and finding that in many cases I'm the first person to add an important link. I think librarians should be concerned that there are 25,000 links to a video of a dog skateboarding and none to the Census Bureau.

Similarly, when searching for pre-exisiting searchrolls in Rollyo, I found one created by another library. To me, that had some authority. I'm guessing other users might feel the same. Yet, it isn't possible at this point to find searchrolls created by source, specifically by a library. Maybe we -- librarians collectively -- should be working with services like to this to get library-generated sources acknowledged and weighted accordingly. I'm sure there are dozens of such opportunities where libraries can have a visible role in Web 2.0 and make a corresponding difference in quality.

For even more ambitious projects, we could be looking to the information science side of the house for ways to make sense or consistency of some of the more chaotic and unbalanced aspects of Web 2.0. For instance, "folksonomy" has some benefits but the debit side is considerable. Is there some way to automatically classify items based on popular tags (perhaps combined with other elements of the record)? What about the way interest groups get their sites better rankings by "bombing" (I think that's the term) the search engines. So Dianetics and Atlas Shrugged always make it into the list of the 100 greatest books of all time. Pollsters know how to measure "generated" responses and compensate for them in their analysis, so why can't we do the same?

I like that we could display librarything tags within our catalog records. librarything already pulls records from LC. Why not try to use some of the overlap between popular tags and ossified LC classification to come up with something both current and structured?

I think there are a lot of opportunities in Web 2.0 for libraries but I'm concerned that most of the discussion is marked by two wrong-headed responses: throw aside all traditional library functions in order to pursue the latest shiny geegaw or ignore anything that we can't control absolutely no matter how irrelevant we may become. I'd like to see a strong, concerted contingent of librarians who are not afraid of new modes (but not easily distracted by things just because they are new) and respect what is still valuable about traditional library functions (but won't cling to every dusty artefact of the profession out of misdirected loyalty).

#15. Custom search engines

I think the concept is good and in practice I'm seeing better results than I might without the CSE function, but there are still problems. My litmus test with any search engine is "John Gay" (the 18th C. English playwright). Years ago, when doing work for my Gulliver's Travels site, I tried this search and retrieved lots of "sponsored-site" ads with oiled hard bodies and very few links to men in powered wigs and silk brocade. I tried a few pre-rolled searches on Rollyo for John Gay and the CSE hits were consistently good but the sponsored sites are still of a different nature (e.g. ""Get Blown" Away by Hot Guys on Gay.com"). If someone is going to promise custom searches, I want better control.

One thing not discussed in the lesson is that you can search SearchRolls in Rollyo, to see what CSEs others have created, test them, edit them and/or add them to your account. I couldn't locate an existing 18th Century searchroll but the English literature searchroll created by Simmons College Library works like a charm. There is a good area for libraries to explore.

#13: IM

I have used chat a few times for technical support and I've found it helpful. (You can type error messages and bad links and not have to deal with being understood on the phone.) Oddly, after these experiences, I remember having talked with the other party as if we were on the phone, instead of typing. It is far more personal and immediate than you might imagine. I did try the Meebo chat but the Library team has been "off-line" so nothing happened. Not the most exciting lesson.

Pipes

I just came across an article -- it was featured on the del.icio.us homepage -- called "Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools" from Wired. Being inclined towards open source, I had to investigate. It outlines a whole world of social networking tools that aren't dependent on a single site/vendor/interface. And it introduced me to "pipes," a new tool launched by Yahoo last February that looks very powerful. I haven't figured it out so I'm looking for some help if anyone else has gotten anywhere.

Wikis: 2

Edited the "About the Library" wiki page. It was pretty easy.

Is there an intermediate point between private/password-protected content and public/no-holds-barred access? I was wondering whether you could give a selected group write access and prevent public editing. Maybe it is a feature of one of the paid upgrades.

Wikis

I've been interested in wikis as a technology for a long time, both as a general Web content management tool -- can't you see the whole of the Library's Web site within a wiki framework -- and also as a tool for creating and maintaining library guides. However, in each case I have encountered hurdles to making this happen. Following up on this lesson, I've been exploring pbwiki.com. It is looking very interesting.

folksonomy

Just a quick thought about folksonomy (I get it: folk + taxonomy = ). I appreciate that there is some opportunity for libraries to enhance our rigid tagging scheme (LCSH) with something more fluid but I see problems in surrendering this responsibility to the masses. I've mentioned some racist tagging I've encountered in del.icio.us. What happens if we pull those sorts of tags into our catalog displays through librarything or a similar system? I suppose that you have to accept a certain level of stupidity with any scheme that depends on the masses. And I also hope that people will filter out the fringe material and focus on the core ideas represented by the majority. But I can't help but feel that we're surrendering our authority and the public's diminishing faith in libraries by following this development.

"Once again, the Internet proves that if you put an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards, they will NOT produce Hamlet."

Week 7: LibraryThing

I love librarything and have been a lifetime member for about a year and a half. Since my first burst of adding titles in the beginning, I don't check in a lot these days and I haven't paid much attention to new developments. I'm vaguely aware that there are affinity groups forming on the site but I've ignored any invitations (in fact, all messages) I've received. I take the "social" part of social networking with a grain of salt.

I enjoyed being reintroduced to librarything and some features I was not aware of. I've added the javascript applet to my blog, as you can see. And I'd really like to see us add the librarything tags to our catalog.

more del.icio.us hacks

I'm seeing more possibilities for library applications in del.icio.us. Seeing that you can use link rolls to generate links within a Web page, it seemed like it would be useful to be able to upload any lists of links you'd already published. Since delicious doesn't have a direct means of uploading links except through browser bookmarks, I set out to find a way to bulk load links from files into Firefox bookmarks and from there into delicious. I'd heard of "screen scraping" as a way of pulling the data from a Web site you were viewing, but searching Google didn't help find anything I could make use of.

In the process I found an article about exporting bookmarks from IE which mentioned the favorites file. That set me to looking for a bookmarks file, which I then copied to my desktop. This seems to be a simple html document with a DL tagged list. Copying the format for the entries I found there, I was able to upload a list of links I pulled from another file. (I haven't figured out how to display html tags within a blog post - it is treated as code instead of raw text.) After a bit of trial and error I was able to bulk load more than 1,000 entries into my Firefox bookmarks and from there directly into delicious.

http://del.icio.us/ldjaffe

Here I've encountered two new frustrations with delicious. First, it automatically marks all the items bulk loaded in this way as "unshared" and I haven't found a way to change this setting in a lump. Second, I'd like delicious to feature a link checker. That would make sense, no?

Back to the project: the idea isn't to have uploaded a lot of links for its own sake. I'm looking at ways to re-use this information in library guides once it has been properly tagged. I've started one example at my Geocities site.

http://www.jaffebros.com/pottery/

I hope this will replace the old pottery links site I started years ago. It currently runs on Filemaker but hasn't worked well since Filemaker has changed some of its features. It's not pretty at the moment but I'm just sketching in the raw content before I begin worrying about how it looks. I think there is enough there, however, to demonstrate the functionality.

technorati redeemed ... sorta

Since I had the technorati window open still I tried searching again after using ping-o-matic to ping my blog. Searching a couple of words I'd used to tag one of my posts, it found my entry this time. It was even on the first page, though still below a couple of spam entries and just before a teenage rant about driver's education that would have gotten me sent to military school.

I'm glad to see that the exercise worked but I continue to be unsold on the value of blogs. I'm getting old and I don't want to know what everyone thinks.

Tagging (isn't that ...?)

The good news is that Ping-O-Matic seems to be working today. I pinged 4-5 services, including Technorati since I don't see my item showing up after directly pinging that site yesterday.

The bad news is that searching Technorati for my tag terms resulted in dozens of hits, all but 1-2 of which are spam and none were my post. I had to scroll through screen after screen of ads for poker and cialis. I work very hard to filter that stuff out of my email -- which I need -- so why would I ever, ever spend any time with a new, and mostly useless, venue that is 90% spam, 9.99% hateful, ignorant racist, misogynist rants, and 0.01% thoughtful and compassionate?

After this exercise, I need a shower.

p.s. to complete the thought in the title "tagging is a) what dogs and other canines do to mark their territory and b) another name for graffiti

Week 6. Tagging

Ping-o-matic repeatedly times out. I tried different sites to ping to see if that was the cause, but it happened no matter what I tried.

del.icio.us part 3

OK, so here's the cool stuff (which completely trumps any of the issues I mentioned in my last post).

* link rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls
You'll find this function under "settings" (not help). At its simplest it creates a javascript string you can paste into an HTML document that will pull your links into your Web page live. That means any changes you make to your del.icio.us links will change on your page. This alone is cool enough - IMHO - for us to drop everything and start building up libraries of del.icio.us links and importing them into our subject guides.

To see any example of the sort of thing I'll describe below, see
http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html

I was really surprised that none of the examples of libraries using del.icio.us took advantage of this capability. Two just pointed to their del.icio.us site and one imported the entire tag cloud into a page. It seems you can do so much more with the link roll function AND feature it within your existing Web site that this is the way to go. No? Yes!

And, that's just the minimum. The link roll utility let's you specify which items are displayed and customize how your links will look. Some of these features aren't (well) documented, but if you look around a bit and experiment, you can figure out some easy hacks. For instance, you can specify more than one condition (additional tags) be met for inclusion of links (e.g., library+pathfinder). If you thought ahead, you could tag your links with this in mind. For instance, if you were doing a guide for a class, tag all the related links with the class number and some other feature (astro101+reference, astro+journals, etc). Then build a page that clusters those items according to relevant categories. You can easily generate four or five link roll scripts and paste them into a page to make a quick and easy guide.

The trick here is getting the links into del.icio.us. I was hoping to find a way to bulk import Web page contents directly or at least to import them into a browser's bookmarks as an intermediate step but haven't found one yet. I did use the menubar tool to add all the links from one of my guides but that was tedious. However, I think that's going to be worthwhile in the long run.

* tag rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls
For the moment, I think these look cooler than they really are (but maybe I shouldn't underestimate the importance of looking good). These are less apparently customizable than the link rolls, but only apparently. Having generated scripts for both formats, I noticed that they shared similar syntax, which suggested that you could limit tag clouds to links with specific tags. The example we were pointed to included all the tags for all the links in a particular collection, whether or not they were relevant. Obviously you can manage that by having subject-specific collections but that rubs against the grain.

original javascript code:

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

... and the hacked version (all caps)

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe/JEWISH+LIBRARY?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

So, take a look and let me know what you think. http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html

del.icio.us part 2

Still loving this utility and finding more and more features that look like they can be useful, either for personal use or as a library tool (or both).

Before going into some of what I've discovered, having used del.icio.us intensively for the past couple of days, here are a few link management functions I'd like to see added to its capabilities:

* duplicate management - it's easy to import duplicate links by accident (e.g., it treats http://library.ucsc.edu/ and http://library.ucsc.ed/home.html as different links) and I'd like to have some way to look at or search my links to sort this out.

* organizing links - it shows your personal links only sorted newest first. you can see all the links sorted by either newest or most popular and with link rolls it allows you to sort alphabetically by title. but it only let's you see you see your links in one, not too useful way.

* flakiness - I can't be absolutely sure but I feel like I've had to edit some links more than once before I've managed to make them stick; and I'm also under the impression that some bookmarks imported from Firefox never made it; but I could be wrong...and eventually things have made it into place, so no permanent harm

* skanky links - the problem with humanity is people and del.icio.us has a lot of people adding links and some of those people are hateful and add their hateful links to this site. For instance, searching 'jewish' for interesting links, I found "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" tagged as a serious document without any indication of its status as a forgery or its antisemitic nature. I'm wondering whether I can add relevant tags? It seems to require that I add the link to my list in the process. Could I delete it afterwards? Would my added tags go away as a result?

That's it for now... I think I'll add my cool discoveries to my next post

del.icio.us

... just like the name. I'm loving this tool! I've had bookmarks on at least three different computers, and even more different browsers, for years and haven't found a way to coordinate my resources before this. This makes me very very happy.

I actually signed up to delicious months ago but was using a public computer at the time and got stuck at the point where it allows you to install menu bar utilities for your browser and import bookmarks. It took until this assignment for me to get back to it. It helps that I've switched to Firefox in the intervening time. It was a bit tricky figuring out how to bulk import Safari book marks (first import them into Firefox and then use delicious import tool in Firefox).

Having spent the first while organizing (checking and re-tagging) my bookmarks within delicious, I've just started to scratch the surface of what it can do. I've tried searching for other sources by tags and have added some good resources into my list. I'm also very interested in the Link Roll feature. I don't have any lists that are as complete or as clean as I'd like, but I can see some very nice applications for this.

The whole idea of collective tagging and sharing resources seems to be the perfect embodiment of Web 2.0.

mySpace chapter 2 - the evacuation

I keep getting msgs from Tom and now one from Christina who was so taken with my profile she just had to write. I tried to block her but somehow mySpace sent me to her profile -- she likes long walks on the beach, candle-light dinners and bondage -- and it still says she's in my circle (or whatever you call it). This is not a community that interested me in the first place and the very rapid intrusion of unwanted solicitations and the poor mechanisms for managing them pushed me over the edge. I've canceled my account. There is just too much crap in the world already to indulge in something that leads to more.

p.s. Another participant called MySpace "seedy" and said you felt "sticky when logging in." I quite agree. I think this was poorly thought out. MySpace is too wide-open, too much of a dating (hitting on) scene, and too open to abuse to serve as a useful platform. I understand that it is an important part of Web 2.0 but so are bars, strip clubs and casinos a significant part of the social environment in the real world. 'nuf said.

my second so-called life : weak 5

From what little I'd seen of it, I was not disposed to take SL seriously. Having reviewed the 3 recommended videos, plus another from Ohio State that showed up in YouTube, I'm less interested than ever. I've also read an article in my SLIS alumni newsletter.

All I want to say is, if this is the best that it's adherents and fans have got to show for themselves, then I'm ready to write it off. (Seeing librarians dance is bad enough but seeing their avatars "dance" will put me off dancing for awhile.) There is something so sad, I'm afraid of laughing, but it looks like a renaissance faire for anime' fans. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time (and I watch a lot of sitcoms and browse eBay auctions).

My objection isn't about techn0logy but about the inept application of technology. I keep thinking of the doctor in "Star Trek: Voyager." He's a holographic creation, meaning he is a visual manifestation of a computer system. Yet, in repeated episodes, this computer avatar sits down at computer console to type at the keyboard and review information on the screen. He's a computer: whatever he knows the compute knows and whatever the computer knows he knows. He doesn't need to type!

I kept thinking of this while watching a demonstration of SL where one avatar needed to be in a particular virtual space in order to rendevous with another. They had to "look around" to see if they could "see" the other. Both avatars are computer manifestations. Why such a strict adherence to physical metaphors, esp. in a world where avatars fly and teleport to locations?

Similarly, information is re-rendered in physical containers, with virtual books put in trunks and you need to be in physical proximity to find out what is in them. Why? Why create a virtual world that mimics the physical one -- particularly the least useful ones -- and subsequently limits it?

When I eventually get involved in a virtual world it will be one that has transcended the physical metaphor to a significant extent. Until then, I'm fine with my so-called first life.

mySpace: week 5

Something I did this time worked and I have a mySpace account. It is far creepier than I imagined. As soon as I joined I already had a "friend" -- Tom Sherwood -- who I immediately stood in front of a wall and had shot. This instant friend business is a sure sign of social decay.

There is all sorts of other garbage on my page I really don't understand or want. I don't want to take the trouble to fix it or clean it up since I'm not staying any longer than necessary.

The Randy Newman song, "Mama told me not to come..." keeps running through my head.

I was in San Diego this weekend and saw a t-shirt that read, "You were much cuter on mySpace."

notMySpace: week 4.2

OK, I decided to suck it up and join MySpace for the sake of the assignment. That part about "invite Library Learning 2.0" made it hard to move forward without doing this. But it wouldn't let me join! First, as a joke (and a test of what I encountered with NING) I tried entering my birthday as 2/31/06 and it wouldn't let me in. The first few times it didn't say why, but on the third try I changed the date to 2/28/06 and got an error message:

We’re sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register on MySpace.com.

So then I corrected the date, making it 2/28/54 and I got the same error message. Am I now too old? That's ok by me.

I tried, I really tried, but I can't say I'm too disappointed that I couldn't register.

social networking: week 4.1

This is starting to enter into uncomfortable territory for me. I've lived a good part of my life online, so the "virtual world" is not exactly new to me. But lame is lame. I just couldn't bring myself to set up a MySpace site with all the implications of sexual predation involved. Afterall, I'm a 53 year old male: what am I going to do on this site? Again, trying to honor the spirit of assignment rather than the letter, I set up a Ning account instead, since the intro explained that it focused on groups. I've been maintaining a Yahoo mail group for my high school class since 2000 and thought that a social networking site might be a better platform than the stale (and stalled) email exchanges we've maintained. Therefore I created a group for my class at http://chs1971.ning.com. I've sent mail through the Yahoo list to invite members.

One odd item about ning: When first signing up it asked almost nothing of me. However, the photo I uploaded didn't display right. Going back to change that required editing my profile. But this insisted on supplying more information than I wanted to share. In frustration, I entered my birthdate at February 31, 2006 and it accepted it!

I think that as these exercises continue I'm going to find I'm more and more uncomfortable with conducting silly activities online. While I've been pretty open to some sort of online existence and have been active in a wide variety of network initiatives, there are some places where I draw the line. In this case, have a space for a group I already belong to makes sense to me. Getting online to join a group which interests me also seems like a good use of the medium. I've been part of discussion lists for library technology, pottery, and 18th century studies.

I'm also interested in tools that let me do things I cannot do in any other form. I was an early member of librarything (http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ldjaffe) and I've been posting pictures on Shutterfly for years. I belong to the Long Now Foundation and participate in discussions there. I even had a blog for a little while but dropped it when I found I couldn't maintain a reasonable level of currency.

But I have to say that I don't get some of these social networking tools for their own sakes. It reminds me of the Dave Barry column where he compared the Internet to CD Radio, "only with more typing." Trying to get beyond the personal to the professional aspects of these tools, I can see where some might have library applications. We looked, for instance, at a wiki tool for the suggestion box (but the available system at the time wouldn't support our needs) but perhaps a public blog might be the way to go in the near future. I could also see a more interactive set of Web tools as a future platform for the Library's Web site. I mentioned earlier that I could see something like a blog for different "what's new" pages. I already maintain a series of pages for Jewish studies research, including a fairly static set of "new titles" pages. A blog could replace this in a snap.

But do I want to be a librarian in MySpace? Categorically and unconditionally, no!

RSS or blogs: week 4

We seem to be back at blogs and there seems to be some confusion about blogs and RSS. Almost any Web content can be shared as an RSS feed and the fact that it makes most sense to syndicate regularly updated sites shouldn't lead to confusion between RSS feeds and blogs. I wouldn't call the NYTimes news feed a blog. Referring randomly to RSS feeds as blogs makes me feel like we're going backwards. I'm experiencing deja vu and not enjoying it much.

I managed to add a Flickr site -- the "interesting, new photos" feed but not the main page -- to the feeds on MyYahoo. Again, not a blog (as far as I can tell) but still an RSS feed. I already mentioned adding the 23 Things blog to MyYahoo. Oddly, I can't add my own (this) blog. It tries and says it can't do it and suggests I try again later. So maybe it is just some temporary issue at Yahoo's end.

Setting aside my hairsplitting, I think that the potential for RSS in the library is enormous. I think blogs by themselves are pretty tedious if the user needs to seek them out and read them. Coupled with the RSS feed capability where they can be published to a space the users already visit it is an entirely different matter. I mentioned finding a Jewish studies library blog -- the selector at a library communicating news about the collection and services to his constituency -- and can see adding this tool to our kit just as it is. It would be even more useful if it can be syndicated and therefore fed to another site. We do have feedsplitter on the Library's Web site that allows displaying RSS feeds within a Web page. I don't know if any live sites are using it but I've been experimenting with it for a project . You can see an example at http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/admin/educ.html

One question is where the potential for RSS publishing exists within the tools we have. Does cruzcat or melvyl allow syndication? Wouldn't it be cool to feel a canned search (e.g., most recent titles on a particular subject)? Can we feed from wiki or RT or cruztime? I know Zope supports RSS in both directions.

The other item is publishing outside info within our sites. On a simple level it maybe just a matter of including the RSS address with the sources we list. But if we can include (feedsplitter, again) live content within our pages that's so much better.

RSS: week 3

I already have a lot of experience with RSS and I really didn't want to create yet another account on another service. I have a MyYahoo page that allows me to install RSS feeds on my main page. I already installed various news sources, a couple of cartoons, and local movie times, local weather and a mapping tool. Since one of the sources mentions using Yahoo as an aggregator instead of BlogLines, I'm going to honor the spirit, if not the letter, of this exercise. For the sake of this exercise I've added the 23 Things feed to MyYahoo page.

This brings me to another issue, the proliferation of sites to manage an online life. Yahoo was already my main site for my personal life online. As mentioned, I have some stuff on my MyYahoo page and it is my email site. I belong to a Yahoo email group (it started out independent but was acquired by Yahoo later). My personal Web site started as Geocities until it was acquired by Yahoo. Now I have a Flickr site (again owned by Yahoo). I did try blogging within my Yahoo site but the editor really sucked. In a way Yahoo was my online aggregator.

But now with these exercises, I'm getting new sites to manage. We're only 3-4 weeks into this and I've got several more new places to keep my stuff than I did before. I thought the virtual world was supposed to make things simpler or better!

I think that as part of a side issue, I'm going to look for ways to integrate as much of this stuff as I can. I've already added an RSS feed from Flickr on MyYahoo. I'm going to see if I can also add this blog to MyYahoo.

week 2.21 (flickr searching)

First rule: Do not search for the term "library" unless you can dedicate the next 8 hours to sleep and are not planning to drive or operate heaving machinery. I was actually hoping to see some sort of assessment project using photography that I could use as an example for a future project here. (I did find a collection of photos from the library assessment conference I attended last year, but I'm not in any of them.) The assessment project was probably not a realistic expectation, but I'm thinking that we should post any assessment pictures we do on Flickr now that I've seen it.

I generally like the intersection of lots and lots of pictures and tags. Most search results -- with some humorous false hits -- are right on the money. It ain't precise but it is fun. For instance, search "UCSC". I also searched "hummingbird" and saw an amazing variety (10s of thousands) of photos like mine. Even searching "hummingbird UCSC arboretum" brings on about a dozen hits.

On the other hand, I didn't see my own pictures. Even though I uploaded my photos last evening (July 2) and reviewed them by most recent first, my pictures don't show up. Hmmmm. It isn't a case of recentness, because I see other July 2nd uploads. I guess I'll double check my tagging or maybe my permissions...

In the meantime, I did some other searching with mixed results. The map business needs rethinking. They can only show about 25 photos per page, so when you browse or even search via maps, you have to page through page after page. Focusing on Santa Cruz means many pages with no SC content for every one that has. I don't get the point. Somehow it should be able to show only pages with photos in that region, no?

One other interesting approach is looking at groups. There are 190 "librarians" groups. (See health alert above.)

Again, I think this is more fun (i.e. social) than practical. Library apps? Still thinking about that.

week 2.2 (flickr)

I set up a Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/ldjaffe) but had to do the uploads from home since that is where my iPhoto library is.

I found out that flickr's uploader isn't compatible with Safari, but that's hardly news. I got bogged down trying to figure out Uploadr's "authorization" process which was launching Firefox in another window. I think maybe because this is a kind of backwards assignment the process of finding photos to upload into Flickr was more awkward than it needs to be. It doesn't really let you browse the iPhoto library with ease so I had to first find photos in my iPhoto library, note the date and filename and then browse directories accordingly. It's a little cumbersome.

By comparison, I have had a Shutterfly account for a few years and that let's me "share" (upload) photos directly from iPhotos via a free plug-in. That way I can be looking at a photo in iPhoto and decide then and there to upload it without a lot of extra steps. I will note that Shutterfly has a different focus - they sell prints and sharing is a secondary proccess. I did set up a shared album for this assignment. http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AaM2jhq0bs2FE¬ag=1 But there is no general access to photos in Shutterfly.

Back to Flickr ... I'm slowly getting on top of some of the basics. For instance, I noticed that some photos were tagged with the camera model. I tagged mine accordingly and then did a tag search for this model. I saw a lot of photos come up without the tag and discovered camera information ("taken with..." ) embedded in a "further information" section. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to add or edit this part before discovering that it was included automatically when I uploaded my photos.

My other issue is that the "My Photos" display defaults to showing the photos in the order they were loaded. I was working backwards through my iPhoto album during the upload process and so the images are in reverse order. I was able to resort the photos in the set (there is a sort order option), but I can't discover any way to change the order on this opening screen. it is a small thing but annoying.

Week 2.1

A bit of a breakthrough on the blog search front. A comment on the Library2.0 site mentioned Technorati "Blog Directory Search" function. I'm still a bit mystified by some of the items that appeared, but a search for "Jewish studies" here did retrieve a couple of likely candidates. One is a blog ty the Jewish studies librarian at Washington University, St. Louis and it looks like just the kind of thing we ought to be doing for our users here. So, there is hope after all.

Week 2.0

I followed the link to the Wikipedia article on the blogosphere. I was particularly interested in looking at some of the aggregators or search systems that I'd seen mentioned and recommended in some of the other blogs. They're not listed, so I'm wondering if there is a better source for this information. Searched Google and found LISZEN by name. (I later found LISZEN and LibDex lower down in our site blog... I thought the link out to Wikipedia was the path we were supposed to follow.)

I tried searching "Jewish" to see what Jewish Studies materials are online - I could really use a JS library blog to support my work. No such luck. The results seem to be random. I either get an entry in a blog where "Jewish" is mentioned in passing or I get to the top of a site with no obvious Jewish content and if I search the site internally I find a single post with the word "Jewish" embedded somewhere, but no significant content. It may be a case of the content just not being there, but it is still frustrating to get so many false leads. Where is the good stuff?

LibDex is a bit of a mystery to me. Why the geographic orientation? This seems counterintuitive in the online world. There were a couple of broken images on the page and trying to find a search box or some subject approach, one of the Links listed took me to a lighting store. Hmmm? And, as long as I'm feeling cranky, why don't these sites say something more about what they are doing?

Finally, using Google's blog search I found a site featuring the Association of Jewish Librarian's 2007 conference. I tracked back to the assocation's main site and found "The Book of Life: a podcast about Jewish people and the books we read." It isn't really a blog though it is featured on blogspot.com, so I may be getting ahead of myself. I'll reserve this for the section on podcasting but it is as close to what I'd been trying to find as I can manage so far.

I found some interesting other sites but no blogs worth reading or revisitng. Maybe it just isn't out there.

day 1.1

I tried Technorati and searched it with a word. The first view was confusing and pretty useless. It searched blog ENTRIES and displayed them in order of posting date. I saw a lot of irrelevant garbage with little relevance to my interest. Looking for a way to sort by other criteria (Relevance or Ranking or ?) I found a tab for displaying by Blog, which turned out to filter out most of the random stuff.

There still didn't seem to be any way to adjust the sort order and I wasn't clear about how they ranked items. Looked at 5-6 blogs, selecting by title and description, and still was disappointed with the content at the other end. Most seemed to be rants and quite a few were inarticulate (lots of ALL CAPS and misspellings). Many were uniformed or misinformed. (I saw one rant that included a follow-up revealing that the subject of the rant turned out to be a hoax. Never mind!) Even some of the better put-together sites were like reading someone else's diary and would require a lot more energy and time than I care to invest.

I don't get blogs, at least not the personal ones. Well, I get why people write them but I don't get why anyone reads them. (I had a blog and after the initial rush of getting my ideas "out there" I found the energy waned and the space between entries got longer and long. I eventually just let it die, less than a couple months of starting it.) The blogs that seem to make the most sense to me are those that reflect the interactions of a community, where the members discuss issues of interest to them. But that's of interest to the members of that community. Interestingly, I didn't find any of that sort of blog -- even when searching by name -- with Technorati.

Back to the mechanics of searching blogs: it seems that given the random nature of the material there, keyword and even tag searching is bound to be frustrating. Trying Technorati's Advanced Search had some advantages in limiting retrieved items, but ironically didn't offer the "Blog" view, so I was stuck with a pretty random list with no way to get to the higher level view. I tried the same with bloglines and blogscope with similar results. I'm inclined to believe that it isn't the search engines problem but that of the unfiltered and generally useless nature of the blog world.

day 1

I've started my blog. Like most people, I don't have anything important to say. Unlike most, I'll stop here.