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!