We’re kind of trapped (in a good way) in a social networking track here at bar camp day 2. I combined sessions with Sam Wallin — he wanted to discuss general social networks and how they relate to libraries. I wanted to talk about Facebook (and other apps) and what adoption of it (and related, heavily architected tools) means to info professionals.

Like Kathleen noted, lots of questions and few answers. I proposed that Facebook might become the killer app and that people will then use Facebook as kind of homebase or main tool (in some cases taking the place of other tools — email, IM, etc — at least in some contexts.), In such a situation, how does the “generic” or architected nature of the site impact the work that info pros can do to expidite the flow of information.

Again, not a lot of answers but a lot of disagreement with me. Many people felt that they don’t see facebook as the killer app — for that to happen there needs to be some way to separate personal and work lives (and separate the networks you belong to in those cases). And if you do separate those parts of your life, then the would shut down the ubiquitous nature of Facebook.

To some degree I can relate to that idea. I agree that you don’t want to do work networking on a site where you post photos of your drunken new years eve episode. I’m not sure if the answer is more social networks. Maybe it’s more thoughtful use of a main network where you limit what you share to make it appropriate for a broader group of users and then belong to special networks (or have a specialized blog or web page or usenetgroup or whatever) for your “fringe” activities.

I liked Justin’s philosophy — he doles out little “tidbits” of information on Facebook. People can learn a little bit more about him based on the groups he belongs to and how he interacts with those however they don’t get a lot of detail from his profile alone.

For what it’s worth, I’m willing to say I might be wrong on one count (at least). Facebook might not kill Linkedin (one of the many inflammatory things I said today). In fact, Linkedin may get stronger because it fills one of those fringe area needs I discuss above. For example you may say you are an interaction designer on your facebook profile, but may not want to throw in your resume or client list up there. Instead, you can let your Linked-in profile fill that need.

I’m not sure what all this means for me…I’ve got some more thinking to do. How about you?

I’m in my first session today at infoCamp day 2. Today’s a bit smaller than yesterday so it will be interesting to see how it goes. We may get some more focused discussion or it may have a little less energy.

Right now I’m in a session about social software and its uses in professional organizations. We’re talking a lot about facebook and what purposes it serves. People are struggling with personas and how much information they want to push out to others. How do they control the information that gets pushed out? How does linkedin relate to facebook? Will there still be a place for linkedin the more and more popular facebook becomes? How do you leverage these tools in an organization?

Lots of questions. Not a lot of answers. But that’s good.

Tim and I are at our second day of InfoCamp. Bob Boiko, teacher, consultant, business person, developer and information leader, is doing the opening session today. He’s pushing the crowd to really think about what tools we have in our toolboxes as information professionals. We have to think practically and concretely so we can understand our roles which will help us understand our value to an organization and can work successfully in an organization. He’s doing a great job of helping people to think about what they mean when they say, “I can help you find the information you need.” How is that helpful to your client? What concrete tools and skills are you bringing to your client?Since we’re in the Information Age, it only makes sense that information professionals lead the information age. There’s a lot of untapped value in information professionals as leaders.

That’s me blowing the dust off this blog after a summer hiatus (as well as time spent on my bike blog.

Today, Kathleen and I are at InfoCamp, a conference designed to “cross pollinate” the information ecosystem (think: Information architects, librarians, usability pros, and other UX minded folks). I’m sure we’ll have something to talk about.

Right now we’re getting a key note from Nick Finck from Blue Flavor talking (mostly) about the role info pros can play in the growing mobile space.

Stay tuned!

I just returned from the Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference in Denver. The SLA is an (inter-) national association for librarians working in less-traditional settings (think corporate, news, competitive intelligence, etc). I’ll blog more about in the next couple days, but for now …
The conference included some highlights, such as an Al Gore as keynote discussing our current inability to use information wisely in decision making, Michael Tiemann from redhat making some interesting points about a copyright and patent system gone awry, and some great information about microformats and how they’ll enable information sharing and searching for social networks.

With the good you sometimes have to take the bad. In the same session as the microformats (“Mining Social Neworking Sites: Rich Resources Lie in Wait for Those Who Dig”), I was disappointed to hear Regina Avila, assistant library director tell of the Denver Post library’s “innovative” mining of social network sites. They use these sites to dig up information on minors to help reporters who are researching news stories. The actually mining doesn’t bother me– I’m a former reporter myself and know you gotta get sources — it’s the idea that they are doing this and obviously haven’t considered the ramifications (and potential chilling effect) this practice could have at a time when lawmakers, educators, and parents are trying to limit access to these sites. This is one you’ll hear more about from me later.

By the way, we’re sorry for the posting lag. It’s graduation week (actually graduation day!) for Kathleen and I. The past couple weeks have flown by with little to show on the blog. I’m sure we’ll make up for that soon.

I picked up David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellanous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder the other day. I’ve only read 30 pages or so but it’s great so far. It’s very thought provoking, especially for me as an LIS student. It’s got me thinking about the power of organization and how everyone’s organization is different. When I first picked up the book, I was struck by the dedication: To the librarians. I thought it was an interesting homage to the librarians who perhaps had influenced Weinberger. But when I got about 10 pages into the book, I soon realized how wrong I’d been. It’s more about encouraging librarians to read the book and think about the power of organization in a different way. And that there’s no “right” way to organize. The power lies in finding a system that allows each of us to organize in our own way, for our own goals, in our own context. And to help people find meaning in their organization. And then I read this quote from David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous blog and realized I was on the right track:

I said that the Aristotelian assumptions, combined with the limitations of paper-based knowledge, lead to authority over knowledge being placed in the hands of a few. The few tend to be highly qualified and often selfless, but it still is a power regime. Although I didn’t say this last night, that’s why I am so enamored of the idea that fundamentally the Internet is ours. In fact, another way to say what the book is about would be: Everything Is Miscellaneous is about meaning becoming ours.

Excellent. I am digging this book and cannot wait to read more. I encourage all you librarians (and non-librarians) out there to read it. It’s all about what I’ve been studying these last two years. And not.

I’m sure you’ve all been following (at least heard of) the DRM/censorship/power of community story at Digg. For those who haven’t, here’s a quick overview:

Hackers, as hackers are wont to do, cracked the the DRM on the HD-DVD standard. This was pretty much inevitable. These nutty hackers have broken every other DRM scheme to date, so this one was probably doomed from the beginning. This crack in the DRM opens the door for people, in a best case scenario, to make back up copies of discs they own. Of course, the industry points of the wost-case scenario: That the sole purpose of these cracks is to steal intellectual property and pirate lots of movies. Personally I think it’s somewhere in the middle, but that’s a discussion for another post or 10.

Anyway, the Digg community got a hold of this code and kept bumping it to the top of Digg’s list of “dug” web pages. Digg, fearful of take down notices and lawsuits under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA, started deleting these links, but as fast as they could delete them, their community added more links. The battle escalated to the point where ALL the top links on Digg were about either the DRM code or Digg’s censorship of the story.

At that point, Digg capitulated to their user base and let the links stay. Rather than losing the sure-thing (their users) by continuing to remove links and tick off their user base, they chose to make a stand against potential DMCA notices. As Dig founder Kevin Rose noted in his blog (where he actually posted the code in question), “If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

Lots of issues here, but I’m interested in the aspect of the community revolt. Were the users successful here because the community is still small enough and homegeneous enough that everyone felt the same way? Is it because Digg founders realize that no matter how cool Digg is, there’s no barrier keeping their community intact. In an online environment these days, these communities have lots of options for their loyalty.

My guess if that the Digg founders realized this and also realized they certainly weren’t going to get rich if they gave into the DRM legal forces and lost their user base. Better to take a risk fighting the take-down notice than just watch your community disappear, I guess. I’m not sure if that’s quite as noble as Rose makes it out to be, but it’s an interesting angle nonetheless.

Some links worth checking out:

• Overview on Digg at Wikipedia
• Nice Analysis from Donna Bogatin at ZD Net.
• New York Times article

I commented on Plone in my “Open Source Social Software” post last week. I still think it’s a great CMS and a great way to go if you can put in the time to get it set up right. What a lot of people don’t know is that a Plone isn’t limited to a plain vanilla interface (like you see by default at Plone.org and with a default install.). I think the default is OK looking, but if people knew what it _could_ be, they might be a little more motivated to embrace a fresh design from the start.

Thankfully, the folks behind Plone have gathered the work of talented designers, coders, and the like, at a nice gallery on Plone.net The collection site itself is a is a step beyond the out-of-the box Plone look. Check it out. Maybe you’ll get some ideas to add a little zing to your vanilla.

David Weinberger, Tim Spaulding (of LibraryThing fame) and Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) were on Radio Open Source yesterday. You can listen to it here. I haven’t listened but I plan to be downloading it to my iPod so I can listen on the bus one day soon. They talked about Daivid Weinberger’s new book and the organization of all digital. Christopher Lydon refers to it as a “new taxonomy of knowledge taking shape”. Tune in. I’m sure it’s a good one.

I’m always looking for the mediating technology that Kathleen mentions (number 4). For a while I thought Plone was going to be my ticket to some kind of librarian-makes-good-via-content-organization consulting goodness. Heck, I even went the conference and got the t-shirt.

I’m still groovin’ on Plone, but you know what? It’s hard. It’s a great tool for managing all your content and maybe for building (and maintaining) a web presence from scratch. But what what about if you already have some stuff going on? You know…. you’ve got an intranet. and maybe some servers with files shares? Or some folks on your team have or want to start their own WordPress or other blog? To make Plone work in a situation like this you either some serious coding ju-ju or you gotta start from scratch.

Sure, a complete Plone site can be effective, cost-efficient, and easy-to-maintain, but starting over is not the answer for everyone. In my past content life I lived with terrible sites I wasn’t allowed to scrap. Many of these, though, these could have been dramatically improved with just the slightest bit of social software love. I suppose that’s why I’ve been thinking lately about ways to integrate some social features into such existing settings.

One potential I’m excited about is the open source tool Elgg. I still need to dig into it more deeply (perhaps in my post-graduation unemployment come June?), but this thing has some potential. According to the blurb at SourceForge, “Elgg is an open source social networking platform developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more.”

Simply put, it’s a tool that enables you to provide some of those fancy social features all the cool kids today are using — on your existing platform. Want to provide your users a blog? Wiki? Online IDs and messaging? It’s looking to me that Elgg could be your answer. A titillatingly titled Wired article on social software trends in education talks about Elgg is being used at the University of Brighton (UK), France Telecom, and others.

You can get Elgg in a whitebox, open source, customize-it-yourself platform, or you can purchase a ready-to-roll, supported enterprise version. We can talk later about the effective use OSS participation incentives (in this case, the open source developer also runs a company that sells an enterprise version), but that’s another post or two.

So far I’m really taken with the profile page functionality you can provide for users. In many cases that might be all you need (but come on, don’t stop there….). ‘ll dig around in this and report back in a while.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out where I heard about Elgg — the American Libraries Association! Imagine that…I’m on the web looking for cool stuff all the time and I find this cool software in an ALA email (well, it was actually just a link to the actually pretty poor Wired story, but I think ALA still gets props for sending me in the right direction). Dave Tosh of Elgg and CurveRider posts over at EduSpaces (yes, an Elgg platformed site) clears up some misinformation in the Wired story starts another conversation.

So, anyone out there used Elgg? Have another worthy tool I’ve missed?