April 23, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Lovereading is a site for readers ...
Lovereading was founded for book lovers by book lovers in 2005.
These days, it is harder than ever to find the book you want to read next - particularly because of the sheer volume and choice of books you can find on the net. So at Lovereading, we only feature books we have read and believe are great reads in their category.
We have developed some unique online tools to help you choose your next read, including free 10-15 page Opening Extracts of every one of our Featured Books. And our readers particularly appreciate the regular magazines we send them recommending books they like might love to read in their categories of choice these are completely free and come with no commitment to buy.
Since we started Lovereading, we have added more and more books, ( we now have over 5,000 Opening Extracts) more and more unique features (you will love Author Like for Like) and more and more readers all of whom we would like to thank for their ongoing help and support. [lovereading - make the most of lovereading]
It is interesting to see the focus on the human touch here when so much is made of ranking, relating and recommending based on the aggregate trace of the crowd.
I have just returned from a trip. The emphasis of Lovereading seems to be on fiction, so I thought I would check for the three novels that accompanied me on the trip:
- I took C.J.Box's Savage Run, based on a recommendation from somebody who had seen my previous note about Wyoming mysteries. OK, but I might not read another one, I thought.
- I bought Borderlands in Dublin airport, curious to read a contemporary crime novel set on both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I didn't like the story but might read another one given the setting.
- I bought Open doors and three novellas by Leonardo Sciascia in the very fine London Review Bookshop in, er, London. I like the author and hadn't seen this particular collection before.
So, armed with this test collection I approached lovereading.co.uk.
Savage Run was not listed, although there were two other books by Box. There were no 'like for like' recommendations for C J Box.
Borderlands was listed, and in a 'like for like' search on Brian McGilloway, Declan Hughes was returned. I have seen Declan Huges in bookshops but have not read anything by him, so I do not know how good the recommendation is. There is also a useful link to a Google search for reviews.
There were several books by Sciascia but not this one. There was no 'like for like' recommendation for Sciascia.
I wonder will they open the site up to reader input at some stage? And let the crowds in?
April 06, 2008
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Categories:
Featured
, Social networking
More of a linked list of other people's thoughts ... about egos and objects. I quote some pieces below: all of the posts are suggestive and worth reading. The linking theme is that people connect and share themselves through 'social objects', pictures, books, or other shared interests, and that successful social networks are those which form around such social objects.
Here is Fred Stutzman in a post which contrasts ego-centric and object-centric social networks. Flickr or Librarything are object-centric networks, while Facebook is an ego-centric one.
In a post I wrote exploring the network effect multiplier, the value proposition of object-centric social networks is described. Object-centric social networks offer core value, which is multiplied by network value. A great photo-hosting service like Flickr stands alone without the network, making it less susceptible to migration. An ego-centic network, on the other hand, has limited core-value - it's value is largely in the network - making it highly susceptible to migration. We see this with Myspace: individuals lose little in terms of affordances when they migrate from Myspace to Facebook, making the main chore of migration network-reestablishment, a chore made ever-simpler as the migration cascade continues. [Unit Structures: Social Network Transitions]
In a much discussed post, Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku talks about the importance of objects in mediating connections between people. He talks about the "'social just means people' fallacy", suggesting that FOAF, for example, will not work because it tries to connect people to people without representing the objects around which they connect.
Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. [zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don't Or: the case for object-centered sociality]
Here is a report of a talk by Jyri Engestrom where he talks about five key principles involved in a successful social network built around objects.
- You should be able to define the social object your service is built around
- Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It's clear what the site is for.
- How can people share the objects?
- Turn invitations into gifts
- Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don't pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.
[NMKForum07: Jyri of Jaiku. Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns in the chaos]
These thoughts are picked up interestingly by Hugh MacLeod (of gapingvoid fame). He suggests that sometimes he will use 'sharing device' rather than 'social object' in conversation. Social networks are built around social objects, he suggests, not the other way around; the objects are nodes which appear before the network, and around which it forms.
5. Yesterday at the Darden talk I explained why geeks have become so important to marketing. My definition of a geek is, "Somebody who socializes via objects." When you think about it, we're all geeks. Because we're all enthusiastic about something outside ourselves. For me, it's marketing and cartooning. for others, it could be cellphones or Scotch Whisky or Apple computers or NASCAR or the Boston Red Sox or Bhuddism. All these act as Social Objects within a social network of people who care passionately about the stuff. Whatever industry you are in, there's somebody who is geeked out about your product category. They are using your product [or a competitor's product] as a Social Object. If you don't understand how the geeks are socializing- connecting to other people- via your product, then you don't actually have a marketing plan. Heck, you probably don't have a viable business plan. [gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": more thoughts on social objects]
John Breslin picks up the theme in practical terms and has some pictures which try to show this 'decentralized me'.
I’ve extended my previous picture showing a person being linked across communities to this idea of people (via their user profiles) being connected by the content they create together, co-annotate, or for which they use similar annotations. Bob and Carol are connected via bookmarked URLs that they both have annotated and also through events that they are both attending, and Alice and Bob are using similar tags and are subscribed to the same blogs. [T-SIOC, object-centered sociality at Cloudlands]
And a final quote from Hugh MacLeod.
14. The most important word on the internet is not "Search". The most important word on the internet is "Share". Sharing is the driver. Sharing is the DNA. We use Social Objects to share ourselves with other people. We're primates. we like to groom each other. It's in our nature. [gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": more thoughts on social objects]
April 05, 2008
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
I have mentioned before the tremor an event can sometimes cause in your communications fabric, as it pops up among your Facebook friends, in your RSS aggregator, and so on. So with Open Repositories 2008. A note about amplifying activities from a description of the event ...
One interesting innovation was using Crowdvine to create an online community of delgates, which proved very simple and effective. And of course there’s an Eprints repository of all the conference papers and proceedings. [da blog (ulcc digital archives blog) » Blog Archive » Open Repositories 2008 in Southampton]
Update: Sarah Shreeves left a comment which I thought it useful to copy in here:
And, of course, the use of hashtags for tracking tweets about the conference: http://hashtags.org/tag/or08/. This was a really fascinating way to follow reactions / thoughts during the conference.
Related entries:
April 03, 2008
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Categories:
Knowledge organization and representation
, Social networking
The University of Michigan has introduced a social bookmarking application, MTagger. Here is Ken Varnum:
More important than the tagging functionality itself is what MTagger will allow our faculty, staff, and students to do. MTagger brings a social component to research that we have not previously had. It will allow users to share knowledge about library resources with each other, to enable quick-and-dirty subject guides to be produced, and -- we hope -- to bring researchers together via their individual tag clouds. As research moves online, chance meetings in the stacks of researchers with overlapping interests become even more rare. Through tagging, we hope to be able to recreate some of those synergistic interactions as one researcher finds a tag of interest, and through that, the other researcher. [New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library (RSS4Lib)]
I very much like the way Ken describes the rationale for this initiative above, and the focus on social connection rather than retrieval. Scale and incentives are important for this type of behavior: it will be interesting to see how well they do.
Related entries:
March 16, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Learning and research - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:
The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.
I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.
A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.
Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:
- Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
- Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
- Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
- We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.
Related entries:
March 10, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Today's Observer has a list of the world's 50 most powerful blogs. There is no indication of how it was put together.
I wasn't familiar with all of the 50. No great surprises in the top few (Huffington, Boing Boing, Techcrunch, Kottke). I was surprised to see Crooked Timber on the list at number 33.
Papers are full of lists now; they are sometimes fun to read and, in some cases, probably fun to compile. They are also cheap, and ideally suited to attract some network discussion.
I saw this article just after I had read John Lanchester's review of Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, a description of how papers now do less original reporting and fact checking as they have to fill more space with fewer journalists (think of the supplements, website, ...). It makes for depressing reading.
Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve. [LRB · John Lanchester: Riots, Terrorism etc]
Coincidentally, I was flicking through an old Economist later and found another review.
Citing research done by Cardiff University, Mr Davies argues that the number of journalists in Britain is roughly the same today as it was 20 years ago. But the rise of supplements, websites and 24-hour services means that the same number of reporters must now fill three times as much space. The result he dubs “churnalism”: more demand for copy means more time spent in airless offices and less spent out and about gathering stories. That, he says, makes reporters vulnerable to the “hidden persuaders”—PR firms, press offices and advertisers—who now seem to have more power and influence than the journalists they ostensibly serve. The same research claims that 60% of stories in Britain's quality papers are either recycled press-agency copy or rehashes of PR releases. [British journalism | Hacks at work | Economist.com]
"Churnalism" - a good name for some of these lists.
Something to return to in future posts ....
Related entry:
March 09, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, Standards
, User experience
OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users. This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more 'social' means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL's Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves. [Scholr 2.0]
There is a pdf version and a commentpress version with the benefit of reader comments.
As one might expect from a discussion white paper, there is a focus on questions and potential directions. Recommendations are given in several areas:
Enhance and improve the user interface
• Enrich Scholars Portal content by bringing in metadata from sources outside the journal repository
• Explore the implementation of controlled vocabulary, thesauri and authority control
• Add user tagging functionality [Scholr 2.0]
Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Provide table of contents (TOC) RSS feeds with links that facilitate authentication. If it is possible, allow users to generate their own RSS feeds.
• Provide users of scholarly resources with social bookmarking services
• Consider services that support the whole of the user’s research process and the development of online space for OCUL research communities.
• Seek means for Scholars Portal to be integrated into Learning Management Systems used by OCUL [Scholr 2.0]
Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer
• Provide both permalinks as well as COinS OpenURLs in the Scholars Portal server and to encourage OCUL libraries to adopt their own versions of LibX or promote other COinS readers
• Investigate how to take advantage of the attribute-based information that Shibboleth can provide
• Consider what semantic metadata could be provided through Scholars Portal [Scholr 2.0]
It usefully brings together a range of material. Worth a read.
March 02, 2008
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Categories:
Featured
, General - distributed environments
, Libraries - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Social networking
I find Web 2.0 increasingly confusing as a label; no surprise there. This is not just because of its essential vagueness, but because I think it tends to be used in a couple of very different ways. Where this happens there is bound to be some confusion. Schematically, I will use the labels 'diffusion' and 'concentration' for these two ways.
diffusion is probably the more dominant of the two. Here it covers a range of tools and techniques which create richer connectivity between people, applications and data; which support writers as well as readers; which provide richer presentation environments. What tends to get discussed here are blogs and wikis; RSS; social networking; crowdsourcing of content; websites made programmable through web services and simple APIs; simple service composition environments; Ajax, flex, silverlight; and so on.
concentration is a major characteristic of our network experience, which often involves major gravitational hubs (google, amazon, flickr, facebook, propertyfinder.com). These concentrate data, users (as providers and consumers), and communications and computational capacity. They build value by collaboratively sourcing the creation of powerful data assets with their users. The value grows with the reinforcing property of network effects: the more people who participate, the more valuable they become. And opening up these platforms through web services creates more network effects. These sites also mobilize usage data to reflexively adapt their services, to better target particular users or to identify design directions. Of course, these platforms are very closely controlled, and there is an interesting balance of interests between openness and control at various levels in how they manage resources (see for example my discussion of the Amazon and Google APIs).
Interestingly, if you trace Tim O'Reilly's writings on Web 2.0 since the publication of his major defining article you see an emphasis on what I have called 'concentration' come through. (See my note on an interview with Tim O'Reilly by David Weinberger, on which I draw above, and also see O'Reilly blog posts here and here.)
Now, of course 'concentration' and 'diffusion' are often complementary approaches. The major Internet hubs 'diffuse' their benefits through service and data syndication, apis, participation, etc, but their value often derives from successfully driving network effects through wide participation and consolidation of data. In fact, many of the 'diffusion' techniques work best when associated with concentrating applications. Think of tagging for example. People have incentives to tag their resources in Flickr or Librarything in ways that may not obtain in the library catalog. Scale matters in the context of the social value created in these services (of course, in these examples, folks are also tagging their own resources). You cannot simply add social networking to a site and expect it to work well. Think of all those empty forums.
Much of the library discussion of Web 2.0 is about 'diffusion', about a set of techniques for richer interaction. It is appropriate that libraries should offer an experience that is continuous with how people experience the web.
However, there is a very important way in which the library experience is not continuous with the web. It remains fragmented: it does not have the characteristics of the concentrating, gravitational hubs which characterize so much web use, and are so much a part of O'Reilly's Web 2.0. Fragmented by database boundary, by service boundary (e.g. connecting a discovery experience gracefully to a fulfillment experience through resolution), by library boundary. We are now familiar with the comparison between this fragmented experience and discovery on the web. And we are also familiar with discussion of how the library presence is weakly represented in the major network presences.
However, think also of the library management environment. Think for example of places where data needs to be concentrated to create value: aggregating user data across sites (e.g. counter data), or aggregating user created data (tags, reviews), or aggregating transactions (e.g. circulations, resolver clickthroughs). Motivations here are to drive business intelligence which allows services to be refined (e.g. how does my database usage compare to that of my peer group), to develop targeted services (people who like this, also liked that), to improve local services (e.g. add tags or reviews). These are examples where scale matters, where data may need to be concentrated above the individual library level.
And, we are seeing for fee services emerge which address this need. LibraryThing, for example, syndicates its user-generated tagging to libraries. I am not sure that ScholarlyStats provides a service which compares usage across libraries; it would be interesting to know if there were demand for such a thing.
This then touches on larger questions about sourcing decisions (in what combination of local, collaborative, and third party do libraries acquire their service capacities) and about concentration of library presence (in what combination of library or library and third party are services offered).
For example, I discussed Georgia Pines and OhioLink the other day as examples of groups of libraries collaboratively sourcing a concentrated library presence which increases their gravitational pull.
And libraries are beginning to think more seriously about sourcing services with central web presences. Think for example of the decisions made by the National Library of Australia and the Library of Congress when they chose to use Flickr for significant image projects. NLA is seeking to expand the coverage of PictureAustralia; LC is seeking to collect tags from viewers. In each case, the library wants to benefit from the concentration of users and data that Flickr has created on the web. And to suggest another example, Andy Powell has been raising some intriguing questions about how repository services should be sourced in ways that, again, map onto peoples' experience of the web: would a consolidated network level service be more motivating than a serious of institutional presences? (see here and here). Social networking or other services, he suggests, might flourish at this network level in ways that are not feasible at the institutional level.
When we discuss Web 2.0, there is a temptation to think about blogs and wikis, RSS and a Facebook application, and to stop there. There is also some useful thinking about how to expose web services or data in ways that they can be remixed into other applications. However, Web 2.0 is also about concentration, concentration of data, of users and of communications. We need also to think about how libraries reconfigure services in an environment of network level gravitational hubs, driven by network effects. This will involve greater concentration of library resources in various ways, and also - probably? - greater reliance on other web presences to deliver their services.
January 18, 2008
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Categories:
Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
A nice picture. I saw it via Martin Weller who uses it alongside some general reflections about Facebook.
You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used. [The Ed Techie: The Facebook lessons]
I do feel a little overwhelmed at the moment by the various reports about search, generations, and web 2.0 that are being discussed. Yet another survey is less interesting than some reflective discussion or demonstration of possibilities and direction.
Incidentally, he also points to the Economist debate about the value of social networking in Education.
December 22, 2007
•
Categories:
OCLC
, Social networking
It is nice to see the Worldcat application for Facebook. Look out for additional features over time.
December 09, 2007
•
Categories:
Digital asset management
, General - distributed environments
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, User experience
Network services have accustomed us to move from the personal to the global. Think of iTunes. I have my own local library on my PC which I can synchronize with mobile devices. It is also tightly integrated with the global network iTunes. And the MiniStore uses aggregate buying patterns to make recommendations to me based on what I have in my 'library'.
Variations of this pattern are repeated everywhere. Flixster allows me to rate movies, and relates those to those of my 'friends' and to the aggregate global network level (Flixster drives the Movies application in Facebook). del.icio.us, LibraryThing, Flickr: I can move from my own collection to a global resource in various ways, often assisted by navigational features based on shared attributes across collections and items.
Of course, the dynamic is different in different places. In LibraryThing, for example, the 'global' data level is made up from aggregate personal collections, and central to the service is the idea that connections between our collections are important connections between us. In iTunes, the 'global' data level is already provided as an indication of available purchases, and I do not get to see other people's collections. Although, as already suggested, I benefit from 'hints' based on aggregate buying decisions. In this way, the balance between 'personal' and 'social' value varies across services.
At the same time, we have seen a related interest in all sorts of ways in creating personal collections which may draw materials from many services. Look at Zotero or the work of the SImile project for instance. These personal collections may or may not connect up to global or shared data layers.
Whatever the context, and whether or not the service has a social orientation, the idea of traversing from the personal to the global is becoming an important characteristic of our web experience. Yet another thing for libraries to think about as they work towards reconfiguring services for the web environment ...
Aside: I am reminded of Dan Chudnov's suggestion that the professional mission of librarians is to help people build their own libraries.
Related entry:
December 09, 2007
•
Categories:
Social networking
 The graph is generated by the Nexus Facebook application and shows the connections between my Facebook friends. I was interested in how it roughly broke down into a 'northern' and a 'southern' concentration.
On inspection, it turns out that folks in the Northern concentration are mostly my US friends (and the most highly connected nodes are OCLC Programs and Research colleagues with whom I have many shared friends). The folks in the Southern contentration are mostly UK friends (and the most highly connected nodes are people who work or worked at UKOLN).
Not sure it means much, but it was interesting to play with for a while ....
November 22, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Knowledge organization and representation
, Social networking
Some holiday morning notelets ....
1. The social graph in action. I felt a tremor in the social graph this week. A bundle of my Facebook befrienders attended the CETIS conference. I was suddenly aware of status lines, notes, imported blog entries. I had a sense of some of what was discussed and could follow up if I wanted. It happened in the background. It was like the weather: I had a sense of what was happening without having to do much investigation. Incidentally, CETIS have done a nice job in collecting some of the network amplification of the conference on the website: blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and so on.
2. The social graph, not. Facebook's flatness does not very well accommodate our layered and multidimensional social lives. A lot to talk about there, but this is still a holiday morning notelet .... To pick a simple and relatively straightforward example: what to do with an unwelcome invitation to be a 'friend' from your boss? I assume we will see a more nuanced way of managing the ways in which we present ourselves emerge over time. Which raises issues about how we port or share our represented identities, something that we do not do well now. The social graph is site-specific.
3. Net, web, graph. Tim Berners Lee gave the social graph expression a lift yesterday in a post about the evolution of our networked environment. He talks about a net/web/graph stack. The 'net' allowed us to address computers directly, abstracting away from the underlying connection paths. The 'web' allowed us to address documents, abstracting away from the machines on which they reside. In each case, new and unanticipated value was built on the navigable spaces the net and the web created. The 'graph', Tim Berners Lee suggests, allows us to work with the things that documents are about, friends, flights, proteins, customers and so on, abstracted away from the documents or sites themselves. If represented appropriately, and he uses the example of FOAF, applications can combine and recombine data about things across multiple documents and sites. So, an application could combine what various sites know about me and my relationships. So yes, in these terms, the social graph meets the semantic web. Of course, we have yet to see whether Facebook believes that the social graph is actually greater than the Facebook graph.
November 10, 2007
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Categories:
Learning and research - distributed environments
, Social networking
, User experience
From the Guardian:
Online spaces are blurring, as universities that podcast and text their students have shown. The Jisc project manager, Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: "Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don't want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information." [Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace! | Students | EducationGuardian.co.uk]
We are only beginning to explore the trade-offs between disclosure, either willed or as a result of usage data, and the services that can be built with that data. And we are only beginning to think about how to create social value in our applications. Much of the early work involves 'pushing' existing applications into social networking sites. However, this lacks the social dimension which characterizes the more successful applications there.
I liked Tony Hirst's empasis on 'pull', benefit and incentive, and on value, personal and social, in his post on Facebook apps (which led me to the above article): The idea was simple - we would provide a tool that would provide students on Facebook with a personal benefit by helping them to enrich their profile with a course profiles badge that listed their OU courses, and then optionally provide them with a social benefit that would allow them to discover each other through that voluntary display of personal information, that is, through a shared declaration of their affiliation with a particular course. [OUseful Info: Helping Students Make More of Facebook Without Stealing Control...]
Via Sarah Horrigan via Tony Hirst.
October 28, 2007
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Categories:
Social networking
From the introduction to the Becker-Posner blog. Becker is a Nobel prize-winning economist; Posner the prolific judge and legal theorist.
Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek's thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek's work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the 'blogosphere.' There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers. [The Becker-Posner Blog: Introduction to the Becker-Posner Blog]
October 28, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Featured
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, The cultural and scholarly record
Here is Grainne Conole, professor of e-learning at the Open University writing about academic papers, conference papers, and blogging:
Coming back to the question of which represents academic discourse – to my mind it’s all three – in different ways writing a paper, giving a presentation and blogging all help me to formulate and take forward my thinking on a particular topic, a means of meaning making and transformation of the raw ‘data’ to new understandings – surely that’s one of the cornerstones of what being an academic means? [e4innovation.com]
And here is how she distinguishes between those modes of academic disclosure:
So the function and nature of the three media seems to be: - Academic paper: reporting of findings against a particular narrative, grounded in the literature and related work; style – formal, academic-speak
- Conference presentation: awareness raising of the work, posing questions and issues about the work, style – entertaining, visual, informal
- Blogging – snippets of the work, reflecting on particular issues, style – short, informal, reflective
[e4innovation.com]
Here is Dani Rodrik, a Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard, commenting on an earlier post of his where he queried whether the high opportunity costs of blogging (think of all those other things that could get done if you did not use the time blogging!) would drive out high quality economics blogs. No, he concludes:
And second, in my trip to Nottingham I was simply stunned by how many people reported reading my blog. Not only that, people actually remembered my posts--some going quite a while back. With this kind of positive feedback, along with others like this, it is hard to imagine closing the operation down. Not so incidentally, one of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time... And here is the evidence: the first third of my talk at Nottingham was based on a couple of blog posts from a few weeks back (this and this). So maybe that someone also over-stated the bit about opportunity costs...[Dani Rodrik's weblog]
It is interesting to see them both discuss blogging as an integral part of their academic lives. And their blogging is an important record of thinking about the academic problems they address. And an indication of their academic networks.
I regularly look at the blogs of several folks from the Open University: Tony Hirst's, John Naughton's, and now Grainne's (with whom I used to interact years ago when she was director of ILRT and I of UKOLN). I will occasionally land on Martin Weller's and am peripherally aware of Marc Eisenstadt's.
Ever since my (economist) colleague Brian Lavoie introduced me to Greg Mankiw's blog, I have intermittently followed it, as well as Rodrik's. They occasionally refer to their colleague George Borjas's blog, another Harvard economics professor. Of course there are some pretty high profile economics blogs, including blogs from the Freakonomics authors and, recently, Paul Krugman, both hosted by the New York Times. And there is the prolific Gary Becker, Nobel prize winning economist, at the Becker-Posner blog. I have found Mankiw and Rodrik interesting because of the general mix of light material, commentary on theirs' and their colleagues' work, and their high-level and engaged policy perspectives. The general nature of the blog discourse, to borrow Grainne's word, in that community is absorbing to watch.
Rodrik notes that his blog material appears to have enduring appeal for colleagues. Indeed, the intrinsic interest of the blog output of both the Open University and the Harvard bloggers, and its relation to their academic work, and their broader communities of interest, means that this is probably more generally true.
The blogging platforms used by these people vary. Sometimes they may be institutionally based, more often they will be on one of the main blog hosting sites. While they may be of enduring interest, little thought has probably been given to thinking about their longer term persistence.
Which brings me to my question. Universities and university libraries are recognizing that they have some responsibility to the curation of the intellectual outputs of their academics and students. So far, this has not generally extended to thinking about blogs. What, if anything, should the Open University or Harvard be doing to make sure that this valuable discourse is available to future readers as part of the scholarly record?
October 23, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Stephen Abram gave a lively presentation to OCLC Members' Council on Sunday night. Several times he remarked that somebody has to have tried a service, Second Life or Facebook for example, and 'had the experience' if they are to speak sensibly about it. This reminded me of a favorite image which I have used a couple of times here before and which bears continued repeating ;-)
 I read a few chapters of Steven Johnson's Everything bad is good for you over the weekend. (I am usually a little behind the curve on these things ;-) I was struck by the following quote:I worry about the experiential gap between people who have immersed themselves in games, and people who have only heard secondhand reports, because the gap makes it difficult to discuss the meaning of games in a coherent way. It reminds me of the way the social critic Jane Jacobs felt about the thriving urban neighborhoods she documented in the sixties: "People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. People who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads - like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of the rhinoceroses." The Jane Jacobs analogy is so good. This experience is familiar to somebody who has moved between cultures, and who tries to explain what one is like to somebody from the other.
I think that we can observe something like this in many of the library discussions about gaming and social networking. For somebody who has not internalized the experiences, the temptation is to assimilate it to some other part of their experience. As in "Oh, it is like ....". But, thinking it is like something else means that you may have it a 'little wrong', and miss the real meaning. [The rhinoceros in the room]
October 23, 2007
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Categories:
OCLC
, Social networking
The latest OCLC report to the membership, Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world, is now available.
The report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S. The research provides insights into the values and social-networking habits of library users. [Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World [OCLC - Membership reports]] It looks at evolving attitudes to privacy and trust in an environment increasingly shaped by web-based communication and relates this to perceptions of the library and its role. Specifically, it addresses:
- The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
- How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
- Opinions on privacy online
- Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking
[Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World [OCLC - Membership reports]]
The report is available on the web, and print copies will be available for ordering later this month. This is the latest in the series of influential reports published by our colleagues in Marketing.
October 15, 2007
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Categories:
Social networking
The things that are interesting.... ;-) See Andy Powell and Jon Udell on the Facebook/Twitter syntactic schISm.
October 15, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, User experience
We have become used to managing collections of digital resources: images, music, citations. Zotero is one response to the question of how we will manage collections of scholarly resources. Raymond Yee's suggestive triple does good service describing the motivation: we want to be able to easily gather, create, and share resources. This general question has emerged strongly in library contexts recently.
The interesting Digital Lives project was advertized on various lists the other week.
As we move from cultural memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory, many fundamental new issues arise for research institutions such as the British Library that will be the custodians of and provide research access to digital archives and personal collections created by individuals in the 21st century. ... ... Digital Lives is a major research project focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web-archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library (one of the world’s leading research libraries) with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and The Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol. [Digital Lives :: About]
The project blog notes the related work of RLG Programs in this area. Here is the scope: Problem statement: Personal collection-building tools abound in the online environment, from social bookmarking sites (De.li.ci.ous, PennTags, CiteULike, Zotero etc.) to iTunes and LibraryThing. As libraries seek to integrate their services into the flow of online scholarship and research and to build collections that mirror and support current scholarly practice, they must reexamine the place of personal collections in the research lifecycle. Are research libraries responsible for creating or supplying tools to support personal collection building? Are they responsible for acquiring and preserving the personal collections of the researchers, student,s and faculty they serve? Little is known about how the range of available tools might be integrated in the library service environment, or what opportunities are available for collaborative sourcing of solutions that can meet the needs of libraries, archives, and museums. [Personal Research Collections program [OCLC - New modes of research, teaching & learning]]
October 15, 2007
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Categories:
Marketing
, Social networking
So here is a chart showing the choices made by those of my Facebook 'friends' who chose to disclose political preferences in their profiles.
As I suggested the other day one would expect a 'liberal' emphasis in the library community. Although I wonder what the distribution is among those who chose not to disclose.
In this context, I was interested to read this post by Greg Mankiw earlier in the week.
The chart is generated by the Socialistics application. Given its name, maybe it puts a finger on the scales ;-)
Socialistics is a creation of Techenlightenment, which appears to exist to create Facebook applications:
Techlightenment is a brand of D.sruptive Limited, an innovations house. We don't only build application for client, but we implement our own thinking into the technology we build so as to accelerate understanding of the marketplace. A recent example was Socialistics, which received rapid critical acclaim. This wasn't simply an application, but a method of understanding social relationships. [Techlightenment: an enlightened approach to technology]
October 13, 2007
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Categories:
Social networking
 Facebook invites participants to disclose their political views. Different national contexts are shaped by different political forces. The Facebook selection represents a US view of those forces.
Take 'liberal' for example. As expected, most folks in the library community self-disclose as 'liberal' or 'very liberal'. However, 'liberal' is a rather complex word. See for example the disambiguation page on Wikipedia. Here is some text from the entry on Modern American Liberalism: Today the word "liberalism" is used differently in different countries. (See Liberalism worldwide) One of the greatest contrasts is between the usage in the United States and usage in Continental Europe. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (writing in 1962), "Liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain."[2] [Modern liberalism in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
And I read in New Keywords: The term subsequently traveled to other European countries and later to the United States, in each of which it acquired somewhat different meanings and represented different policies. In France, "liberalism" retains a strong connotation of moral anarchy and rebelliousness; in Britain it stresses individual liberty and limited government; and in the United States, where it did no |
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