Week 8: A Nest of Singing Birds

NOTE: I have skipped forward to the last module for easiness, as some of the in between modules require collaboration with other librarians. The missing modules will follow later.

Twitter

Twitter has been dubbed by its creators as a "micro-blogging" service. Using just 140 characters, users can update their followers instantly on minutae events happening in their lives - think like a cross between a facebook status update and a bilboard. Unless you alter your privacy settings, your tweets (blog posts) can be viewed by anyone. You can choose to 'follow' people/organisations on Twitter - meaning that their tweets show up on your Twitter front page, and likewise other people/organisations can follow you - meaning that your tweets will show up on their pages or in their feeds.

You can also tweet at someone - meaning either that you're talking directly to them, or mentioning them in your tweet, by typing an @ in front of their name - however your tweet is still tweeted out to the twittersphere. Another Twitter feature popular with users is retweeting (done by typing RT before your tweet) which allows you to share information previously posted by someone you follow to the rest of your followers - good for spreading the word on news, events, concerts et cetera. You can also type #fb after your update to make your tweet become your facebook status update (more on Facebook later).

Not surprisingly, Twitter's ability to broadcast the pithy (or maybe just small) has meant the service has gained popularity with a diverse group of people and orginisations - celebrities, businesses, bloggers, public organisations such as libraries and galleries, bands and generally vain people.

Some People/Organisations I'm Following on Twitter

Swonderful - Cute Wellington boutique located just around the corner from the library.

Wellington City Gallery

Feminist Library - One of the largest collections of feminist materials ever, the Feminist Library is located in Southwark, London

Victoria University Press

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

National Library of New Zealand

Mojo Bond St - Serves the best lunch-break coffee

Wellington City Library

Week 4: Urban Graffiti - Tag you're it!

People who have known me for a long time always laugh when I tell them I am now a librarian. While others spent their misspent youth misbehaving, I spent mine misbehaving, then going home and thinking up new ways of organising my CD collection (Alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within artist? Chronologically? By mood? Alphabetically by album title? The possibilities are endless, seriously.) Whenever I move house, one of the first things I unpack is my book collection, which is currently arranged alphabetically by author name, apart from dictionary/reference-type books, which are grouped by subject matter, in a vague dewey-type sequence.

Thankfully, I'm not the only nerd in the world who gets a kick out of organising my things. LibraryThing is an amazing site with an interface that allows users to catalogue their bookshelves, make book wishlists, and keep track of what they're reading, have read and want to read. You can check out my LibraryThing library here.

A vaguely similar website that allows users to catalogue cool stuff they find on the web is Delicious.

Delicious and LibraryThing are both sort-of based on the idea of folksonomies, or social or collaborative tagging. The idea is that instead of a top-down, ie information science approach to the categorisation, organisation and presentation/distribution of information (ie by librarians, curators, archivists, kaitiaki etc) certain information in the public domain can and should be categorised, organised an presented/distributed by members of the community. This could manifest as people "tagging" photos of themselves and their friends on facebook, or creating online bibliographic collections of a certain type - a blog roll, bookmark collection or tag cloud.

In theory, the idea of a "bottom-up" organisational approach to collaborative information is appealing, as again in theory, it allows those who create information to control it - to label it, describe it and use it how the choose.

However, the reality of folksonomy is not as excitingly border-breaking as its proponents would suggest. The problem with collaborative/people's information science/folksonomy/whatever else you'd like to call it is that it, like many web2.0 and other contemporary media studies theories, assumes that every internet user is a tertiary educated, socially-minded infonerd who enjoys alphabetising their CD collections (Bon Iver, Bright Eyes, M Ward, Sufjan Stevens, anyone?) It ignores the fact that most internet users view the internet as a consumer product of the subscriber-service kind, like cable TV. To most people, website interfaces that allow folksonomies are merely a personal convenience, like MySky. The fact is that the majority of internet users don't care about information collaboration, and use the internet primarily to buy stuff, laugh at internet memes that have more-or-less entered the pop culture mainstream, and to look at the wedding photos of people to whose wedding they were not invited.

The other grating aspect of folksonomy is the way that many folksonomy enthusiasts villify "traditional" information science and those who practice it. Folksonomy enthusiasts insist that collaborative organisation takes common information out of the hands of evil top-down information organisers (which lumps librarians, archivists, curators and evilprofitgrabbingcopyrightholdingcorporations all in the same lump) and puts it into the hands of the people. Never mind that a)information professionals have always grappled with the conflict between access/respect of intellectual property/material preservation, and will nearly always provide the maximum possible access to information, b) information professionals are generally better informed of ethical issues of intellectual property, licences and access, c) "the people" may only be 15-year-old girls tagging photos on myspacebook and d) in my opinion, the only way to create open-source, free and easily accessible information, computer software and fair-priced consumer goods is to allow all people equal opportunities for information use, and to make that information as reliable, easily accessible, and well-organised as possible. To dismiss information science as merely a tool of the elite aimed at disabling access to information runs the risk of that information becoming unaccessible and losing its intellectual credibility.

So. Hating on folksonomies, generally. Having said that, LibraryThing and Delicious are extremely useful tools - LibraryThing can be used by smaller, indepedent libraries who might otherwise not have access to a digitised cataloging system (see this article on flash-mob cataloging as an example), as well as by book enthusiasts and collectors, book-clubs etc. While Delicious' usefulness is not as obvious, it would be easy to recommend it to researches, students or travellers who often used different computers but had a lot of pages they wanted to be able to access easily.

Web 2.LOL

This was originally posted on the WCL staff blog. Totally too hilarious not to repost

Powerful Personal Learning Networks PLN

View more documents from Mark Woolley.

Week 3, Part 2: An afternoon down the tube...

This post is about the second aspect of photo, image and video sharing - and is all about the different ways people can share videos online, and how users can access online video.

The most well-known video sharing website is Youtube. Youtube is an insane hive of video information - music videos, home-movies, documentaries, illegally uploaded blockbusters, video blogs - just about everything you can think of is on here (I couldn't find the Judge Judy Kung Fu mashups again, though.) To showcase what Youtube can do, particuarly how awesome it is for musicians to be able to share their dulcet stylez, I've embeded a couple of great music clips from two unsung New Zealand music heroes. The first video is of Little Pictures, an indie-pop band made up of my friends Mark and Johanna. They're performing at Camp A Low Hum, which, in my opinion, is the best little music festival in the world. The second video is of Jubilation Choir, a great gospel choir based in Auckland.





Basically the only downsides to Youtube are that a) You can't save content, which is completely fair enough, as it allows the distribution of information without posing a huge threat to intellectual property rights (it makes it hard to alter or reproduce the video) and b) Youtube videos are fiendishly difficult to embed onto blogs (but there are instructions on how to do it here.)

In my opinion, the coolest video-sharing site on the web is Vimeo. It's a little more grown-up in vibe than it's obnoxious younger sibling, Youtube, and has a lot of documentaries, and really awesome art/avant garde-type videos. While you won't find many videos of kittens being hilarious, or teenage girls waxing lyrical about their lives, there's some really beautiful content on here, and sharing/embedding is really easy. Here is an amazing video of cars driving in the rain made by James Adamson:

Lights and Water from James Adamson on Vimeo.

And here is me, and a bunch of other people, muppeting out at the aforementioned Camp a Low Hum at the start of this year. Who said librarians don't know how to party?

Disasteradio - Camp A Low Hum 2009 from A LOW HUM on Vimeo.

The final video-sharing site that's worth a look is videojug. It purports to help users "get good at life" and allows users to upload "how to" videos on a variety of subjects. I found that there was a lot of rubbish on this site, however if you trawl through it there are a few good finds. Here, for example, is a pretty decent video on how to make your own basic household cleaning products.


Cleaning:
How To Make Non Toxic Cleaners

For all the rubbish on the site, videojug has pretty good useability - it's easy to embed, share and find related videos.

Week 3, Part 1: Little flickrs of light....

Sorry. Today must be pun wednesday.


This week's post is all about image sharing. There is also a video-sharing component to this module, but I'm going to write that up in a separate post so I don't get all inarticulate and confusing.

Like every great procrastinator, I've always been a big YouTube fan, but thought Flickr was only useful to soccer moms from Utah with ginormously fancy SLR cameras who also enjoyed elaborately decorating cakes and then taking pictures of their elaborately decorated cakes with their fancy SLR cameras. And maybe I still think that, a little bit. But even if Flickr is mostly populated by the destination-wedding crowd, the concept behind it is really, really great.


Flickr is a non-profit, photo-sharing community, based primarily on types of distribution licences used by Creative Commons. Basically, users can upload their content, then state what type of distribution/reproduction license they give to other users who find their work and want to modify, use or redistribute it (for example, an attribution license, which allows users of an image to modify, reproduce or distribute an image provided they give the original author of the image credit). Flickr also allows users to restrict who can view their images -for example contacts, friends or family members.


What's Awesome About Flickr


Flickr has some really amazing features. First and foremost, it allows for the non-profit, open-source sharing of visual material. In the internet age, this may seem like a really obvious, unexciting thing, but basically Flickr built on the idea that people should be allowed to distribute and share pictures. It's a facility where people can share their photography (both personal and artistic) and other art with networks wider than Facebook or other social networks, by creating photo albums, collections or art portfolios. Even free accounts have heaps of storage space, pretty decent image editing tools, comment facilities and even geo-tagging - allowing users to tag the place where pictures were taken on a map. These are all awesome features for travellers, photografiles, cloud-spotters etc.


What's Not Awesome About Flickr


While Flickr is definitely awesome, there are a number of usability and other issues which make it slightly annoying. Firstly, the way you save and organise images is not super user-friendly, at least for this bird of little brain. Photos can be organised by sets, albums, and tags, as well as appearing in feeds, favourites and "galleries" - a system confusingly similar to favourites. Being able to organise your material is useful, but having so many organisation systems so confusingly laid out is just confusing.

Secondly, while Flickr has the potential to be an awesome art-sharing community, in reality it's mostly just a place where people upload their wedding photos/graduation photos/holiday photos etc so they can bore an even wider audience with unwanted minutiae detail about their lives. Cynical, perhaps.

Finally, while Flickr claims to be an open-source-type community, it creates (like Facebook image hosting) a whole bunch of copyright grey areas. While using Creative Common Licenses is a really good way to communicate to other web-users about how you feel about your creative work, there's an "all rights reserved" copyright option on Flickr (which is basically an assertion of ordinary intellectual property rights) - so basically you have a site set up for non-commercial, open-source image sharing where people can claim a proprietary interest in certain images. Confusing.

Having said all that, Flickr is still a great way to distribute visual information to a broad range of networks, without the expense and environmental degradation caused by printing, which is useful for both librarians and library-users. An example of this can be seen in Wellington City Libraries' Cuba St Memories Project, which uses a different open-source image sharing interface.

Here is my Flickr photostream. I haven't put that much up on it, because a) I don't have a camera at the moment and b) there is nearly always a hideously unphotogenic person behaving obnoxiously in photos, and that person is nearly always me.

NEXT POST: JUDGE JUDY MASHUPS WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!!! Alternative Title: How to Use Video Sharing Web Programmes.

Week 2: Relatively Super Stuff...

Time for some more social networking and information sharing time. This post is all about RSS Feeds. RSS apparently stands for Really Simple Syndication - I guess the people who invented the name needed to make an acronym to make it sound a little more...technical. But anyway. Using RSS is actually really simple, and also really awesome. I am a recent RSS-convert from doing the second "Learn It, Show It, Do It" module, so here are a few thoughts about what I've discovered from setting up RSS feeds....

What RSS Actually Is

RSS is basically a feeder-application that you can use to view a variety of web content in one place. If there's a particular website with frequently updated content that you view all the time, (I, for instance, have a major weakness for lolcats) then instead of having to go to the website to check for updated content, you can subscribe to an RSS feed and have the updated content fed from the website into your own feed.

There are a number of different ways you can create your own feeds. At work, because we use shared computers, I'm using the online RSS Google Reader, which is Google's personal feed service that you can access from any computer. At home however, I've started using the RSS feed service inbuilt in my internet browser (I use Safari, but newer versions of Internet Explorer also have this service). There are advantages and disadvantages in both types of readers - the Google reader is completely portable - I can use it from any computer, whereas my browser reader only works on my computer. However, it's way easier to add feeds to the reader using Safari's browser reader (just click on the orange button like the one shown on the left - they usually appear at the bottom of a post on a particular website). To receive content using Google Reader, it's easier to add stuff from the Google Reader site - just click on the "Add a Subscription" button in the top left-hand corner, type in a keyword of what you want to subscribe to, and then click on the right website from the list. Not as easy, but the advantage to this is that you can find related or similar content to subscribe to by doing keyword searches.

Finally, you can also subscribe to Tweets through RSS, so you don't have to go to twitter.com to read them (but more about this later).

Why It's Useful for Info-Nerds

RSS is useful for info-nerds, not just because you can have your feed inundated with lolcats, MLIA and Penny Arcade, but also because it allows you to compare a variety of information sources. By subscribing to a number of news sites, opinion blogs and media watchdogs, readers can easily access a wide variety of information written from different perspectives and with different agendas, giving the reader greater integrity of information. This can be used by librarians to help them easily access a wide variety of news and information sources, which they can then use to inform customers and recommend news, information or entertainment sources to suit their needs.

What I'm Subscribing To

A Softer World - beautiful and original webcomic

Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty - New Zealand feminist socialist blog

Icanhascheezburger - lolcats take over the world

Mojo Coffee Cartel Twitter Feed - Tweets from the only good chain coffee empire in the world

My Life is Average - stories of average people's lives

Passive Aggressive Notes - hilarious passive aggressive notes normally left in shared spaces

Radio New Zealand - updates and programme notes from the consistently finest radio network in the land

Socialist Worker - daily opinions and news from the left

The Hand Mirror - amazing feminist blog mentioned in my last post

Urban Vegan - great vegan blog also mentioned in my last post

Stuff - great New Zealand news website - content gets frequently updated throughout the day

IndyMedia - international independent news site

Week 1 (again) Further adventures in Blogland

I forgot to add a speil about finding blogs in my last post, and it wouldn't make sense to edit it, so here is a short list of ways to find cool blogs.

I wasn't sure if there were any large New Zealand-centric blog rolls, so I did a quick google search and found Gotcha!'s Blogroll, which is a pretty comprehensive list of New Zealand blogs, vaguely organised by the writers' political ideologies. The Hand Mirror, which I reviewed in my previous post, also has links to several other blogs, and is a good place to go to find New Zealand blog writing as most of the writers also publish other blogs. I found the Best American Non-Required Reading Blog after being recommended one of their published books by a friend, and I literally stumbled across all the Public Address blogs one afternoon when I was procrastinating from doing some schoolwork. Afternoon well spent, I think.

Coming soon: Adventures in RSS: or On How To Get Lolcats Delivered to Your (Virtual) Doorstep.

Week 1 - Blogs Blogs Blogs

O HAI! This entry covers the first module of the Learn it, Show it, Do it programme - which is all about Blogs. Blogs can be used to express opinions, distribute information to large audiences across a wide range of networks and provide links to similar types of information. This means that writers, readers and information can all be networked, mobilised and organised. HOORAY!


Here is a list of blogs that I've read and enjoyed. I've provided links to all of them along the right-hand sidebar of my blog so that I don't forget about them, and so that other people can easily find and enjoy them too.

New Zealand Library Blogs

Wellington City Libraries News Blog - The Wellington City Libraries News Blog is the news blog for Wellington City Libraries, and contains heaps of book reviews for new books we have here in the library. Wellington City Libraries also publish a business blog, a kids blog and a teens blog, as well as a staff blog with heaps of information about libraries, particularly the way librarians can use new technologies to collect and share information.


Library Tech NZ - Library Tech NZ is a blog written by librarians from New Zealand's formidable National Library. It's a pretty wordy and dense-looking blog, but don't let this put you off - it contains links to heaps of articles about the library profession and the sharing and archiving of information in the digital age.

Other Cool Blogs

Public Address and Up Front - Public Address is an amazing network of really well-written New Zealand Blogs, covering a wide range of topics and political ideologies. My favourite blog in the collection is Up Front , a feminist blog written by Emma Hart. She writes about serious things, like the fact that actor Roman Polanski has yet to face justice for committing a serious crime, and also other serious things, like how awesome Outrageous Fortune is.


The Best American Non-Required Reading Blog - The Best American Non-Required Reading is a blog written by a group of high school students from across the US with writer Dave Eggers. The blog presents a transcript of their group discussions, where they review a variety of new and unusual short fiction, essays and novels.


The Hand Mirror - The Hand Mirror is a New Zealand feminist blog written by a number of contributors. Kind of a veteran of the New Zealand "blog community", but still totally awesome.


Another Green World - Another Green World is written by UK Green Party member Derek Wall, whose central philosophy for living green is "Consume less. Share more. Enjoy life." Derek's blog is useful because it links to heaps of international green, global action and anti-capitalist blogs, as well as providing heaps of links to upcoming events, news, ideas etc.


Urban Vegan - Urban Vegan is, in my not-at-all humble opinion, the best vegan blog on the internet, and there are heaps and heaps of vegan blogs on the internet. It has recipes, product reviews, and pictures of the writer's adorable pets. Win.

Honourable Mentions

Not blogs, but I wanted to do a shout out to the Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa - a project that gets broadband internet to public libraries all across Aotearoa, enabling access to digitised information. Also to Just Focus, a huge network and information hub for New Zealand youth concerned with global issues and social justice. Werd.