Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them

NEASIST - MIT - November 18th, 2005

Steven M. Cohen

Senior Librarian, PubSub Concepts, Inc

Library Stuff (published by Information Today)

http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/OnlineCommunities

• Shakespeare

• Have you ever wanted to be the world's fastest librarian?

• About the article that inspired this presentation
• The two way street
• Wisdom of the Crowds and Collective Knowledge

• Library Catalogs and collective knowledge - Will it fly?
• Social Capital and library catalogs
• The new Web

Trends

• Everything is in beta
• Sign up here and we'll tell you when we GO LIVE!
• RSS is built into these apps. It's a given. (Web 2.0 Compliant)
• It all happens separately, which adds to the commons (My Space example)
• A bit on Splogs
• No more Desktop readers?
• Structured Blogging will be huge!

Over the past year...

• The big boys catch up with blog search.
• G! catches up with RSS
• G! News is STILL in beta - (since March 2003)
• Wikipedia getting lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of attention (pro and con)
• What's in Your wallet?
• small companies get bought - Bloglines, Weblogs.com, Live Journal, Flickr
• The new bubble?

Resources

Return of the "My ____"

• NetVibes - (http://www.netvibes.com/)
• Google Personalized
• My Yahoo still around

Ratings - (Human or otherwise)

• Reddit - (http://www.reddit.com/)
• Digg - (http://www.digg.com)
• Memeorandum - (http://www.memeorandum.com)
• Oishii - (http://opencontent.org/oishii)

Interaction and Collaboration

• Library Thing - (http://www.librarything.com)
• Reader2 - (http://reader2.com)
• Livemarks - (http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/)
• NumSum - (http://numsum.com)
• Writely - (http://www.writely.com)

Life Management

• Ta Da List - (http://www.tadalist.com)
• Backpackit - (http://www.backpackit.com)
• 43 Things - (http://www.43things.com)
• Bla Bla List - (http://blablalist.com)
• Planzo - (http://www.planzo.com)
• Calendar Hub - (http://www.calendarhub.com)

Are Meta Search Apps Back?

• Gada.be - (http://gada.be)
• Kebberfegg - (http://www.researchbuzz.org/tools/kebberfegg.pl)

Other Apps

• Meebo - (http://www.meebo.com)
• Upcoming - (http://upcoming.org)
• RSSMix - (http://www.rssmix.com)
• Feedshake - (http://www.feedshake.com)
• Feedmarker - (http://www.feedmarker.com)

My vision of Community-based Readers Advisory

• Materials reviews from librarians AND patrons.
• My catalog (http://www.netvibes.com) and sharing them.
• Online book clubs (this book is being read by X group).
• RSS Feeds galore

+ Ratings

• Tagging

Libraries that incorporate online communities

Not that many!

• Library OPAC Greatness in (Denmark
• Beyond the Typical Library OPAC
• Taggytastic Library Catalogs

Pitfalls

• Spam
• Bias
• Overload
• Staff/IT time (but...)