Week 12 Reading Notes

John Blossom: What makes social media tick: seven secrets of social media. Content Nation.

-       Book developed through collaborative Wiki – very interesting!

-       Social media as a tool that helps people to publish influentially

o   Web 2.0 is user-generated content, social networking, everything that encompasses the movement that enables regular people to become influential creators and contributors to web content

-       Social media defined as : any highly scalable and accessible communications technology or technique that enables any individual to influence groups of other individuals easily

o   Includes wikis, weblogs, other collaborative tools

-       “social networking” does not cover every component of social media

-       social media is a peer to peer medium – really about connecting people with information

-       Aggregation and filtering: the processing of amassing collections

o   Includes cataloging and “tagging” to give social media content some sense of organizations

§  Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.

o   Widgets and mashups as a way to package and give context to information created and disseminated through social media channels

-       Social media and self-marketing: social media gives users the opportunity to establish markets between individuals

o   Not as much need to rely on intermediaries – individuals can market themselves/their products and ideas directly

§  Is this like Etsy?

-       Social Media secret: its about understanding what people are looking for – to influence others and in turn be influenced by them

o   I think this would be a useful secret for all organizations/companies that employ social media to keep in mind – it is NOT just a broadcasting tool, but a tool for communication and reciprocal influence

-       Social media essentially allows people to collaborate more effectively and participate in greater participatory culture

o   This does not immediately guarantee a utopic society

-       Content is inherently defined by its social values

o   The value that one finds in content is therefore contextual – depends on the audience and the means by which they are experiencing or interacting with content

o   This becomes harder to define with the proliferation of information through social media

§  Information is divorced from context, harder to define the “where” and “how” of a particular piece of content

·      Like when we get news from Facebook – the news we receive is removed from its original sources and possibly filtered through many other individuals before it gets to us. How does this effect the content?

o   Aggregation is an important tool for creating value in social media publishing

§  The categories and tags bring meaning to mass amounts of content

o   Production and publishing models are changing in response to social media developments

-       While social media is a publishing model, its major goal lies in the creation of marketable relationships as well as the dissemination of marketable content

Charles Allan: Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons.

-       I actually collaborate on a Wiki to manage and support library programs through ACLA so I’m interested to learn more about this and bring back new ideas to our organization.

-       Facilitates information sharing, collaboration in the creation of information resources, and distribution of the workload in library program creation

-       Users can be invited to a created Wiki; they each have equal editing rights

-       Wikis could benefit librarians working in instruction programs because it could facilitate the sharing of resources, reduce the risk of duplicating work, etc.

-       East Tennessee State University – an example of Wiki use in instructional programming

-       Wiki can also serve as a centralized resource collaboration tool

o   This is how we use the Wiki at ACLA – to support collaborative programing/share ideas among countywide member libraries

Xan Arch: Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution.

-       Social tagging helps with the organization of information on the Web

o   Is this model transferable to libraries, or will it cause some major complications to librarian’s bibliographic responsibilities?

o   I see how it could benefit library users – they may be able to generate tags and subject/keywords that are familiar to them

o   But I fear that it may not lend itself to the standardization that is necessary to organized bibliographic record keeping

-       Folksonomy – a taxonomy created by ordinary folks

o   Users create their own controlled vocabularies, subject headings, keywords, “tags”

o   Could it be used to help librarians create indexes to quality internet resources?

-       May bring “gray” literature to light (the materials or information that are not easily found)

-       PennTags at UPenn – example of library using social tagging

-       Risks include “spagging” (spam tagging), inevitable variation of tags  

o   This seems like a huge concern to me. How can libraries properly organize information with such wide variation?

o   It seems like users would need some instruction before they could run with social tagging to mitigate these concerns. Based on just this short article, I’m not convinced that social tagging could be effectively applied to libraries. I would like to see more examples of its use.

Jimmy Wales: "How a ragtag band created Wikipedia". TED Talk.

-       “The ideal encyclopedia should be radical” – this seems to be what Wikipedia is all about

-       Had a vision that all people should be able to access knowledge stored in encyclopedias for free, as well as to contribute their own knowledge

-       Assembled volunteers, gave them tools to collaborate

o   Truly amazing that Wikipedia is managed solely by volunteers! There must be something intriguing about collaborating to create a pool of knowledge that inspires volunteers to participate.

-       Owned by nonprofit – Wikimedia foundation – core goal is to get free encyclopedia to everyone – empowering people with knowledge,

-       Uses free-licensing model – users can do anything they want with the content

o   A way to bridge the “digital divide”?

-       Strives to remain impartial, unbiased

-       Over 600, 000 articles in English (as of this video)

o   Only about 1/3 of traffic to the site is to the English pages

-       Only one actual employee – software developer

-       How is Wikipedia as good as it is (quality-wise)?

o   Vandalism is fixed quickly by volunteers

o   Elements in quality control – neutral point of view policy

·      Social concept of cooperation

§  One tool to monitor history of a page – can view IP addresses of editors

§  Nothing in the software that enforces the rules

-       The wiki model really is the way Wikipedia works

o   There is a lot of passion and influence by the social norms of the Wikipedia community

-       New project: Wikibooks project to create textbooks

o   Freely-licensed textbooks – is this REALLY the next big thing in education?