by David Lee King on February 23, 2007
Senator Matt Murphy has a blog. That’s cool. However, read Jenny Levine’s post about the good senator. He wants to ban himself from the library. That’s not so cool.
He, of course, is the senator who introduced Illinois Senate Bill SB1682, which bans social networking sites in public libraries and public schools. And banning social networking sites means he wants to ban … blogger … where HIS OWN BLOG resides.
Hmm… Besides the complete silliness of voting to ban one’s own blog (I’m hearing the line from the movie Spinal Tap… “… but it goes to 11.”), this bill isn’t really grounded in today’s emerging digital reality. For example, think about John Edward’s campaign for a second. He has hired bloggers as part of his campaign staff. He made his major “I’m running” announcement on Youtube. Most likely, other presidential hopefuls will do the same.
With this in mind, when a bill is introduced to remove social networking sites from public libraries, in essense it actually asks for the removal of a type of public discourse. Public discussion. Public interaction and conversation.
And I don’t think that’s quite legal.
by David Lee King on February 23, 2007
Steve Rubel just wrote about the web 2.0 impact in the tourism industry, of all things. In fact, you might want to watch his blog for awhile. He says “Over the next several weeks I am going to start posting about the
global medium to long-term impact Web 2.0 will have on different
industry sectors.” Now THAT should be highly interesting!
Anyway… check out the tourism article. Some great quotes:
“In the Web 2.0 era, the power is shifting. The authority figure is no longer the travel agent or even the media. It’s us.”
“We’re empowered with technology and we’re using it to catalog every
place on earth using video, photos and text. We are telling it like it
is and sharing it globally.”
“Yahoo Trip Planner: Who needs a travel agent when there’s 43,000 people eager to help us.” (similar to Amazon’s book reviews).
Wow. Just wow.
by David Lee King on February 21, 2007
For all you filtering fans (or anti-fans), check out this article: From Bess to Worse, at Slashdot. They claim that 30% of sites blocked by Bess are obvious errors. Wow. I checked this at my last library, and came up with 42% – that’s pretty bad (and pretty much matches what the article writer came up with).
Filtering might be a “have-to” in your neck of the woods – but you can work with your filtering vendor to get those errors down, or find a better filtering solution.
Any good filter suggestions?
by David Lee King on February 20, 2007
Louis Rosenfeld has started a 5-part series on Information Architecture. Part one includes this:
Step #1: Ban the word “redesign” from your meetings.
Step #2: Determine who your most important audiences are.
Step #3: Determine each primary audience’s 3-5 major needs.
Step #4: Make damned sure your site addresses each of those needs.
Great words of wisdom, I think! Now… who are your library’s most important audiences?
by David Lee King on February 16, 2007
This is cool. Adaptive Path, a company that focuses on building digital experiences, is apparently going to help Linden Labs improve the digital experience that is Second Life.
I find that to be an extremely interesting project. Usually, improving a digital experience means improving someone’s website, or a function of the website – not improve something that, in many ways, is mimicking real life in a digital way.
They also say this: “So, after we spoke with them for a while, we discovered that, while there may be a few issues with the world and it’s amazing growth rate, there is one issue in particular that’s affecting the usability for the residents. While I can’t divulge the exact issue, I can say that it’s a very complex and interesting problem -– something that we’ve not tackled in this manner before.” I sure hope that means actually talking within Second Life, rather than just being able to type/chat to each other!
And I hope they write it up, speak about it, etc – I think we’d all learn much from their “experience.”
second life, secondlife, experience
by David Lee King on February 15, 2007
Just a reminder to myself – SHIFT-F3 toggles text between first letter uppercase, all upper case, and all lower case.
by David Lee King on February 15, 2007
I just found this great article on the online video industry (from the Read/WriteWeb). The author discusses online video, and divides the online video industry into handy categories:
- Video Sharing
- Intermediaries
- Video Search
- Video eCommerce
- Video Editing & Creation
- Rich Media Advertising
- P2P (Peer To Peer)
- Video Streaming
- Vlogosphere
Each category has example websites/links – go explore!
by David Lee King on February 3, 2007
by David Lee King on February 1, 2007
Lots of bloggers have been posting about the article 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important. And that’s cool – it’s a great article, and I’d say that all librarians should digest it.
However, I’d also say that this article didn’t need to be written. Well, I’d say that if there weren’t some librarians doubting our continued existence, anyway (the article points to one such librarian). In my talks, I’ve had librarians, and I mean 20+ year career librarians, ask me if we’ll still exist in 10 years time. They also tend to be the librarians who have a hard time understanding the difference between an RSS feed and an email.
I don’t know – I guess I don’t get it. When I decided to become “a librarian,” the web was brand new (I graduated in 1994). Looking back, that was a time of tremendous change for libraries. And change hasn’t stopped yet – if anything, I’d say the rate of change has accelerated!
And so, in a way, I quickly learned that I needed to embrace change – in my job (IT/Webish management job), change is a given. And I can either react to change around me (hint – bad idea) or I can try to anticipate it, understand it, and figure out how it can work for me and my library (hint – good idea).
Dang – I’m rambling a little. Sorry! So what’s my point? I think my point is this – that article didn’t need to be written… if librarians were anticipating change, jumping off the cliff instead of running the other way … marketing – no, evangelizing – their reason for existence in the new digital society … going where the customers are … and adapting to the the concept of “change is a given.”
Comments?
