Comments on: The Actionable Blog

By: Library & Literary Miscellany Links of the Week » Library & Literary Miscellany

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:49:35 +0000

[...] The Actionable Blog by David Lee King speaks to the idea of intentionally creating content enabling/requiring action (his example of an actionable blog that requires action is his library’s posts titled “What’s in Your Top 5?” where the library begins the conversation and then patrons add their own ideas) [...]

By: davidleeking

davidleeking — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:21:33 +0000

Wow – great idea, Ben! Good question – we’re collecting data of all types right now, actually. Not sure the data we’re gathering would work in this setting – it’s stuff like where our users live, where growth is in the area, why certain segments of our county don’t use us, where wifi access is, etc – lots coming off of a GIS study we’re doing.

But mainly, we need to know who our patrons are, where they live, and what they use… and where our non-users are, etc…

Thanks for the thought-provoking comment!

By: ben rigby

ben rigby — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:03:50 +0000

Ooops! Sorry, I meant to address the comment to “David” … I read “Jim” above and retyped automatically…

By: ben rigby

ben rigby — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:58:18 +0000

Hi Jim. Thanks for the references to my book (very flattering). Have been reading through your thread here – and love the idea of asking customers to take action.

Riffing on that idea… I starting thinking about some recent stories I’ve come across about game mechanics driving data collection (see this post: http://blog.mobilevoter.org/2008/05/using-games-to.html).

What if you tied the library related action to the gathering of data that was, itself, actionable by the library… and then added a game mechanic (such as competition), so that young people would be more incentivized to participate?

In one of the examples mentioned in the above post, they’ve created a game where two people try to type the same word to describe a given photo. The two people play a game, but the organizer gets human-powered image recognition… and with lots of people playing the game, they get a valuable database for free!

So thinking (now very roughly) about libraries, I’m wondering a) what kind of data a library needs… and b) what kind of data library patrons might be able to develop.

I’m sure you can answer (a) better than I. For (b), I started wondering if there might be an opporunity to build out Semantic Web ontologies and data to support them. Although I’m sure there’s a raging debate about the usefulness of the Semantic Web approach in the librarian community, there may be some interesting/useful connections here. At a library, people are already thinking about how one chunk of information relates to another… there might be some simple way to harvest the value in this thought process to build up a dataset that improves understanding of information on the WWW.

Rough thoughts… thanks for firing a spark… has been interesting to think through…

By: davidleeking

davidleeking — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:24:21 +0000

Hi, Jim! I’ve mostly read things more library-related, like a book on blogging for libraries. And of course I’ll plug my non-library-specific book that’s coming out this fall

Otherwise, go to amazon.com, search for things like “social media” or “social networking” or “web 2.0″ and you’ll have a great list of books to start off with.

By: Jim Ogle

Jim Ogle — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:17:30 +0000

This sounds like an interesting book. Except my Kindle won’t connect here in the hotel in Dodge City for me to see if it has a “Kindle” edition.

Are there any other books or monographs you’ve found engaging about social media/web 2.0?

Jim