Social Networking

Social Networking is fascinating, and the different feel of the various sites always interests me. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/ talks about the ages of people using different social networking sites, whilst http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/11/27/study-males-vs-females-in-social-networks/ talks about the male vs female ratios. I must admit, the sheer number of social networking sites is rather overwhelming! I hadn't even heard of some of them...

Anyway. How can Facebook be used by libraries?

I run the Oriental Institute Library fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Oxford-United-Kingdom/Oriental-Institute-Library/137472003754
In theory it's a great extra way to get in touch with readers, to keep them informed about on-going projects, and so on. In pratice, the big issue is getting enough readers signed up to your Facebook page. If you don't get enough then there's really no point, it's like giving a lecture to an empty room. So I think Facebook can be great, but it needs lots and lots of advertising.
Still, my Mum regularly reads the blog posts there to catch up on how my job's going- so maybe it is useful after all. Even if only for her.

Also, I've joined Linked In. Even if I'm over 17 years younger than the average age for it... http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamesnfishwick is my profile, with lots of copy-and-pasting from my CV! Excitingly, I put my employer down as "Bodleian Libraries" and was the first person to do so-although I then realised Laura had said she worked at "Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford" so I changed to that instead. Doubt I'll ever visit Linked In again.

The big problem with Social Networking, in my view, is information overload. With Facebook, LiveJournal and now LinkedIn all clamouring for my attention on a daily basis, I generally find it easier to just ignore them all!
I guess Facebook gets a Meh, and LinkedIn gets a Nay?

We're half way there...

So, thought I'd do a bit of a review. Which of the 23 Things have been useful and which do I think I will I keep up?

I was initially anti-iGoogle, not seeing the need for it and disliking it's clutter. But, having set it up so it just showed me things I'm really interested in, it's now proving invaluable and is my homepage both at work and at home. I've also embraced (because they work so well inside iGoogle) Google Reader for getting RSS feeds of blogs & podcasts and Google Bookmarks so I can access all my bookmarks wherever I go. If only there was a good Livejournal gadget!
I'm also a big fan of Flickr- being able to upload higher resolution versions of pictures is excellent, I've always hated Facebook for it's compression.

Picnik was fun, but I'd rather use Picture Publisher. Guess I may use it if I'm at a PC that doesn't have an image manipulation program? I didn't like Delicious for personal use- my bookmarks are for my personal reference, not for everyone else, and Google Bookmarks sits better in Google Reader. But still, I can see Delicious could be good for libraries to advertise online resources and so on.

So yes. Despite my initial cynicism and belief I'd already seen every Web 2.0 tool that mattered I've now become addicted to a whole bunch more. I'm not sure this is neccessarily a good thing, but oh well! There's another 6 weeks to go, and I dread to think what I'm going to get hooked on next...

Om-nom-nom-nom... Mmm, Delicious

I often move around computers. There are several I use at work, I've got one in my flat, I use my girlfriend's computer and sometimes my mum's computer. So loosing track of where I saved which bookmarks is a constant problem. But no longer! Apparently.

On the surface, Delicious seems great. But there's two big problems with it:

• It's just not as easy as my favourites on IE or whatever. Those are available from a sidebox, a toolbar *and* a menu. Whilst I need to go to a whole new website to see Delicious. And to get to that website, I need to use my favourites anyway! If there was a good iGoogle gadget I could forgive it, but there isn't.
  
• Also, it won't let me organise all my links into folders. I like hierarchical structures as well as unstructured systems. So yes, I just like having folders as well as tags, sorry.
  

Delicious definitely isn't useless. The idea of having a tool that lets you share your bookmarks is cool, and the Networks feature that lets you see other people's bookmarks is a good one. But it's not going to change my life and I won't be using it regularly.

So Delicious gets a meh from me, I'm afraid.

I may well be converted by Google Bookmarks, on the other hand. Having all my bookmarks nice and simply in my iGoogle page is great. I know it's Bookmarking not Social Bookmarking, but I've always seen Bookmarking as quite personal anyway. So Google Bookmarks it is!

On the other hand, I think Tags are awesome, I love opening up classification and making it so gloriously post-co-ordinate and unstructured. I've always been a big fan of tags, and I use them excessively in my Googlemail. As I said above, they don't work for everything and I do like having structured nested folders as well, but they are great.

Tags get a big yay!

Over the past week I've also revisited iGoogle, and I must say I'm converted. It means my Googlemail and my Google Reader are in the same window. That's brilliant. It's rapidly becoming essential for me. Especially as I've trimmed it down to just a few gadgets, thus avoiding information overload- BBC Oxford weather, Googlemail, Google Reader and a satirical news site. Yeah, I'm totally revising my opinion of it to a yay.
I just wish more sites had good iGoogle gadgets. Livejournal, for example. There is a gadget that uses the mobile phone Livejournal platform (cunning!), but you have to log into it each time rather than it remembering your details- very irritating.

Buzz off!

Yeah, Buzz's privacy settings really weren't good. And the way it kept sending my Buzz conversations to my Googlemail inbox was infuriating. So I've turned it off (at least that's nice and simple- it's a tiny little link right at the bottom of your gmail page).

Article about Buzz: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

If Buzz had just been an extra link below my Inbox (and not being squirting information at me constantly) I would have kept it. Similarly, if there was a way to put a link from that sidebar to my Google Reader or my Blogger dashboard or my Livejournal friendslist I'd be overjoyed.

Hmm. Perhaps it's time to re-visit iGoogle? Perhaps it could be the solution to my problems?

What's the Buzz?

So, yet another Web 2.0 tool is released. This one, Google Buzz, seems to be a mix of Twitter and Facebook. I like the way it can pull in data from other sources - it'll tell everyone if I update Flickr, or share items in Google Reader, or if I update a blog. And it's nicely integrated with Googlemail.

Yeah, not a bad platform.

I must admit, I'm increasingly considering returning to blogging properly. I used to do it on Livejournal and stopped a few years ago, but this 23 Things has reminded me about it. It would be a good way to re-establish contact with old mates...

Google Reader

Google Reader is excellent!

It's certainly solving a lot of the issues I had with blogs in last week's post- finally I can see when blogs are updated and just read those bits, not all the posts on a blog.

I've subscribed to a big pile of other 23 Things blogs, so I look forward to reading other people's opinions nice and easily. It was very cool the way Google saw all my Blogspot subscriptions and copied them straight into the Reader, made this week's task much easier!

I still prefer Livejournal as my blogging & rss platform, as I think the Livejournal communities are such a good feature, but I can definitely see advantages to the Google & Blogspot combination.

Blogs

Now I have to write my thoughts about blogs, apparently.

I got my first blog (on Livejournal) whilst at university. My second is the official OIL one, mainly used to update our news on Facebook via RSS. And then there's this one.

My overwhelming thought about blogs is: they're not really that great. There are a lot of problems with them, really. I especially dislike the way things are ordered chronologically starting with the most recent- it's like reading a book starting with reading the last chapter, then the penultimate, and so on. Or like watching Memento.
Of course, you can always start at the bottom, but that's a bit like reading a book by always starting at the beginning. It's fine, as long as you're reading the book in one sitting. But what about if you've already read half the book? Blogs just don't have a convenient way of putting a bookmark in. And for something that has new content added all the time, that's a huge problem.
So yes, in many ways I prefer forums or emails- the way they combine chronological ordering whilst automatically and easily showing you which are "unread posts" appeals to me.

On the other hand, blogs do have uses. On Livejournal I *love* the Friends Page. On one page I can have all the blog posts from all my friends, plus any RSS feeds I want (Unshelved comics alongside the latest news), plus any posts made to Livejournal Communities I'm a member of. Ideal. An excellent one-stop place to keep informed of the wider world- it's like a better version of Blogger's Reading List of Blogs I'm Following. Although, of course, it does still suffer the sorting-posts-chronologically problem.

I also really like blogs for short informative things, like the OIL blog. It tells readers what the current big projects are, changes to our opening hours, that sort of thing. It's useful! And most posts are self-contained, which means the chronological problem isn't an issue.

Finally, I love the newer developments in blogs- things like trackbacks, where you can see places that have linked to a post. That's neat. Or the RSS feeds can then be fed into Facebook or Livejournal or wherever. And tagging interests me, as a cataloguer.

So yes. I'm torn on the issue of blogs. I think they're overused and there are times that other tools (like forums) would be better. And the ordering of posts annoys me deeply. And yet I still keep several blogs, and watch a whole bunch by checking my Livejournal Friends regularly.

Blogs get a resounding "Meh" from me. I'm too torn to go one way or the other.