Archive for November 2007

I will be speaking today at the ACRL/NY Symposium about Social Software in Academic Libraries. My presentation is here on Slideshare.net. Thank you to all of the college and university libraries who gave me great quotes about their social software initiatives to use in my prez. Also, here is a quick guide to all of the websites I refer to in my presentation:

Wikis
Wikipedia
WikiHow
University of Minnesota Libraries Wiki
Antioch University New England Library Staff Training & Support Wiki
USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library Wiki Webpage
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki
Butler University Libraries WikiRef
ALA 2007 Annual Conference Wiki
Library Success Wiki
Library Instruction Wiki

Social Bookmarking
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Southern Connecticut State University Hilton C. Buley Library
MIT Libraries Virtual Reference Collection
University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ PennTags
Libmarks
LIS901-06
Maui Community College Library
University of South Florida Lakeland Library Services
library2.0 tag
ALA2007 tag in del.icio.us

Media Sharing
YouTube
Flickr
Colorado College Tutt & Coburn Libraries
Arizona State University Libraries
Williams College Library on YouTube
School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Michigan
GeorgiaTech Webcasts
LIS901-06 Webcasts
SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science
American Library Association on Flickr

Social Networks
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
University of Central Florida
StonyBrook University Health Sciences Library
Facebook Applications
JSTOR on Facebook
Library 2.0 network on Ning

Blogs
Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
Binghampton University Library
Mohawk College Library
Barnard College
University librarian at the McMaster University Library

IM
Ohio University Libraries
American University Library

Microblogging
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Lunar and Planetary Institute

Second Life
Nova Southeastern University Law Library & Technology Center
McMaster University Libraries
San Jose State University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ohio University

Answers
Answer Board Librarians

Subject Guides
Boston College University Libraries LibGuides
LIS753 on Squidoo

Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research discusses Why Your Company Needs To Be on Facebook with a recent post on the Harvard Buisness blog. She talks about using the social network to build relationships and enter into conversations with people while Tom Davenport, President of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, discusses Why Facebook and MySpace Won’t Change the Workplace.

via Social Media

Presentation Zen, the go-to blog for professional presentation design advice, has put together a list of 10 links to cool, high-rez images. These websites provide mainly public domain photographs in very large sizes for use in photo projects or in presentations. And check out their comments section for a few more suggestions.

Close to half of the 83 million Americans who went on the Web in October visited either MySpace or Facebook. Members of these two social networking ecosystems spend an average of 3 1/2 hours per month on the sites. But while people are paying attention to each other in these social networks, are they paying attention to the ads? Both MySpace and Facebook announced targeted advertising strategies earlier this month, but how successful will they be? Time Magazine explores these and other questions such as “Is Facebook worth $15 billion?” in Is Facebook Overrated?.

The latest top 100 list comes from Laura Milligan at VirtualHosting.com who puts together a stellar list of the best and most read blogs in the following categories:

• Social Media
• Social Networking
• Web 2.0
• Investor Analysis
• Developer Blogs
• Industry News
• Social Media and Marketing
• Social Media and Google
• Miscellaneous

I noticed a few of my faves on this list including Social Media, Groundswell, Mashable, Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, Read/Write Web, and TechCrunch.

Wired Magazine describes the formidable competition at the National Texting Championship held earlier this year in New York City. Over 300 competitors from across the country joined together in the Roseland Ballroom to put their texting skills to the test in a series of single-elimination rounds in which participants were given increasingly difficult phrases to type into their cell phones for a chance at $25,000.

In his article, In the World of Competitive Texting, Over 20 Is Over the Hill, Neil Janowitz tells us of the de-throning of a West Coast champ, and the rise of a thirteen year old texter, who according to the event website, sends over 4,000 text messages a month.

The technology research analysts at the Gartner Group have issued a new press release discussing the latest driving force in Web consumption and influence - Generation V. Generation V is the Generation Virtual - and it includes all those people who spend their time interacting, shopping, socializing, and creating online.

Much like in traditional Third Places, the Web equalizes distinctions between generations, backgrounds, and professions, and allows people the freedom to act and interact in a leveled environment.

“An 11-year old individual can be the leading “go to” person for advice on how to upgrade/hack a digital video recorder…An unpopular office worker can be a highly revered, accomplished 40th-level half-elf in World of Warcraft.”

So, instead of targeting or marketing to a particular demographic group such as Gen X or Y, etc. - Gartner suggests that marketers should approach this new group whose behaviors, attitudes, and interests have blended and treat them as one group - Virtuals. Marketers should then focus on collecting data surrounding the multiple online personas that people create and the behaviors associated with them to glean valuable marketing information.

“By 2015, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple anonymous online personas than marketing and selling offline.”

The Gartner report raises an interesting point which is that the real identity of individuals may never be known, however, a wealth of intimate information about their online persona’s interests, habits and attitudes can still be collected and used for marketing to them.

Here are some of their tips on marketing to Gen V:

• Companies should organize their products and services around multiple online personas.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from Generation V and its virtual environment

via Web Worker Daily

The New York Times Book Review has selected 100 Notable Books of the Year from all those books reviewed since December 3, 2006. The list is set to run in the Dec. 2, 2007 print edition of the Book Review, but you can read it online first!

Here are a few of the more interesting tomes on the list:

• HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.
• LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
• PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.

via Micro Persuasion

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending the Ad:Tech interactive marketing conference here in NYC. The conference had a lot of very timely sessions focusing on how new social software tools are being used as marketing vehicles by companies and organizations.

Two sessions in particular stood out for me, one of which was “Social Media and Consumer Generated Content: Has a Value Proposition Emerged?” which featured representatives from Fox Interactive Media, Coca-Cola, YouTube.com, and Digitas, each discussing their latest marketing efforts with social media and applications such as MySpace. The other was “The Online Female Consumer” which talked about women as a coveted target audience because of their zealous consumption of not only products and services but experiences and information. For the session, they brought in a panel of 3 women who were not tech or marketing experts but actual consumers who talked about their online behavior.

But now you can also check out what Ad:Tech had to offer by accessing their conference presentations which have been uploaded to their website. These are a few of the presentations you’ll find:

• SEO Workshop
• The Podosphere: Everything You Need to Know for Success in One Hour
• Tracking the Elusive Consumer: Designing Media Engagement to Drive Performance and ROI
• TV 3.0
• Web 2.0 Meets Thunderdome
• Tales from the Bleeding Edge
• Tactical Search: Local and Mobile Search Strategies

I am a avid reader of Forrester research which provides keen insight into information technology trends and developments in their analysis reports such as: “Leveraging User-Generated Content”, “How Consumers Use Social Networks“, (free to registered guests) “Why You Should Care About Web Widgets”, ” A Second Life For Marketers?”, etc.

They have just made available a series of videos from their recent Consumer Forum 2007 which everyone can access for free when they either log-in or register as guests. (They have noted that you must use Internet Explorer to access the navigation and see the slides.) Two of the analysts that I watch out for because they cover emerging trends and interactive marketing topics, Brian Haven and Charlene Li, have both got videos listed. Here are some others you’ll find:

• Social Networking And User-Generated Content In Today’s Media Environment
  Brian Haven — Senior Analyst
  Christie Hefner — Chairman and CEO, Playboy Enterprises
• MTV — Defining The Next Generation
  Christina Norman — President, MTV Networks
• Corporate Image In The Age Of Social Technologies
  Richard Edelman — President and CEO, Edelman
• Three People Who Are Changing The Face Of Media
  Shar VanBoskirk — Principal Analyst
  Jeremy Allaire — Founder and CEO, Brightcove
  Ze Frank — Founder, ZeFrank.com
  Philip J. Kaplan — Founder and President, Products, AdBrite

…and check out the website for more.

The Kindle e-book reader was released by Amazon today at a price point of $399. A click on the Kindle books section of Amazon’s website displays over 91,000 results with e-book prices ranging from just pennies to $1,000, with most popular books landing in the $9.99 range. Newsweek has full coverage of the story along with a talk with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos here.

Via Seth’s Blog.

Click for full size.

Want to catalog your DVD collections, as well as books, CDs, and video games? Check out applications such as delicious library, lib.rario.us, and shelfmates listed in Mashable’s latest list of 20+ Media Cataloging Sites.

The Washington Post has some great blogging advice about how to Be More Than a Blip in the Blogosphere. If you’re a blogger, you may want to check out this article for their ten tips:

1. TELL STORIES RATHER THAN STICKING SOLELY TO LINKS OR PHOTOS.
2. CREATE A VOICE FOR YOURSELF.
3. MAKE EVERYTHING EASY TO READ AND ACCESS.
4. SIFT THROUGH BLOGROLLS AND CREATE YOUR OWN.
5. WIDGET YOUR PAGE.
6. COMMENT EARLY AND OFTEN.
7. PRAY FOR A LINK FROM THE BIG BOYS.
8. NOMINATE YOURSELF FOR AWARDS.
9. POST WITH VERVE AND CONSISTENCY
10. JOIN THE CROWD.

Via Micro Persuasion

Click for full image.

Steven Bell discusses OCLC’s latest survey report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World in his post Takes More Than Blogs And Wikis To Build The Socially Networked Academic Library. The report calls for the creation of library social networks which enable user-generated content, although the majority of people surveyed felt that libraries should not be buildng such websites. Steven brings up some interesting challenges such as - what would the rationale be for our user community to participate in a socially networked library? And would we want to leverage the book brand that the public identifies us with, or attempt to establish a new one?

For those of you who IM, you may want to head over to Web Worker Daily to see their latest collection of 17 Tips to Be Productive with Instant Messaging.

1. Limit your time.
2. Have a purpose.
3. Get to the point.
4. Be concise.
5. Know when to use IM.
6. Stay with one chat service.
7. Limit your friends.
8. Block unproductive friends.
9. Respect others’ time.
10. Be friendly.
11. Say thank you or congrats.
12. Bounce ideas off people.
13. Ask for quick favors.
14. Switch to email.
15. Use group chat.
16. End it quickly.
17. Think action.