The Synthetic Librarian

What does it mean to find your voice in blogging? I believe there are two parts to the answer of this question. First, If you want to be relevant, people must be able to distinguish you from others. Second, you must be authenticate: 100% you. The first part is important, because no one will read you unless they find you relevant, and they won’t read you unless you stand out. The second part is important because, without it, you cannot consistently achieve the first part.

I have some rules that I follow to help me achieve these two things and I’ll explain them below.

I’m not going to quote any scholarly research. That is because everything I learned about finding my voice, I learned from Copyblogger, a blog written by professional copy editors and writers, not from scholarly sources. I was once employed, on contract, as a technical writer and, when I stumbled and experienced difficulties, I spent a fair bit of time reading about writing. Copyblogger was the turning point for me and I’ll refer to a few choice posts below.

Rule 1: Construct a Niche

Copyblogger asks Why Should Anyone Read Your Blog? and in answer they suggest that you pick the “spaces” you write in carefully. You want to compete in an idea-space. Yes: Compete. You won’t get noticed if your ideas are the same as everyone else. At the same time, you want to be relevant. This implies that when you write, you need to post in place where your topic is valued but you must say something different from others.

I accomplish this not by picking arguments but crossing boundaries. I like to combine knowledge taken from different fields and apply it to things I’m interested in. I have found this to be a remarkably constructive approach to building relevance in a niche. For example, the title of my blog is an allusion to “synthetic psychology” and librarianship two different fields that can inform one another.

By the way, what copyblogger means by “space” is the conversation that your writing is part of. Even if it is on your blog, it needs to be part of a bigger conversation. You need to link to the sources you are responding to (technical mechanisms called trackbacks and pings will alert others that your responding to their posts automatically usually).

My past “niches” have involved combining librarianship and cognitive science, information security and usability, systems administration and psychology. I can always distinguish myself from other voices by “mashing up” the topics a bit.

Rule 2: Don’t bury your lead

A big part of being distinguished from others is being remembered. To be remembered you need to be noticed, and to be noticed you need to attract attention long enough for new readers to get your point. My rule for this is “don’t bury your lead.”

Burying your lead means that you take a while to build up to your point.

An important rule of writing for the web is to never bury your lead. It’s good to tell a story, but no one will stay around long enough to read your story, if they don’t trust that you have a point. What that means, for someone like me with a small audience, is that I have to get to the point right up front.

If you want to get noticed, you need people to understand your point. But not everyone is going to take the time to read every word of your post, so you need to get to the point. That way, even if someone doesn’t read everything you wrote, they still got your point.

So I have come up with a rule of thumb to help me with this. My rule is, “Say it in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article.” I will figure out the essence of what I want to say in one sentence: if the reader has time for just one sentence what do I want them to “take away”? Then I will expand on that with just one paragraph. Finally, I will write the same thing up with much more detail: premise, assumptions, argument, and resolution/conclusion. Copyblogger describes this in their post “Your Unique Story Proposition“. You want the reader to be clear about what you are saying no matter where they start reading your post or how long they stay. This gives them the chance to see the 100% authenticate you even if they don’t know you yet.

I should point out that my recent blog posts were for a course and I haven’t followed this rule very well. I wrote dramatically longer pieces, due to the requirements of the grading criteria, than I ever would in a “real” blog post. In part this is because it takes a LONG TIME to be concise. My blog posts for this class take about 8-12 hours to research and write. But because of the deadlines involved (every 3 days) I cannot justify the extra 2 hours it would probably take to cut them down and weed them (it kills me actually… really kills me to post stuff that long).

Rule 3: Say something controversial

If you’ve managed to be relevant and to make your point, you need for people to remember you and find you remarkable. To do this, it helps to say something controversial (remember that part about competing in an idea-space?). Honestly, this scares me, and when I first blogged years ago, I avoid saying anything controversial. I wanted to be objective and rational.

Copyblogger however advises that you have the courage to be wrong. You need to walk the fine line of stating an opinion and supporting it, but not being so brash that you are offensive. You’ve got to give yourself room to be wrong.

This is important not just as an method of getting attention (and therefore distinguishing yourself from others in the minds of your readers) but because it makes you part of “the conversation”. If you can say something and be corrected by someone else: that’s a conversation.

In “Markets Are Conversations”(Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 2001), Searls and Weinberger argue that, in the online world, everything is a conversation because people are empowered to respond as well as read. The Internet has transformed marketplaces from producer-consumer environments into conversations in which everyone is a participant. They advise that business must find their “authentic” voice and that people will easily detect unauthentic marketing.

Being authentic is how I try to prevent “saying something controversial” from being “something offensive.” I like to use attention getting headlines, but nothing that I cannot defend or be corrected for. Take my most recent blog post for this class where I call Facebook a “Creepy Privacy-eating Monster.” That got your attention right? I’m will to stand by that. I’m also willing to be proved wrong or discuss the matter at depth where the sensationalism is irrelevant. I know this is the case because Facebook does creep me out. It creeps a lot of people out. On the other hand, I know facebook has a lot of privacy controls (and I know them intimately and technically). So I can go either way and that is the nature and value of discourse.

Things my rules don’t help me with.

I’ve been struggling with one piece of advice from Copyblogger for some time: Formality. In “How to write with a distinctive voice” (oh how very relevant to this week’s topic!) Copyblogger advises that bloggers avoid formality. This is a big problem for me, and I suspect for other grad students. We spend so much time writing formal papers that blogging can be a jarring experience.

When I follow my steps of “say it in a sentence, a paragraph, etc.) I naturally star following a kind of assertion-evidence teaching model. But that leads me into formality pretty fast.

In the assignments for the course I just finished, its been killing me to read what I’ve posted on this blog. It’s a hodge-podge of formal/academic writing and informal blogging. I don’t think the posts I write for this class are representative of my overall blogging style, but I still think the formality thing is something I have to conquer.

On the other hand, given the niches that I attempt to fill all of which are either academic or highly technical… how can I avoid a certain formality and still remain clear?

This post is an assignment for a graduate course I’m taking at the University of Alberta: EDES 501 an Exploration of Web 2.0 for Libraries. In this assignment, I am asked to reflective on what I have learned throughout the course, and discuss how it will impact me my future.

In EDES 501 we learn, primarily, through blogging. We are given 13 blogging assignments. For each one, we have to explore a different Web 2.0 technology, read about it, use it, reflect on it, and blog about our experience. Because the course is offered as part of the University of Alberta’s Teacher-Librarianship program, we are required to put these technologies into a library (or teacher-librarian) context. The blogging assignments require that we read the scholarly literature as well as the blogsphere. Finally, and most importantly, we must demonstrate our ability to use Web 2.0 technologies: we must apply these technologies by creating podcasts, videos, etc.

I believe that Cognition is for Action (Wilson, 2002, p. 626). Our intelligence comes from and is directed toward our need to interact with our environment. By demonstrating our use of technologies, instead of just discussing those technologies, we change the context of how we perceive those technologies and open ourselves to new opportunities for applying those technologies. EDES 501 changes how we think by making us do.

Two illustrate this, I will share three highlights of my EDES 501 exploration. Each be framed in the form of an assertion about Web 2.0. The most important one, I will argue, is that Web 2.0 is a technology that turns participation into value.

Highlights of my Web 2.0 Exploration

Privacy is Misunderstood

While I only touched on it lightly in several blog assignments, the concept of privacy was with me constantly during this course. Specifically, the notion that privacy is misunderstood by people both as users of Web 2.0 systems and by those who operate Web 2.0 systems.

The primary misunderstanding that must be addressed is that privacy is not confidentiality. Confidentiality (or secrecy) is one method we employ to get privacy. It is confidentiality that most Web 2.0 sites offer us instead of privacy.

What is privacy then? A traditional view of privacy is that one has the right to be alone or apart. (Woodward, 2007, p. x). Privacy, in the modern sense, is an individual’s right to control information about them (Acquisti, et al., 2007, Chapter 1). Both of these definitions are important in Web 2.0.

We would not like to have anyone feel that they are forced to participate or that we have invaded their private spaces. For librarians considering uses for Web 2.0, we must be sensitive to the fact that users may not appreciate us fulfilling our professional role in spaces that “feel private.” I have largely advocated for risking violations of this view of privacy (for example, when I suggested pro-active reference as a form of library marketing).

Mostly, this definition impacts the degree to which we might require users to participate in open social systems in order to benefit from library services. Users must be able to get reasonable access to library services, without having to join Facebook, tweet their personal questions, or expose themselves. Twitter evangelists take note: it is OK for people to NOT like and not value Twitter.

I am much more concerned with the second, modern, definition of privacy. I would be extremely critical of the privacy practices of Web 2.0 companies, but instead I will highlight how the emerging practices of Web 2.0 companies are creating the privacy: Web 2.0 is giving us increasing control over the information about us.

Facebook has had a number of “privacy train-wrecks”. Facebook has typically responded by offering users new controls to allow them to decide who can see their information. The fundemantal features of social media sharing are “sharing” and “social relationships”. As these services evolve there is a natural tendency to provide features that enhances these two things: find grain control over how and with whom we share. This is also, happily, the modern definition of privacy. By fulfilling our sharing needs, Web 2.0 must also fulfil our need for privacy.

It is important to note that there is a giant loophole in my optimistic observation of Web 2.0 privacy. Consider Facebook: since this release of their application platform privacy controls have been irrelevant, because it bypasses all those controls. Think also of Google. Google knows not only what you search for, but due to the popularity of its advertising system and analytics products, they know almost everything you read online (I challenge you to look at 100 pages and mark down which have Google urchin, analytics, or adwords embedded in them: most pages allow google to track you).

The standard discourse related to Web 2.0 and privacy however focuses around how much information we “put out there.” Through this course I have come to realize that the real issue is “how much control will we have to share with whom we want.” Libraries, as they develop their own Web 2.0 applications, must give users choices both to share and not share. Too many library applications today offer no sharing, perhaps under the misunderstanding that privacy is provided to patrons only when we keep their information secret. Let us, as a profession, find new ways to allow our users to share what they are comfortable sharing.

Organization of Knowledge has become Ambient Findability in Library 2.0

Why should we help our users “share”? Because, in Web 2.0 sharing is how information becomes organized (and organizing knowledge is a fundemantal aspect of librarianship).

The last chapter of Morville (200x) has this to say about the findability of stuff on the web:

Findability is at the centre of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions, and learn independently…. Because our trust in authority has eroded, we must find our own solutions. We select our sources. We choose our news. But since we’re swimming in information, our decision quality is poor. So, how do we stop from drowning? We fall back on instinct. We retreat from data. We drop pull and endure push. We pay attention only to messages that find us. And when we do search, we skim. A keyword or two into Google, a few good hits, and we’re done. We satisfice with reckless abandon, waffling back and forth between too much information and not enough. And, we make some very bad decisions as individuals, organizations, and societies.

Morville (2005) paints a dire picture in that passage, but not all hope is lost (I highly recommend his book). Folksonomy, social tagging, is helping us organize the information on the Web.

Throughout this course, I have come back to social tagging over and over. It seemed that every time I explored a Web 2.0 technology, the way that I derived value from it required social tagging. Systems with rich tagging systems worked better for me than those without.

In social media sharing systems, enormous value is added when items are tagged. This helps us search for them, it helps us find which items are related to each other, it helps us understand what a person is interested (by seeing what tags they use). Even without substantial authority control, folksonomy is powerful here.

In social bookmarking systems, which exist to give us tagging abilities, the best ones were those that had rich displays that enable quick ways to find things that were tagged the same, and to let me find people who used various tags. Delicious does this best, but Diigo might become better.

I’m not interest in Twitter, but even as a non-tweeter, I found enourmous value in Twitter search systems, primarily because of the use of social tagging.

What I learned here is that social tagging is allowing everyone to participate in organizing the web. Not everyone will blog: writing is hard. Not everyone will Tweet: its just noise to many people. Not everyone will write book reviews: that takes time and critical thinking. But many people can and will tag items.

Participation is Value

This brings me my most important lesson from EDES 501. If Web 2.0 were a single technology, it’s function would be to convert participation into value. I held this belief before EDES 501 [it's not new, see (O'Reilly, 2004, "Architectures of Participation"], but I gained a much deeper intuition for how that is occurring and how powerful it is.

To me this implies that a critically important thing for libraries to do, without delay, is to find ways to allow users to participate through and in libraries, and for libraries to find ways to participate in the communities that they serve. Web 2.0 gives us the opportunities for this, but it is unclear where the low-hanging fruit (the cost-effective, expeditious opportunities) are.

I have pointed to the example of Bibliocommons which is an OPAC that provides social media features to library users. But it is not cleared if this is a “walled garden” or not. My exploration in EDES 501 made me somewhat wary of walled gardens in Web 2.0.

There are some things that are very obvious to me know. Libraries should be enabling bookmarking of their catalogues: if your library cannot do it, people will use something else instead. Libraries should be enable comments and feedback on many pages. Libraries should be allowing users to contribute (wiki-style) to learning and training materials for library systems. Our users understand our systems better than we do in some cases: leverage that experience.

Librarians hold the role of expert searchers, finders, and recommenders. The “participation = value” model of Web 2.0 suggests two things here: librarians should be looking for their users online, in social space, to fulfill those roles. Librarians must participate beyond the walls of their libraries because other people are already fulfilling that role online and doing a passable job of it. Librarians, show your strengths: be web maven.

EDES 501 has Changed the Course of my MLIS Studies

When I signed up for this course, I expected an opportunity for reflective practice and to revisit technologies that I thought I knew in a whole new way. I got that. I did not, however, expect this course to change my plans for the rest of my MLIS degree: it did that too!

Throughout this course, I have come back to the importance of social tagging over and over. Even after our assignment of social bookmarking, I kept exploring social bookmarking tools that I had never used. I put serious thought into what I wanted to be able to do with these tools and what others were doing with them.

Directed Study in my Future

This weekend I prepared an proposal to undertake a directed study course where I will develop a Firefox add-on that enables social search leverage social bookmarking. This is a direct consequence of my exploration in this class. Prior to the course, I felt that I understand social bookmarking and was using as well as I could. I realize I was wrong and that there are substantial enhancements that can be had. Several papers I read during the course suggested that social tagging is best when tag re-use in encouraged. Usability studies showed that social bookmarking toolbars are essential to making use of social tagging. When I consider the courses I have taken in information architecture and organization of knowledge, and combine them with the reflection I engaged in EDES 501, I come to a conclusion. More people will tag, and more people will tag better, if the usability of tagging is improved. Usability will lead directly to better organization, and better organization will result in greater opportunities for participation. Pure value.

Professional Development in my Future

As part of my assignment on Wikis I created a wiki for a separate project I have been working: Information Security Learning for Information Professionals (ISLIP). Previously, I developed a digital library using the Greenstone software for ISLIP. I’m convinced that a wiki is a better platform, and I intend to develop that project late next year. Similarly, during our assignment on social networks, I discovered the value of Ning, and created a Ning for Information Security in Libraries. I hope to promote that Ning next October during the EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

These are both activities I had planned to do anyway, but this course shaped how I will do them. In the case of the Ning, I am quite optimistic that I will come up with a way to use social networking to generate interesting in information security in libraries. I don’t think I would have considered social networking for this purpose had I not taken EDES 501.

Coming back to blogging

I’m quite happy with the outcomes of my blogging in this course, and what it helped me to discover. However, throughout the entire course, I felt that my blogging was unnatural. This is because it was done in the context of the marking rubric. I think I would rarely post anything as long as I have in this course. To address the kinds of issues that I have addressed in invidual blog posts in this course, normally I would take time to write multiple, more focused blog posts, and others that synthesize them.

I plan to return to a number of the posts I have written, and rewrite them in a more focused way.

I learned something about the pace I like to blog at as well. I think blogging once-a-week is what feels right for me. I don’t like short posts. I like to think about something and go back and edit my posts until they are lean and effecient. In this class I didn’t feel I could do that, but I was constantly aware of the desire to do that.

A note for those considering this course

For those who might consider taking EDES 501 in the future, consider this: EDES 501 temporarily made me a rockstar of the biblioblogosphere. As I am writing this, my blog is currently ranked #2 on Davey Pattern’s Biblioblogosphere “Hot or Not” scale. Basically, that means that I’m blogging about topics that are increasing in popularity among other library bloggers and not blogging about things that are decreasing in popularity.

It’s not just that one “hot-or-not” scale either. Of the span of this course, I’ve discovered that other people are bookmarking, tweeting, and linking to my posts. This isn’t just an ego boost, it means this course has directed me toward generating and finding value.

I believe that this has as much to do with the structure of the course, as it does with me. By making me do Web 2.0, but directing me to participate in the social web, EDES 501 pushed me to think about, write about, and participate in those technologies that are the hottest topics in current library discourse. That doesn’t just make me feel good about the course or about my blogging, its changed me and provided me with new opportunities!

References

• Acquisti, A., Gritzalis, S., Di Vimercati S. (2007). Digital Privacy. CRC Press
• O’Reilly, T. (2004, June). Open Source Paradigm Shift.
• Morville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

This blog post is an assignment for a course I’m taking at the University of Alberta: EDES 501. In this assignment we are asked to consider all of the Web 2.0 technologies that we have explored in this course and decide what technology we would choose to introduce our coworkers, and discuss how we would fit it into a larger context of technology integration.

Choosing a technology to introduce to staff

In this course we have reviewed a wide variety of Web 2.0 technologies: photosharing, videosharing, social bookmarking, podcasting, virtual libraries, wikis, mashups, social networking sites, twitter, and blogs. Each of these has enormous potential for using libraries. I would argue that they are all required, however to pick just one, I would choose social bookmarking.

Why social bookmarking? Librarians are not strangers to social bookmarking and I believe that the time is right for more sophisticated uses of social bookmarking within libraries. Because the technology is mature but still evolving, social bookmarking can be put to greater use in reference, marketing, and training. In each each of the next three sections, I will explain an important use for social bookmarking in the library context, and then provide insight into what librarians must learn to put social bookmarking to this use. I will provide specific ideas for how that learning might take place in practice.

First, librarians must improve their own tagging practices

“Librarians use the latest information technology to perform research, classify materials, and help students and library patrons seek information.” (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook for 2008/2009). Librarians are required to be exceptional if not expert searchers, thus social bookmarking represents a technology that librarians must become adept using. To better use social bookmarking, librarians must draw upon knowledge of indexing and abstracting to create well organized collections of bookmarks. To use social bookmarking for to enhance search, librarians must be are of the various social bookmarking systems that exist and techniques for using them.

Indexing and abstracting skills can improve social bookmarking

Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) examined two years of data from CiteULike, a social bookmarking service for scholarly publications. They argue that tag reuse is important for long-term use of social bookmarking but found that “tag vocabulary is consistently increasing and users are not reusing others’ tags” (p. 354, p., 358). Librarians should recognize this pattern. It is precisely the argument that librarians make for authority control in bibliographic records. Strict authority control cannot work for social bookmarking, however, improving resuse is highly desirable as Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) have argued.

Librarians represent a professional class of worker (potentially) trained in the kind of skills that can improve tag reuse. Last year, as part of my work toward and MLIS degree, I choose to take a course on Indexing and Abstracting specifically so that I could improve my ability to tag bookmarks in delicious. I had accumulated over 1000 bookmarks and was finding it increasingly difficult to retrieve them. Learning the professional practises of journal article indexers helped immensely. For example, coming up with consistent rules for choosing the plural or singular form of tags, or for choosing how many tags to apply and their specificity have allowed me to continue to grow my bookmarks (nearly 500 in the past 4 months).

For librarians to improve their own bookmarking practices they should engage in professional development and either refresh their existing knowledge of indexing, or audit courses on indexing. These skills will apply equally well no matter what social bookmarking system is being used (e.g. delicious, diigo, CiteULike, etc.). It is important to note that cataloguing is unlikely to be as effective: rigid and formal classification systems designed for use in the library setting are not the same as general principles for organizing knowledge.

The need for improved tagging cannot be overstated. Benbuann-Fich & Koufaris (May 2008) examined the motivations of users in social bookmarking and found that “users contribute tagged resources for other users only if they believe they will be useful for those users. Moreover, higher quality contributions for others do not diminish the quantity of such contributions. We also find that there is a spill-over effect from quality of contributions for self to quality of contributions for others” (p. 150). Thus librarians can create and benefit from a snowball effect. The research indicates that users will contribute more if they feel others value it, and quality increases by some encourage quality increases by others.

In this respect, I believe that peer-education among librarians could be extremely effective in improving tagging. If I openly communicate my tagging practices among a peer group, it may start that snowball effect that Benbuann-Fich & Koufaris (May 2008) observed.

Use the Delicious Toolbar

There are other, technical, lessons to be learned that can assist librarians in improving their tagging practices. Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) found that in CiteUlike, the user interface did not support tag reuse and suggested interface changes that would promote tag reuse. In the past two years, several social bookmarking systems have added toolbars to assist users in visualizing bookmarks. For example, both delicious and diigo have toolbars for the Firefox web browser. These toolbars help users make new bookmarks, quickly access their existing bookmarks, and view the tags used by others. By adding the ability to see which tags others have used to describe a webpage, users are much more likely to reuse existing tags.

This may seem obvious, however, graduate students at Indiana University conducted a formal usability test of the Delicious social bookmarking system and found that the existence and availability of the Delicious toolbar was not obvious to users (Addy, Fan, Rafuiddin, & Zhao, 2008, p. 7). My own experience is that most delicious user (I know quite a few) use only the bookmarklet or the just the plain site: few use the toolbar. My personal approach to educating co-workers would start with instruction of the use of the toolbar, not of the service itself. I suspect that if the tool is useful, users will figure out how to use it without instruction of the all-to-basic aspects. If the tool is hard to use, they may not encounter enough early success to justify further exploration.

The diigo toolbar in particular is very attractive, and while I am heavily invested in delicious, I would start by introducing co-worker to diigo. Diigo also has the potential to converge with other social networking systems, as I will discuss later in this post.

Social bookmarking can be integrated with the ILS and other library applications

A famous library use of social bookmarking is PennTags: the Pennsylvania State University Libraries social bookmarking system.

PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain URLs, links to journal articles, and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat, our online video catalog. Once these resources are compiled, you can organize them by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by grouping them into projects, according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used collaboratively, because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite online resources. (Penntags website, “What is penntags”)

A novel feature of PennTags is the defacto subject guides that are created when users create “projects”. Projects are groups of bookmarks under a common title. For example, I might create an “EDES 501: Social Bookmarking” project to collect tags for this post. Project represent a high-level classification than tags and allow groups of bookmarks to be shared easily. Another interesting feature of PennTags is that items within the library catalogue can be tagged, providing for a new discovery mechanism for library collection items: the catalogue alone provides search by subject heading, but supplemented with folksonomy, users are more likely to find what they are looking for (see also Jefferson, 2007).

Barsky & Purdon (2007, pp. 66-67) stress the importance of these features “we can use social bookmarking tools to create Internet subject guides. An example of this the University of Pennsylvania Library’s social tagging cloud…. This page provide up-to-the-date information on user behaviour at the university’s library. Moreover, how about tagging your own online public access cataog (OPAC)?” This is excellent for UPenn, but we must ask how this can be accomplished for other libraries who do not have their own homegrown social bookmarking system.

The solution could be to use Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges from Delicious. For example, Delicious has a number of badges that can be easily embedded into library catalogues or other library webpages to promote bookmarking and to allow others to see what tags have been used to describe a page. This webpage has a delicious badge in the right-hand column that indicates how many people have bookmarked the page. The University of Alberta embeds a link to Delicious in the details page for every item in their catalogue to make bookmarking easier. However, I believe the most useful badge is one that shows what tags the current page is tagged with (as below).

So how can we encourage librarians to use these? I have already begun to implement my own approach to peer-education. Two years ago I gave a presentation called Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges at a local library conference. The talk was aimed making the use of this kind of technology as simple as “copy-and-paste”. I believe that making introductory use of these technologies to have the lowest barrier-to-entry but also to have high-rewards, they are more likely to be explored. The significant uses often require self-learning and exploration but to sustain motivation and build momentum, peer-education must focus on low-investment/high-reward strategies. Widgets, gadgets, and badges represent that.

Social bookmarking can aid in marketing and community engagement

The importance of low-investment/high-reward strategies in peer-education is so that librarians are likely to pursue more sophisticated uses of social bookmarking. There are substantial opportunities, beyond simple copy-and-paste widgets, to integrate social bookmarking with library websites. Delicious and Diigo both offer rich APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) that can be used to integrate social bookmark data into other websites. While this requires programming knowledge that librarians are unlikely to posses, they must provide leadership in identify opportunities and driving development.

In this sense, social bookmarking services must be thought of as databases of organized knowledge. Librarians use these systems to identify and describe valuable information resources. Toolbars help with that as does skill development (e.g. indexing as discussed). However, to have the greatest impact on users, the content must be presented in a variety of space outside of the social bookmarking system.

PennTags is hailed for its use in constructing subject guides, however Delicious or Diigo (thanks to their APIs) can be used to do the same. For example, it is possible to write a Javascript (a program embedded in a webpage) to fetch the bookmarks of a specific user, with specific tags, and present them on the webpage directly. Thus any library can use Delicious or Diigo to create dynamic subject guides. Any time the librarian updates their bookmarks, the library subject guide webpage would automatically be updated. In fact, I wrote such a system for The Alberta Library’s Ask-a-Question system many years ago.

If subject guides are possible, Librarians might consider radical collaborative efforts with their community. Imagine a subject guide that displays all the bookmarks from everyone who is a member of a librarians network, and has a particular tag. Librarians could use this to promote library events and collections. Patrons only need to “friend” the library in the social bookmarking system and then use a tag promoted by the library to have their own bookmarks included in a subject guide. If authority or authentication is desired (to prevent spam links), then the system could be reversed so that the librarian must friend the patron instead.

Similar opportunities exist by simply promoting the RSS feeds of the library’s own bookmarks. For example, if a library or librarian has a Delicious account, it is easy for people to subscribe to bookmarks for a specific tag. If the tag relates to a collection or event, then it may be valueable for marketing. Systems like Yahoo! Pipes can be used to trivially create visual displays of the RSS feed that can be embedded in any webpage.

Before these sophisticated applications are possible, Librarians must be confident users of all basic aspects of social bookmarking. I believe the peer-learning strategy outlined previously can accomplish that. However, to kick-start thinking about more sophisticated uses, librarians also have to be comfortable, at a minimum, with the copy-and-paste economy of widgets of the type created by Pipes or made available directly by Delicious and Diigo. Even if the librarians are not the technology implementors they must understand the connection between how they organize knowledge, and how it becomes embedded and available elsewhere (such as on their library homepage).

In this sense, education of other non-bookmark related technologies is essential before more sophisticated bookmark-related projects can be conceived. Librarians must feel confident enough to say “yes” to new ideas. I put a great deal of faith in the idea that Yahoo! Pipes can be platform that convinces librarians that sophisticated applications of RSS and social bookmarking are worth pursuing (as opposed to high-risk). Even if Yahoo! Pipes is not the actual technology that accomplishes these projects, it is the one that can show how easily it can be done and that sophisticated applications are *really* possible.

Social bookmarking is converging with other social media

Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott (2005, “Architectures of Participation”) discusses Tim O’Reilly’s concept of ‘architectures of participation’ “whereby a grassroots user base creates a self-regulating collaborative network. The result of this approach is that the best applications become more useful for all participants the more that people make use of them.” This is what we hope to get out of social bookmarking.

In a very basic way Delicious and CiteULike already deliver this. However, emerging trends point to how social bookmarking might grow dramatically in its value. For example, Google Reader recently added a feature called “Sharing” that is essential social bookmarking. Google Reader is a an RSS aggregator, but the Sharing feature allows a user to mark an item from an RSS feed, or any webpage, for “sharing” via the user’s public profile. Users can “follow” each other’s shared items from withing Reader or via an RSS feed or via another users Profile page. For example, my shared items are public.

This combines the features of social bookmarking and social networking and RSS aggregation. When these features are combined, the potential for value-through-participation is substantially enhanced. Imagine that your patrons might be able to follow a subject librarian. Imagine that the library might incorporate the profiles of their librarians into their own library website. Imagine that the library could aggregate and display the RSS feeds for their own librarian’s shared items on subject guide pages on their website. The number of ways that patrons might discover the resources being promoted by the library expands dramatically.

Conclusion

In summary, social bookmarking is converging with other important Web 2.0 technologies. It is likely to gain in value in the near future. I believe that an effective strategy for introducing this to co-workers is to promote and demonstrate low-investment/high-reward tools and practices that can be used by individual librarians, but that have the potential to be re-used in projects that integrate social bookmarking content with library websites. By encouraging librarians to become more-than-comfortable with the underlying technology is becomes possible to encourage them to imagine possibilities for more sophisticated applications. Even if they are not to be the ultimate technology implementors, Librarians are the expert searchers and organizers of knowledge and by focusing on that side of social bookmarking they are likely to be more capable of leading projects that integrate the organized content they create with library websites and applications.

References

Barsky, E. & Purdon, M. (2007). Introducing Web 2.0: social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians.
Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 27(3), 65-67. https://circle-ubc-ca.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/bitstream/2429/499/1/c06-024.pdf

Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B., & Scott, J. (2005). Social Bookmarking Tools (I). D-Lib Magazine, 11(04). doi: 10.1045/april2005-hammond.

Byrant, T. (2006). Social Software in Academia. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, (2), 61-64. http://net.educause.edu.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/ir/library/pdf/EQM0627.pdf

Jankowski, T. (2008). Becoming an expert searcher. New York : Neal-Schuman Publishers.

Ensor, P. (n.d.) Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher. LITA website.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (2009). Librarians: Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008-09 Edition..

Addy, C., Fan, C., Rafuiddin, M., & Zhao, Y. (2008, December 2). Usability Report for Delicious.com. Report for Interaction Design Methods course at Indiana University – Bloomington.

Farooq, U., Kannampallil, T. G., Song, Y., Ganoe, C. H., Carroll, J. M., & Giles, L. (2007). Evaluating tagging behavior in social bookmarking systems: metrics and design heuristics. InProceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work (pp. 351-360). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. Retrieved August 13, 2009, from http://portal.acm.org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/citation.cfm?id=1316624.1316677.

Benbuann-Fich, R. & Koufaris, M. (May 2008). Motivations and Contribution Behaviour in Social Bookmarking Systems: An Empirical Investigation. Electronic Markets, 18(2), pp. 150-160.

Yanbe, Y., Jatowt, A., Nakamura, S., & Tanaka, K. (2007). Can Social Bookmarking Enhance Search in the Web? Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 18-23, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Puspitasari, F., Lim, E., Chang C., Theng Y., Goh, D., Chatterjea, K., Zhang, J., Sun, A., & Li, Y. (2007). Social Bookmarking in Digital Library Systems: Framework and Case Study. Joint Conference on Digital

Older, N. (2008). Bibliocommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries. Library Journal, 07/18/2008
Jefferson, B. (2007). Forget the Lipstick. This Pig Just Needs Social Skills. Code4Lib Conference, 2007 (video).

If discourse is the extended expression of thought on a subject through speech, writing, or conversation, then discourse 2.0 is extended expression whose value is enhanced by participatory technology (i.e. Web 2.0). In this post I outline how the technologies for blogging and reading blogs allow people to connect to their profession in a way that can be called as discourse 2.0.

Blogging is Discourse

Consider the following two definitions:

Discourse….
a : formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject
b : connected speech or writing
c : a linguistic unit (as a conversation or a story) larger than a sentence
….(“>Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences. (O’Reilly, 2005, October 1).

The similarity between these two definitions may only seem superficial. Consider blogging however. Blogs are “tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public” (Efimova & Moor, 2005, p. 1) and typically have a chronological journal format: that is separate entries are distinguished by title and date. Even basic blogging is a form of discourse because “although a weblog is a personal writing space, its public nature suggest a need to communicate and invites feedback.” (Efimova & Moor, 2005, p. 1). Efimova & Moor (2005) argue blogging as more than a form of publication but one of conversation: “unlike other communication tools, weblogs create an environment for conversations distributed over multiple media spaces, so it is the effort that bloggers take linking to each other that holds a conversation together.” (p. 9).

In this respect blogging is certainly a form of discourse fulfilling different aspects of the definition of discourse. Blogging is writing; blogging is publication; and blogging is conversation.

However, these features of blogging are very “web 1.0″: read and write as separate activities (O’Reilly, 2005, September 30, p. 2). The Web 2.0 form of blogging offers a substantially enhanced form of discourse. Discourse 2.0 is blogging enhanced by the social web. Where blogging was ad-hoc, discourse 2.0 is orderly. Where blogging was individual, discourse 2.0 constructs social niches. Where blogging was personal conversation, discourse 2.0 enables professional dialogue.

Discourse 2.0 is Orderly

Original blogs were content management systems that enable easy publication on the web. The global collection of blog posts however, were not orderly. One found blog posts through keyword search and links provided between blogs. Organization of blogs before web 2.0 was ad-hoc at best.

Several important technologies have been developed that allow for self-organization of blog content. With these technologies, order emerges from the ad-hoc postings of individuals. Generally, this comes in the form of tagging supported by multiple different technologies. Tagging is supported with in RSS (the syndication technology that allows one to “subscribe” to a blog and automatically receive new posts), hidden inside blog posts, and externally in RSS aggregators.

Tagging in RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the name commonly given to a collection of protocols that allow users to subscribe to blogs. Users use software, called an RSS aggregator, which periodically downloads the RSS file of each blog the user is subscribed to. The RSS file contains a description, and possibly the content of, the latest blog posts. The descriptive information in RSS can contain tags (categorical descriptions of the content of each post). The tags can be used to allow users to sort, filter, and otherwise organize the posts they subscribe to. More significantly, the tags allow other services to identify which blogs and blog posts are similar and should be grouped together.

Tagging in Posts. The most substantial use of tags in blogging is hidden within the posts themselves. This occurs through the use of microformats. Microformats are simple rules for using HTML to explicitly describe content. For example, the ‘rel=”tag”‘ microformat is used widely to associate descriptive tags with the content in blog posts. Links within a blog post can have the words ‘rel=”tag”‘ hidden inside them (invisible to the reader, but visible to browsers and software). These magic words indicate that the text of a link is intended to describe the post.

Sites like Technorati look for ‘rel=”tag”‘ and create a directory of blog posts based on these emergent categories. This post contains many ‘rel=”tag”‘ links with descriptive terms such as “blogs”, “microformats”, “tags”, “rss”, and “discourse”. After this is posted, if you visit http://technorati.com/tag/discourse you will see this post listed, along with many other posts that have been tagged as “discourse”.

Other microformats exist to explicitly specify social relationships (e.g. FOAF) and geographical locations (e.g. Machine tags/Triple tags). For a large list, see microformats.org.

Tagging in Aggregators. While microformats use tags to describe blog posts, RSS Aggregators allow users to assign tags to describe entire blogs. For example, Bloglines and Google Reader both use tags to categorize all the blogs a user is subscribed to. In the case of Bloglines, these tags are used to create directories of blogs that users can search and browse through. In the case of Google Reader, the tags are used to suggest blogs that might also be of interest to you. When other people tag a blog, the describe it, and the RSS aggregators can help you find other blogs similar to the ones your already subscribed to.

For example, to see a list of all the blogs I have categorized as “Library” in Bloglines visit http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=clonedmilkmen&folder=Library.

Discourse 2.0 Constructs Niches

Consider that in traditional professional discourse, order is created, in part, through exclusion. Publishers and the peer-review system exclude those who are considered outsiders to a field. Discourse 2.0 is transparent and outsiders are free to join the conversation (be it a blunder or a blessing). Interdisciplinary discourse is enabled by the rough-edges of folksonomy classification. Where two groups share the same vocabulary, and tag their posts similarly, they are likely to discover each other through discovery mechanisms that depend on tagging and more likely to interact.

Traditional publishing followed already established groups, however, discourse 2.0 constructs new niches, which may or may not correspond to traditional social grouping.

Consider this passage from Sterelny (2007):

…social life became obligatorily cooperative, as the acquisition of crucial resources came to depend on a division of labour…. expansion into new habitats began. As this expansion continued, it co-occurred with, and sometimes depended on, an expansion of expertise and cooperation. (p. 719)

This sounds surprisingly like the kind of activity enabled by Web 2.0 and the kind of interdisciplinary connections I have mentioned. Sterelny (2007) however was describing social niche construction of early humans. In this sense, discourse 2.0 may be empowering some of the most basics aspects of human behaviours: to share and expand, something that requires cooperation and diverse group activity.

The technologies mentioned in the previous section that allow order to emerge from blogging, are precisely the technologies that allow individuals to discover others with similar interests. RSS feeds, allow us to keep up with others with similar interests. RSS aggregators allow us to organize the blogs we find according to our own constructed reality. Our own identity, our perception of what we belong to is shaped by tagging, but more fluid in discourse 2.0 than it was in discourse enabled by traditional publishing.

Weblog conversations branch into multiple paths and difficult to track and to follow, but they are also not restricted to a specific audience, making serendipitous inclusion of new participants possible. Furthermore, weblog conversations show how bloggers weave personal narratives and discussions with others into a whole. (Efimova & Moor, 2005, p. 1)

An excellent example is this post which cites evolutionary biology (“social niche construction”) in Sterelny (2007) and systems sciences (Efimova & Moor, 2005). Some bloggers are unabashedly transgressors of scholarly boundaries.

When a substantial number of individuals blog about overlapping ideas, when they discover each other via the order emerging from folksonomy, and when they engage in extended conversation as a result, they construct new niches through their discourse.

Discourse 2.0 enables Professional Dialogue

The ability to converse through blogging, and its orderliness alone, imply that professional dialogue is possible. However, the ease with which blogging can occur and the large numbers of professionals who can/do blog imposes a new problem for discourse: information overload.

How many blogs can you follow? How many conversations from emerge from those blogs? It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of discussion. In traditional publishing this problem is solved through the exclusionary nature of publishing and peer-review. One reads only a few journals from one’s field. Those journals contain relatively few articles compared to the total available. In discourse 2.0, the problem is solved by social niche construction mentioned in the previous section.

I would find it extremely hard to keep up with all the librarian blogs that exist. I subscribe to a large number of them. However, the emergent orderliness of blogs enabled by web 2.0 allows me to put them into a context. They each exist in certain niches: niches that I also occupy. Some I read and follow, and others are part of the discourse I participate in.

My ability to participate in professional dialogue is enabled by discourse 2.0. I find others who are active in niche areas that I am active in: systems administration and libraries for example. While professional journals exist that appear to discuss these issues, they do not enable the kind of specific attention to issues, that blogging allows. For example, LITA’s journals do not often get into the technical detail that Usenix/SAGE’s do. However, the blogs aggregated at Planet Code4Lib come much closer to one of the niches I inhabit (and that together with others there, construct).< ?p>

The Emergence of Social Sharing in Blogging: My Experience with Google Reader’s New Features

The remarkable aspect of “blogging as discourse” emerges when you consider the effects of social sharing technology. As a form of discourse, I believe that blogging is being substantially enhanced through the kind of participation enabled by the social web. In this respect, I am referring to a suite of complimentary technologies that enable writing, publication, reading, discovery, and conversation. These technologies currently include: RSS (syndication), Ping-o-matic (announcement), Trackbacks (conversation) (Hixie, 2002), Microformats (folksonomy), RSS aggregators and OPML (publication).

However, I would like to highlight emerging and as yet nameless social sharing mechanisms that rely upon and enhance these others. The example that I will pick is the “shared items” feature recently added to Google Reader.

Google Reader is an RSS Aggregator. With it you can subscribe to blogs, organize them by tagging them, and read the latest posts in the blogs you subscribe to. Google Reader has long been able to leverage Google’s search abilities to recommend blogs that you might be interested in. As you tag blogs, and so do others, Google can recommend blogs that you don’t subscribe to, but that others do, with the same tags or similar content. The new “shared items” feature however, offers much more fine-grained discovery potential and mimics social bookmarking at the same time.

There are two ways to use the Google Reader’s “sharing”: within Reader or to bookmark webpages.

Within Reader, as you are viewing blogs posts from your list of subscriptions, you can click the “share” icon. This tells Reader that you want to share the existence of this item publicly. Other people who also use Reader can “follow” you and they will see the items that you share. In turn, you can follow others and see what they share. This can enhance professional discourse by making is simpler and more transparent to discover items of interest. Reader gives you the option to add a note commenting on the item, further facilitating discussion. Finally, Reader gives one the ability to indicate if they “liked” the item (with a happy-face icon) and to tag the individual item.

Previously, tagging an entire blog was possible, but not individual items. However, now one can tag an individual blog post. This brings social bookmarking directly into the RSS aggregator. This brings in the second way to use Reader’s “sharing” feature. It is possible to use a bookmarklet to mark any webpage as a “shared item” with the same features as sharing a blog post. Essentially, Google Reader is a now a social bookmarking service that has a built in RSS aggregator and social network.

With these features, it is possible to discover blogs, people, and webpages through the emergent organization properties created by commentary and descriptive work of others.

Google Reader allows each user to create a public profile that includes their shared items. Much in the same way that delicious does. For example, profile is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/cloned.milkmen and there is an RSS feed for my shared items as well so that even those that don’t use Google Reader can still follow what I share and discover what I’m reading and respond to what I’m commenting on.

At this time, I have not discovered how someone might be able to browse what I “share” by tag. To truly enhance discourse, this system will have to allow others to transparently explore what I have shared and how I have described it. This is one of the greatest strengths of Delicious in my opinion.

Reference

• Efimova, L., & Moor, A. D. (2005). Beyond Personal Webpublishing: An Exploratory Study of Conversational Blogging Practices. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Vol. 4, p. 107a). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society.
• Hixie, I. (2002, September, 27). Whitepaper: Pingback vs. Trackback. Hixie’s Natural Log.
• O’Reilly, T. (2005, September 30). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O’Reilly.com Website.
• O’Reilly, T. (2005, October 1). Web 2.0: Compact Definition? O’Reilly Radar blog
• Sterelny, K. (2007). Social intelligence, human intelligence and niche construction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 719-730. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2006.2006.

I’ve got something negative to get off my chest: I’m not impressed by Twitter. There, I said it. I like a lot of web things: probably most web things. I really like Internet technology and I believe it has power to connect people. But, Twitter doesn’t draw my attention.

In this post, I’m not going to attack Twitter. Instead, I’m going to briefly explain what is and why other people like it. Then I will explain what libraries can do with Twitter including a few caveats. Finally, I will describe my own recent experience setting up a Twitter account and following other people. I have have some nice things to say about Twitter search, but I confess that I’m unlikely to tweet or follow tweets.

If you are new to Twitter and want to know how people use it, I recommend you watch the CommonCraft video “Twitter in Plain English”. I’ve embedded a copy blow for easy viewing. I’m going to assume that you know the basics: tweet, replies, follow, hashtag, retweet.

Twitter is Facebook’s most Popular Feature Opened up to the World

Twitter is often described as “microblogging“: blogging where the posts are really short. “Micro-blogs are social networks for broadcasting news with a very short character limit in the vein of text messaging” (Murphy, 2008, p. 375).

Twitter doesn’t attempt to define itself on its website. The Twitter “about” page says this:

Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

I would argue that Twitter has become popular because it takes the single most popular feature of Facebook and opened it up to the world. Twitter emerged in 2006, at roughly the same time that Facebook opened up to everyone (not just schools and corporations) and added “minifeeds” (short status updates) (Body & Ellison, 2008, p. 212). Twitter wasn’t that popular initially, but Facebook’s feeds were an enormous hit (after first being a privacy trainwreck).

The problem with Facebook’s status feeds, is that you have to be logged into Facebook to see them (or use SMS). Facebook’s “walled garden” approach works against them in some ways. The idea behind Twitter is to just do status updates and make them easy. In part, “easy” means providing more ways to get those status updates: RSS, instant messenger, on the Twitter website, via SMS, on your computer. Almost anyone should be able to find a way of following updates that is easy for them: not so true of Facebook.

With either Twitter or Facebook, making a status update is easy. With twitter, following updates is easier and more personal, so Twitter wins for people who like status updates.

Twitter has Five Winning Characteristics

It’s Easy

Twitter requires you to answer a simple question, “what are you doing?” The barrier to entry for using this technology is the lowest I’ve experienced. Similarly, following other twitterers is easy because you can choose the technology you are most comfortable with: RSS, mobile phone (SMS), and many others. Compare this with blogging which is writing and writing is harder.

It’s Real-time

Twitter works in real-time. This differentiates it from blogging. The advantage of blogging, especially when augmented with RSS, is that readers can choose when to read and are motivated to read often but not immediately. Twitter, on the other hand, encourages real-time updates: “What are you doing?” implies “What are you doing RIGHT NOW?”. This motivates readers to follow updates in real-time and Twitter supports technologies to do that (e.g. Instant messaging and SMS) so it works well for real-time updates.

It’s Organized/Searchable

Twitter messages can contain embedded descriptive tag (i.e. “hashtags” just as blog posts can contain tags. This makes past tweets searchable and organizable. Facebook status updates which are emphemeral by comparison. This characteristic has lead to Twitter becoming a substantial tool for trend research (Rowse, 2008) (e.g. M(Heil & Piskorski, June 1, 2009). See also HP Lab’s Twitter Research.

It’s Social

Twitter is a social media platform. The list of who you follow and who follows you defines a social network that can be used to discover new people with similar interests. For example:

I use Twitter to learn more about my particular intersection of interests and I seek out movers and shakers and writers and thinkers in the worlds of education, libraries, technology, edtech, journalism, and media. My Twitter network helps me grow as a professional and share as a mentor and teacher. (Valenza, 2009)

Libraries CAN put Twitter to Good Use

Organized, social, and searchable: What does that remind you of? These characteristics help us predict the types of uses that Twitter libraries might benefit from.

Lots of users implies a use in marketing

It’s no secret that Twitter has a lot of users, though nobody knows how many. This is important to libraries when they consider marketing services. A trivial outcome of this is that libraries must consider this as a medium in which they can reach some of their users. The non-trivial part is how best to use Twitter to reach them.

The CommonCraft video “Twitter in Plain English” paints of picture of how twitter can affect people: “the little messages from twitter painted a picture of her friends family and coworkers that she had never seen before. It was the real world” and argues that “Most of our day-to-day lives are hidden from people that care”. While this description is intended to talk about the inter-personal connections people, make it can apply to organizations as well.

Markets are Conversations

Searls & Weinberger (2001, chap. 4) argue that “markets are conversations” and that mass marketing has failed to deliver what customers want.

The product of mass marketing was the message, delivered in as many forms as there were media and in as many guises as there were marketers to invent them. Delivered locally, shipped globally, repeated inescapably, the business of marketing devoted itself to delivering the message. Unfortunately, the customer never wanted to take delivery. (Searls & Weinberger, 2001, chap. 4)

The example from the CommonCraft video shows what customers are looking for out of a converstation. Twitter represents an opportunity to let people see the hidden lives of libraries.

I would caution however that libraries must consider that people have a choice regarding who they follow and who they do not. If twitter is going to be used to help people discover the side of the library they never knew, then a library should be as authentic as possible. This means being part of the community and joining the conversation.

For example, identify five aspects of your library that might be relevant and desirable to communicate. Do not broadcast these directly. Rather, wait keep them in mind. Assign a library tweeter or tweeters to follow people in the local community. Use twitter search tools to track trends. When an opportunity arise reply to tweets by community members refering to library resources.

When using Twitter for marketing, Murphy (2008, p. 376) astutely observes that you should consider not only who is following you but who you follow: “The more friends you add or “follow” by subscribing to others’ feeds, the larger your community and the more visible your account will be.”

Libraries Organize Information

There are many search tools (a list is given at the end of this post) that can be used to search and visual tweets. However, it is also beneficial to have a person organize information in interesting ways. Libraries often establish pathfinds, guides, and other resources that collect together links to other information of relevance to their community. Often these are topical, but often they are simply timely. Twitters combination of social and real-time characteristics mean that librarians can leverage it to quickly put together lists of information of timely relevance to a particular social group.

Mastermaq provides an example of how Twitter had value in a real-time weather crisis for Edmontonians. While librarians are unlikely to be able to provide value on the kind of short time-span Mastermaq refers, to they could play a role in collecting information in longer, but still “emphemeral” time frames: weeks. If they combine resources and trends garnered from Twitter with local resources, they could become valueable to the community.

The commoncraft video argues that “real life happens between blog posts and emails”. For libraries, their value may be to organize information between the tweets about an event and the publication of the book about the event. Commoncraft also argues that the answer to the question “what are you doing?” “…makes us feel connected and part of each other’s lives.” Using twitter to identify what is relevant in that time-gap between immediate, emphemeral, and permanent could allow libraries to help people feel connect to local events in new ways.

Twitter for reference

One way that College@Home, in Twitter for Librarians: The Ulimate Guide (not so ultimate but still good) recommends “sharing references”:

Library patrons can get online help from librarians through a Twitter account. Patrons can send messages asking about specific materials and staff can get back to them when they have information. You could also use if for your own personal information sharing with friends and colleagues.

Better yet, are you answering a reference question and the user wants the link to the page you found? Offer to tweet it @them if that is what they want. This is a trivial offering that might be highly valued for twitter users and help patrons redefine their attitude toward libraries and their use of technology.

For a survey of libraries using Twitter in reference, see this blog post: Reference services and twitter.

Be wise in your use of Twitter

In the next section I describe my personal experience trying out twitter and I argue that social bookmarking and RSS readers are better choices for many of the things people use Twitter for. I would urge libraries to be wise in their adoption of Twitter. Ask, “Is Twitter the best tool to get this outcome?”

Similarly, be cautious of scholarly research reports on Twitter. I have not quoted many of the recent reports, some interesting ones that have come out just recently, because of their controversy. It takes time and circumspect consideration to really make use of this emerging literature.

For example, Heil & Piskorski (2009) is a preliminary report on research into gender differences among Twitter users. This research has been much linked to, in part because it comes out of Harvard Business School, and in part because Twitter is a hot topic. However, there is criticism of this from the library community (the respected voice of social network research Fred Stutzman).

Stutzman also draws attention to the recent Pew and Neilson studies claiming that teens don’t tweet as does Danah Boyd (from UC Berkeley School of Information) (see also the mashable article for the pro-teens-don’t-tweet research)

I’m aware of no criticism of Romero & Wu (2009), a report on research done at HP Labs but I needed additional explaination to make sense of it, and that makes me think that we must all take a moment to consider the research before acting on it.

In summary, I believe Twitter represents opportunities, but it is unclear how successful experiments with Twitter will be. Slightly more mature social media is likely to yield more consistent and impressive results. Don’t shy away from experimentation but set clear boundaries to prevent sinking too much effort in when you could be making bigger gains elsewhere.

My Experience Using Twitter

I have never used Twitter before, though I have used various twitter search systems. It’s one of the few social technologies that I have not explored.

Twitter is as easy to setup as the reports claim. In fact, the setup process is more light-weight than most sign-up processes. I created a Twitter account with my standard handle: clonedmilkmen. I made a few customizations: I added my standard picture, entered my timezone, and customized the background. I choose not to give them my mobile phone number (for SMS) or my email password because the first would cost me a great deal of money (receiving tweets at $0.25 per message, yikes!) and the second is bad news (never give anyone your password: no legitimate person or organization should ever ask for your password).

I skimmed through the help portal and the Getting Started guide to ensure I knew what I was doing. “Tweet”, “reply”, “retweet”, “hashtag”, “follow”: check, got it. Seriously, this is beautiful in its simplicity.

Next, I admitted to myself that I had nothing to tweet and tweeting that I had nothing to tweet is something I cannot bring myself to do. So, I turned to finding others to follow. I started with the Top 100 Librarian Tweeters and identified some libraries and librarians that I already know (from their blogs) and some I did not know. I also did a Find Peopel search for terms like “security” and “sysadmin” and “information security” and picked some people to follow from there.

I then I had to decide how I wanted to follow the posts of the people I choose. I already ruled out SMS as too expensive. I choose RSS because I use an RSS reader as part of my existing workflow. I was shocked however to find that I need to provide my Twitter username and password in order to add my RSS feed to Google Reader. I had assumed that the list of people I was following would be public, and therefore the RSS feed of tweets of those I follow would be too. Not so! That information is only available to those who are logged in: a walled garden like Facebook.

I choose not to give Google Reader my Twitter password, and opted to return, periodically to look at the list of new tweets from those I’m following. (deep sigh)

I was not impressed with what I was following. Here is a snapshot of what one 24 hour period contained:

• 72 tweets from 15 people I’m following
• 67 tweets were bookmarks: links to other sites
• Only 6 of these bookmarks didn’t use url shortening services
• 7 bookmarks contains information that would be valuable in real-time
• The rest were either news stories or bookmarked sites of interest
• 11 Tweets were personal: “what am I doing”
• One person posted, almost exclusively, links to their blog post

I use RSS Readers for News, and Delicious for Bookmarks

I could probably improve this through searching for more interesting twitter users. I looked around further but it looks like these patterns are very common. Lots of links to news stories are posted. Lots of people posting what they are doing right now. Lots of people posting bookmarks to interesting things.

Those are all valuable, and they are, in fact, the reasons why we use social software. However, I already have better tools for each of those things. I have no shortage of news articles, and in my RSS reader they are better organized. In twitter, because of the use of URL shortening services, I cannot perform triage on incoming items. I have to “go to them” to check them out before I know if they are any good. Similarly, delicious is already better at helping me discover interesting bookmarks than twitter.

Twitter Generates Interruptions

Twitter has something that other systems do not have however: it can interrupt me. This is both good and bad. If a news item can empower me to take action right now or help me make a decision right now, then I want to be interrupted.

The problem is, if I enable twitter to send messages to me by SMS, I’m going to a LOT more interruptions than I need. My summary above shows that I would be interrupted by an excessive number of items that I would not want to be interrupted for. That would lead me to stop paying attention and then I’m not going to see the important empowering interruptions in real-time. It’s a catch-22.

If I could identify a small number of high-value twitter accounts to follow that provided me with real-time updates of information that empowers my work, I’d use them in a heart beat.

Twitter Search has High Value

While I find that RSS readers and social bookmarking do a better job at helping me discover the same kind of information I’m seeing via twitter, I did find one useful aspect of twitter: search. There are a large and growing number of ways to search twitter and these can be helpful. I would go so far as to say that search is, by far, the most interesting thing about twitter.

For example, here is a question that has always plagued me in my career: Is the Internet down? I get asked that A LOT. What people really mean is, “I’m having a problem getting to one or more websites: fix it or take the blame” (I administer networks and systems on the Internet). The best I can usually do is offer and explanation. This problem occurs, when Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have outages. So, when I’m asked “Is the Internet down?” I ask, “is there an ISP ‘between here and there’ that is having an outage?” and “Is anyone else reporting wide-spread problems?”

I’ve never had a good answer, until Twitter. I can search twitter and quickly find out if TELUS or Shaw cable have an outage, or if there is a problem with Sprint in Seattle. When there is an outage, people tweet about it and in real-time. “Real-time” is a strength of twitter. I cannot search blogs this way. While someone *might* post on their blog about an outage, they are really not likely to do so. Blogs are not interactive in real-time, and so there is little incentive for people to share information in that way.

So, I like twitter search at face value.

Twitter is easy, and it is very easy to fall in love with Twitter search. I won’t give an exhaustive review of the multitude of ways, instead I’ll provide some links to different twitter search systems and mashups:

5k Twitter Browser

Visualize tweets and twitter networks. Search by username to see their network and most recent tweets, then drag and click to explore.

Twittervision

Google maps mashup that shows tweets by the geographical location of the tweeter. Let’s you select the language you want to follow. No search, just a map showing the location of the latest tweet. Also available in 3D!

Tweetstats

Lets you enter a twitter username and gets stats as a bar graph

Tweetnews

From their blog:

Basically this service boosts Yahoo’s freshest news search results… based on how similar they are to the emerging topics found on Twitter for the same query (hence using Twitter to determine authority for content that don’t yet have links because they are so fresh).

Twitgoo

A mashup that lets you twitter about what you are seeing right now. You take a photo and tweet it. Warning: when I first tried this, each of the first five pages contains pictures of people…. er… enjoying themselves.

Twellow

The twitter yellow pages. The grab all the public tweets and categorize them by content and create a yellow pages style directory. [Hmmm, maybe I can use this to find people that tweet stuff that I would actually want to read?]

Reference

• Boyd, D. M., & Nicole B. Ellison. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x.
• Honeycutt, C. & Herring, S. (2009). Beyond microblogging: Converstation and collaboration via Twitter. Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
• Heil, B. & Piskorski, M. (June 1, 2009). New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. blogs.harvardbusiness.org: Harvard Business Publishing.
• Murphy, J. (2008). Micro-blogging for Science and Technology Libraries. Science & Technology Libraries, 28(4), p. 375-378.
• Rowse, A. (December 3, 2008). Twitter for Research: Why and How to Do It, Including Case Studies. TwitTip.com website.
• Searls, D. & Weinberger, D. (2001). Markets are Conversations. In The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual.
• Valenza, J. (March 1, 2009). Meet Mr. Tweet and more on applying the app. School Library Journal website.