The Synthetic Librarian

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.

Social Networking and Libraries

In the library context, social networking presents three interesting opportunities: marketing, professional development, and socially enhanced search. I have already addressed socially enhanced search in relation to Delicious in a previous post, and while I find it to be the most interesting opportunity, I will not discuss it further here. Instead, I will start by providing a brief overview of what social networking is. Second, I will explain how Ning, a specific social networking system, can be used for professional development. Third, I will describe ways in which libraries can use popular social networking sites to market their services. Finally, I will conclude by commenting on the overwhelming privacy problems that social networking systems represent.

Social Networking and Social Networking Sites

Social Networking is the term, broadly applied, to features of Internet systems that allow you to specify your connection to other people and to search, browse, filter, find, or otherwise organize things using information about the connections between people. Online Social Networking occurs in two overlapping ways: via Social Networking Sites and via sites whose purpose is not social networking but that leverage social networking.

Social Networking for Communication

Social Network Sites (also called Social Networking Services or Social Networking Communities), are those Internet systems that have at their heart the personalized profile (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 49). Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace are prominent examples. These sites share three core features: each user has a “profile” that explicitly catalogues their interests and background; each users explicitly identifies who they know (establishing a “network” of social relationships); and users have some mechanism to communicate with one another through the site. (For a longer list of popular features see Courtney, 2007, pp. 77-78).

By having every user declare describe themselves and their relationships to other users, it becomes possible for groups of people that know each other already to communicate online as a group, and for strangers with shared interests to discover each other.

For people who already know each other, social networking sites are a transparent communication mechanism. It has become common for social networking sites to incorporate the ability for users to post content (e.g. photos, updates, videos, events) which is automatically made available to everyone they know (on that site). This transparent automation of the distribution of information is significant improvement over previous Internet technologies (e.g. email or Instant messaging) which require a user to manage multiple communication methods and contact details.

Social networking sites also support the formation of new social connections. Because each user is required to describe themselves and their relationships, it becomes possible to search for people with shared interests, and to discover others through “friends” they have in common. In this sense, a person’s identity is as much about who they know as it is about how they describe themselves.

Social Network Sites facilitate the sharing of identity information…. Compared with traditional methods for identity information disclosure, such as a campus directory, the social network community fosters a more subjective and holistic disclosure of identity information.” (Stuzman, 2006a, p. 1)

Social Networking as a Feature of Other Sites

Many websites leverage social networking without it being at the “heart” of site. For example, Flickr is, arguably, primarily a photo sharing site. However, it includes the ability for members to declare which other members are their friends are distinguish friends from family and strangers. This information is used in two ways: to allow users to restrict access to their photos to only their friends or family; and to allow users to browse the photos of their friends and family. Similarily, delicious, the social bookmarking site, recently added the ability for users to declare who is in their “network”. This feature is used to allow users to list the newest bookmarks added by their friends.

It is worth mentioning that in both Flickr and Delicious, people in a social network are not explicitly “friends”. Unlike social networking sites like Facebook, users cannot deny someone the ability to add them as a contact and follow their photos or bookmarks. The people in are network are not necessarily friends, and relationships can be “one way” (e.g. Bob lists Jane in his network, but Jane does not list Bob in hers). The purpose of explicitly recoding a relationship is not to communicate with someone else, but to watch what they post.

[Aside: I believe this non-communicating use of social networking features is a form of Stigmergy (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, 1999): where “indirect communication between individuals via modifications made to the shared environment” causes the emergence of surprisingly complex and sophisticated structures (Fong, Nourbakhsh, Dautenhahn, 2003, p. 143). In this case organized information.]

Ning as a Platform for Professional Development

While the professional literature provides many examples of how to use social networking sites to “reach out” to library patrons (e.g. Courtney, 2007, pp. 82-84), I believe that it is important for librarians to use this technology directly for their own benefit. Librarianship holds collaboration as core value, and social networking sites provide substantial opportunities for collaboration.

However, I would argue that large, general, social networking communities like Facebook, are not the most effective space for this type of collaboration. If librarianship is a single profession, then is a diverse and complicated containing many groups with different goals and interests. To effectively make use of social networking there should be organization and focus. Multiple social networks, with separate focuses, and smaller communities may be desirable. In this way, individual librarians may find it easier to keep up, benefit from, and participate in individual social networks. For example, I envision separate social networks focused on literacy, teacher-librarianship, or reference to be desirable.

Wishing to explore this, I went looking for such social networks and discovered the TeacherLibrarianNing. This social network has 3,466 (currently) and features a way for members to share photos & videos, announce events, and discussion items of interest. The site also features individual blog which are aggregated together.

I was impressed by the mix of both closed and open community that this “Ning” supported. To participate in discussions, one must be a member. This “wall garden” approach encourages thoughtful, qualified participation and (in theory) should raise the quality of conversation. At the same time, the blogs are public and allow non-members to see the public face of this community.

While I am not interested in Teacher-librarianship, it did prompt to me find a Ning that suits my specific niche interests. I could not find a similar community for those interested in libraries and technology but I did find the SysAdmin Network which is also built with “Ning”. This particular social network is of intense interest to me as I have been an information technology professional for 15 years. I immediately joined and, once inside the walled garden, recognized the same value I speculated existed for teacher librarians in their Ning. The level of discussion was much higher than I had experienced in most other open forums, and the aggregated blog of all community members was worth adding to my blogroll. On the other hand, the shared photos were comparable but not superior to those found in Sysadmin groups on Flickr that I am member of.

Ning is a kind of “meta” social networking site. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, where all users are partipating in the same system, Ning allows anyone to create a new social networking site, with substantial customization available and ways to open or limit membership and access.

This lead me to consider that there was no social network for another niche topic of intense interest to me: Information Security in Libraries/Librarianship. As a serious experiment with Ning, I decided to create a new social network on this topic.

The steps were easy. On the Ning homepage there is a link that says “Create Your Own Social Network”. Clicking that link provides a short form where you provide a name, tagline, and other brief details for your social network. You also get to pick your own URL (ending in “ning.com”). I created the “Information Security for Libraries” (http://infosec4lib.ning.com/ Ning.

After the site was created, I specified that anyone could join and that all parts of the site were public. I choose to default features for the site (photo and video sharing and blogs for all members). Then I sent an invitation to the instructor of the course for which this post is written as a test.

I explored the available features of the the Ning available through the “Manage” control panel (only available to the Ning creator/administrator). I was very impressed by the features available. For example, it is possible to “broadcast” message to all Ning members, to create a “badge” for each member to embed in their other online spaces. It is possible to import photos for Flickr.

Similarly, the privacy features of Ning lend themselves to the ideas I previously articulated for a constrained community. It is possible to make some parts of the site private (available to members only) while others are public. I believe this would allow librarians to create vibrant social networks with focused internal activity but a productive public face. For example, by restricting discussion forums to members-only but allowing all blogs to be public, members have a place to share openly without a fear of being misunderstood in public, but also a place to communicate to the “outside” world.

Libraries can use Facebook for Marketing

Charningo & Barnett-Ellis (2007) surveyed 126 academic librarians about their knowledge of and attitude toward Facebook and found that while librarians were overwhelmingly aware of Facebook (p. 28) but that most were not involved (p. 28). My personal experience was that in the spring of 2007, librarians in my community (Alberta, Canada) began to adopt Facebook in incredible numbers but that libraries are still struggling to find productive uses for Facebook.

Importantly, Facebook is an online space heavily represented by University and College students. Stutzman (2006b) found that 88 percent of college freshmen at UNC Chapel Hill had facebook accounts, and that the majority were active, frequent users. Similarly, Charingo & Barnett-Ellis (2007) found that librarians reported Facebook to be a very popular use for library computers. My own experience is that Facebook is the most popular website used on public computers in the large academic library in which I work.

Given the popularity of Facebook among students, and the familiarity of Facebook with librarians, I believe it is an ideal vehicle for marketing the services of academic libraries to students.

The notion of “reaching out” to students where they are is not new. Courtney, 2007, p. 83) summarizes some ideas including delivering existing content on social networking platforms, promoting library events through social network sites (Facebook has a nice event management system).

Social networking sites allow librarians to adopt a new role by placing themselves into a social realm with users. By reading blogs, group postings, and message boards, the librarian becomes an active participant, who is able to anticipate and advise patrons as needs arise. Linking to patron profiles also keeps the library within the consciousness of users, potentially increasing interaction. Courtney (2007, p. 83)

I will go further, and describe a practice that I will call “pro-active reference” whose goal is not reference but marketing. The idea is for librarians to identify members of their community in social spaces (Facebook is the example I will use) and to participate in these social spaces by pro-actively providing the type of information that would normally result from reference service. Think of this as “roaming reference” in cyberspace.

Furthermore, an explicit goal in this practice would be to encourage the word-of-mouth spread of knowledge about library services through social networks. I will explain this by referring to the “Tipping Point” social network model (Gladwell, 2000).

The Tipping Point

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell (2000) explains how three types of social agents are responsible for the spread of word-of-mouth information. These agents are:

1. Connectors: people who know many other people, and often bridge different (real-world) social networks
2. Mavens: subject-area experts who make it their business to know a lot about a subject and who are strongly motivated to share that information.
3. Salesmen: people are advocates and evangelists for information, products, or points-of-view.

Gladwell (2002) argues that:

Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources out to be solely concentrated on those three groups. (p. 256)

While libraries are unlikely to start an “epidemic” spread of knowledge about their services, they still stand to benefit from spreading knowledge about their services. For example, in my experience even LIS students are not fully aware of offerings from the library such as Refworks and Citation Linking services. Undergraduates are often not aware of databases, and faculty are not often aware of specific databases that might be available to them.

Pro-Active Reference for Marketing

So how can libraries exploit “tipping point” like effects in Facebook and other social networks? I propose that libraries should appoint a “Social Networking Librarian” whose job is to find members of the libraries community in Facebook, and identify those who are connectors, mavens, and salesmen in subject areas for which the library can be of extraordinary value. The social networking librarian should follow the public conversations, posts, updates, and events of these key individuals, and pro-actively offer advise, resources, and help. This is not an attempt to mindlessly “shill” library services or to say, “you should come to the library for that!” Instead, the goal is to act as an authentic participant in the social spaces and activities of those members of the libraries communities and to be of value in precisely the way that libraries set out to.

For example, at the University of Alberta, students form group online for all kinds of purposes. On Facebook there are long-standing groups of students whose common bond is that they hang-out and study in Cameron library. There are groups directly associated with clubs on campus. There are also individuals from the University of Alberta, participating in groups not associated with campus, but with their scholarly or recreational interests.

Idea #1. The social networking librarian would seek out Mavens (subject-area experts and the spreaders of knowledge) and follow their wall posts, posts in discussion forums, etc. The librarian would look for ways that library resources or services might help out and participate by offering information, links to the library resources, and even direct offers of help. The mavens, who are naturally inclined to collect, explore, and share information will be likely to pass on not only the information provided, but knowledge of how to get more information on that topic.

Idea #2. By finding connectors in the community, the social networking librarian can spread awareness of library services to those who might never hear of them in the first place. Connectors of those people that bridge communities by virtue of the large number of people they know. Connectors are often the people that forward links (mindlessly or otherwise) (Phelps, Lewis, Mobilio, Perry, and Raman, 2004). Librarians can make excellent use of connectors by simply posting links that get attention: the interesting, flashy, weird, or unusual. I would also suggest that connectors are the ideal spreaders of information about library events. Anything that is simple to spread and obvious in its value is going to be spread far and wide by connectors. Fortunately, because individual self-identify who their friends are and who they affiliations are, it is easy to find those individuals are well-connected on Facebook.

Idea #3. The social networking librarian can find the library’s “salesmen” in facebook by looking at the discussions associated with hot topic groups. Specifically, groups whose subject matter is of local interest, or interest to areas where the library has services or collections would be of interest. The salesmen are the ones who vocal in advocating or evangelizing a point of view, or a product. While librarians might not be comfortable assisting someone in evangelizing a specific point-of-view, they should be interested in those individuals that advocate information-related products. Finding an individual that helps others pick a technology is a good idea: if you can make that person aware of the technology provided by the library, they may become an effective advocate for the libraries costly and underutilized software, computers, and online resources.

An unlikely approach?

I suspect that many librarians would bristle at the thought that they should seek out members of the library’s community for the purpose of making them aware of the useful services and information of the library. I suspect that most would be more comfortable with waiting for the community to come and ask us for assistance, that we would be happy to provide. However, social networks represent “spaces” where members of our community go to actively participate in information exchange: information resources are of premium value in these space. Libraries should see a new opportunity here: an opportunity to be relevant in new and stronger ways through active participation instead not passive assistance.

The Creepy Way that Social Networks Know You

I would like to conclude by discussing the topic that must have been invoked by the last section: privacy. Social networking sites are tied directly to concepts of privacy because of the intimate details shared openly through them.

Govani & Pashley (2005) surveyed 50 undergraduate as Carnegie Mellon University as to their attitudes toward privacy on Facebook and the types of information they shared. They examined how student’s use of Facebook privacy settings changed after the survey, when they were more aware of the consequences. They found that openly shared a great deal of information, with only postal addresses, phone numbers being held back from public view. Notably, students were willing to share their mobile phone number much more so than their home phone numbers, but not nearly as much as other information. Email addresses were shared publicly by roughly 40% of surveyed students. After the study, there was almost no change in the use of privacy settings: knowledge of privacy risks and the availability of privacy controls did not result in increased usage of privacy controls.

Similarly, Stutzman (2006a) found that students at UNC Chapel Hill shared openly with course schedules, sexual orientation, web sites URLs, and phone numbers being held back by most students.

The public discourse surrounding Facebook, other social networking sites, and privacy usual boils down to comments such as, “I have nothing to hide”, or “I don’t put anything personal up there anyways.” However, other research (see Govani & Pashley, 2005 for a review) shows that users do have substantial concerns.

As a person involved in and with strong knowledge of information security, I believe the discourse needs to move away from promoting awareness of sharing only what you are comfortable with and looking at the more alarming trends in cybercrime. Social networking sites work because of the explicit detail we provide about ourselves, however, this information is precisely what enables cybercrime (e.g. identity theft).

For example, most sites require that you provide your full (real) name, date of birth, and encourage you to list where you went to school, where you live, and where you work. Participation in the social networking sites is difficult if you don’t provide this kind of information. However, this information is also valuable to someone who want to steal your identity as these are the types of questions need to fill in credit applications or to prove your identity over the phone to a large institution.

On Facebook, the greatest threat comes from its “applications.” Anyone can make an facebook application: there is no vetting process for application developers. This is a problem because when you add an application, it gets access to your entire profile with few limits. The Canadian Privacy Commisioner has recently notified Facebook that this is not inline with Canadian privacy legislation because there is nothing to prevent application developers from storing information gathered from user profiles (the license agreement requires them to say they won’t do that, but there is no practical auditing of this agreement).

Many users might believe the solution is to avoid adding applications. However, applications also have access to your friends profiles. If one of your friends adds an application, it can see everything in your profile that your friend can. Thus, you are at risk even if you do not add applications.

So, realistically, how bad is the problem? Criminals are active on facebook and have been for some time. One ploy involves “malvertising” whereby criminals use facebook apps that appear to be ads, but are in fact viruses. Another method is cookie stealing, where hackers can take control of your entire facebook account.

To my mind, the worst are the phishing scams disguised as quizzes. Have you ever taken a quiz on facebook? You know, things like, “What 80s rockstar are you?”, “What is your pr0n-star name?” These seem innocent but involve you answering a lot of unrelated questions about yourself. Scammers have used these quizzes to collect precisely the information they need to steal your identity: the kinds of questions your bank would ask if they wanted you to prove who you were over the phone. When disguised as a quiz the questions seem completely innocent, the problem is that you might not know who is recording the answers or assume that they are not recording them at all.

The Creepy Feeling of Facebook and Google/Orkut

When I signed up for both Orkut and Facebook under a pseudonym, both systems suggested people I might know. This is creepy because facebook go things right. Despite not using my real name, it guessed who my friends are. Three of the people listed are people known to me. One was a person whose name I know, but whom I’m never had contact. The last was completely unknown to me.

In Orkut, I found the profile of a friend: a profile I didn’t know about that reveals a somewhat different side to the person. They might not want me to know about that profile. I am fairly certain that the suggestion in this case was based on the fact that Orkut was allowed to read the names of everyone in my Gmail address book and did pattern matching. This is wrong. Nothing in the sign-up process indicated that my private address book would be scanned by Orkut and used to reveal my identity to others (other people are now going to see ME as a suggestion should they have my address, or something like it, in their contact list).

Facebook wanted access to my email account. They wanted me to give them my email address and password. This would allow facebook to download all my emails and scan them for email addresses. Why on earth would you give the password to your email account to anyone, ever? I’m not sure who thought it was OK to encourage people to give up their passwords to their email accounts. In the Information Security world we go to great lengths to tell people to never share their passwords due to the constant and horrible consequences we see every day from that kind of behaviour.

So how did Facebook know my friends? Because my friends shared their email accounts with Facebook. Facebook slurped up everything in those email accounts. My friends have emailed me at my pseudonymous address and so my pseudonym, Cloned Milkmen, is a “contact” of theirs.

So what is a librarian to do?

You might find my concerns over Facebook privacy contradictory. On the one hand, I have advocated that librarians use Facebook to identity specific individuals and participate in the conversations those people are involved in and pro-actively offer them reference-style assistance. Surely, that is an invasion of privacy?

I would argue that it is participation, and not privacy-invasion. Privacy, in the modern sense, is an individual’s right to control information about them (Acquisti, et al., 2007, Chapter 1), it is not the same as confidentiality or secrecy. We must respect that individuals have a right to share what they want, that they are free to make potentially risky choices in sharing. To respect privacy means that we must not share information about them, that they have not chosen to share.

At the same time, a traditional view of privacy is that one has the right to be alone or apart. (Woodward, 2007, p. x). By this definition we would not like to have anyone feel that they are forced to participate or that we have invaded their private spaces. For this reason, I advocate that any Social Network Librarian, seek out ways to be an authentic participant in social networking discourse, and not simply a “shill” for the library. This requires that such a librarian be immersed in and part of Internet culture, not simply a worker doing a job.

What then is the role of librarians when it comes to the creepy side of social networking? Many libraries already adopt a role in educating users on the practices of evaluating information sources and identifying “good” information. Should librarians have a role in educating users on how to protect their privacy?

I would like to say yes, however, I am not convinced that the level of discourse surrounding privacy in the library community is sufficiently developed that they could play that role. For example, knowledge of information security is not generally taught in library schools (The University of Alberta will be offering a 1-credit course on this topic in October).

On the other hand, many libraries are aware of and participants in EDUCAUSE’s Cybersecurity Awareness month activities. Librarians, if they are to be advocates of improved privacy practices, must start by improving their own awareness and technical skills related to information security. In creating the Information Security for Libraries Ning, I hope that I might soon play some small part in that.

Reference

• Acquisti, A., Gritzalis, S., Di Vimercati S. (2007). Digital Privacy. CRC Press
• 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.
• Charnigo, L., & Barnett-Ellis, P. (2007). Checking Out Facebook.com: The Impact of a Digital Trend on Academic Libraries. Information Technology & Libraries, 26(1), 23-34. doi: Article.
• Courtney, N. (2007). Library 2.0 and beyond : innovative technologies and tomorrow's user. Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2007.
• Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I., & Dautenhahn, K. (2003). A survey of socially interactive robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3-4), 143-166. doi: 10.1016/S0921-8890(02)00372-X.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point. New York: Hatchet Book Group.
• Govani, T. and Pashley, H. (2005). Student Awareness of the Privacy Implications When Using Facebook. Privacy Policy, Law, and Technology Course, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005.
• Phelps, Joseph E., R. Lewis, L. Mobilio, D. Perry, and N. Raman. 2004. Viral Marketing or Electronic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examining Consumer Responses and Motivations to Pass Along Email. Journal of Advertising Research 44 (4): 333-348.
• Stutzman, F. (2006a) An Evaluation of Identity-Sharing Behavior in Social Network Communities. International Digital and Media Arts Journal, 3(1).
• Stutzman, F. (2006b) Student Life on the Facebook. Ph.D. Research Report.
• Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2006). Wikinomics : how mass collaboration changes everything. New York, NY : Portfolio, 2006.
• Theraulaz, G. and Bonabeau, E. (1999). A Brief History of Stigmergy. Artificial Life, 5(2), 97-117.
• Woodward, J. (2007). What every librarians should know about electronic privacy. Westort, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Media Sharing sites are extremely popular. Common examples are Flickr for sharing photos, or Youtube for sharing videos. You can also share audio, powerpoint presentations, and screencasts. These sites allow you to upload your content and other people can search for it, access it, and easily share your content with others in a variety of ways.

A Mashup combines one or more different *things* to make something distinctly new: something more than the sum of its parts. A mashup could combine two different songs to make something more interesting than either of the originals. A mashup could combine audio and video in an interesting way (e.g. Animoto makes movie-trailer like mashups from your videos and a soundtrack). A mashup could combine two the features of two different websites (e.g. Panoramio combines Google maps with photo sharing) to provide something that neither provided on their own.

Media sharing and mashups share a common feature: they create value through sharing content. This is obvious in media sharing, but it is also fairly simple: content is shared through viewing, linking, and copying. Mashups depend upon others sharing content, but in a way that allows the creation of something new (not simple copying).

In this post, I am going to describe how, socially, media sharing works. I am also going to explain how mashups work and are enabled by media sharing. As interesting as each of these things are, I’m going to demonstrate something remarkable: that mashups are becoming shareable media in their own right. I will conclude by arguing that this is a significant opportunities for libraries and suggests ways that it can be used.

What does it mean to “share” media?

Originally, media sharing sites were pretty simple. They were essentially social media sites: You would upload your photos or videos, and other users could view and search for your videos if they visited that site. People could also discuss each other’s content. However, it was basic: You shared your content.

Things got interesting when media sharing sites allowed anyone to embed shared content on other sites. Embedding means that you find something you like and you put a copy on your blog, or your Facebook account, or somewhere else. The content links back to the media sharing site (and all those social media features), but visitors to your blog (or whatever) can see the content without having to visit the media sharing site at all. In this context, someone else is sharing your content.

A Simple Example of Media Sharing

If you already know how media sharing works (e.g. embedding youtube videos), just skip to the end of this section.

This development is significant because it changes how content is found by others. You content becomes more findable when others can share it. Other people, people you don’t know, will find an audience for your content. Here is an example:

Imagine that Bob has a very dramatic chipmunk. He makes a video and shares it on Youtube. He’s got a small audience, and they all see the video because they regularily visit his Youtube page. A few other people might find Bob’s video by searching on the Youtube website (if he tags it well). Bob’s video is cool, but not enough people know it.

One day, Jane sees Bob’s video on youtube. She’s blown away by the coolness of Bob’s chipmunk video. In fact, Jane has a blog about chipmunks. So she copies the “Embed” code for the video into her blog (just like I did below). Now the video appears in her blog post. Her audience sees the video when they visit her site, they don’t have to visit Youtube at all. A lot more people have seen Bob’s cool video now.

The video still links back to Youtube of course. This is important, because Jane doesn’t know it but Alice has a website for humourus pet videos. Alice subscribes to Jane’s blog and see the video. Alice follows the link back to Youtube and, like Jane, shares the video on her blog, and a LOT more people see it. Now Bob’s video is getting copied all over the place. It’s so popular it’s catching on like a virus (and hence it’s called a
viral video).

The video in this example is actually real, as is its popularity, but it wasn’t originally shared by a guy named Bob (as far as I know).

Media Sharing is Important because it makes Content Findable

In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More Chris Anderson argues that abundance is the marketplace is revealing new truths about what customers want and how they expect to get it (Anderson, 2006). Specifically, he observes that the Internet has made more goods available, easier to find, and cheaper to obtain and argues that these three forces are transforming the marketplace focus away from blockbuster hits and toward satisfying myriad niche interests.

The popularity and media sharing is an example of Anderson (2006) theory. Content creation is easy, and the Internet makes distribution cheap. We must ask, however, how in a growing glut of user-generated content is anything findable? To understand this, we must realize that, unlike older communications media, like television, not everything is a blockbuster hit and therefore known by everyone.

Anderson (2006) is heavily influenced by the example of Amazon.com researched by Brynjolfsson, Hu, & Smith (2003) which reported that Amazon.com offered a selection of books that was 23 times larger than the number of books available in a typical “big box” bookstore and concluded that “increased product variety of online bookstores enhanced consumer welfare more than lower prices or increased competition in the marketplace (p. 1580). This measure of consumer welfare means that consumer needs in bookstores are being revealed only when book selection is greatly increased (p. 1591). In short, there is a trend for variety, not blockbuster hits, to drive demand. Anderson (2006) expands on this by examining CD music sales at Amazon.com and finds the same trend (pp. 90-91).

In media sharing sites, very few videos every “go viral” as we saw in the dramatic chipmunk example. Instead, most content find a small audience that are interested specifically interested in that content. “Sharing” is the mechanism by which we make personal media findable. If you find a video on Youtube that you like, you might share it with people you feel will like it. They might do it the same. Thus, content finds it way to its audience: the audience doesn’t have to necessarily find the content.

How (socially) does sharing work?

We might ask, why does media sharing work at all? Will people really share? Why do they share? Will they share enough that non-blockbuster-popular items will find a new audience? Recent research indicates that individuals posses a variety of motiviations for sharing, and that some individuals share a great deal.

Phelps, Lewis, Mobilio, Perry, and Raman (2004) studied the responses and motivations of people in sharing content and links by email. 66 participants agreed to have their email analysed for content and forwarding patterns and 23 were later interviewed at length. The study identified a variety of motivations that influence the chances that a person will forward an email to an acquaintance. Specifically, they found that individuals were likely to pass on information in areas that they were experts in to those that they felt could benefit from the information. They also found that some individuals passed on information more generally to large numbers of individuals.

This matches the popular Tipping Point theory. Gladwell (2000) suggests that the spread of information is heavily influenced by three specific social network roles: connectors, mavens, and persuaders. Connectors are people who have many social ties, mavens are subject experts, and persuaders advocate specific ideas. The role(s) that an individual plays in their own social network and the presence or absence of others playing various roles may influence the individual’s effectiveness in finding and using information in day-to-day tasks.

Huotari and Chatman (2001) studied the influence of social networks on information seeking among staff of a University. Fourteen participants were selected from five different levels in the corporate structure of the University of Tampere in Finland and were interviewed at length. Their interviews were analysed and contacts between individuals from different levels in the corporate structure were categorized as “outsiders” and contact between individuals from the same level were termed “insiders.” The study found a variety of relationships between people: some of which revolved around reciprocal information sharing arrangements, and others which involved one-way flow of information. The study identified individuals seeking out others that fill maven-like roles especially as relates to power-relationships in corporate hierarchy (that is, the powerful actively seek out mavens). In the context of media sharing, we might imagine that this influences how and when people share professional presentations (e.g. found on slideshare). By putting your presentations on slideshare, you become a maven in the hopes of gaining the favour of those more powerful. This would appear to be a strong motivator toward sharing.

Uses of Media Sharing by Libraries

There are many examples of media sharing being used by libraries. I have previously blogged about The Flickr Commons, an extremely popular photo sharing project that grew out of the Library of Congress sharing their photo collections on Flickr. Now there are over a dozen institutions making their photos available through Flickr. These collections had limited audiences before, when they were only available on the LoC website, but are now finding niche audiences thanks to media sharing.

Calgary Public Library choose to share its videos on Youtube. So now others can embed those videos in their blogs and the advertisements might reach new audiences that they did not before. These videos are not likely to “go viral” but there isn’t a need for everyone in the world to see these. Instead, it is enough that they will reach a niche audience that is receptive of the ads.

Many librarians are expanding their professional development activities by on slideshare.com. If you give a presentation at a conference, you reach a certain audience. However, if you share it on slideshare, others can share it on their own sites with an audience that is likely to be receptive and interested. Here is a presentation on Library 2.0 for example.

Mashups are Enabled by Sharing

The open attitude that lead media sharing sites to allow embedding of content in other sites, has also lead to the development of “mashups” sites. A mashup site combines the features of two or more other sites to do something completely new. These are possible, when one website allows their content to shared through mechanisms that computer programmers can use to automatically search, retrieve, and display content. These mechanisms are called APIs: but think of them as automated sharing.

For example, Twitgoo combines twitter and photosharing. Panoramio combines Google maps with photo sharing). The Edmonton City Policy Neighborhood Crime Map combines google maps and crime stats (but shh… don’t talk about it… its against the usage agreement).

Mashups are also popular in libraries. In 2006, Talis, an ILS vendor, held the Mashing up the Library Competition (my entry was a google maps mashup showing Alberta’s libraries). Countless innovation arose, including mashups of multiple, normally separate, library services and data sources.

LibraryThing is probably the most important source of library mashups. They provide APIs so that programmers can “mashup” LibraryThing with other systems. For example, zorked.net/bm mashes up data from BookMooch, LibraryThing, and Amazon.com. CodexMap combines LibraryThing data with Google Maps.

Sharing Mashups

Mashups are as exciting as media sharing sites are. As the examples, I have given demonstrate, they should both be of intense interest to libraries. Media sharing allows libraries to reach niche audiences that they might not know exist. Mashups allow libraries to create entirely new services from existing sources.

However, a key traditional limitation of mashups, is that they are websites. Like those media sharing sites of old, before embedding, where people had to search the site itself to find content, mashups are destinations. To “share” a mashup, you would have to give them the link. Another limitation is that to make typical mashups, one has to be a programmer.

This is rapidly changing however. For example, for over a year, it has been possible to share a google map. Here is a map to the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.

View Larger Map

That is a trivial mashup though: a little bit of data, and a map. What would be ideal, is to be able to create custom mashups, without having to be programmer, and to be able to share them as easily as we share embeddable content.

Making Embeddable Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a system that allows you to generate simple or sophisticated mashups without being a programmer and to be able to share them as several different types of embedded content. In this section, I will describe the process of creating two mashups (one actually didn’t work but it’s not Pipes fault).

You have to have a Yahoo! ID to login to Yahoo! Pipes. After you login and you choose to create a new “Pipes” you are presented with a screen that looks like graphing paper. This is a canvas on which you will “draw” your mashup.

To create the mashup, you drag-and-drop modules onto the canvas. Your mashup has to have one input module and one output module, and (optionally) other modules that modify your input.

The input sources can be many things. For example, it could be a Flickr photo search, an RSS feed, an XML data source, a search of Yahoo! Local, a search of Google Base, or several other things. You can also type in your own input which is surprising useful

The output depends, in part, on the input. Typically the output is an RSS feed of the items generated from the input. If your input is a Flickr search, than you will have the option of presenting the output as a slideshow, as a list of image, or an RSS feed of the images. If the photos have been geotagged (i.e. contain the location of where they were taken) then you will also be able to present the results as a map.

Example 1: Flickr photos of Cameron Library

To start off with, lets create a Flickr mashup. I drag the Flickr input module onto the canvas and I specify a search of “cameron library” and then connect the input module to the output module and click “Save”. I give it a name and click “Run Pipe…”. It shows me three different views of the mashup and a link to an RSS feed. Here are two of the views.

Example 2: Creating an RSS Feed

Many libraries offer RSS feeds, however, some libraries don’t have the technology to do it. They might want to provide a list of new items that have arrives, or even something as simple as an RSS feed for events and changes in holiday hours.

Yahoo! Pipes, will let you create an RSS feed from scratch. Just drag the “RSS Item Builder” input onto the canvas and then fill out all the forms fields (e.g. Title, author, etc.). You can even include the URLs of multimedia files here (podcast anyone?!). To add multiple items to your RSS feed, just drag another RSS Item Builder and fill out, then drag a “union” module. Draw a line between each of them and the “union” and now you have an RSS feed with both items. After you save the feed, you can choose to embed it or give someone the link. Here is an embedded version.

Example 3: Searching the Library Catalog

What I’d like to do is mashup my library catalogue with RSS. I want to be able to create an RSS feed that will contain all the new books that come up when I search the catalogue for “mashups”. There is a technical trick to this. Yahoo! Pipes will allow you to use any XML data source as input. There is a standard system called SRU (Search Retrieve by URL) that will search a library catalogue and return the results as XML.

To create this, you drag the “Fetch Data” input on to the canvas, and then put in an URL. The URL is special, it is an SRU query. Once you know the trick, it is easy to change the query. Here is an example of a query of the University of Alberta Libraries for “mashup” books.

http://sru.library.ualberta.ca/neos/Unicorn?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=bath.issn=0029-4713&maximumRecords=1&recordSchema=mods

I have to specify the XML tag (just like an HTML tag) that will contain my search results. In this case that is “records.record”. And then attach the input to the output.

To improve this, I could transform many of the input items, into known RSS fields. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Pipes, had a problem parsing the XML data from the SRU service and this pipe did not work. However, the general idea that you can transform any XML source into a mashup is interesting.

Other Possibilities for Pipes

A number of the modules in Pipes hold out interesting opporutunities. For example, there is a “location extractor” module. Any input source that contains geographical information (e.g. place names, addresses, latitude and longitude) can be used to mashup with a map. This happens automatically: the user doesn’t have to do anything to create the map output. As long as some data from the input is identified (by dragging-and-dropping or drawing lines to it) as a location identifier, the output will contain an mapping option.

Similarly, any input that contains images will provide for slideshow or other display options.

Imagine a mashup of library catalogue search and cover art. The mashup in Pipes would automatically provide an RSS feed and an embeddable list to put on a website.

The Value of Shareable Mashups for Libraries

Libraries have a lot more to share than photos, videos, presentations, etc. Libraries are sources of organized information. As with Anderson (2006) “long tail” theory, libraries have large amounts of information, where most items are likely to be of interest to only a few individuals. So how can we put together niche interest items with the unknown individuals who might be interested in them? In an Academic Library, the traditional approach is to have liaison librarians who get to know a special collection and the faculty that collection serves.

Sharable mashups present a new way to do this. By combining library data sources, with other information libraries can create new applications, that may be highly specific to a niche interest. By making these sharable through a simple cut-and-paste, users who find these items interesting can then share them with other likeminded individuals.

Reference

• Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling more of less. New York: Hyperion.
• Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y., & Smith, M. (2003). Consumer surplus in the digital economy: Estimating the value of increased product variety at online booksellers. Management Science, 49(11), 1580-1596.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point. New York: Hatchet Book Group.
• Huotari, M-L, and E. Chatman. 2001. Using everyday life information seeking to explain organizational behavior. Library and Information Science Research 23 (4): 351-366.
• Phelps, Joseph E., R. Lewis, L. Mobilio, D. Perry, and N. Raman. 2004. Viral Marketing or Electronic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examining Consumer Responses and Motivations to Pass Along Email. Journal of Advertising Research 44 (4): 333-348.

For this EDES 501 blog assignment (wikis), I decided to engage in a personal and practical exploration. I am currently working on a personal project to develop resources to help information professionals learn about information security. I have called this project ISLIP: Information Security Learning for Information Professionals.

In a previous course (LIS 538), I created a collection of openly redistributable learning resources using the Greenstone Digital Library software. While Greenstone provided many features, after developing the collection, I felt that wiki might be a better technology for this project.

In this post, I will describe my motivation for using a wiki, describe the characteristics that make a wiki right for my project, share my experience setting up a prototype wiki, conclude by explaining what I think will or will not work for my wikified project.

The ISLIP Project

Information Security is the process of protecting information and has three fundamental goals: to assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information resources and system (Merkow & Breithaupt, p. 21; Krutz & Vines, p. 6). Traditionally, information security has been treated as a technical implementation problem, however, as the impact of information security threats have become more prominent the professions that are involved in information security have broadened (Krutz & Vines, p. 4; Merkow & Breithaupt, 2006, pp. 7-10). I believe that information professionals of all kinds, including librarians, have an much to gain from learning and important contributions to make to information security (see also EDUCAUSE’s Cybersecurity Awareness activities.

What is needed is the collection of existing, re-usable, re-distributable, and re-mixable information security related content that can be used directly for individual learning or that can be used in the creation of learning materials. There exists a growing body of such materials, but they are typically aimed at information technology applications. These materials can be valuable but they must be collected and put into context through description and review. Previously, I have created a digital library with several dozen examples. Each item was a video, podcast, document, paper, or link to a website that could be used as I have described. For each, item the digital library described why the item was significant and how it might be used in the context of information security (e.g. was it an example related to a fundamental concept? Was it an exercise? A lecture? etc.).

In developing the digital library it became clear that a more collaborative technology platform would serve the ISLIP project better. That platform would have to allow for usable content management and structured descriptive metadata. A wiki would seem to be a suitable technology for this. In the next section, I will demonstrate, in detail, why this is so.

Why Wikis?

“A wiki is basically a website in which the content can be created and edited by a community of users” (Boeninger, 2007, p. 25). This is a typical definition of a wiki, however, there are many common and important characteristics that are responsible for the popularity of wikis. Wikis are valued because they are:

1. collaborative
2. content management systems
3. archives
4. capable or organizing knowledge

Wikis enable Collaboration

For those who value collaboration, Wikis represent one of the most exciting web technologies. Tapscott & Williams (2006) describe wikis as “a metaphor for a new era of collaboration and participation….” (p. 18) and attribute the successes of many projects to the ability of wikis to foster collaboration (e.g. Wikipedia (p. 71) and OpenWetWare, a wiki-based project at MIT “designed to share expertise, information, and ideas in biology” (p. 161)).

This perspective is common in the LIS literature. Farkas (2005) states that “wikis are a great way of collaboratively developing a website” and specifically suggests that they be used for the creation of subject guides “because it can be edited by anyone, patrons can add to the collection of useful resources and can prune away the dead links”.

Frumkin (2005) also stresses the value of collaboration and reviews a number of library projects that used Wikis. For example, OSU augments their virtual reference service by having a wiki that librarians update with new and updated information resources used in answering questions (pp. 19-20).

In both of these examples, the value stressed is that problems that projects that are difficult for a single person to manage, are easily accomplished when technologies allows many people to work on small parts of it. Wikis enable this collaboration.

Wikis are also Content Management Systems

Collaboration may be the defining feature of wikis, however, collaboration is not the only feature that makes them successful. Prior to wikis, an entire community could edit a single website, but problems in coordinating the editing process could quickly make the site unmanageable. Wikis are successful because they are collaborative content management systems.

Tapscott & Williams (2006) further point out that the benefits of wikis “are linked to the ease and efficiency with which collaboration takes place… wikis distribute the burden of organization across a collaborative network instead of making an individual project manager a choke point” (p. 254). We see here that is isn’t just collaboration that is important: it is the usability and management that are important.

We can imagine then, that the most successful wikis are those that provide for the most usability features. Consider that the original wikis, which used WikiWords (or CamelCase) have fallen out of favour. WikiWords refers to the practice of creating new pages in a wiki by using mixed capitalization in the text of a page: any word with multiple capital letters was assumed to be a link to another wiki page. However, this made wiki pages difficult to read as spaces were removed from many long phrases (and precisely the most important phrases, as these were the ones that represented entries in the wiki!). Usability was poor in these wikis and they are no longer popular.

Desilets, Paquet, and Vison (2005) conducted an early, formal, study of wiki usability. They observed children as they used a wiki to create a hypertext story with minimal instruction. They found that the children required little help in using a wiki, and most questions they had related to linking and not content creation. Kickmeier-Rust, Ebner, & Holzinger (2006) also conducted empirical studies on the usability of wikis among students and found that those with poor usability resulted in decreased enthusiasm by learners. The concluded that usability as a crucial factor for the success of specific wiki software.

Wikis are Archives

I feel that an overlooked feature of wikis is the ability to act as content versioning or archiving system. A fundamental problem with a content management system that allows for multiple authors is the tracking of changes. Many wikis automatically archive the previous version of a wiki page, when a new edit is created. Thus, as a document evolves, a complete archive of its history is being created. It is possible for users, to go back and see who and when a document was edited and to retrieve prior versions of the document. While this is primarily a functional feature of wikis (to enable recovery from vandalism or poor edits), it provides new possibilities in scholarship. For example, WikiScanner is a tool that tracks who is editing pages in wikipedia and has been used to out government officials and others who try to whitewash pages describing them.

When a system acts as its own archive, with fine-grained tracking of changes, entirely new possibilities are opened up and wikis are one of the few collaborative systems that do that.

Wikis support Knowledge Organization

In the library context, most applications require more than easy-to-use content management and collaboration. Libraries have a great deal of information to communicate and doing so effectively requires knowledge organization. Many wikis have features to assist with this as well: primarily I am thinking of MediaWiki.

Boeninger (2007, pp. 29-30) reports how MediaWiki supports the co-creation of content and knowledge structure: “I learned about the structure and organization as I added content. In adding the content, I assigned many of the resources in the wiki to categories, which helps to make the wiki more organized and usable.

In the corporate world, wikis are valued for their ability to organize knowledge, not necessarily for their collaborative features. For example, Wagner (2004) compared wikis to several other Internet technologies (discussion forums, blogs, video streaming, chat, among others) and found that wikis were the best collaborative solution to capturing and organizing corporate knowledge on an ad-hoc basis. This should not be overlooked: the ability to capture knowledge on an ad-hoc basis could be the key to success in many projects as authors may have the time to write, but not the time to plan and organize what they have written. Any system that allows for effective but ad-hoc organization is a winner.

Wikipedia is probably the most popular example of a successful wiki. Consider that Wikipedia has an enormous amount of information to organize. Is the success of wikipedia that it is collaborative? Certainly this is true, because without a huge number of editors, such a large body of work would not be authored. However, consider that also, that large body of work would not be usable unless it were well organized. Wikipedia’s success is partly due to the mechanisms of MediaWiki that allow content to be easily organized through the creation of categories, and alphabetic lists, as well as largely due to the encyclopedic model where information is stored in individual entries (one per page) on specific topics (unlike say, a book or a story which are not constrained to a single topic in this way).

Creating a Wiki with MediaWiki

MediaWiki for usability and organization

I was disappointed with the lack of usability I saw in PBWiki, and other hosted wiki sites like wikispaces have limits on the amount of content a free account can host. The obvious solution for my project seems to be to host my own wiki with software of my choosing. However, the number of MediaWiki, the software used to create Wikipedia. MediaWiki, by default, has some minimal usability features. I also know, from experience using sites like Wikipedia, that it has the ability to use strutured metadata to format and organize pages. This is very appealing to me. Furthermore, unlike hosted wikis, MediaWiki is appropriate wikis that serve limited communities (where only members can edit).

Installation of MediaWiki is easy

The requirements for a server to run MediaWiki are minimal. The software is written in PHP and requires an open-source SQL database, so any L.A.M.P. system will work (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Most organizations should find this easy to support as LAMP is the most popular and widely support “web stack” in use today. I already have a L.A.M.P. server, so all that needed to be done was to follow the installation instructions.

The install process for MediaWiki is straight-forward. First, I unpacked the archive file containing the software, and uploaded it to the webserver. Second, I created a database on my server for MediaWiki to use. Third, I ran the configuration web page over the web, and followed the prompts. The install process prepares the backend database and configuration files needed to run the Wiki. Normally, the MediaWiki installer will creat the database for you, however in my environment (which is somewhat more secure than most), I had to manually create the database. In total, the installation process took about 15 minutes.

The URL for a Wiki is Important

The MediaWiki documentation explains that picking the specific URL for your wiki can have long-term consequences. I choose to follow the best-practices of creating a site for project and putting my wiki in subdirectory of my site. This allows me to have other web applications on the site in other subdirectories (for example a blog or discussion forum) and homepage at the root of the site that is NOT managed by the wiki. I choose the URL islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/ for my wiki.

Some basic Customizations are Required

The most idiosyncratic aspect of setting up my wiki came after the wiki was installed and working. I had three features that I wanted and implementing these required that I edited a configuration file that was generated during the installation of MediaWiki. To determine what specifically needed to be done required that I read some rather elaborate documentation that outlines the pros and cons of different methods. This process, including learning, took a little over an hour to complete: most of the time was spent reading, planning, and making decisions.

Fortunately, I am familiar with editing files on my server and was not challenged by the basic steps of knowing where to look and how to edit the files (this might require an extra hour or so of learning users new to web hosting technology). The MediaWiki documentation has many exmaples that novice users could follow if they have trouble configuring the software.

The three customizations I wanted were to change the default logo, to allow editing only by authorized users, and to use clean URLs.

By default there is a logo in the top-left corner of the screen with a message indicating that the logo should be changed by changing a variable “$wgLogo”. This message is a bit cryptic, but the MediaWiki documentation indicated that I just had to add a line to the file LocalSettings.php that contained the URL of a image to use as a logo. I put in the URL to my standard photo. It worked and took only 5 minutes to learn how and complete the work! I only choose my photo because it was readily available, and my time to experiment is limited. In reality, I would create a proper logo for ISLIP, should this experiment continue.

I also wanted to ensure that edits could only be made by users with accounts and that, as the administrator, I could activate accounts before they were used. This is to prevent any potential abuse or spam problems. This topic was covered in the MediaWiki FAQ and so the instructions were easy to find. Disabling the ability of anonymous users from making edits was easy and took less than 5 minutes. Reading the documentation, it became apparent that a feature I would want in the future would be the Confirm Account Extension. This extension allows the administrator of the wiki to approve accounts before they are able to make edits. Again, this would help prevent spam. Due to time constraints, I decided to leave that for another day.

Finally, I wanted to use clean URLs (called Pretty URLs in the MediaWiki manual). For example, “islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/Title” instead of “islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/index.php?id=161″. Clean URLs avoid complex and idiosyncratic syntax and communicate information to users. Given that librarians represent a professional class of information organizers, I feel that clean URLs are a must for my project .

This step took considerably longer than the others (roughly 1 hour). I had to read extensively about the various methods available to achieve the result I wanted and make choices that would impact my site. In the end I used the recommended “no root access” method. Once I picked this method, it took only 10 minutes to implement.

Adding Content to a Wiki is Easy but Organizing is NOT

After I had my wiki installed, I needed to add some content. For the purpose of this assignment, I decided to create 5 entries: a main page describing the project, 2 pages with conceptual content, and 2 pages describing external learning resources. The content is only “stub” content, designed to demonstrate and explore the wiki as a tool, not to be actual content (which would take substantially more time than this assignment allows).

Creating the main page was simple, and just a matter of understanding the basic MediaWiki syntax for linking to other pages in the wiki. Similarly, creating the 2 pages describing concepts was a also easy. I just needed to edit the page and provide content. In the concept pages, I put in links to resources pages I planned to create.

Creating pages to describe interesting external resource pages required more forethought and planning however. Everything in a wiki is identified by its title, and when you create a new page you must consider future conflicts for the title of your page. For a conceptual page, the name of the concept is clearly the title. But what about for a learning resource? Should I title it based on the title of the resource? What if that title is generic (e.g. there might be several resources I want to link to titled “Introduction to Information Security”). Another issue, that comes to mind is that pages describing external resource represent a special category of content in the wiki. This begs the question, should I create a special category in MediaWiki?

MediaWiki was chosen because it has special features for organizing knowledge, just not the ability to collaboratively edit web pages. So the category feature is something I wanted to try out. Specifically, I believe that I would like to use structured data when I add pages that describe external resources that might be useful in the development of learning materials. In Wikipedia, many special pages use this kind of metadata. For example, look at the Wikipedia page for Datura, a plant. On the right-hand side, you will se a box displaying the scientific classification for that plant. If you edit the page, you will see that this data is explicitly described: this is not just fancy presentation, it is descriptive metadata.

If you click on the “Platea” link on the Datura page, you will see a regular page, but at the bottom of the page are a number of boxes (e..g “Elements of Nature”) that represent categories of information related to the page. I believe this would be very handy for organizing categories of different types of external resources that I would describe in the ISLIP wiki.

According to the MediaWiki documentation both of these features are implemented with “Templates”. To create a template, you simple create a new page named “Template:something” and that page becomes the definition for the template used elsewhere. To use the template you use put the template name in curly braces, and supply parameters that will be displayed in the format defined by the template page.

To experiment, I created a template called Template:Resource and defined some key metadata, based on what I had developed in the Greenstone ISLIP digital library. Namely, I created parameters for the ISC2 Subject Domain (and information security specific body of knowledge), Library of Congress Subject Headings, and intended audience. After examining the template in Wikipedia used in the plant example (a Template:Taxobox), I realized that formatting would required significant work. So for this exercise, I left the formatting out.

With the new template created, I went back and created two pages (Hackers in the Library and ), that use the template. Invoking the template was a simple as entering the metadata inside triple-curly braces. One problem I encountered was that I could not figure out how to include parameters that might be repeated. For example, a given resource might have 3 LoC subject headings. This will be a topic for future investigation for me.

Due to time constraints, I was unable to experiment with the creation of categories. I would have liked to created multiple categories of resource, and created pages that list the various resources that are in each category to make it easier for users to browse through the available resources “by type”, “by subject” etc. This will also be a topic of future investigation for me.

Conclusion

I found that setting up MediaWiki was simple and that MediaWiki was a good choice of software. I also found that, while opportunities for potential collaboration provide a motivation for using a wiki, that other less discussed wiki features are significantly important. In particular, the ability to leverage knowledge organization features, tip the scales so that a Wiki looks like a much more attractive platform for the ISLIP project than does a digital library platform like Greenstone.

While, I used my project as a testbed, the lessons learned here apply broadly to other library projects that might use a wiki. While the literature emphasizes the collaborative aspects of wikis, and how that fits with library activities, my experience demonstrates, that wikis are valuable to libraries because they have knowledge organization features. The research discussed shows that wikis represent a technology platform that supports ad-hoc knowledge management that is effective enough to be useful.

In the library context, this implies that there might be other uses for wikis. For example, many libraries do not catalogue their paperbacks. The cost of doing so would be high. However, a MediaWiki has suitable support for descriptive metadata that it could be used to create an ad-hoc catalogue that links to a libraries ILS (for holds etc.) and that is maintain by patrons and librarians alike. If librarians viewed wikis not just a platforms for collaboration but for, access, archiving, and organization, what might we create?

References

• Merkow, M. & Breithaupt, J. (2006). Information Security: Principles and Practices. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Halls.
• Stamp, M. (2006). Information Security: Principles and Practices. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Dhillon, G. (2007). Information Systems Security: Text and Cases. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Krutz, R. & Vines, R. (2007). The CISSP and CAP Prep Guide: Mastering CISSP and CAP. Inianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing.
• Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. London: Penguin Books.
• Boeninger, C. (2007). The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries in Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User. Nancy Courtney, Ed. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
• Farkas, Meredith. “Using Wikis to Create Online Communities.” WebJunction. September 1, 2005.
• Frumkin, J. (2005). The Wiki and the digital library. International Digital Library Perspectives. 21(1), pp. 18-22.
• Desilets, A., Sebastien, P., & Vinson, N. (2005). Are wikis usable? In Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Wikis; 16-18 Oct. 2005. Presented at the International Symposium on Wikis.
• Kickmeier-Rust, M. Ebner, M., & Holzinger, A. (2006). Wikis: Do they need usability engineering? Interdisciplinary Aspects of Digital Media & Education. Conference Proceeding of the 2nd Symposium WGHCI&UE, Osterreichische Computergesellschaft, Wien, S. pp. 137-144.
• Wagner, C. (2004). Wiki: A tool for converstational knowledge management and group collaboration. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 13, pp. 265-289.