Week 13 Reading Notes

Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future

Social media: highly scalable and accessible communications tech, helps individuals to easily publish and influence others

-Similar: Web 2.0, user-generated content, social networking

• Scalable and accessible tech
• Individual people communicate with other groups of individuals
• Enables influence

Types of social media:

1. Personal publishing - blogs - individuals tell stories to others
2. Collaborate publishing - wikis - multiple people collaborate on common document for themselves and/or others
3. Social-network publishing - Facebook and LinkedIn - people find other people
4. Feedback and discussions - Amazon - share info and opinions on a topic with others
5. Aggregation and filtering - YouTube and Flickr - aggregate collections of content from various sources
6. Widgets and mashups - add value to social media by creating complementary content
7. Personal markets and marketing - Craigslist and eBay - find people with goods and services, create market

Social media does not eliminate human nature, just gives a new way to express itself

Goal of social media = influence over others

Conflict can arise, however:

*"Order can come from people who collaborate to enforce mutually accepted standards of behavior."

-Each site has own standards

-Need to follow standards in order to influence opinions of others

Content:

• The "stuff"
• Requires an audience
• Value is contextual
• = "info and experiences in contexts that provide value to audiences"
• Comes from many different sources
• Social media makes distribution easier
• Exponentially more every day

Aggregation in social media: different from traditional model, distribution not a competitive barrier

-aggregation can now be highly focused (New Aggregation)

-content not indexed but can be reinvented

Brands, Affinity, Endorsements:

-value through marketable relationships as well as marketable content

-Ex. blogs that become popular, build reputation = influence over others

-affinity = more important because more options

Timing: part of context, different formats have different value

-long tail = consistent popularity in small groups

-long snout = popularity in some groups while still in development (social media)

Social Media Secrets

1. Ability to scale efforts independently = important
2. Understanding people > understanding technology
3. Law of the campfire, not law of the jungle
4. Valuable to create new contexts for content
5. Not mass production, but mass contextualization
6. Direct contact with others who value your insights
7. Valuable to people who want to be ahead of other people

This article was a fascinating account of how to effectively use social media. I'd never thought of influencing others as the main goal of social media, but it does make sense. I think there are a lot of valuable insights here for someone who wants to publish through social media or for a corporation that wants to understand how to use social media. Corporations, which are used traditional models of publishing and advertising need this information the most because social media has its own model that is in some ways radically different.

Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program

Wiki can:

• create better info sharing
• facilitate collaboration in creation of resources
• efficiently divide workload

Many websites where you can set up wikis, invite by email

Wikis have been used by librarians to: "manage public services information, collaborate on and keep track of reference questions, and assess databases"

-stores info in central location

Used in library instruction program at ETSU

-teaches how to use website, find journal articles, critical thinking about info sources, evaluating websites

Learned more about:

• specifics of the classes' needs
• unforeseen directions of assignment
• preferences of professor
• housekeeping issues
• broken web links

Second use: centralized resource collaboration tool

-information handouts, subject resource guides, how-to instructions

This is good background on how wikis could be useful to librarians, but I think that their uses are probably endless and there are more than is covered in this article. Mostly I use wikis for working on group projects when it is difficult to keep getting together to work. Really any project where a group of people has to come up with one final deliverable is a good time to use a wiki. I think people will be using them more and more, in and out of libraries. The other benefit to them is that they require almost no training at all to use.


Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy

Social tagging enables: quickly find disparate info, store bookmarks and access them anywhere, see what others are reading, find unexpected resources

Social tagging = create bookmarks/tags for websites and save them online, including subject keywords (such as del.icio.us)
Folksonomy = taxonomy created by ordinary folks, users create own controlled vocab

Library: has catalog, but can't catalog the internet

• use tagging to guide users to helpful resources online
• can tag articles in licensed databases, too
• tagging can bring to light resources that are harder to search for

PennTags at UPenn = students bookmark quality websites and share
-Stanford uses content management software Drupal

Connotea and CiteULike intended for academics, pull bib info

Subject specialists can begin social tagging process
-can use Librarians' Internet Index or C&RL News Internet Resources columns

Risks of social tagging:

• Spagging or spam tagging
• Users with bad intentions tagging inappropriate content
• No specific controlled vocabulary among users

This was a good, brief introduction into the ways that libraries can use social tagging at universities. I think that this could be very useful to academic libraries, and I'm curious if, since it was written, there are more universities that utilize something like this. Obviously social tagging has its downsides, but it works particularly well with internet sites, which librarians can't feasibly catalog anyway. Just as there are a multitude of ways that libraries can use wikis in their program, so there are also many ways that tagging could be useful, especially if you creatively set up the tagging system, such as giving subject specialists administrative control.

Jimmy Wales on the Birth of Wikipedia - TED

Radical encyclopedias: Brittanica vs. Wikipedia

Goal = give everyone in the world access to the sum of human knowledge (free encyclopedia)

• Staffed by volunteers
• Wiki software
• Freely licensed
• Funded by public
• Many languages, only 1/3 traffic to English
• One employee
• Cost: $5000/month

More accurate than more traditional encyclopedias

Neutral point-of-view

-vandalism is bigger problem than controversy

Policies and software maintain quality

-despite allowing edits by anonymous users (minority of edits)

-Request for Deletion page

-volunteer administrators

Administration: part consensus, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy (Jimmy Wales can change the rules), NOT anarchists

I already knew a bit about Wikipedia, but it was interesting to hear about it from the founder himself. Since this video is from 2005, I wonder how much of the information has changed, besides things like the number of pages or pageviews or things like that. I think that, in general, the world is better off with a source like Wikipedia than if it didn't exist, but I think that people need to understand the best way to use it, when to use it, and what parts are the most trustworthy. I think this is true of any information source, though.