Library Stuff

I can’t begin to explain how awesome IL 2006 was. Besides feeling 100% rejuvinated professionally (which explains the many blog posts over the past few days), I really loved seeing old friends and making new ones.

I’ve put up my pictures here, but this one sums up the evening sessions at the Crown and Anchor

Thanks for a great time and for the wonderful one on one chats. I really needed this conference to go well and it did.

Two recent articles that suggest that use of huge social network sites like My Space may be on the decline.

First, this one from the WSJ:

“While it takes a critical mass of users to make these sites work, having too many users alienates some, especially when they attract an ever-growing cacophony of advertising and in some cases, spam. Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number of visitors to Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million.”

I’ve been thinking about niche sites lately and think that Wikis will go this route. I spoke alot about this in Monterey this past week. Th emajor Web 2.0 review sites have been discussing niche social networking sites as well and I think a smaller community of like users will boost the ROI of social networks.

Here’s another similar article from the Washington Post:

“Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months’ time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever’s hot now.”

Now, it may take a while for these sites to be passé, but I do think that it will happen.

Look for more narrow, more focused social network sites to take over and be more effective in bringing like minds together.

Flurl seems to be a cross between Digg, YouTube, and any one of the meta video engines out there. I’d be interested to see how this one progreses. No development blog though. Some companies make it so hard to keep up with them.

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This paper just came up on E-LIS.

“By the end of mid 1990 and the early of twentieth century, web 1.0 has pulled users to information; in contrast, using new structures, the creation of web 2.0 started pushing information to users. It was taken placed by marriage of content and technology. Electronic encyclopedias such as wiki, photo sharing such as Flikr, social networks, blogs and so forth can be called as their babies. Blog or weblog is one of web 2.0 attractive components which let information societies demonstrate and exchange thoughts and information easily in a flash. Library Weblogs can be created by librarians, library science faculties and students in any of related issues which enable the librarianship society to access updated information as a duck soup. Some may wonder if blogging in the library is a responsible thing to do however, blogging does offer an alternative and superior way to communicate with the patrons. Since 2002, when weblog has been introduced to Iranian librarianship for the first time, it has been well matured amongst Iranian librarianship and flourished in 2005 and 2006, entirely. The current research is about activities of Iranian librarianship weblogs and study them using webometrics methods. AltaVista search engine has been used for this research within April 2006.The results demonstrate that only 28 weblogs are active out of 46 Iranian librarianship blogs which are updating day in and day out. This study also indicates that there are only three cooperated weblogs and almost all of them use Iranian hosts, mostly Blogfa. There is only one weblog which is hosted by Blogsky. The language assessment of the survey shows 25 Persian (Farsi) weblogs, two English weblog and only one bilingual (English and Persian) among those 28 active blogs. The survey ranks aforementioned weblogs using total links, self-link, inlinks and web impact factor5 (WIF). Writing in Persian, limiting to Iran library science society, informing local information focused on Iranian librarianship and general library sciences issues; The Iranian librarians’ weblogs could neither find extended links so do exchanged links and the link exchanging is mostly limited to library weblogs in Persian.”

Troy Swanson from Morraine Valley Community College sent me a link to his new library podcasts. Coolness!

Something else that I find intriguing are the Library PodCast Policies that were posted.

Thanks Troy!