Task Force on Social Networking Software

TechCrunch has a post concerning del.icio.us 2.0.  Along with the new look and feel, it promises to be faster and easier to learn.  Check out the post at TechCrunch and while you are there check out all the Trackback posts.

At the recent annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) I attended the BIGWIG meeting. BIGWIG (Blogs, Interactive Groupware Wikis Interest Group) is an interest group in the division of ALA called Library and Information Technology Association, and was most recently headed by Jason Griffey. After ALA I corresponded with him about the impetus for BIGWIG and asked him about its progress so far. Here’s how he responded.

MK: Jason, how did BIGWIG come about?
JG: In 2004, Karen Schneider and Clara Ruttenberg thought there was a need to press LITA on the fact that blogs and wikis were increasingly important communications tools, and formed the Interest Group to explore the possibilities. After Karen S. roped Karen Coombs and myself into doing a presentation on blogs and blogging at ALA Annual 2005, the two of us and Michelle Boule stepped into leadership roles in BIGWIG, and decided that blogs and wikis, while interesting, were moving from exciting to understood pretty quickly. We’ve worked over the last 3 years, with the help of Jonathan Blackburn and Tiffany Smith, to expand the coverage of BIGWIG to be more of a general purpose technology incubator for LITA.

MK: Talk about the reasoning behind the BIGWIG URL being outside the ALA domain.
JG: The URL you are talking about is our website YourBIGWIG, at www.yourbigwig.com. That came about largely from discussions that Karen, Michelle and I had regarding the byzantine nature of the ALA and LITA, and how the insistence on face to face meetings really killed the possibility for virtual participation. We were all interested as well in increasing the transparency of the operations of the organization, and moving BIGWIG towards having more voices involved in the overall decision making parts of the IG. We felt that increasing transparency by attempting to utilize what was, at the time, a very poor Content Management System (nothing against ALA, just that Serena is not exactly intuitive) wasn’t going to make us more effective, but less. Moving to a platform that is open and has the ability to grow without the overhead of bureaucracy holding it back had its appeal. So we bought a domain, asked Blake at LISHost.net if he would host us, and put up a Drupal based site to help us organize things.

This gives us the freedom to do things quickly, try new technologies, integrate the larger information community, and generally experiment…something that is hard to do under the auspices of a larger organization.

MK: Did BIGWIG exist before it was part of LITA, or did LITA create BIGWIG?
JG: You know, it’s fair to say that LITA created BIGWIG as it exists today. But that’s not exactly a compliment, since the onus for creation was a dissatisfaction with the existing structures and use of technology. We’ve tried, during our existence, to model modern technologies and digital norms in hopes that LITA will see the benefit and absorb some of those as a better way of doing business. Our first attempts at this were installing and using the LITABlog and LITAWiki for division business, and once that was well established we moved on to reinventing the conference session by holding the Social Software Showcase in 2007.

MK: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
JG: The biggest challenge for BIGWIG has been mobilizing those interested in what we’re doing. That was another driver for YourBIGWIG, to try and put together someplace for people to become active and help us push the envelope.

MK: What’s the mission of BIGWIG?
JG: In three words: “Do Cool Stuff.” A bit longer mission statement would involve some of the things I said above about modeling appropriate digital information and communication behaviors for groups that are still, to some degree, stuck in the last century. To put it in the terms Clay Shirkey uses in Here Comes Everybody, we’re trying to take things that are beneath the Coasean floor and find a way to see if they are useful inside the organization as well.

MK: Other than the technology showcase, what do you hope to accomplish via this group?
JG: Taking over the worl^h^h^h^h…I mean, BIGWIG is moving into a role within LITA as a technology incubator, where we’re the skunkworks for the larger organization. I personally hope that BIGWIG becomes the place within LITA that the most edgy technologies are being explored and pushed, and where we’re willing to bleed just a little in order to be on the edge. I hope that we can find people that are doing innovative things with technology that translate into doing showing others how to do cool things with technology. I hope that we can innovate and educate.

MK: Does BIGWIG aspire to being more than an interest group (IG)?
JG: I’m not sure what BIGWIG aspires to be. We definitely aren’t the typical IG. IG’s, in the LITA world, are designed to be very rough, possibly transient discussion groups that can put on programs at conferences. The real work of the division is done by committees. The problem with this model is that while committees are appointed positions, IG’s are meritocracies….they spring into being because of pure interest, and are driven, again as Clay Shirkey puts it, by love. So in some ways BIGWIG wants to work towards a new model of organization, one driven by the love of the technology.

MK: Does BIGWIG serve sections other than LITA?
JG: I’m not sure how much we “serve” LITA, even. We kind of sprang into existence within LITA, but we are talking with other groups about how our models might help them as well….the hope isn’t that we are a service-organization, but instead that we are a guide or consultative group. We’ve already worked our way through some of the areas that other divisions are just coming upon, and we certainly have in our membership people who understand not only the technology but the social mores and norms of the new online world. We’re always available for consultation.

(this interview is being simultaneously published at http://orgmonkey.net)

Can it be?  Twitter, not just for telling the world about your latest spin class (sorry Gabe)?  This is partially funny, but also stunning when you consider the affect social networking is having on the world.

Check out this story about how Twitter helped free a jailed translator in Egypt.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/10/maree.freed/index.html

If you have a lot of free time and like videos about, from, and containing librarians, check out 100 Awesome Youtube Vids for Librarians.

You got to love YouTube!

Google enters the virtual world . . . .  watch out Second Life.

Rumors that Google was working on a new virtual world have turned out to be true. The company unveiled this week its three-dimensional make-believe community called Lively . . .

Chronicle of Higher Education - Scholars Are Skeptical of Google’s New Virtual World

Roz Dudden from the Tucker Medical Library contacted me to let me know that she has replicated the Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools for her library.  Very cool.  We are leaving the course site online for the time being.  Much like original Learning 2.0 course we encourage anyone to use the content, customize it, or modify it for your library.

I left out the link to the site. Added 06.27.2008 and Roz added in comments below.
http://tuckerlibrary.wordpress.com/

Bart

Last week NPR ran a series of stories dealing with email and how it affects our lives.  I find it interesting that many of us have shied away from Web 2.0 while clinging to our inbox as the primary method of communication.  Well, the days of keeping our email in the 1.0 world may be coming to and end — social networking is coming to email.

One of the products featured in last weeks stories was Xobni (inbox spelled backwards).   Xobni claims:

“Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Our users tell us that Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does”

According to Newsweek:

“Bill Gates called Xobni the next generation of social networking.”

Basically, Xobni is trying to allow you to manage your email the way that you manage your relationships.  It is a Outlook plugin that provides additional functionality.  In the series of stories from NPR many of the themes centered around the increasing amount email we all receive, how much time they consume, and how companies are trying to deal with the problem.

Bart

In case you are in the New York area September 16-19 you may consider going to the Web 2.0 Expo New York sponsored by O’Reilly Media, Inc.

“Whether you’re a designer, developer, marketer, entrepreneur, business strategist, or technologist, whether you’re a geek or a suit that “gets it,” if you’re looking to understand and harness the changes taking place right now, this is the one event you need to attend this fall.”

If you do happen to go, we’d love to hear from you!

Bart

Earlier this month Acrobat launched a new 2.0 public beta collaborative site (http://www.acrobat.com/).  Imagine Google Docs on steroids.  Within the site you can:

• Collaboratively create documents
• Share your computer screen for live meetings (formerly Brio)
• Convert files to PDF
• Store files in a central location
• Share files without losing control

Will this compete with Google Docs?  It will be hard to wrangle me out of Google Docs at this point, but the live meeting is really nice.

Read more . . .

Coming soon to the Grey Lady: application programming interface capabilities. The online rumor mill is buzzing that the NYT digital side aims to make the entire newspaper “programmable.” This feature might appear as soon as a couple of weeks. Marc Frons, NYT Chief Technical Officer, told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. The paper plans to offer developer keys to the API, which would allow programmers to more easily mash up the paper’s structured content — reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”

We touched upon Mashups and API in Week 8 of the Web 2.0 101 CE.