Bells, Whistles & Bandwagon 2.0
It seems BioMed Central is the next content provider to jump on bandwagon 2.0 . Their current newsletter reveals they’ve added an option to post articles to social networking sites:
You can now easily post articles to sites including Cite-U-Like, Connotea and Facebook, using links conveniently placed at the foot of the new navigation box.
But before you yawn at yet another example of the inescapability of trendy social networking tools, let’s break down how this can benefit you and your library constituents.
Citeulike, Connotea, and del.icio.us are all what I consider ’social bookmarking’ sites: sites that offer users an online location to share, store, discover and organize urls. This is good because they are all a) free & b) accessible from [mostly] anywhere. Sociality aside, you don’t have to build networks or request friends to optimize these tools…anyone who needs a portable space to store links will find these useful.
So how can social bookmarking work for you and your library users? Once you find something of interest, you can create a tag for it in your social bookmarking tool for other users to find. In fact, with a little coding you can even post your link roll on your library website.
Posting to del.icio.us from BMC is literally one-click away if you’re already a del.icio.us user and logged in. It stands to be noted that all of the tools listed above offer simple plug-ins for your browser which makes updating your bookmarks with new resources super-easy.
Digg describes itself as “democratizing digital media”. To me it’s a fusion of a bookmarking tool, discussion board, and the world’s most awesome RSS feed. The way digg works: users submit and classify content, whether it’s news, video, podcasts. Other users rate or “digg” the links, and comment on them. The most recent items are displayed on the main page for other users to sort, read, rate or comment upon. I use digg to keep tabs on rumors and industry buzz. It’s great for staying current on news, but you may have to go through 15 articles about low carb diet fads to find one scientific paper on nutrition.
That is why integrating social bookmarking tools into BMC is pretty cool - if you want people to know that skipping meals makes teens fat, you can submit it to digg & start a discussion. The ’social’ side of digg allows users to build networks and commentary. Imagine a network of users with similar research interests having a digg discussion on a peer reviewed article. The potential for collaboration is there.
Note: the process to post from BMC to digg was really easy. However you can only classify by tags that digg provides, which may irk some people.
Then there’s “the Facebook.” Bane of the IT department, college yearbook of the future, call it what you will, this social networking tool is going to be categorized with other 2.0 tools until marketing gets the memo that some of these things are not like the others. Realistically, I don’t see users fervently posting BMC articles as comments on their friend’s profiles (Brah -check out the c. elegans on this one! etc), but then again, this is an easy way to announce if you are published to a network of friends or colleagues, or if you want to start a discussion.
Note: you can send articles to Facebook as either a post on your profile or as a message to a friend. I’m unsure whether articles can be sent as a message to a Facebook group, which would be probably the most useful application.
It’s time for us to utilize the collaborative nature of social networking tools to initiate dialogs about topics other than Britney Spears. Incorporating these tools into ’serious’ resources like BMC is a good step. Maybe bandwagon 2.0 isn’t so bad after all.