You can view a Charlie Rose interview with Chris Anderson about the Long Tail. Chris Anderson coined the phrase “Long Tail” and works for Wired magazine. It is an interesting conversation about where the Internet is headed and has implications for Web 2.0.
Bart
Many of our institutions use Microsoft SharePoint implementations to increase collaboration, manage projects, share documents, use group calendering, etc… Over the years, I have worked with some with similar (but NOT as fully featured) inexpensive/free Web-based products such as the 37Signals products - Basecamp and Backpack or some of the Google Apps like Google Docs and Presentations. These services are great but SharePoint has better integration and team collaboration features.
Today, I signed up for the new Google App called Google Sites. Using the former wiki service, JotSpot, Google has increased its capacity to compete with Microsoft Heavyweight SharePoint in terms of integration and team collaboration. The most obvious feature to me is how easy it is to use Google Sites. SharePoint has a much steeper learning curve due to the amount of flexibility available on the platform.
Using your work e-mail, Google Apps will create a landing page named after your domain (in my case uab.edu). If someone on your e-mail domain has already logged in, you will see a list of people that have logged in using the same e-mail domain you used. From the landing page (see the picture below), you can create Google sites (similar to Web Part Pages in SharePoint) that are accessible to everyone in your e-mail domain or only people that you invite. Other Google Apps already integrated into the landing page named after your domain are Docs, Calendar, and Chat.
With the addition of Google Sites, the Google application suite now closely mirrors all of Microsoft SharePoint’s most popular features.
Ask a scientist what blogs, wikis or social networking sites they use, and you’re likely to draw a big blank stare. But make something useful, such as software that helps geneticists replicate one another’s experiments, and you’ll have users coming in droves. An article by Lila Guterman from the Chronicle of Higher Education this week reports on trends in online tools for scientific collaboration at the annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.
Today I learned about Sermo a social networking site for physicians. The website claims:
Here, physicians aggregate observations from their daily practice and then - rapidly and in large numbers - challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments. You can then apply the collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for your patients.
It’s nice to see professional social networking sites that will advance the practice of medicine. I think we all recognize the potential of facebook, but in the end medical librarians are going to need better tools. I know that a lot of this type interaction occurs on Medlib-l, but could medical librarians benifit from similar social networking?
Bart
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a couple of articles following the status of a book that is being peer-reviewed in the traditional sense and in addition is also being “reviewed” via blog. Part 1 of the Chronicle article describes the motivation and process for the blog-based review, and Part 2 collections reactions from those that read the article.
Have a look at the site where the first chapter of the book is being commented on at http://grandtextauto.org/2008/01/22/expressive-processing-an-experiment-in-blog-based-peer-review/ and then follow future chapters at posts that begin with EP. One can see that the comments that have been left so far are quite different than a traditional peer review. A peer review generally summarizes the piece being reviewed and points out a few things that the writer should reconsider, change, or add to. The comments on this blog are very specific, down to the paragraph level. The comments are not anonymous, though they could be.
This process advances the idea of openness in peer review and creates a collegiality that encourages conversation about aspects of the book. There’s a give and take, a grass-roots mood that is common on blogs, that may actually produce a better product in the end. I’ll stay tuned to this and post updates when the author finishes the peer- and blog-review process to see which produces better quality, the wisdom-of-the-crowds approach or the few-experts approach.
In the meantime, what are your thoughts? Does peer review get muddied by including non experts, or should peer review be opened up to include anyone who wants a say?
Scientific American is running what they are calling “an experiment in networked journalism”. An author has written an article about how researchers are beginning to use Web 2.0 technologies in their work. He has posted a draft of his article and is soliciting feedback. The feedback he receives will influence the article’s content and maybe even its point of view. Additionally the author has posed questions he’d like feedback on. He posted his article on Jan 9 and already today, Jan 23, he has received 89 comments.
This is an interesting idea and you, along with researchers, scientists, health care professionals or others at your institution, might want to add your comments too. Scientific American does not appear to be letting people post anonymous comments, they are requiring users to register with SciAm.com in order to leave a comment. Here is the link to check it out:
I’m not sure how long this has been around but I discovered today that the Library of Congress has a flickr site. How cool!
Offering historical photograph collections through Flickr gives the Library of Congress a welcome opportunity to share some of our most popular images with a new visual community.
We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying information—many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions!
Read more at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html.
The January 10th MLA-Focus announced the Webcast, “Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: Discovering the Participatory Web,” to be held Wednesday, March 5, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. No word on speakers or topics yet, but it sounds exciting.
Find more information about the program’s goals, objectives, and online registration at http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/
web2.0/index.html?focus_20070110.
In a previous post we discussed privacy issues with Facebook’s Beacon service. This week Google has been criticized for opening up Google Reader. Google Reader has allowed users to ’share’ items in their reading list for awhile now. Recently Google tweaked the product so that shared items are shared with everyone in a users Google Talk list. As a CNET article states:
But, as anyone who uses instant messaging knows, not all of your IM contacts are friends. Many are acquaintances or people you barely know and with whom you may not want to share a reading list.
This is an interesting dilemma for developers of social networking products. I’m sure that Google is only trying to open the system up to allow for more interaction between users. Yet at the same time users are saying, “Whoa, not so fast, I want to choose my interactions”. In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t represent a huge problem in privacy and in fact Google has posted directions to limit the user one shares with. However libraries should watch these issues closely. As OPACs, citation management software, and other services open up for library users we will all be faced with similar concerns over privacy.
The lesson here, open is good, but only as far as the user wants it to be.
Bart
This is a post to follow up on a comment from December 17th while I was out of town. I’m creating a new post for those readers who do not subscribe to the comments via RSS. Thanks Lisa in Australia for letting us know!
The survey similar to one administered by the Social Networking Task Force in the fall. As in the TF survey, I see results I expect as well as some that are surprising.
Check out the results from down under.
Bart