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.

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 . . .

Can’t get to the MLA Annual meeting this year but still want the dish? David Rothman has put together an RSS feed of the official conference bloggers, so you can get your scoop without leaving the desk.

Now head on over to his blog and give him a pat on the back, and check out the list of official conference bloggers as well.

PS: Want to make a fancy RSS feed too? Check out the Yahoo Pipes application & aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content of your own from around the web.

A search for “Web 2.0″ on the MLA’s online program planner yields 107 results. Which means chances are good: if you throw a rock at the conference, it’s bound to hit some type of new media. So here’s the deal: to make things easier for you, I’ve tried to organize & filter these results by the topics we covered in our recently concluded Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools CE. Just click the link below to view.

Incidentally, the SNSTF is having an Open Forum on Tuesday, May 20th from 3:30-4:30 (Regency Ballroom B) to discuss what we’ve done so far. Please attend & join in the discussion!

(Of course, if I’ve left out a ‘must see’, let us know in the comments.)

(Read on …)