Web 2.0 Wrapup

Having completed the prescribed exercises, I am left with a few observations.

First, theoretically these are all good things that foster greater participation online since it is easier than ever to jump in and comment on anything. It is easier than ever to see and hear from persons all around the world and maintain some form of communication with them.

Second, the level of discourse is what you might expect when anyone with internet access can say pretty much whatever they want. And while these are very egalitarian advances that level the proverbial playing field, they also lead to the kind of drek recently satirized in this to The Onion (courtesy of Nick):

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/local_idiot_to_post_comment_on


This phenomena has spawned a number of books/treatises devoted to how web2.0 is impacting the web and society. One of these, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andew Keen (http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Amateur-Internet-Killing-Culture/dp/0385520808) posits that "a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one's own views rather than expand horizons." Now this is obviously not true for everyone, clearly there are thoughtful and well reasoned analyses on any number of subjects, but my guess is that this constitutes a relatively small number of people when compared to the vast majority of witless polemics, crude argumentative jibes and personal attacks that make up the such a large portion of what transpires online. According to Keen most people eschew information from supposed experts in favor of like minded opinions expressed by other amateurs, looking not for truth but someone else's opinion that runs along the lines of their own and confirms their impressions, half formed ideas and prejudices. It's hard to see how this adds to the great global debate that was foreseen by the progenitors of these various technologies and sofware.


On the one hand having to face the capricious and overly market conscious publishing world of the last century kept countless works from seeing the light of day, many unfairly, but it also provided some sort of official review of the material which would include editing, fact checking and presumably an editorial sensibility that weeded out the truly ridiculous and worthless runs at literary notoriety.


So this new accessibility to the public eye should serve those who have been kept from publishing by the viccissitudes of the marketplace and allow those with talent or something of substance to say to hopefully find an audience. The downside of this is of course all the unfettered crap constantly coming your way the further you burrow into the web2.0 world.

Craigslist

Well it took me a while but I found a library related posting in the Long Island Rants and Raves section, http://longisland.craigslist.org/rnr/1154376061.html. I don't know the director of the Hauppauge library, but I wonder if she looks at Craigslist. Perusing the personals is a bit of an eye opener, equally funny and depressing.

Welcome to Googleplex

At what point does google turn into microsoft or has it already happened? I guess when people bitch about google as much as they bitch about microsoft then we'll know.

Wiki Work

Did the wiki thing, even added to a real live Wiki- Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki -Reference Services and Information Literacy - Online Reference - Libraries Using Virtual Reference Services -Libraries Offering SMS Reference Services - by adding us to the list of libraries offering SMS text reference, here's the link:
http://libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Online_Reference

just scroll down the list and find us just after the Kresge Engineering Library at UC Berkeley.

More Feeding

I thought I covered the rest of the RSS requirements for this assignment, but I guess not.
Be it known have discovered the feeds on our website, have used the feeds on our website and have rejoiced in their use. I have subscribed to feeds from beyond our page and library world.
Is there something else I am supposed to do in order to fulfill numbers 12 and 13, that I haven't done?

Feed Me

Once again sounding a recurrent theme, RSS feeds add to the cacophony of unlimited, instantly available information, albeit you select the feed you want to receive. This allows you to mainline your most necessary info directly to your "aggregator", a term particularly apt as aggregate is also the term for the coarse material- crushed stone, slag, gravel- added to cement or asphalt to cheaply extend the amount of concrete, another words filler.

Obviously their are many instances where this sort of service could/would be extremely helpful for many persons, but clearly many more people are feeding off of People, Us or OK magazines' RSS s than the NYT or WSJ.

The idea is that this gives you control over the info that comes your way is true but that just adds another stream to the river of info that overflows our banks everyday. A newstory Friday on NPR reported that according to the the Council for Research Excellence, an industry group funded by the Nielsen Company, "Most people average more than eight hours a day facing a screen of some sort — whether it be a television, computer, mobile phone or even GPS."
Hell, I can't even get gas anymore without having a television, with an inaccessible voloume control, talking to me- Gas Station TV it's called. (And just as an aside: The researchers were surprised to learn that younger baby boomers, aged 45 to 54, averaged roughly an hour more screen time than any other age group, including teenagers.)

In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler posited that change tended to disorient people and drive them to certain predictable behaviors, and that the rate of change had been and would continue to accelerate all the time. I think he is right and now the internet, and even GSTV, have only made things worse by increasing people's awareness of the rate of change because of the ubiquity of news or information about those changes.

I learned the the libray would not be closing this Friday afterall- which was useful but disappointing, because i subscribed to the director's and staff's blogs through our staff page.
This would be the link: http://staff/rss/director.aspx

Overdriven

Overdrive worked perfectly- always nice to see. I downloaded some music to try it when it first went up which worked fine, but this time I downloaded a book- "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fford (not a typo), and placed another title- "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan on hold.

I will be transferring these titles to my mp3 player, hopefully that will work as easily and smoothly as the rest of the process.

I'll be curious to see the circ stats on Overdrive use around the county, I suspect it is vastly underutilized at present, but I believe it is probably the model for future libraries.

I remember our original director Bob Verbesey remarking on how he felt when videos first outcirculateded books; on the one hand videos were pushing overall circ stats ever higher but there was something about books losing their primacy in the library galaxy that was sad and disconcerting. Those of us who come to librarianship primarily from a love of reading and the comfort and efficacy of books continue to have that sense of loss as we watch books transform from what they have been to what they will be and the resultant transformation of libraries themselves.