Tag Archives: facebook

My version of “Lots of links to David”

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David Lee King wrote an interesting post last week that outlines all of the digital communities in which he participates. He entitled it “Participating in Digital Community, or Lots of Links to David.” I thought that was a good idea and so here goes similar information for me. It would make an interesting study to know this detail about other library bloggers. I imagine it’d reveal some interesting trends:

Things I use the most:

  • email (BY FAR the most activity for me online is in email communications — and my personal interface of choice is Gmail)
  • Google Reader
  • Meebo (I have accounts for AIM (sjoberg67), Yahoo! (steve_oberg), Google Talk (steve.oberg), and Windows Messenger (steve at obergs dot net) that I can all monitor in one place)
  • my blog
  • Twitter

Things I dabble in:

Things I am trying and not sure if I’ll go beyond the trial phase:

  • fav.or.it
  • Netvibes
  • Digsby
  • Adobe Photoshop Express
  • coComment
  • Disqus
  • divShare
  • Last.fm
  • LiquidPlanner
  • Newsgator
  • Newspond
  • Nutsie
  • Remember the Milk
  • Slideshare
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Zoho
  • Plaxo

Just trying to keep track of all of these places where I have a user account is a big challenge. Like David states in his post, although it may seem like this kind of participation is excessive, and this is exactly why I have actually cut back on the number of things I use, participation is key to fully understanding services like those above.

Pulling the plug

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On the way to work this a.m. I decided that I would pull the plug on the majority of the social networks that I’ve participated in.  This includes Facebook, MySpace, and some others including Twitter and LinkedIn.  I’m not going to go into the reasons why except to state that they are many and varied.  Generally, though, I find participation in them to be more of a burden than a benefit.  From now on I intend to focus on this site and this site alone to participate in the general social network of the web.  I’m sure it’ll cost me readers and traffic but oh well.  If you want to keep up-to-date with what I’m doing, subscribe to this blog because that’s the only place that I’ll maintain for the foreseeable future.

My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 6th through June 11th

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These are my links for June 6th through June 11th:

  • COinS Generator – “This tool will take bibliographic metadata for a citation and produce a “COinS”, i.e. a snippet of HTML that can be placed on a webpage and processed by web tools.”
  • Scopus – A multidisciplinary database of citations to articles in the life, health, physical, and social sciences.
  • Bolinfest Changeblog » Your Page Here (an iGoogle gadget) – A nifty and easy-to-use way to incorporate other content as tabs into iGoogle. I’m experimenting with using this for Google Reader, Facebook, and Meebo.
  • FML – A personal blog about family, libraries, and technology
  • TagsAhoy: All your tags in one place – Love this idea; not sure, though if it’ll prove useful or not. Not because of the site’s functionality but because of my lackadaisical approach to tagging my own stuff.
  • nuTsie – A cool new beta service allowing users to stream their iTunes libraries to their cell phones. I sure hope this works with Blackberry devices — I’m going to give it a try.

Social network frenzy

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Last night I discovered Facebook. I know, I know, it really isn’t anything new of course, but somehow I had never taken the plunge and created an account there. I have had a profile on MySpace for a few years and because I thought the two services were two halves of the same coin, I thought I’d just be content with MySpace even though I hate most things about it.

What a surprise. I actually like Facebook. And in Facebook, I actually have a lot of friends. By that I mean that there are many more people whom I know from one thing or another on Facebook and not on MySpace.

What does all of this gain me? I’m not sure, really, except that it feels good to join networks of people whom I know, and also I get to see or find out more information about friends than I would otherwise. For instance, I got to see lots of photos of friends, Ashley and Paul, that I hadn’t seen before. And another friend had lots of photos of his little baby boy that I hadn’t seen. And I can also see friends’ birthdays.

Obviously there is such a thing as too much social network stuff, and you can easily overload yourself. One way I found out this afternoon that I can reduce the risk of overload is that I figured out a way that my blog postings here can automatically be posted in both MySpace and Facebook without any extra work on my part. Automatic crossposting. That’s cool!

So…If you use either social network and are interested in adding me as a friend, please let me know. My Facebook profile is at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=552938337 and my MySpace profile is at http://www.myspace.com/murphymoose. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I have a profile in LinkedIn as well.

When you build it and they don’t come

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I was thinking lately about MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and other social networking sites. There has been a lot of positive buzz about libraries carving out a foothold in these online spaces as a way to market themselves and to make themselves more accessible particularly to younger generations. This a.m. I saw another positive mention about this phenomenon on CNET where Steven Cohen’s excellent work via Library Stuff regarding libraries using Flickr is highlighted. Good stuff!

However I wonder if the old adage, “If you build it, they will come” always applies? Just because we have a presence in these virtual spaces, does that guarantee that we will be successful in extending our libraries’ reach? I guess that the answer to that question obviously relates to how one defines success. Still, my personal experience in sites such as MySpace has been that when you build it, they (meaning friends or users or whatever you want to call them) don’t necessarily come. This is true even when I have spent time inviting many others directly to join. Even those whom I know already have an account in a particular service ignore an invitation, almost always. Even those who advertise that they would like to extend their network of friends, more often than not, ignore an invitation. Is this just me? Very possibly it is, and I can’t help but feel as a result like I’m back in high school again, an outsider who doesn’t belong in any particular clique and certainly not in the “popular” clique.

Setting the “me” factor aside, though, I think it is important for libraries who get involved in these virtual spaces to have accurate expectations or to have established clear goals for their outreach efforts. They need to continually evaluate how they are doing and work to improve their message or their content as needed. This is a fairly tall order and it requires a significant amount of dedicated time and energy. Yes, we need to get in there and take risks but we also need to be clear about any limits we might have in terms of longterm staffing. We also need to be clear about what we expect to get out of this kind of outreach and be willing to pull the plug if and when the investment doesn’t pan out.