Flickr as a teaching tool

Buley Library Home Page
Originally uploaded by rch.

great idea!

openserving???

This comes via the Baby Boomer librarian blog written by Bill Drew. Tech Crunch reports that Wikia.com will host free wikis, storage space, server space, bandwidth, applications and computing power "Wikia Announces Free Wiki Hosting."
This free model for one or two Web services has so far proven to be sustainable, but I am skeptical about so many Web services that are potentially beyond the scope of adwords or banner ads being able to generate a profit. If hosting and bandwidth are free, and the user has control over the markup and scripts run in their site, how will the host be able to ensure that its users display advertising. Presumably advertising is the driver for revenue in this model. The article stats that the Wiki Developer only need link back to the Wikia home page and otherwise can control all ad inventory.

Google Goes to College: (pointer)

http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/12/google-goes-to-college.html

This item from the ALA Techsource Blog was very interesting. I could see
the various google services being used for a course or a school even
without integrating them via _Google Apps for Education_.

Amateur Indexing and Amateur Geocoding: a boon to librarians?

Chris Hammond Thrasher (in Fiji no less!) commented on my post to a Facebook Library 2.0 interest group discussion. He writes:
"I think that you are right, institutional inertia in the face of new technologies can be severe - especially when libraries are faced with technologies that can seem threatening to librarians. A good example is social bookmarking. Many librarians are threatened by this sort of "amateur classification" and how popular it is. I suspect that some GIS professionsals are also concerned about the amateurization of their spatial data through initiatives such as geonames.
Is this concern founded or unfounded?"

and my reply...

I think it is a genuine concern only in the sense that the amatuer classification is seen as marginalizing the professional classification of catalogers and indexers. I highly doubt that those prefessionals need to worry about the "dirty data" of amateurs getting mixed up with professional metadata | geospatial data | cataloging records.

As I see it, it is the epitiome of the professional catalogers or GIS professionals work to be invisible to the user. If cataloging or mapping (if we may conflate the nature of their tasks), is effective, users locate the information they need without needing the knowledge of a classification system.

To take a different tack, let us consider the average person who is actively tagging their bookmarks, flickr photos or map applications. If I may be so bold as to hazard an educated guess, the active taggers are early adopters, and digital natives. From what we understand about digital natives, one way they seek information or learn new subjects is by appealing to their peer group, rather than to "experts"

In my view, "Web 2.0" tools that invite personalization, participation, and, for lack of a better word the "mnemonicization" of descriptive data simply enhances the amateurs understanding of the complexity of classification concepts and are hence creating a class of better educated library users.

Geotagging content in libraries

I wrote this in a discussion topic for librarians and Web 2.0 in Facebook.
"In these posts so far, the librarians are asking if any _libraries_ are geocoding or geotagging content. But isn't it true that the institutional response to new technology, and especially the "chaotic - anyone can edit" world of Web services is pretty slow? Would it not be more apt to ask if any librarians are geocoding content and building sites and services which one day might be recognized as valuable by libraries?"

link: Library 2.0 Interest Group Discussions

Lynn's comments

1:21 pm, Tuesday November Twenty-first. Lynn Westney, my fellow reference librarian walks past with her signature jaunty gait and says, "Why do people leave their gum in the drinking fountain?" Why indeed Lynn, why indeed.

Tagging: what happens if it gets sold? Is that really a problem?

"AML" (at my library) Our DB and Web server administrator frequently establishes stand alone, "unpublic," (that is, not advertised or linked to the users), Web 2.0 software such as blogs wikis and tagging software. The reason they are not made available to the public are myriad, but one stated reason is that the current public products like del.icio.us, blogger and so forth may one day be sold, taking all of our lovely and lovingly created content with them to sap as marketing information. As a result, the Server administrator has established the alternative tagging software called "Scuttle."
From Scuttle's "about" page: "Scuttle is based on an open-source project licensed under the GNU General Public License. This means you can host it on your own web server for free, whether it is on the Internet, a private network or just your own computer. Scuttle supports most of the del.icio.us API. Almost all of the neat tools made for that system can be modified to work with Scuttle instead. If you find a tool that won't let you change the API address, ask the creator to add this setting. You never know, they might just do it."
I'm glad to know there are multiple projects out there, but I'm not sure the concern is warranted by our Server admin. I would like to hear more reasons why we should be concerned about the potential sale of our tags or bookmarks. I'm not sure my life would be adversely affected by the use of this information.


Relevant links:
Tame the Web: http://tametheweb.com/2006/11/so_lets_talk_about_tagging.html
Original post: http://jennimi.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/asist-2006-poster-session-so-lets-talk-about-tagging/

JennX's Flickr shots of session:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennx/tags/asistpostersession2006/