My summer of social networking has been great...to be continued both for pleasure and in my career. I want to find a good RSS feed for keeping up with the latest developments in the Web 2.0 (and maybe 3.0) field.

The Interaction between Humans and Social Software: A Personal View

I decided that I had better look back at my original blog posts before posting this week because I don’t want to repeat myself and I wondered if my opinions had changed over the past few months. I made a comment near the beginning of the course about not liking the fact that once online the blog post is there “permanently”—I cannot change my mind and delete it; I cannot correct errors in it. I still think this is annoying, and bloggers should be able to edit their own blogs. I find reading blogs on the Internet that have no substance just a waste of time—and so I avoid them as much as possible. For this reason, I am reluctant to put on a blog anything that is not founded in research or serious thought. So for me, blogging is a good method of collecting my thoughts on a subject—but I know I need to add more personal opinion—that is what makes the post interesting to read. I still hope to use the blog to determine my own interests and points of view. I can see how communities of bloggers read at each others’ blogs and share ideas—that’s ideas, Jill, not facts.

Del.icio.us has been an interesting browsing tool within our course community. I did not, however, find it useful for general browsing outside the community—the quantity of unrelated material one has to browse through to find the “serendipitous” link takes too much time to go through. I do think I’ll continue using del.icio.us for personal tagging and later retrieval. I will also use Cite-U-Like.

RSS Feeds are a great idea, but I don’t find them very useful hiding on my aggregator where I have to go and search for them and where they are out of context on the aggregator screen. I did not use the aggregator to access fellow-student’s blogs—I relied on the course blog’s listing, where I could link directly to the blogs and see the updates in context. I like feeds onto my desktop. I also still prefer information fed to my email (listservs, etc.).

Wikis are great for collaboration for internal projects. I certainly intend to use these. I also intend to become reasonably proficient in Second Life in order to witness the virtual world that parallels the real world. This course has been a trip to various options in cyberspace—where we continue to socialize as human beings, which we do best in small groups. We will continue to “tread” virtually in new paths, but still interact as humans.

A New Level of Interaction

Although I had looked at blogs and wikis, sometimes for research, I had never contributed to one before. I had been wanting to implement tags and RSS feeds for some time, and I have appreciated what I have learned. My recent online social network presence gave me an understanding for the possibilities in this field. And although I knew about online gaming, I knew nothing about SecondLife. There is a whole world on the Internet that parallels the real world, and that expands our options and speeds up our interactions. As with the Internet in general, the quantity of information on social software is vast. Online communities within that software reduce the space to a conceivable size. Friends and colleagues read and comment on each others’ blog posts. Wales stated about wikis that “things go well when a group of people know each other; things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting”. Choices of RSS feeds customize the information. Tagging communities develop such as the one set up for our course. And of course online social networks and gaming are community-building. In the vastness of the Internet, people need the smallness of the communities.

Social Software and Libraries: Steps to Consider

1. Community: I think this is one of the most important things for libraries to remember when considering social software. The library serves a community. Different libraries have very different community needs, and these should be assessed before a decision is made. The social software must meet that community’s needs if it is going to succeed. It’s hard to decide in preference of one type of social software over another for use in a library because the software serve different purposes. I feel that instead of trying to choose just between one and another, the library should look results from a community needs survey and adopt whatever variety serve those needs.

2. Planning: The library needs to plan its involvement with social software. This may include a change in description of services to the community, and may go to as basic a level as policy making. It will include a commitment to the development and maintenance of the library’s use of the social software, and clear goals to be achieved. The use of social software involves a very different relationship to the community than either the library staff or the community are used to—far more interaction, requiring feedback from both sides. The library needs to prepare for this.

3. Collaboration: As part of the policy, the staff as a whole should be involved and have responsibilities. The one-staff-person blog efforts, seen in some case studies, sound too much like that—one-person blogs, and not the voice of the library.

4. Involvement: The inauguration of this new library service should be advertised widely. We have seen many case studies of libraries who have set up social software that is not being used. Libraries cannot assume that if they set it up “they will come”.

5. Centralization: With all the many services possible, the library must have a central site as a portal, with any social software service prominently linked from that site. There should be an equally prominent link from the blog, wiki, or social network back to the library’s portal. Often, the links were very hard to find (or impossible for me to find). The most successful sites were those that held everything together, with perhaps a wiki or a blog serving as the portal.

6. Education and expertise: In addition to advertising, education and encouragement is needed about using the software. How to receive an RSS feed, for example, or how to tag. The library staff may need this education just as much as the patrons. The really good examples of library uses of social software were done by staff who had lots of knowledge and training in the capabilities of the software.

7. Commitment and flexibility: Once an online presence for the library has been established, a major commitment of staff time and expertise is needed to maintain it. This also involves adapting to newer technologies as they become available.