Categories Social Media

David Pogue writes: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/ A few months ago, I blogged about my mixed feelings toward Facebook, LinkedIn and the like. I get about 15 invitations a day, from people I don’t know, asking to be friends. It’s flattering, of course, but there’s an etiquette problem: Do I accept them all, just to be friendly — but thereby defeat the purpose of building a true social network? Or do I reject or ignore them, hurting their feelings and making me seem like an ingrate? Little did I know that I’m not alone — and that my affliction actually has a name. […]

A Year in the Life (via iTunes), originally uploaded by mstephens7. When I do talks, I always try to relate changes in technology to how they can impact, enhance or chronicle people’s lives. I’ve been highlighting LastFM in The Hyperlinked Libraries and other presentations since 2006. I was pleased to discover a new site called lastgraph – which takes LastFM data and creates graphs and charts. Looking at the graph above, I can see major milestones in the last 12 months. It blows my mind how a “year in the life” can be represented by music tracks played, or by […]

Via Michael Casey: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7325019.stm The Ofcom report looks into the impact of social networks on people’s lives in the UK as part of a wider media literacy campaign and surveyed 5,000 adults and more than 3,000 children. Its statistics suggest that around 19% of all UK youngsters have a presence on a social networking site. “Social networks are clearly a very important part of people’s lives and are having an impact on how people live their lives,” said James Thickett, director of market research at Ofcom.

http://curtisrogers.blogspot.com Check out this article. Shouldn’t libraries be included in this equation? Every Company Should Use Social Media | Employee Evolution Social media is changing everything. Business Week recently published an article about the power of social media and how companies are beginning to embrace it, because they really don’t have a choice. Not everyone has a blog, or wants to blog, but you would be hard pressed to find many people who aren’t on some type of social network. Now it’s time for corporate America to follow suit and meet their potential customers on their own turf, or risk […]

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2008/05/17/news/walker051708.txt Walker’s latest venture seems a mixture of those two. It’s an online forum called RottenNeighbor.com, and it allows residents of a neighborhood to complain about the noise, dogs, midnight habits or lawn-mowing antics of the folks next door. Launched last summer, the site was first based entirely out of Walker’s UTC apartment until a portion was purchased by Attenunit, a venture capital firm, and most of the work moved to Austin, Texas. From the site: Rotten Neighbor is the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after […]

Nice article from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2008-05-06-tech-flickr_N.htm Flickr was created in 2003 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, initially as a video game site. It was purchased by Yahoo in 2005, when it had 400,000 registered members. Today, Flickr has 26 million members. Free accounts are limited to uploads of 100 megabytes monthly, or about 50 photos. “Pro” members get unlimited uploads. Yahoo won’t say how many paid members Flickr has. Hitwise says the site’s market share among online photo sites leaped to 11.7% in March, from 4.5% the year before, after Yahoo added Flickr images to its search index. “Yahoo […]

Arlington Heights Memorial Library rolls out “A Baker’s Dozen” – a 13 part, 13 month learning program for library users. It’s nice to see Helene Blowers ultra-successful model adapted for patrons. I’ll be watching this one closely. You may have seen the phrase “social networking,” along with mention of sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Do you watch or even upload videos to YouTube? Do you read blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds? Maybe you’ve added some photos to Flickr. All of the aforementioned sites are part of the Web 2.0 craze. Please join AHML for the next year and 1 month for a Baker’s Dozen; each month this series will highlight a Web 2.0 topic and tool as well as feature a brief […]

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937956-7.html A Republican congressman who has sponsored legislation banning access to social-networking Web sites in schools and libraries has found a new target of displeasure: Second Life. Rep. Mark Kirk, who is seeking re-election this year, staged a press conference at a library in his suburban Chicago district on Tuesday to highlight what he called the “dangers” of the virtual world to children. Flanked by local officials, he also released a letter asking Federal Trade Commission Chairman William E. Kovacic to “take action to warn parents of the similar dangers and sexually explicit content found on Second Life.” Kirk said he was appalled that Second […]

Karen M. Burns, Administrator of the Southwest Iowa Library Service Area, writes: We did a National Library Week project this year–on the Wednesday of NLW we invited libraries in central, southwest and southeast Iowa to take photos of what was happening at the library that day, and upload up to 10 of them to a group on flickr.  I thought you might enjoy taking a look, they’re at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dayiowalibraries/ We set up an FAQ page before hand, (http://www.swilsa.lib.ia.us/dayinthelife.htm) and did some “training” sessions in the Wimba online classroom.  The Meebo Me widget on the FAQ page was used more often than […]