Netiquette: Blog comments

Coming from a family oft referred to by others as the Flanders, blog comments were fraught with peril for me.  If posting them myself, I used to feel responsible for posting only positive, affirming words that couldn’t possibly be seen as negative – to ensure the blogger’s feelings would not be hurt, their self-esteem remain [...]

MySpace, MyDeathSpace

Web 2.0 technologies enable more people to have access to creating their own online content. This results not only in blogs, wikis, websites, and social networking sites, but creative spin-offs, too. A mixture of tongue-in-cheek parodies and smart marketing exist, like the following: SecondLife is parodied by Geta(First)Life.  Bloggers with a dark [...]

ALA Techsource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium

Check out The Shifted Librarian blog today. It’s focus is the ALA Techsource and Association of College Research Libraries (ACRL) on the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium that just wrapped up in Chicago. There is a wiki of information shared at the symposium, a very valuable resource for perusing.
A note on folksonomy [...]

Digi-learning: maximizing the benefits of social economies

The value of collaborative development is widely acknowledged (see proprietary software development release dates versus those of open source programs – guess which advances more rapidly). How can these proven techniques be leveraged to advance education?  Recent studies by IBM (reign in your scepticism, please) show : “hours spent playing online can hone [...]

Best practices for “healthy meetings”

It rarely happens that I so love a blog entry that I want to quote the entire thing, but that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. Check out K. G. Schneider’s latest blog entry on healthy meetings for your organization at Free Range Librarian. It provides a summary of ways to keep [...]

Response to Stephen Abram on Social Networking sites and Libraries

Demi-god of internet information management Stephen Abram’s latest monthly e-letter questions what makes social networking sites  site “sticky”, encouraging return visits, and why prods us to wonder why users “willingly create and share…without financial and assessment award”.  Danah Boyd’s presentation to the AAAS covered these questions: youths engage in these social networking sites for interaction [...]

Social Networking: CBC report on the new Internet phenom

A quote from early CBC coverage on the Internet likened its rapid growth to that of an embryonic brain. It’s a fascinating report that touches upon many big issues of social networking: behaviour of the anonymous; the ameliorating effect of group environments on anonymous behaviour; posting of “sensitive” information [...]

Multi-author blogging: guidelines

An institution is an individual in corporate law.  As such, each member of the institution are representatives of the single “body”.  For Librarians, this idea of the many representing the one can be keenly felt in multi-author blogs for their own particular Library.
In order to maintain a uniform voice, Libraries with more than one Librarian [...]