What could have changed in 20 years?

See those two cute kids in the photo over there to the right? (Well, at least one of them is cute.) That's me and Kathy, my date to the Junior Prom back in 1987. (Note the big hair and gold.)  So, why am I posting this photo now? Well, it's all Facebook's fault.

Last week I received a friend invite from a "Kathy" who's last name I did not recognize. In the message she gave her maiden name and I instantly placed her despite having not spoken to her for more than 20 years. (Back at the prom she was currently dating my best friend who went to a different high school and she was a year behind me so I invited her to my prom.) How else could this have happened except through the current wonders of online social networking.

When I asked how she found me she said "your grad class". Here's where it starts to get weird. Having been a trainer for the past 14 years and having also taught in the University of Denver's grad school, I immediately became confused. "Through DU?" I asked. What she'd meant was my "graduating class". She has searched through Facebook's page for our high school and looked for folks she new who she might have gone to school with. And, there I was found.

Suddenly I find myself using Facebook for more than just playing Zombies and Scrabulous. We've been "e-maliing" back and forth for a week now still busily catching up. A lot has happened to the both of us in the past 20 years but I have quickly learned that Kathy is still the wonderful person that I remember.

Not to get too into what I think about my high school years but I've only regularly spoken to one person from back then. Most of that was intentional, some of it was not. That was true until this past week. I'm so happy that this giant heart and smile has come back into my life.

We Think

I'm so going to use this the next time I do a Social Web presentation!

Hey Monkeybrain!

The creators of Squidoo.com have just released HeyMonkeybrain.com a social way of arguing online. Want to check it out? I've started an argument titled "The Dewey Decimal System is not the problem". Got an opinion? Agree? Disagree? Log in an state your case.

Growing Up Online

Last night's episode of PBS' Frontline was all about kids and the Net.

In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

I've only watched excerpts so far but the whole program is available online on Frontline Web site. The best quote from the show I believe is "We have to look at our kids less like victims and more like participants."

Doctorow on Facebook

Cory Doctorow's latest Information Week column is on Facebook specifically and social networking sites in general. Here's just a taste:

'Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"'

Unintended Consequences of The Social Web

At the Nebraska Library Commission we have a flickr account to which we post photos of NE libraries, and NLC-related events. As we don't post daily, or even weekly some times, we're generally happy to find out that someone has added one of our photos to their favorites.

This morning one of our staff noticed that one of our library photos was added as a favorite by another flickr user. She clicked on the link for that user's photos and was presented with the "this account is not within your safe search settings, do you still wish to see the photos" page and she clicked ok. The photos were, as you may guess, rather pornographic. So, technically, there is a link on one of our pages in flickr to a page that would be considered rather inappropriate to many possibly even offensive.

In flickr one user can block another. By doing so, they can still see your photos but they are not allowed to add any of your photos as favorites thereby removing the link. We have since blocked this user but doing this raised some distinct and important issues in my mind. I asked that we discuss this and here's the two original responses I received from coworkers: (quoted with permission)

There is also the issue of people who don't understand the internet and don't understand that things like this can happen purely by accident, and that we (the NLC) did not have any control over this.  Some of these same people will simply see a state agency linking to a full-on porn site, and nothing else.  I'd hate to be the person who has to take that call.  Or who has to justify the expense to the auditors (NLC has paid for a pro account).

We all know that when people use the internet and tools like flickr, there is no guarantee that they won’t stumble on sites/pictures that are offensive.  But why would we leave a link in our NLC account that would directly lead viewers to something that most would probably agree to be inappropriate for a public forum?  If we want libraries to use Flickr and they see something like this and think it might happen to them and think there is no recourse, I am afraid they will be scared off. 
Social networking sites provide users with tools like privacy settings, blocking capabilities, etc.  so that they can use the services in a way that’s comfortable for them.  What’s wrong with using them?  If we don’t think that’s appropriate, why should we leave this link when there is something we can do about it.

Here is a list of my initial concerns and some additional questions that we're raised when we talked about it verbally:

• Since we're a government agency could this be considered censorship?
  
• If we block this one user, what's to stop up from blocking others and who gets to decide who's blocked and who isn't?
  
• Does allowing this link give any sort of validation to the content of the other user's account even if the system created the link and not us?
  
• Would a link to said content in a blog comment post be any different?
  
• In a Social Web world, do we need to allow for links that we wouldn't create ourselves? Should there be more latitude?
  
• Should these sorts of links be removed out of fear of those that control the money might react badly or should we take a chance and use it as a teaching opportunity?
  
• Does the appearance of the click-through warning page remove us from any perceived liability? Is the warning page irrelevant? What if the user following the link has turned off safe search in their account (as one co-worker had)? Does that change the situation?

Debate on my blog has been lively of late and I'd love to keep it going. So, library-land and other readers, what do you think? How would you handle this situation? Should we have handled it differently and not blocked the user. Please, let us know.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The folks at CommonCraft have done it again!

Facebook Off

*This

Here's a list of the social networks I'm actively participating in:

• Flickr
• YouTube
• SlideShare
• LibraryThing
• Twitter
• Blog
• del.icio.us
• Jaiku
• Tumblr
• Facebook
• Yelp

Then there's the ones I have accounts in but don't use all that much:

• 43Things
• BlipTV
• Google Video
• MySpace

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few too. Add the fact that in some of these services (Flickr, YouTube, blogging) I have access to multiple accounts, one personal, one work. (Blip.tv is only work right now. I don't have a personal account there.)

Here's the problem: when I find something interesting online or have something to say, how should I share it?

I've got four bookmarklets set up; BlogThis, TwitThis, TumblThis, and TwitThis, along with the Share+ button on the Facebook toolbar, which makes posting to those sites a simple process. But each one has a different audience (if any audience at all) with different levels of immediacy. (For example, if I post it to my blog, only my subscribers will read it but maybe not for a few hours or days. If I post it to Facebook, only my Facebook friends will see it albeit a bit quicker. If I put it out to Twitter, only my Twitter followers will see it but within minutes.) Additionally, Twitter posts need to be kept to 140 characters, my Tumblog can contain more but I usually don't, del.icio.us is for stuff I want to go back to later or share with my classes, and my blog is for more extensive writing even though I post short stuff there too.

Well I could, and do sometimes, post the same content, or various versions of the same content, to multiple services. For example, I put a link to my blog review of my new keyboard on Twitter. Why didn't I also share it on Facebook? I have no idea. It just didn't occur to me until I wrote the previous sentence.

I have a pseudo-solution and that's my Jaiku account. Jaiku allows me to pull in content from all of my other accounts that are outputting feeds. So, if you visit my Jaiku page or subscribe to my Jaiku feed, you'll get all of the content from almost every other service I post to. (There's no way to pull in Facebook info that I can find so there's one notable exception.) The trouble is, there's no one in my extended circle of friends using Jaiku with two notable exceptions (planetneutral and jessamyn) and they don't seem to be doing much with it anyway. So, is a "solution" really a solution if no one uses it? I don't think so.

So, how do you handle it? Do you just pick a favorite and stick to it? Do you clearly delineate in your own mind what goes where and not worry about who's at the receiving end? I'd really like to know.

Facebook song

I think I need to work this into my upcoming Social Web presentations.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

del.icio.us RSS

It turns out that more than 50% of requests for data from the del.icio.us site are from RSS, not humans. Because of this the folks at del.icio.us are working to improve what gets delivered via their RSS feeds such as "offering the ability to save bookmarks straight from your feed reader" and "displaying an up-to-date count of saves, without making items appear new again in feed readers". More details on the del.icio.us blog.

This cartoon made me think of Twitter

via gapingvoid

Twittered out?

Just use AutoTwit. Write your posts, set a schedule, and forget it.

One-sided Twitter conversations

I'm being sucked in by Twitter. So much so that I complained to one friend that she never posts and she retorted with the fact that I'd not yet moved my Twitter widget to my sidebar. But that doesn't exactly address the title of this post...

Lat night I got to watch one side of several conversations. What was happening is one of my Twitter friends, person A, was obviously posting back and forth with one of their Twitter friends, person B. However person B isn't a friend of mine so I was unable to "hear" their side of the conversation. In this particular instance I was thinking that the conversation was more interesting this way but not knowing what the actual topic was, it just got me thinking.

A Basic Twitter Search Engine

Steve Rubel at the Micro Persuasion blog has used Google to create a basic Twitter search engine. Here's the results for searching library.

Another way to post to Twitter

Don't want to leave Firefox nor actually go to the Twitter site in order to post? Try the Twitter Firefox Search Plugin which allows you to "post updates to Twitter right from your Firefox Search Bar". I've tested it and it works. The only catch is that as a result you end up going to your Twitter page. I'd rather it didn't send me anywhere but it does save a few clicks in the posting process.

Vista Librarians

As an experiment I've set up a Ning social netowrk for the impatient librarians who are implementing, or attempting to implement, Windows Vista. Join Vista Librarians today.

Twitter

I'll eventually add this to the sidebar but in the mean time...

follow msauers at http://twitter.com