IL05: Tuesday Keynote

Social Computing & the Info Pro
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Rochester Institute of Technology

• About a ½ dozen folks in the audience are blogging this, two years ago, there wasn’t anyone blogging her presentation
• It’s significant that social software is becoming part of the hallway conversation, not just the presentation
• Technorati indexed their 20 millionth blog yesterday. It was from an elementary class in France.
• Search for “liz” on Google and her blog is the third hit. That’s the power of blogs. Regularly updated relevant content that people link to
• She’ll be blogging her own talk. A first for her. (Not live though, “I’m not that good at multitasking.”)
• “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson article in Wired magazine
• A few with a lot, most have a few
• The bulk of the content is in the most that have a few
• “I want to read the stuff that not everybody else already knows.”
• Librarians are good at knowing what’s in the long tail
• “if you liked that, you’ll like this”
• Social software is trying to create the computer equivalent of a good librarian. We won’t be there for quite a while.
• These tools augment, not replace
• “we need a human component. We need a social component” in these tools
• Blog: Creating Passionate Users (writer of the “head first” series of computer books)
• “we make the tools dumber because we think the users are dumber”
• You can’t change your users. You can educate them, but not change them
• Let’s make the tools foster better use.
• Make search better
• You go to friends before the web to find something to do @ conference
• That’s your social network
• How do you fin a good blog? Ask someone who’s also interested in that topic.
• Yahoo!’s My Web – bases results on list of trusted information sources (2 degrees – my friends and their friends)
• There are no bad links. Everything’s picked by my trusted resources
• Sent URLs by friends via e-mail, never going to get to it
• Now, put it into del.icio.us and then have your friends subscribe to it.
• “Information Network Discovery” – who are the experts in the field?
• See the resources. Also see the people who use those resources.
• Not all social networks are equal. They may be my friend and I’ll accept an IM form them but they may not be good at picking out good information
• del.icio.us – LaGrangeParkLibrary (username)
• Don’t bookmark at the desk, use del.icio.us instead
• Get to from any computer
• Patrons can get to from outside the library
• Social information filter for those that don’t want to save bookmarks
• [M: Note for my next reference book: USE THIS!]
• Link on library page: ad me to del.icio.us bookmarks (make me a trusted information resource)
• Wouldn’t it be great if your doctor would do this to point you to good resources? Or maybe the local health sciences organization?
• Warning: all this could focus you too much and remove outside, unexpected sources
• That’s where librarians come in.
• 1200 items in her del.icio.us account because she wants to share
• If you rely on tagging to find things, you loose the long tail
• Good folksonomy relies on critical mass
• Web design: what are people in del.icio.us calling it, this is what they’ll respond to, then call it that.
• If there isn’t a critical mass, it’s not tagged, and that’s what you’re relying on, you won’t find it
• Do I want a majority rules approach to naming things
• The ESP Game (Carnegie Mellon)
• Assign meaningful keywords to a random image
• Play against someone else
• When both of you pick the same word, you move to the next level
• When a word match happens several times, that word becomes taboo
• Lowest common denominator approach
• Shows interesting biases
• Pic of woman, typical response is “girl”
• Pic of man, “boy” almost never comes up
• Pic of black girl, racial slur comes up
• 43 Folders
• Lifehacker
• Continuous computing: just because it’s bad for you doesn’t mean it’s bad for everyone.
• Attention if a form of capital. I can’t demand your attention without giving you something in exchange. If I demand your attention, you’re going to find a way around it.
• Why do we want to control attention?
• The technology doesn’t let us do that any more!
• Negatives
• We all feel overwhelmed
• Everything’s competing for our attention
• Person on stage vs ceiling tiles vs email on smartphone
• NYT Article: “Meet the Lifehackers”
• People @ Microsoft who research how we deal with interruptions
• Bigger screens make you more productive
• The tools are out there but you still need to take control of what you need to do.
• Who better to control and influence tagging than the people who know classification (librarians)