Giant worms. Huge.

I think YouTube is fantastic - one of the things on the web that has really changed how we do things.   I know copyright infringement is rife (and an ongoing source of controversy), but how amazing is it that you can find clips of almost anything and everything that's ever been on screen?   Technology like the BBC iPlayer and its like mean that you never actually need to miss anything on the TV if you're otherwise occupied, but it's YouTube that fills all those odd little niches and provides instant satisfaction.  And this is how I mostly use YouTube, to see things that I missed first time round, that I wouldn't otherwise have seen, or that I did see and want to see again.   I'm a strongly passive YouTube user - I didn't have an account myself until just before Christmas and never comment (YouTube comments are generally some of the worst on the internet, to be honest), and I also use it almost exclusively to view stuff that technically shouldn't be there in terms of copyright.  

Copyright on the web is a hugely complex and controversial area, and YouTube is right on the front lines.   I'm not going to go into detail about the ins and outs of it here (and I'm not an expert by any means!), but where YouTube is concerned it's been interesting to see the two approaches being played out in changes to the site.   On the one hand you have the copyright holders that are cracking down hard on any infringement (or perceived infringement) - there was a huge fuss last year when YouTube went through and removed the audio from thousands of fan videos, essentially rendering them pointless.   Now when you upload videos it will run automatic checks on the audio and may block the video if it discovers copyright infringement, depending on whether the copyright holder demands this.   (Of course the usual response by the person who made the video is to try another, less restrictive, site, like Photobucket or Bam Vid Vault, or will just share via a filesharing site like Sendspace or Mediafire, so it doesn't actually stop the videos from being made and distributed!)   But not everyone is taking this approach - many such videos now have pop-up adverts along the bottom which tell you the song that is used and link you to iTunes to buy a copy - thus using the illegitimate use to generate sales.   The other way in which copyright holders are working with YouTube is to put content up themselves, figuring that if they make things (or parts of things) freely available it might reduce the amount of stuff put up by other people (and YouTube allows some corporate users to put up longer clips than the standard 10 minute limit).   The Monty Python channel is a great example of this - they explicitly say so (and check out the trailer for the Not the Messiah film if you're there - my Dad's in it!).  

Anyway, having said I wasn't going to say much about YouTube and copyright I seem to have done so!   If anyone wants to read more about copyright and the web though I can recommend the writings of Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig in particular - their two recent books are both in the Staff Library and also available as free PDF downloads, so take a look. 

• Cory Doctorow: Content
• Lawrence Lessig: Remix 

OK. Enough about copyright.  Back to the original point of this Thing.

Much like the rest of the web, YouTube has enormous potential for libraries and educational institutions, as well as students and researchers, as long as you are able to apply those critical faculties and sort through the haystack in order to find the needles you want.   YouTubeEDU is YouTube's equivalent of iTunesU for podcasts, and just like iTunesU there's some really amazing stuff there when you browse through.   However I want to highlight an excellent library-specific example, again from the Library of Congress.   They use their YouTube channel not only to put up information about the library and videos of their events, but also for video footage from their archives, making these clips more widely available in just the same way as they do photgraphs via the Flickr Commons.   Again they also put up a lot of this kind of material on their own site, but YouTube makes them more visible on the web and more easily findable by people that might not otherwise go to their site, as well as presenting material in a more accessible and user-friendly way.




Before I go, a quick note about subscribing to YouTube channels.   At first glance, YouTube only seems to let you do this via your log-in to the site, but you can do so via RSS - fellow 23er CybrarianBeta has blogged about how to do this if anyone is like me and would prefer to subscribe in Google Reader.

Kree!

Podcasts are one of those things that I like the idea of very much but never seem to get around to using!   I think it's mainly because I've never got on well with things I just have to listen to (other than music) - I don't like spoken radio, don't like audiobooks, and therefore also struggle with podcasts.   I find my attention wanders and I start doing other things and then miss half of what is said so I never usually bother.   Which is a shame because there's some fantastic stuff out there to listen to, but I guess it's just not my medium.

Anyway, personal foibles aside, podcasting is a great way to get audio content out, and as with all these web 2.0 tools there are so many different ways you can make use of the technology.   From a library point of view I think they are great for user education, obviously, but also for things like audio tours - I heard a good talk at the OULS Exchange of Experience day in 2008 about the podcasted induction tour for Oxford Brookes library, for example.   But where I think podcasts are really great is for more interesting things like talks and lectures - at the Rothermere American Institute we've been starting to record some of the talks and seminars that take place in order to reach a wider audience (our podcast of Professor Robin Kelley's Harmsworth Lecture in November was in the popular downloads section for a while), and this is of course where Oxford's venture into iTunesU is so fantastic.   I was also particularly excited to discover that Oxford is now releasing a lot of podcasts with creative commons licences, which I think is brilliant and highly commendable.

Being a non-audio-fan-type-person I haven't ever really subscribed to podcasts much, but for this Thing I've made myself overcome my reticence and looked some out.   I subscribed to the RAI's podcasts via iTunes and my Google Reader, and mooched about some of the other material on iTunesU - some really fantastic stuff and, if you're so minded, you can follow entire courses and lecture series from many universities.   It's an awesome resource - I really should try and get over my dislike of just listening someday!

The secret masters of the Universe

I'm surprised, reading this week's blogs, to find such a lukewarm reception to delicious - I think we as the 23 Things team were expecting this one to be a hit, as we're all big fans of it and also it seems to speak right to librarians' hearts (collect things! classify them! show them to everyone else!).   But I'm getting the impression that a lot of people are a bit unsure about it, and that perhaps not everyone is realising quite what it offers, or why people are so keen on it.

The first thing I'm noticing people asking is why use delicious instead of saving bookmarks in your browser?   My answer to this is that it's not 'instead of' - I still have favourites saved for the sites I go to most frequently, and in many cases don't have these saved on delicious at all.   Delicious, for me, is more like my web library - all the things I've read on the internet that I want to save for future reference, or just in case, or because I don't have time to read them just yet but want to come back to, or just because I thought they were good/interesting/entertaining etc, as well as all the sites that I don't visit that often (and so don't want to have cluttering up my browser bookmarks), but do want to be able to find quickly and easily on occasion.   It's therefore full of individual articles and pages rather than whole sites - links to specific things like YouTube videos, short stories, reviews, comic strips, articles, blog posts, picture galleries, fics, forum posts...  you get the picture.   It's also, as I talked about in my previous post, a really useful discovery tool, but for this kind of thing - not whole sites, but for what is being talked about and produced on the web.   I suppose, to continue the library analogy, it's like my browser bookmarks are my quick reference section, whereas my delicious page is my whole collection.

The idea of delicious as a discovery tool has also perplexed some people, with complaints about volume/quality of information etc.   To be honest, my initial answer to this is 'in what way is this different or worse than Google?', but fellow 23er Laura has addressed this concern excellently in her blog, so I will say no more and refer you to her!

Finally, this week's things have really introduced the idea of tagging on a mass scale, and the concept of folksonomies.   I found this excellent article by Clay Shirky saved by someone with the ox23 tag (via my Google Reader - see what I mean about delicious tags as a resource discovery method?), which explains why classifying the web in a traditional sense doesn't work, but tagging does.   And secondly I'm going to embed a really good presentation here by Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing - another site that uses tagging heavily) wherein he explains the benefits that tagging offers as compared to library classification schemes like LCSH.   It's a really thought-provoking talk, and while I'm not going to be a complete traitor to my profession and advocate throwing out LCSH completely, I do think that tagging has a lot to offer library catalogues as an additional feature.   Of course, we have tagging functionality in SOLO, but as both Shirky and Spalding point out, tagging only works if a critical mass can be achieved, and SOLO is nowhere near there yet!

Learning is delightful and delicious

I adore delicious. It is one of my favourite web 2.0 tools, and along with RSS feeds is the one I'd say has definitely changed my life!   I have been maintaining three delicious accounts for over two years now - a personal one which now has getting on for 1000 saved links, a work-related one that I set up to keep track of and share specifically work-related and web 2.0 related things, and finally the VHL's account, for useful links for our readers.   I use the first one all the time, saving anything and everything that I might conceivably ever want to come back to, but it is distinctly designed more for me rather than for sharing with others - I make use of the 'mark as private' feature too so that I can save things there that I'd rather not broadcast to the world.   The other two accounts are designed more for other people, a way to save and share things that I think other people might find useful.

For the library, this has been a particularly useful tool.   There are so many really useful websites and free web resources relating to US Studies and US History in particular, and before I discovered delicious I was trying to build up a links page on our website in order to save some of these for our readers.   It was cumbersome to maintain though as I had to log in to the CMS every time I wanted to add something, and also there were difficulties in deciding how to organise the links and make the list appear manageable and have everything easily findable.   Delicious makes this all really easy - I can save links quickly as and when I come across them, and by using tags I can make that list browsable and break-down-able into smaller lists.   Our tags do need a bit of work - I keep meaning to go in and sort them into bundles but never quite getting round to it.  Perhaps I'll try and do that this week as part of the Things.   I know that the Education Library has made good use of tags to offer lists broken down by course and subject, and that's the kind of thing that delicious does really well.   Another useful feature is of course expanding on the sharing by putting the links elsewhere - our latest links show up in the sidebar of our blog, on our website (although there have been problems in general with getting delicious widgets to display in the CMS and whether they show up or not can be rather hit and miss), and are pushed out to Twitter and via RSS.

Another way in which I find delicious particularly useful is for discovering new content.   As everything saved on delicious (and similar sites) has been done so consciously, social bookmarking sites become a kind of 'best of the web'.  This means that searching delicious can have distinct advantages over searching via Google, particularly if you are looking for something which is likely to have a specific tag.   And of course then you can subscribe to that tag (or to other users if their interests coincide with yours) by RSS and get automatically notified when new things are added.   This is a feature that I use quite a lot as well, and have promoted to people as a good current awareness service.   As part of this week's Things therefore, I've subscribed to the feed for the ox23 tag in my Google Reader.  

I only really use the networks insofar as getting notifications via RSS - as I tend to only visit delicious to find something specific, I'm not going to go and browse my network just to see what's new, but RSS takes care of that for me too.  

All in all, my thoughts on delicious can be summed up as follows: delicious by name, delicious by nature!

Indoors, with waiters and tables

Picnik is a new tool for me, and so this Thing is particularly exciting.   I'm a Photoshop addict, and have spent quite a lot of time over the last few months learning the tools and tricks, and would now consider myself a pretty competent user, but equally I know how unintuitive I found it when starting out.   I know there are a lot of tools around that aim to let you do the same kind of editing and manipulation but in a far more user-friendly way, but hadn't ever really explored any other than the functions on Picasa on my laptop at home.   Picnik seems like a really good option for this kind of tweaking - the way it links directly with Flickr is great, and the editing options are helpfully labelled with actual words rather than the not-so-obvious images you find in the likes of Photoshop and GIMP.   I played around with a couple of the photos I'd uploaded of the VHL, mostly just fixes like sharpening and adjusting colour/saturation/contrast, and also tried out some of the extras like the vignette, soften, Lomo and sepia tools.   I'll have to have a play with some of the wackier options another time!   For me though, much as I'm impressed with what Picnik offers, I don't think it'll tempt me away from my Photoshop.

Time future contained in time past

Georgia oat field? Southern U.S. (LOC)

One of the library-related web 2.0 projects I have been most impressed by in general is the Flickr Commons.   It has been up and running for two years now and contains a vast collection of photographs from libraries and archives all over the world, all made available via Flickr.   It began as a pilot project with the Library of Congress (whose web 2.0 activities are particularly impressive in general), and has since grown to include 32 institutions including the US National Archives, New York Public Library, National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, and LSE Library.   It describes itself as having two aims: to increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and thereby increase the knowledge about the people, places and events in those photos.   I heard a talk from Michelle Springer of the Library of Congress at ALA last summer where she described how participation in the Flickr Commons had benefited the library, including demonstrating how their catalogue records have been enhanced with information contributed by Flickr users. 

I think the Flickr Commons is a fantastic resource, and I've promoted it a bit to readers here at the VHL, as there is so much there for US historians.   I think it's also a wonderful example of how libraries and web 2.0 sites can work together to really promote and increase access to resources, not only to their traditional users but reaching out to a worldwide community of web users.

Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams

This week's things are right up my street, as I'm a picture addict.   Friends and family find endless amusement in the sheer quantities of photos I am able to take when I have my camera with me (current record is 587 for one week's holiday), and over the last couple of years I've been teaching myself image manipulation software - first GIMP and now Photoshop.   I have accounts on three photosharing websites - Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr - and I use them all for slightly different purposes.   Picasa is my site of choice for bulk uploading of photos to share, as I have the Picasa software on my laptop at home and so uploading there is incredibly easy.   Photobucket I use to store images that I want to post elsewhere individually, on forums or blogs/LiveJournal, or (with a URL shortener) on Twitter.   And Flickr is where I post my 'good' photos, more as a showcase.   I also use Facebook for photo sharing with friends.   Obviously all the sites basically do the same thing, but I think the way that I use them is quite reflective of how they are used in general.

For Thing 7, I'm therefore already well on my way.   The photos I have on Flickr already are a selection of pictures taken on various travels around the UK and the world in the last few years, and I've cropped and touched them up in Photoshop before uploading.   I have given them all a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence which means that I've chosen to permit other people to redistribute and modify my images as long as they credit me, and allow the same conditions when reposting or modifying.   I really approve of Creative Commons licences as a way to choose a less restrictive form of copyright, and as someone who also creates from other people's work I benefit from other people doing the same.   Since putting my photos up on Flickr I've seen my licence used, as I was contacted twice by a company producing free online travel guides asking for permission to include images I'd taken on their website.   These are the images that were used:

Included in Schmap Guide to Washington DC


Included in Schmap Guide to Brisbane

This week, for Thing 7, I have uploaded a few new photos that I took of my library in the snow in January, and added them to a new set to keep them separate from my other photos. I've joined the Ox23 group and added one of my photos to the pool - hopefully later in the week I'll have time to take a few more photos of the VHL and add those too.   I've also had a lot of fun geo-tagging my photos - as most of them were taken on my travels and so I had to zoom all over the world to find the locations to tag them with.

A little tip for when you can't find a feed

In reading quite a few of the other 23 Thinger's blogs this week I've noticed some people bemoaning websites that don't have RSS feeds and therefore cannot be subscribed to.   Well, the good news is, with Google Reader, they can anyway!   Google Reader will create custom feeds for sites that will let you know when there has been an update - all you need to do is type the website address or URL into the 'add a subscription' box, and Google Reader will give you the option to create a custom feed.   Sweet, huh?

The Wire is hungry

I am a big fan of RSS feeds and have no idea how I used to manage without them!   I remember the feeling of utter revelation when they were demonstrated to me, and have enjoyed seeing the exact same expressions of wonder and delight on the faces of other people at various training sessions when the joys of RSS have been revealed to them too.   I love knowing that I'm not going to miss things, and it saves a huge amount of time.  However there are drawbacks too - if you're not careful you can go a bit too nuts with subscribing to everything going, and end up with a severe case of information overload.   Returning to your Google Reader after being away on holiday is every bit as bad as getting back to your email inbox - you feel like you'll never get back on top.  And also like my email inbox, I have long given up the notion that I will ever get to zero.   However, unlike email, you don't actually have to read everything - these are things of interest, rather than something you might need to know or respond to.   The 'mark all as read' button can be your friend, as well as the 'unsubscribe' button.   If you find you are skimming over a feed and never seeing anything you actually want to read, or often marking them all as unread, then perhaps you should just get rid of it completely.   I've learnt that it's vital to be selective in your subscriptions, and I've used some of the time for this week's Things to have a good prune of my feeds.  I've also added the feed for the 23 Things blog, as well as a lot of the participant blogs, so that I can easily keep up with the progress of the programme.  

One of the things I like most about Google Reader is its search function.   I'm very bad at organising things into folders and categories in general (I know, I know, and yet I am a librarian), and tend to prefer to make use of search to find things.   You can search read items as well as unread, and what this means in practice is that you can search the entire archive of a site's feed.   Many has been the time that I knew I read an article on a site, but didn't save it and couldn't find it any more, only to search in Google Reader for it and up it comes, straight away.   Really very useful.