A widget it has got

In my opinion, widgets are one of the best and most transformative things about web 2.0.   It's fantastic that you can take little chunks of websites and put them in other sites, and bring things together so easily.   Considering one of the potential pitfalls of using these sites is 'spreading yourself too thin', it's very important to build prominent links between all your online profiles, and widgets allow you to do this in a nice, visually appealing way.   I populate the sidebars of all my blogs with widgets to everything else that I think is related and that I want on the page - as Penny said in her introductory post on the main blog it allows you to make a 'you central' - a one-stop shop for all your web content.   It's one of the things I really like about the VHL blog as opposed to our website, that it's so easy for me to do this.  And as it is just a case of copying and pasting code that the sites generate for you, you really don't need any technical knowledge at all to create a really rich and dynamic site.   In short, widgets plus RSS feeds are the answer to the question: how do you find time to keep all these different things updated?  

I've been adding various widgets (Flickr, delicious, Twitter) to my blog as I've gone along, so this Thing was really done well in advance.   I haven't been quite so on the ball with adding things to my iGoogle page (probably because, no matter how many times I try, I never quite get converted to using iGoogle), but delicious was one of the gadgets I chose back in week one.

Why then should the mind not climb right out?

I was both impressed and unimpressed with Thinkfree Office.  I haven't come across it before, and it's always good to discover new alternatives to applications.   Compared to Google Docs it has a lot of nice functionality - it looks almost exactly like MS Office, it offers you all the same choice of fonts as you have installed on your machine, and can save directly as PDFs too.  And the HTML notes function is nice, although I do wonder whether it's not a little bit behind the curve, seeing as there are so many web 2.0 tools which make publishing content to the internet so easy already - why would you use their travel template when you could blog instead for example?   However, as many people have said already, it's just so slow!   It took an absolute age to load up the first time, and despite assurances that that was just because it was the first time, it was still not exactly speedy when opening things the second and third and fourth times.   And if that wasn't offputting enough, it was even sluggish when actually using the application, leaving me to have to wait for it to catch up with my typing.   I also found the interface rather unintuitive.   To be honest, these are dealbreakers for me.   It's nice to know that if I do get frustrated with the limited functionality of Google Docs, particularly where presentation is concerned, there is an alternative, but I can't see me using it a lot unless I really do need to overcome that limitation and am prepared to deal with it's slowness.

Paper's for wimps

This may be becoming a bit of a theme, but I'm a big fan of Google Docs.  So much so that when I got my new laptop at home last year I decided not to fork out to buy MS Office, and just use Google Docs for everything.  That isn't to say I'd advocate abandoning it entirely in all circumstances, but to be honest I found I was using Google Docs far more than MS Office for most things at home anyway.   I love that if I use Google Docs, I have access to the document no matter what computer I'm using, I love Google Docs as a filestore (now if I'm giving a presentation I usually upload the file to Google Docs as well as putting it on my USB drive to take with me - that way if I forget the drive I've got the online back-up), I love the sharing function for collaborative documents (so much better than emailing things back and forth the whole time), and I love the plethora of file formats supported (exporting as PDF is a particular favourite, much the easiest way I've found to do this without Acrobat or similar).   I don't use them so much generally, but I love the forms as a really easy way to create quick questionnaires and get the results automatically delivered into spreadsheet form for you - this is exactly how we as the 23 Things team dealt with you all registering your blogs, and you'll register completion as well via a Google form at the end of the programme.

As I said, I use this all the time, but I have just now used it to create our Saturday staffing rota for Trinity Term and shared it with the staff concerned, which satisfies Thing 19 nicely.

It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

As I said in my introductory post on the main blog, I think Wikipedia is the best example of what the 'wisdom of crowds' can achieve.  Say what you like about the merits or otherwise of the site, it can't be argued that it's very existence is hugely impressive.   That that many people have contributed so much time and knowledge for free, and have produced such a vast repository of information that is all freely available, is just incredible and wonderful, I think.   And by and large, Wikipedia is a fantastic resource.  It works very hard to ensure that it is as error-free and neutral as any such project could be, and I think the onus has to be on users as well to recognise that Wikipedia should be used with caution.   Like many 23ers I use it a lot, and to be honest for finding out basic information it's my first stop, even ahead of Google.   I think the practice of warning students off Wikipedia is not helpful - as with so much on the web, you should be taught to understand the tool, not be blanket-banned from using it, and that's always the approach I would take.   Interestingly the first person to tell me about Wikipedia was my tutor on the information skills module at library school!   But for any serious research you should always double-check elsewhere - that's just good research practice, regardless.

I have rarely ventured into the world of Wikipedia editing though, for no other reason than that I rarely find an article I feel strongly that I could improve.   Occasionally I find stubs or missing articles for something I do know a bit about, but it always seems too much effort at the time to write something then and there, and then of course I forget about it!   For this Thing though I have made a couple of minor additions to the American Studies in Britain page, adding that Oxford now has the US Congressional Serial Set (one of our new eresources) and that we have the Early American Imprints too, which was listed as only at the BL, NLS and Cambridge.

Quick, now, here, now, always

I think wikis are terribly useful, and along with blogs are a great example of web 2.0 making it easy for anyone to create websites and web content.   Using a wiki site means you can get a site up and running in minutes, and they are (mostly) fairly intuitive to navigate and put together.   Obviously for groups they are great, as you can all contribute, and host discussions etc within the site - as I said on the introductory post for this week, they are excellent whenever a 'quick and dirty' site is needed that multiple people can edit (without any particular 'web editing skills').   I set up the Oxford web 2.0 wiki exactly for this purpose back in December 2007 when web 2.0 stuff in the libraries was in its infancy and people were first starting to want to know what it all was and how it could be useful for us.   Since then the site has grown with the help of all sorts of other Oxford librarians, and rather like a garden it's got rather messy and needed weeding and tidying up at times.   But it's been a useful site to have as a repository of information relating to web 2.0 in Oxford libraries, as a central place to point people to.   The most useful part I think is the case studies section, and it's been great to see that grow as more libraries have started using web 2.0 sites.   Hopefully after 23 Things more libraries will be inspired to start web 2.0ing and it'd be really helpful if anyone who does can share their experiences here.

For this Thing, I have updated the VHL page, and also subscribed to the RSS feed of the updates for the site so I can be alerted to the changes other 23ers are making as the week goes on (and afterwards).

It's about flocking. And togetherness.

Like many of the Things, I have multiple twitter accounts that I maintain for different purposes.   As with my blogs and delicious, I have both personal and 'professional' accounts, as well as one for the library and one for the Rothermere American Institute.   My personal one I use in a manner somewhere in between Facebook status update and blog - more stream-of-consciousness than both - as well as for sharing links to interesting things.  My 'professional' one is more passive - I use it to follow library/web-related tweeters of interest, and when I tweet myself it tends to be passing things on, retweeting or sharing links.   The VHL and RAI twitter accounts are used much like our Facebook pages, as another place to disseminate news, and our blog feed posts there automatically too via a third party application called twitterfeed.   I also make use of the 'send to twitter' function from delicious to tweet our new saved websites, and keep an eye on the twitter streams of other Oxford libraries in case they post things of interest to retweet (and save me writing the same thing out myself!).   In this way, with our blog and its RSS feed pointing to our website and Facebook page and Twitter, I can write one single news update and have it publish in a variety of locations, all automatically, so that our readers can receive that news in whatever way suits them best.   As Emma said in her 23 Things post about social networking, with no duplication of effort, you get maximum reach via duplication of content.

As a consumer, I find with twitter that it is like the internet at high speed - so much coming in so fast and if you're away from it for any period of time the amount to catch up on is overwhelming.   However I don't view twitter as for anything other than the up-to-the-minute ephemeral things, and don't worry if I miss stuff, unlike my RSS feeds.   Just like RSS feeds though, I've found you need to be selective about who you follow to avoid getting deluged, and as most sites now offer both newsfeeds and twitter feeds you can choose which way you want to keep up with any individual site.   It's also a great way to get a digested overview of what's going on, and in many cases now I first hear of breaking news stories via the twitter chat rather than conventional means - I was looking at pictures of the Sydney dust storm in September via twitter the night before there was any mention of it on the BBC, for example.   This is where hashtags really come into their own, along with the trending topics, and you can get a real sense of community or shared experience if you 'watch' unfolding events on twitter.   I remain rather baffled though as to why Justin Bieber seems to be almost permanently trending...  Anyway, I've subscribed to the #ox23 hashtag in Tweetdeck (which I use to manage my multiple twitter accounts) and am enjoying seeing all the 23ers popping up and in many cases taking their first steps into the twitterverse.  

Think it's too late to pitch a tent?

I'm feeling a strange wariness towards LinkedIn.   It could be that the name of it reminds me of an episode of Stargate, where a community of people are living in an ever shrinking biodome on a toxic planet, and are permanently connected via a direct neural interface to something called the link which, as well as providing them with access to information, also revises their memories so that they never know that it's gradually sending people off outside to their deaths.  So it was with some completely unwarranted trepidation that I signed up to the site and started poking around.   I'd heard of LinkedIn before, and knew it to be a professional networking site - the non-social version of Facebook, if you like, but had never explored it myself.   I can entirely see the point of the site - I like to keep my personal and professional identities largely separate so to have a place where you can get the benefit of social networking but also be sure that your holiday snaps and party photos are well out of the way (not to mention all the insight into your life outside of work) is a great idea.   However I'm not certain I'm entirely comfortable with the public-ness of LinkedIn.   It really does seem very geared towards networking in terms of finding professional opportunities, and pushes you to almost advertise yourself on the web, which is not really what I want to do.   The edit profile tab just scares me away with all the big green and blue 'add this information here!' exhortations, far more in your face than Facebook (from what I remember, anyway).   I talked about privacy settings in my post about Facebook, and how I think it's really important to have control over what information you put out on the web, so the first place I went was the 'edit my public profile' and unticked most of the options, just the same as how on Facebook I've closed everything down to friends-only.   To be honest, I haven't put much information on LinkedIn anyway, and what is there is what I'd consider to be public information - my name, work email and where I work.   Perhaps I'm oddly inconsistent where the web is concerned, as I've merrily put all sorts of information about myself all over the place, but I like to do so on my own terms and for a reason, rather than just in a 'look at me' way.   It's one of the reasons I deeply disliked Myspace (which I was on, for a while), and I think sites that have this approach do turn people off.   I've heard many complaints from people about web 2.0 in general that it's all about broadcasting or advertising yourself, which I don't actually think is right, and it's certainly not what attracts me to it personally.   For my library, sure, I want to put us out there and broadcast and advertise as widely as possible, but I want to market my library!   I don't want to market myself - I just want to keep in touch with people and share things and find information and contribute to the global conversation, almost, and I love how there are so many sites that make that possible and easy now.   Admittedly, having only just signed up, I haven't explored LinkedIn fully, but I think if it sold itself more on that aspect (as it does have groups, for example) rather than on 'look at me, here's what I can do, give me a job' aspect I'd find it more appealing.

Textbook enigmatic

Like many people, I've been on Facebook for several years now and use it a lot.   I love the way it enables me to keep in contact with so many different people so easily - I have a lot of friends living elsewhere around the world and Facebook means that when friends move away it's much easier to keep in touch.   I'm also in touch a lot more with extended family than I ever used to be through it - even my Nan is on there and she loves keeping up-to-date with all her grandchildren and nieces and nephews (and great-nieces and nephews!) through it.   I particularly like that it enables you to see a lot of the more mundane things - the kind of things that you might not bother to explicitly write about it in an email or tell someone over the phone - and so you feel closer to people as a result.   The flipside of this of course is that there's an awful lot of people who you end up knowing far more about than you might necessarily want them to, by virtue of being friends with them - and of course the definition of a friend on Facebook is not necessarily the same as a friend in the real world!   Facebook comes in for a lot of criticism, at times, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but in many ways its problems and benefits really reflect its users - it all depends on how people use the site.   One of the most important things I think for anyone on there is to remember that you control your information - it's the usual rule for the internet multiplied.   Don't put things on Facebook that you aren't comfortable with having people see, and make sure that you adjust your privacy settings.   I'm always quite cautious about what is publicly available, and have set all my privacy settings to friends-only so that only people I approve can see things.   I also take care of the problem of the 'friend' who's really only an acquaintance (or the old school friends getting back in touch out of curiosity) by using the lists feature and customising what different categories of friends can and can't see.   Facebook is a fantastic tool, but like everything, it should be used with thought and care!

Libraries and Facebook

Facebook was the first web 2.0 tool I tried out for the VHL, and at the time I set us up, the page function had yet to be introduced.   I therefore made a group for the library, thinking how great it would be to be able to get readers to communicate with us through the site, and with each other too and discuss library things.   A few people joined, but nothing ever came of it.   This was my first lesson in how the participatory ideal of web 2.0 just doesn't necessarily work in practice - expecting users to contribute just leads to disappointment when they don't!   However, soon after that Facebook introduced the pages feature, and so I moved the VHL over to that (although the group does still exist, just unused).   I think the pages feature has had the effect of changing people's expectations of what is on Facebook and what it's for.   It was quite a big concern a few years ago that organisations going onto Facebook were somehow intruding on a personal space, and I think that was pretty valid with the original set-up of the site.   However pages have created a space for the corporate within the site - there used to be a link right on the homepage saying 'create a page for your business or organisation' (or something along those lines - it's not there any more!).   And as more organisations have set up pages I think people have stopped viewing them as an intrusion onto a personal space and have started expecting, almost, that they'll be there.   I think there's an increasing expectation that everyone and everything is on Facebook now, and if nothing else I think this is why it is important for libraries to be there too.

Looking around at library Facebook pages, the most common approach is to basically replicate what's on your website or elsewhere, and this is really all that I've done with the VHL page.   I view it as another place to push out our news and updates (our blog feed imports directly to the page) and to have our basic information listed - contact details, opening hours etc.   I know that people who sign up to be fans get our news through the site, in the same way as anyone subscribing to our blog feed or following us on Twitter does.   We also have a SOLO search box on there - as adapted by Jen at the EFL (the code is on the web 2.0 wiki if anyone wants to use it for their library page), which again is just giving people another place to access the library.   It's therefore low-maintenance and an easy way to expand your web 'reach' without too much effort.   Looking around at other library pages, this approach seems quite common, and I think it's perfectly fine!    There are some really impressive Facebook pages around for libraries, with a lot of extras - Manchester Library & Information Service is a particularly great example, but for all the customisation they've put in, they still seem to be using it in much the same way as we are ours.