Archive for August, 2008
I currently know more about the lives and interests of many of my professional contacts than I do about some family members. This isn’t really on purpose, but it is a direct result of the choice many people I know have made, to keep people constantly abreast of what they’re doing via web services such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed (which I’ll discuss shortly). Most of my family is not engaged in the social Web, and as a result I’m not as engaged in their lives. Face it; if I’m getting daily/hourly updates from one person and a once-a-week or once-a-month phone call from another, which person do I likely know more about?
Now, this is not an issue with my family1, but it does demonstrate that the Web has some serious power to keep us not only connected, but constantly connected. For many, this constant connectedness is a good thing that allows them to easily keep up with their friends and industries. For others, it’s like a firehose of information they can’t shut off or filter. “TMI!” (Too Much Information) they cry. Obviously, the truth really lies somewhere in between.
The idea of lifestreaming is really the application of some logic to all of this information we’re putting out there about ourselves on the Web. Essentially, it allows social network users to collate web data about particular people in one place. Think of it this way….
Let’s say that you rate businesses on Yelp, upload or favorite videos on YouTube, post photos on Flickr, tweet on Twitter, update your statuses on Facebook, blog at WordPress.com, and maybe even have a professional profile on LinkedIn. That’s a lot of stuff you’ve got (actually, ok, not that much for some), and your friends sure aren’t going to go to each individual site to see what you’ve been up to. Enter services like FriendFeed, which aggregate all of this kind of activity for your (participating) contacts and spew it back out for you all in one place or even through a handy RSS feed. So, now your friends can know every time you do anything on any of the many, many web services that Friendfeed supports. Voila! Your friends know every time you review another restaurant in Cleveland on Yelp, or favorite another Obama Girl video, etc etc etc. One source for lots of social data.
Now, remember the firehose analogy? Once you subscribe to enough people on FriendFeed (or just enough very prolific ones), you can easily become deluged by the constant activity. This is the main gripe people have about FriendFeed; there is not truly a good way to filter out what you might consider “noise” and everything is treated equally. If you want to know every time Friend #1 and Friend #2 upload a video but not #3, and also every time only #4 updates her blog, you’re out of luck. Thus, the firehose you can’t turn off.
Does this make FriendFeed useless? No, but it means that you have to understand why you’re using it. I use it primarily as a way to keep up with people I know and what they are doing professionally. However, some argument has been made that lifestreaming could be replacing blogging and that blogging is dead. I don’t really buy that, myself. But it is true that many people are totally replacing their personal blogs with lifestreams, because the purpose of their blogs is to keep people abreast of what they’re up to. That does makes some sense, I think. And many others agree. Thus the rising popularity of lifestreaming, and of new lifestreaming services such as Ping.fm, Profilactic, Socialthing, and many more. This type of service/application is collectively called social aggregators.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- If your library is involved in more than one or two web services, you really ought to get a FriendFeed account. Make getting your social data easier for your patrons. (And I recommend FriendFeed for a library, simply because it is the most popular right now and the most well-known. Not because it’s necessarily the best!)
- FriendFeed also provides a way to have conversations about posted items with other FriendFeed users. That’s another reason for libraries to get over there; another way to interact directly with patrons. (Possibly. Just because you build it….you know.)
- It’s easy to get overwhelmed by what comes out of this kind of aggregator. Recognize that you will not likely ready EVERYTHING. It’s ok, really.
- If you’re really bored, you can subscribe to my FriendFeed. Yes, you need a FriendFeed account. Yes, another #@$! account. Yeah, I know.
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1All of my immediate family is geeky. I’ve just binged on the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid a little more than the rest. And yes, they’re weird, too.
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(Something kind of fun for a slow(er) Friday.)
A couple of weeks ago I covered Weblins here, and someday, I promise, I’ll get to avatars and gravatars. Each of those examples is a visual way to represent yourself on the web through various web sites and applications. Now, there’s a way to have an aural representation of yourself as well. Thanks to a collaboration between a beatboxer and a team of Ruby on Rails programmers, you can now have an acoustical avatar all your own. It’s called a Soundbadge. Just fill in some personality questions and almost immediately you will be presented with a small sound loop that is supposed to represent you. You can then embed the sound loop on any web page by simply cutting and pasting a very small code snippet that Soundbadge generates for you. Here’s mine:
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- Possibly, not much. But part of effectively delving into all things Web is the ability to play. You’re never too old to play with new toys.
- This might actually be a fun link for a teen site. Or have your library generate its own Soundbadge and embed it in your teen site. Ask your teen patrons to make their own and share it.
- You can edit your badge at any time, so if you suddenly feel depressed, your Soundbadge can easily reflect that. Could be a fun way for kids to keep up with the “moods” of their local librarians.
- People like to find ways to make themselves stand out among the huddled masses of the web. This is a new and unique entry into the “Distinguish Yourself” category.
(With a lot of credit to George Lenzer, blogger at alt.think!)
Here’s some facts about email’s biggest annoyance. Did you know:
- Spam is largely automated? There aren’t sweatshops full of people typing up those messages at lightning speed in some less developed nation for half a cent per day. In fact, the automation of spam is one aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat.
- Your own PC might be a spam bot? Just as with medical conditions, I’ll leave the diagnosis of your PC being a spam bot to your chosen expert analyst, however… It’s quite easy to have your PC sending out tons of spam without you knowing it. Especially now that the typical desktop PC has 1980s super computer power ten times over and a fairly fast internet connection. You may not even notice a slowdown at all. Make sure you keep those OS updates and anti-virus/anti-malware signatures up to date. Also make sure you keep all of your networked software up to date too. That includes broswers, browser plug-ins, things like Java and Flash, IM clients, mail clients, etc…
- Spam can’t be traced back to it’s original source no matter what some movies and TV shows illustrate? In technical terms there is something of a list of routes that tells you where spam came from included in the message. This is known as a mail header and generally says, “The message arrived at your address from the address listed below. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that”… But even if you go back to the first address in the list, it is likely that even that address was just someone’s home PC being controlled remotely by a spammer. So it’s a dead end. There is no way for an end user, or even a network administrator to track the message back to the accountable party and then file charges at them.
- Personal home computers infected with worms and viruses can generate spam on their own without a spammer controlling the system? Not necessarily spam that is useful to anyone, but the cryptic sort where you see excerpts of various mail messages spliced together. These systems also splice together the prefix and the domain of an e-mail address (the parts before and after the @ sign, respectively) in order to come up with new addresses to send to. Sometimes those messages actually hit a real person. And worst of all, these infected machines will use all of the e-mail addresses they have access to as the FROM address. This means that for all of the non-existent addresses that are created by this random patter, the unfortunate person being spoofed in the FROM field will get “scatterback” non-delivery messages. This usually makes people worry that they’ve been infected when they haven’t.
- Spammers, through the resource of these compromised “bot nets” have the ability to overload entire networks for purposes other than spam? The bot nets are used for more than just sending spam. In the past few years incidences of extortion on high profile sites have occurred. One party threatens another party who absolutely must remain online to be profitable with an attack that will knock them off the internet. That is unless they pay the requested sum of money.
Spam is a huge problem, and one that will not be easily solved. Mail administrators, like George, are constantly trying new tweaks or methodologies to lessen the amount of spam in your inbox…but the chances of them being completely successful are very low. It’s too easy for spammers to deluge mail systems with garbage, too fast. The next time you get a spam message in your email, be thankful you’re not seeing the other 95% of them that your mail admin helped to prevent. Over 100 billion spam messages are sent per day.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- Be thankful for all of the spam you’re NOT getting.
- Keep your virus, anti-spyware and operating system up to date so that your PC does not become an infected zombie machine.
- Spam isn’t going away any time soon. It will only get worse.
- Bring your mail admin some cookies. Really.
Ah, Twitter is a wonderful thing. I asked members of the Twitterverse to catalog the problems of library web sites, and my followers (as friends on Twitter are called) did not disappoint. I got responses not only from both library and non-library folks, but even a bit of international participation with a comment or two from Australia.
Here’s a sample of much of what I received:
- “Nonsensical links to products by name. Bookletters, EBSCO, iBistro.”
- “Branch hours/locations not easy to find from the library home page.”
- Having to…”scroll waaay down to bottom to find search box and then was Title(not keyword).”
- “Animated gifs and blinking text.”
- “Focus on library materials and facilities, rather than how people use our materials and facilities.”
- “Acronyms.”
- “No site search. C’mon, time to leave 1998.”
- “Hiding your staff and/or hiding ways (or not providing them at all) to contact staff through the web site.”
- “Library jargon: what the heck is a ‘electronic reference database’ to the layperson?”
I saw at least one major theme here: many libraries don’t have sites that are intended for the end user. Too many library sites are designed around the perceived needs of library staff, rather than for their patrons. I encourage every library to take a good, hard look at their public-facing web site(s) and ask the question “Who is this really for?”
Here’s some additional sins I’ll add to the list:
- Can’t find the address and/or phone number for at least the main branch on the front page.
- Too much text on the front page. Don’t put the whole 3-paragraph story there; just a teaser. People scan the web; they don’t read. When I see too much text, I’m outta there.
What other problems with library web sites do you commonly see? Share’em in the comments!
