- Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University
- Blogger
- Wiki creator
Currently finishing up writing my book Social Software in Libraries to be published by Information Today in early 2007.
- Blogging about their life and interests
- Networking via Facebook and MySpace
- Sharing photos via Flickr
- Gaming
- Creating all sorts of audio and video content
- Chatting via IM
What are your students into? And where is the library in all this?
Wikipedia: "Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities."
Social software...
- encourages participation and collaboration
- builds community from the bottom up
- encourages transparency
- requires trust
- reduces barriers of time and space
- isn't necessarily software
How do you define a medium that is used by teenagers, Nobel Prize-winners, car companies, rock bands and libraries?
A blog is "a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first."
--Jill Walker, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory
Blogs can be
- personal or professional
- individual or collaborative
- about ANYTHING
- Look
- Organization
- by TIME: reverse-chronological order
- by TOPIC: categories
- Preservation: “permalink” to the archives
- Formatting
- Via user-interface “quicktags”
- Assume minimal HTML knowledge
What a blogging interface looks like
But there are so many blogs... how can you keep up?
RSS is format for syndicating content on the Web.
- based on XML
- RSS breaks websites into discrete chunks of information
- RSS enables you to view content from different sites on a single page.
- Many Web sites have RSS feeds these days if they have information that is updated regularly (examples: CNN, NY Times, Burlington Free Press).
- Look for these icons
to find sites with RSS feeds
- RSS lacks information about how the file should be presented (example).
- To be able to read RSS feeds, you need to use an aggregator.
Web site or desktop application used for displaying multiple RSS feeds (from 2 to 2,000 and more)
Most common way of using RSS
Most people have used an RSS aggregators and don't know it (Example: MyYahoo!)
Popular Web-based aggregators
My Bloglines feeds
Allows a user interact synchronously over the internet with anyone in the world
Meredith Gorran Farkas
Distance Learning Librarian
Norwich University
mfarkas at norwich dot edu
AIM: librarianmer
Information Wants To Be Free
This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. Template created by Jessamyn West. Thanks to Aaron Schmidt, Jessamyn West, and Dorothea Salo and many others for the inspiration.
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