A very good talk by Liz Lawley on social computing opened the second day of Internet Librarian today. I’m going to try and be more selective with my notes today, and hit more highlights than a full play-by-play.

Click though to read my notes on this keynote.

Technorati tags: , ,

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

Technorati has just indexed its 20-millionth blog (from an elementary school in France).

Librarians have always been good at the long tail, being aware of the specific and the less-known.

Social computing augments, not replaces human interactions.

Most tools these days, from the standpoint of usability, suck. I’m coming from a place that is responsible for a lot of that. From the outside it is impossible to believe that smart, passionate people can work there. But they do–the individuals “get it,” but the company can’t make it happen.

Kathy of Creating Passionate Users blog. Cool concept => “something bad happens” => same old thing.

Let’s make it so the tools foster better use (rather than blame the user or dumb down the tools). Which is very hard to do.

Recent changes in search have less to do with algorithms and a lot to do with social networks.

Shows Google search and Yahoo! My Web 2.0 search on “clay”; Google returns a wide variety: polymer clay, Clay Aiken, Clay Shirkey. Yahoo! My Web 2.0 returns all Clay Shirky hits at the top, since Liz has told Yahoo! My Web 2.0 that her trusted information sources all have to do with social software. A “two-degree-out” social search; her friends and their friends. From “resource discovery” to “information network discovery”

Using del.icio.us bookmarks to not only keep track of information for herself, but to share those links with interested others.

Shows del.icio.us/LaGrangeParkLibrary; the reference librarians can get to it, the patrons can get to it, we can get to it. Why shouldn’t a library be part of your trusted information network?

The risk is that it is easy to close yourself off from interesting new discoveries; you can filter out stuff you didn’t know you wanted.

Tagging is not going away, no matter what librarians might think of it. Most people understand the concept of keywords and don’t understand the concept of faceted classification.

Wondering what you should call a site, a service? Find similar sites, then see how they are tagged on del.icio.us to know what words real people come up with to describe it.

At the same time do we really want a “majority-rules” approach to metadata? [I'm thinking of Family Feud: "We showed 100 people a website, top ten tags are on the board, here's the website"]. Is it the case that what we all agree on is the best thing? Example of racial slurs used to describe images on The ESP Game.

Shows 43Folders and Lifehacker re: continuous partial attention. People have such a strong emotional reaction to the ideas of continuous partial attention, continuous computing. Do we think it is bad for us, or do we think it is bad for us? Might it not work for some people?

Some people say that they don’t like giving talks any more because everyone is looking at their computers. Is that the computers’ fault? Attention is a form of capital; I can’t demand it without giving you something in return. If I try to demand your attention, you will resist it. People listen when there is something they need to hear, and don’t when there is not.