Last week Meredith Farkas wrote The changing professional conversation.

Last Friday, Roy Tennant pointed and nodded at Meredith’s post when he wrote Farkas on the Changing Professional Conversation.

The upshot of all three posts is that the authors feel pulled in many different directions by all the social media sites where they are active. They feel it on the writer’s side, where they feel a lack of control over things they write and then post on sites that they don’t own. And Meredith and Roy also are feeling it on the reader’s side where they find it harder to recall and re-locate the things they saw on Twitter. Or was it Google+. Couldn’t have been Google Wave…

So. I don’t usually like to offer advice here. But I realized that I used to worry about this kind of thing and now I don’t so much. So here’s what I do, or what I would do if I were still more worried about this problem of fragmentation–your mileage may vary.

1. Blog more. If you have something kind of interesting to share, blog it. Don’t just slap it on Twitter and call it good. Let Twitter or Google+ or whatever be your first draft of your cool idea and the blog post be the second draft. If you want to link to someone else’s thing, take two minutes to write up a bit of context and blog it. You know you are just feeding your blog to all those social network sites anyway.

2. Blog less. Each post should be 25-75% shorter than you first thought it should be. I don’t think I have ever wished a post were 250 words longer.

3. Ignore almost everything. FriendFeed is my social network and professional network of choice. I  subscribe to about 20 blogs or other feeds that I’d call “professional.”

And I mostly ignore everything else. I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Jobs knows what else (Plurk? Hunch still sends me newsletters. Get a life, Hunch), but only because some people I care about are only active on those sites and it’s nice to check in on them sometimes.

You don’t have to worry about finding again that thing you saw on Google+ if you never go to Google+. Who are the five people in your professional network that really bring the good stuff time and again? Who is reading tons of blogs so you don’t have to? Follow those people, and forget the rest.

4. Keep everything else in one place forever.  Put all your eggs in one basket. My basket used to be del.icio.us. Anything I saw on the web that I thought I might ever want to see again for any reason, I tried to remember to bookmark in del.icio.us. Now I have switched to Evernote, which is more versatile in what kinds of eggs I can throw in the basket, and keeps a copy of the eggs on my computer.

You don’t have to ever look at most of those notes or links ever again. Don’t groom your folksonomy, don’t spend a moment wondering if you should keep a link or cull it. Keep it. Back it up. Space is cheap.

If it’s something that you can’t ignore (see 3, above), own it.

5. Don’t delete your accounts. Just trust me on this one. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you can’t stop fussing with it, get a friend to change the password or something.

That’s it. If you liked this post, you’ll like my new social media optimization handbook, Who Leads the Thought Leaders Thoughts, and my book of daily affirmations, The Clothes’ New Emperor.

Anyway.

The guy lost his job recently, which prompted his newest scheme: The Jason Scott Sabbatical. The idea is that if he can raise $25,000 in donations, he can devote himself to his myriad projects in computer history. People like you and me pledge money. If he hits $25K in pledges by 22 November 2009, the pledges will automatically be paid out of pledger’s Amazon accounts, Jason gets a pile of money, pledgers get various premiums based on how much we pledged, and Jason keeps us updated on how he’s spending his time and our money. If he fails to meet the goal, nothing happens.

I pledged $25, the minimum suggested pledge (though you could pledge as little as $5.00). I want to see this succeed for him. I’m also very intrigued at how Kickstarter works. It could have been a good way to do the Louisville Free Public Library fundraiser. It could be a way to do a project like the LSW Zine (more on that very soon) and ensure it gets entirely funded before making a single photocopy. It could be a way for a library to run a fundraiser for a specific project. It looks elegant and fun.

I doubt many of you will want to pledge to the Jason Scott Sabbatical if you aren’t familiar with him, but if you are, then please consider pledging. And if you aren’t familiar with him, why not?

Also, if you have any experience with Kickstarter or have other interesting Kickstarter projects you’d like to point me to, please leave a comment.

There is a large organization whose main business isn’t producing information, but instead hosting and aggregating information for many thousands of users on the web. Users upload content, and use the service to make that content public worldwide, and, likewise, to find other users’ content. Then one day the large organization decides to change the rules about how that information is shared, giving the organization more rights–to the point where it sounds to some people like the organization is trying to claim ownership of the users’ content, rather than simply hosting it and making it available on the web.

A small but vocal and influential group of users object to the policy change. The organization protests that it isn’t their intent to fundamentally change their relationship with their users and that legal documents tend to sound scarier than they really are. Most customers are either unaware or unconcerned by the change in policy, but the outcry continues until the organization backs down a bit, sticking with the old policy for the time being. The future, though, is up in the air.

Facebook? Or OCLC?

So here is my TTT for 2009:

Social software deathwatch

AOL Hometown shut down with very little notice to the people who still had their sites hosted there. Google is closing, stopping development or otherwise 86’ing Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball (ReadWriteWeb article). LiveJournal laid off a bunch of people and sorta forgot to comment on it publicly for a while, leading people to suspect that they have something to hide and may not be long for this World Wide Web. Social bookmarking site, Ma.gnolia, had “data corruption and loss” on Friday, and at the moment they still haven’t recovered. (WebCite cached version of Ma.gnolia home page with apology and explanation.) Thomas Hawk has been blogging occasions (one, two) where Flickr permanently deleted users accounts with little notice or negotiation. (Please note that Hawk is CEO and Chief Evangelist [*gag* -ed.] of Zooomr, a Flickr competitor.)

I didn’t watch the whole LITA Top Tech Trends video, so it’s possible that the actual TTT panel talked about this. Karen Coombs certainly comes close with what she calls “the one which scares the sh!t out of me”: “The waking digital preservation nightmare.”

I admit that I’m conflating some not-entirely-related phenomena: sites where the owning company pulls the plug; sites that have one-time serious, possibly irrevocable losses; and sites that are too eager to not just suspend users’ accounts, but to delete everything they have posted.

But it goes back to something I wrote about two years ago in a post called When good sites go bad. It’s great to put stuff on these sites to increase your media’s visibility or to find a more convenient way to share documents or something. But what happens if your free hosted wiki site suddenly goes bankrupt or your document sharing site’s servers are accidentaly sold for scrap, or the video hosting site you use objects to the hot book-on-book action you have posted?

Jason Scott got me thinking about this again with a series of posts on his blog, ASCII: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, Stand Back, We’re Archivists, and Fuck the Cloud. (N.B.: If you are offended by that last post title, please don’t click any of the Jason Scott links. The man uses profanity like a Thai chef uses chiles; his writing might not sit well with those used to blander fare.) Scott is a self-made historian and archivist of the recent but rapidly receeding digital past. His stuff is provacative and fascinating, and I think you should read it all, but I’ll highlight two things here.

The first is Scott’s Archive Team, logo seen here. As he said in the “Eviction” post:

Our little technorati, our people who cry for open source and beg us for money to Fight For Electronic Freedom and make their rounds at all the right cocktail parties at tech shows.. where the hell are they now? We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

Archive Team is his answer to his own question, with the idea that the team will swoop in and back up (by any means necessary) users’ files on sites that are in danger of going under.

We might well ask the same question: libraries and librarians and archivists who care about preserving the world’s cultural output: where are we now? Do we have anything to add to an effort to help keep online culture from going down the drain. I fear that most libraries can barely deal with the digital content we are directly responsible for, leaving the wilds of the Internet to people like Scott and Brewster Kahle to deal with, but I’d love to hear examples of libraries taking on this kind of responsibility.

The other thing is a nice quote from the “Cloud” post:

If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

(Note that Google Video isn’t “going off the air”; it’s discontinuing uploading of new content.)

So that’s my top tech trend for 2009. There’s a reason it’s called “cloud” computing. It looks beautiful now, but could be gone in a moment.

Edited 2009-02-04, noon MST to add: Walt Crawford is certainly talking about the same trends when he suggest that we consider sites’ business models before placing too much trust in them, and that we “should think several times before relying entirely on the cloud.” I knew I’d seen Walt mention these issues, but didn’t have a link when I wrote the post.

I am also thankful for tacky glitter animated gifs.

I have wondered from time to time just what it means for an atheist to be thankful. Exactly whom would I be thanking? I suppose it is just a convenient way of acknowledging that life can be very hard indeed, and it is worth pausing to note those people and things, happy accidents and long-sought accomplishments, that make our lives worthwhile.

I’m most thankful for my family and my health. I’m thankful that I have meaningful work that pays me a living wage and for my home. Expressed like that, those things sound like cliches, banal even. Yet we all know what complex and highly personal emotions and relationships lurk behind simple words like “family” and “work.”

I’m thankful for libraries, the ones that I have worked in and the ones I have used or visited. When I walk into a library’s stacks and start browsing and pulling down books, I still get that sense of “this is so cool” that I have always had.

I’m also thankful for the Internet and the World Wide Web. I’m glad that I am part of the generation who was born into a world where computers were not common household objects, and have lived through the coming of the microcomputer and the household connection to the Internet. There’s no point in pretending that computers and the Internet are uniformly good (any more than “family” or “work” are always fun and easy). But I value the Web for the way it has brought me closer to people all over the country (and to a small degree, all over the world).

Kate Sheehan has a recent post on ALA TechSource entitled Making Friends where she gets at some of the “drama” surrounding making friends online. She mentions some of the fragmentation we have seen in the online community of librarians as blogs have lost some of their gravitational pull and people have put more effort into communicating on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. We wrestle with keeping things public versus taking them to more private spaces on the Web.

It’s messy. As Kate points out, we don’t go into these sites with “focus and purpose” in mind. People screw up and people’s feelings get hurt, and sometimes we share too much. But the people I have met on the web over the last three years have become my closest friends. Outside of my family, they (you) are the people I look forward to seeing every day, the people who know me best.

And I’m thankful.

We don’t get a whole lot of traffic on our ask-a-librarian IM chat, but the people use it seem to like it. A lot.

Tumblr is a pretty slick platform, but I stopped using it for my own linkblog, Bevedog, because it all felt so locked up. I still haven’t been able to export all my stuff from the Tumblr blog.

But I still check in on the blogs I’m following on Tumblr every now and then, and I enjoyed this moment of JSTOR love that I found today. One of the features of Tumblr is “reblogging” where you can easily do a “me too” and blog the same quote or photo or video that you friends have blogged, choosing to add a comment of your own or not, and you get a unique view of all the reblogs if you see it through your Tumblr feed. It’s fun to see people geek out over JSTOR on a non-academic site.

The Treehouse

Originally uploaded by sacolton.

Barbara Fister has an interesting post with a great title over at ACRLog: Creepy Treehouse. She writes about Blackboard setting up an application for Facebook with the idea that students might want to check their academic stuff from within the “social” world of Facebook. She wonders if there isn’t something a little icky about trying to fit academics into Facebook. Here’s what the “creepy treehouse” thing is all about:

A creepy treehouse is a place built by scheming adults to lure in kids. Kids tend to sense there’s something creepy about that treehouse and avoid it. Hence, a new definition: “Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”

It’s an interesting take on that vaguely unsettled response we sometimes get from students when we try to be too cool, try too hard to seem fun and playful, when we make familiar toys unpalatably “educational.” Setting up an outpost in an attractive playspace with an ulterior motive is just . . . creepy.

I’m not really buying this “creepy treehouse” thing (though I do admire the phrase) as far as it applies to putting a Blackboard app in Facebook. Facebook is huge, and contains many different kinds of people using it for many different kinds of things. It seems reasonable to assume that a small percentage of students would find a Blackboard application worthwhile.

Also, remember how people use Facebook; they have complete control over their profile. They don’t have to walk past the Blackboard application or the librarian profile every day. If they are into that kind of thing, they add the application or become a fan of the library or add the librarian as a friend. If they don’t, they ignore it and no one feels molested.

Aside from the slightly dopey language on the main application page (“Let’s face it. You would live on Facebook if you could. Imagine a world where you could manage your entire life from Facebook – it’s not that far off!”) I don’t see anything too smarmy or creepy about this Blackboard thing. Creepy is as creepy does, and this particular case looks pretty straightforward to me.

I do think that librarians and others need to pay attention to the cultural norms of Facebook or other online sites, and I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that a presence in Facebook makes one cool, or will immediately result in lots of attention. But in general, I find Jessamyn West’s post Why should libraries be socially networking? more convincing than this notion of the creepy treehouse.

As you may remember from last April, I wrote about 365 Library Days and the League of Awesomeness when my library decided to join the 365 Library Days project cooked up by Michael “Libraryman” Porter.

We had to give ourselves an extension–we are an academic library, so we can do that kind of thing–but we uploaded our last images to our 365 Tutt Library Days photoset today. We’ve got 365 photos and two videos.

Did it make us more awesome? Hard to say (we were pretty awesome to begin with). Unlike the projects I mentioned in thet first post, this one was less intense, and I changed the deadline anyway, making it even less intense.

But because of the project, we took some photos that we probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise like the art installation on the patio or circ dog or Chas the pumpkinhead or the poor dude trying to finish his paper at the end of the block.

So I’m going to say it was a success, and a reminder to keep taking photos around the library. I suppose the next frontier is to upload some of them to the Tutt Library Facebook page.

“Howdy” JCPL

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

On Friday, I drove up to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds where the Jefferson County Public Library was having their annual All Staff Day. Thanks to a referral from Meredith Farkas, the Jeffco folks had asked me to talk about web 2.0 / social software stuff.

I did a session I called Social Software for Library People. I had a longish time slot of 90 minutes. I knew that many of the Jeffco staff would already have some familiarity with many of the sites I wanted to talk about, and I also assumed that if I just got up and ran through the usual suspects one after another, it would get old fast. So instead, I tried to talk about a few common features or ideas expressed in social software, and look at what that meant. I used a lot of library examples, but the idea wasn’t so much “what can this library system do with social software?” but “what kind of things might people who work in libraries want to know about social software?”

I took a lot of inspiration (and some of my section titles) from Ryan Deschamps’ post Navigating Online Cultures, and I owe a lot to the Library Society of the World, members of which have been very patient with me for the past few weeks as I solicited their ideas and opinions and generally nattered on about my preparations for this presentation.

There were three or four simultaneous sessions, and I ended up with group of about 50-75 people. I think they enjoyed the session–I know I did. They fed me, gave me a bag full of library swag, paid my mileage, and generally made me feel welcome.