Chris in 768

Something of note about this class for me was that it definitely did challenge my ways, but not at all in the ways I would have guessed going in. I think of myself as part of a generation and mindset that has 2.0 ideas ingrained as a way of life, so to be in a class about the subject with a fair number of people who question or resist the concept was…interesting. It got me to read a couple books from authors I disagree with a lot and don’t necessarily hold in high regard (Keen and Siegel), but that’s a very useful exercise for sharpening my own thinking on a subject. So I would say it was good for me. Now, sometimes it was good for me in an eat-your-broccoli-and-spinach kind of way, but that still counts for something.

And that’s not to say I didn’t learn anything about 2.0 tools as well. I was very happy to have a place to experience how Twitter can be useful, since I didn’t have such a chance before now. Things like Ning I had only heard about in passing if at all, so broadening my horizons there was a definite plus. And I absolutely loved the chance to experiment with Drupal and to go from complete ignorance to a great fully-functioning website in a month — that was very empowering and makes me eager for more such challenges.

And I was told I should post my final paper, so here it is! As a reminder, it’s about the lessons from the book Blink and how they apply to Library 2.0, using websites as a specific example. I hope everyone ends up posting their own papers too! Now that I’ve completed a class this semester, there may actually be some free time to browse them.

For my paper, I am spinning off the lessons of Blink. Very briefly, its main point is that people take in an impression of a person or thing quickly (in the blink of an eye, what he calls thin slicing) and reach conclusions about it which can be very accurate. However, these conclusions can be knocked askew for many reasons, and it’s important to understand the right way to interpret them. For the Library 2.0 world, I am examining how to take the lessons in this book and apply them to the designs and redesigning of library websites. Libraries are of course interested in knowing if users can navigate their websites smoothly, but when they seek to test this, are the tests asking the wrong questions and biasing the results? What is the right way to judge a site’s effectiveness? When is it appropriate to aim for a complete redesign and when is it the right time to do a tuneup around the edges while keeping the main functions intact? Malcolm Gladwell’s book provides a roadmap into better understanding these questions and arriving at the right answers.

Well I will mainly echo what my partners on the Drupal project said. The thing about a project like this is that it’s really best done in small chunks. Try some stuff out, stop, think, sleep on it, come back the next day fresh and with a new idea. For better or worse I have a tendency to give a question an instant reply, then an hour or a day later come back to it and think wait, am I really sure about that, shouldn’t I investigate a bit more fully? This kind of process serves me just peachy in my job or on my own projects, but it would not be so great in the case of a group project where all of the work was done in a couple lengthy sessions. Thankfully, this is not the way we had to do things, because we could collaborate online. It was really nice to be able to move some things around, leave a comment about what I was trying, and then come back the next day and see Lisa and Kay had advanced things and had a new idea or roadblock for me to think about. And looking back on our wiki comment log, it is a very good chronicle of our thoughts, challenges, and triumphs as we bent Drupal to our will. Much clearer than trying to track back my own thought process on an individual project! This is probably my favorite project I’ve been involved in during my library school tenure, and the social software aspect played a big part in that.

One of the original A-list bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, recently wrote an article for The Atlantic called Why I Blog. I think it’s a must-read for anyone immersed in blogging, whether through writing one or from reading and commenting on favorites. Lots of good stuff here, I’ll try to highlight a couple.

First, something that serves as almost a direct rebuttal to Andrew Keen:

In an era when the traditional media found itself beset by scandals as disparate as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Dan Rather, bloggers survived the first assault on their worth. In time, in fact, the high standards expected of well-trafficked bloggers spilled over into greater accountability, transparency, and punctiliousness among the media powers that were. Even New York Times columnists were forced to admit when they had been wrong.

I think this is true. Contradictions and falsehoods can be exposed quickly, on the blog itself if there are comments enabled. Rebukes don’t filter through letters to the editor, they land right on your work and your e-mail. Now, it might not always be nice feedback, but as Sullivan puts it, “Rudeness, in any case, isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a blogger.”

Other things — the immediacy of it captures how a blogger feels in real time and creates a bond between the blogger and reader that you would never get in front. This is highlighted very well in how his blog readers meeting him for the first time will call him Andrew, while for readers of his print columns, it’s Mr. Sullivan. Quick, name some New York Times reporters! This personal connection isn’t everything but I do think it has its place. It helps to put what a blogger writes in the proper context. It won’t immediately be accepted as capital-T Truth, but may well provide some insight.

And I especially like the jazz analogy at the end. Jazz isn’t all there is to music, but the music world is much richer for it existing. At this point in my life, there is no way I am going to subscribe to any library journals or reserve a big portion of my time to go out and sit in a library to read them. But I certainly do feel up to getting quick hits from library bloggers that help me think beyond being in school and to what all’s going on out there. Blogging doesn’t affect library services too much on a day-to-day basis, but there are a solid number of librarians out there who have gotten renown in the field through blogging and are now in a position to do conferences and other things that will also help shape the future of librarianship. All through the force of their ideas breaking through the din based on merit. I think that’s a good thing.

Video discussion with Sullivan based on the article.

Roundtable discussion on NPR.

Come one, come all, to the greatest, most social mock-up library website you’re likely to visit this week!

http://dev.tametheweb.com/

What can you do on this website? I’m so glad you asked.

• Create your own account! You can sign up yourself in the left-hand sidebar, with no approval needed by anyone. Once you have an account, write your own book reviews that will show up on the front page. Leave comments on others’ book reviews and various other pieces of library news. You can also comment without an account, just putting in your name yourself.
• Use Meebo to speak with your favorite librarians about all of your reference needs. Your favorite librarians, of course, being Kay, Lisa, and myself.
• Go to the Adults, Teens, and Kids pages, to see the newest items, staff book reviews, and other news. On the Kids page is a blog devoted to the library’s StoryTime program — see what the theme is this week.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed! Every time something new on the site gets posted, you’ll see it.
• Seach the library catalog straight from the front page.
• Browse the library’s Flickr and Library Thing pages.
• Check out the Calendar for new and upcoming events.
• Check the weather — very important.
• Find out more about the library on the About page. Including a Google Map link that will give you driving directions if you ask it too.

So give it a spin! If everyone gets familiar with it before our next class, it will make our presentation that much more interactive and in-depth. And if you have feedback, please leave it on this post as a comment. We would greatly appreciate it!

I recently finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The title is about what he refers to as “thin slicing”, or being able to make decisions in the blink of an eye. To summarize it quickly, there are two parts to this. The first is that there is a lot of information available on a short impression, and people can be very good at picking up on this and making good decisions quickly. The darker side is that this can completely fail. Non-experts may read the wrong signals and make a bad call, the heat of the moment can strip people’s senses so they big mistakes, etc.

When reading this, I had in mind how libraries design things. Two anecdotes from this book stood out for me with that in mind. The first was with a man who designed a radically different kind of office chair, one that looks like an exoskeleton with a mesh backing. It was so different that dealers hated it, and even people who tested it for some time and gave it high ratings on comfort rated it low on aesthetics. This might normally kill a product, but he persisted. Things were slow at first but designers loved it and showered it with awards. And sales picked up every year, until it was the best selling chair that that company had ever designed.

The other story was about the now-infamous New Coke. Coca Cola made it because they got really worried that Coke lost taste tests to Pepsi, at a time Pepsi was gaining market share. Pepsi was winning, they determined, because it was sweeter. So they cranked up the sweetness of New Coke until it won those taste tests. And then…disaster. Why? People like more sweetness in taste tests, but not when drinking a whole can, which is of course what everyone does in the real world.

So designing and redesigning with users in mind is important, but you gotta do it the right way. If you’re getting feedback on something, get feedback through people actually using a service the way they really would, not by demonstrating it yourself or flashing it in front of them. And this one’s trickier, but don’t necessarily be completely swayed by a negative reaction. Long-timers always fuss about a redesign, even the with-it 2.0ers on Facebook, when it was overhauled recently. If people who know their stuff think that you have something golden, it’s quite possible everyone will be won over. (But don’t try to hide behind this guideline when something really is truly awful.)

(For anyone who doesn’t get the title, read up on your LOLcats)

The latest controversy to be all abuzz in the library blog world is Library Journal’s decision to hire the Annoyed Librarian, an anonymous snarky blogger mean-spirited blogger, to blog on its site. And I have to side with the respectable A-listers on this one. Not a good move. I don’t have anything against anonymity/pseudonymity per se, but to what end is it being employed? I also don’t have any problem with criticism. But a look at what exactly that criticism consists of in this case is not quite so great. For example, look at the comments in this post, in which the blogger replies to someone thusly:

“Here I thought”

That was definitely your first mistake. It’s best to know your limitations.

Oh dear. I certainly can’t talk to anyone like that at my job (and yes, it was before AL was hired, but it’s that kind of thing that she was hired for). I do recognize it as a fairly typical way to argue on the Internet, might have done it myself once or twice, but not in any sort of professional context.

So the larger point is this: Library 2.0 does not mean finding the hottest thing on the Internet and immediately buying it up and sticking it in. I’m sure Library Journal is getting way more hits to their site right now, but that doesn’t make it the right call any more than disallowing outside book drops to increase door count. It should first pass ethical scrutiny and really advance the cause of the organization.

This seems to be a popular book! I read it this week as well. And I first heard about Keen from the Colbert Report, where Colbert basically got him to say that Web 2.0 is worse than Nazis. It’s a funny watch. (And this is going to be longer than assignment length again, sorry! Though a lot of it at the end is e-mails)

Anyway, this book did not start out well for me. I was flagging things left and right that I thought were unfair. He blames the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry on blogs, which is crazy — that group was funded by millionaires who bought ads on TV. And remember the hoax story about the finger in Wendy’s chili? It also gets blamed on Web 2.0, but I’m guessing you heard about it from TV (or from someone who heard it from someone who saw it on TV).

One glaring example of one-sidedness for me was when he mentioned a Wikipedia incident where a climate scientist, William Connolley, got into a spat with some anonymous nobody on the climate change article, and Wikipedia put Connolley’s account on probation while arbitrating the dispute. That sounds bad for Wikipedia, but when I looked up the incident myself, I read that Wikipedia found in Connolley’s favor and that he’s now a site administrator there, while the anonymous guy causing trouble was banned. So instead, that looks a lot better for Wikipedia and made me unsure what other examples of Keen’s I could trust. Instead of just blasting him here for it, I decided to e-mail him asking about this incident, and the same day I got a very nice reply back that made me feel better about his willingness to concede points. I’ll post the e-mails below.

So there are things I disagree with. In fact, there are sentences that I might say myself, but that I would consider a plus while he considers them a negative. Still, things did get better in the middle of the book, and I do consider the trustworthiness of some user generated content to be a real issue. People shill for their own books on Amazon, pay for their links to be promoted by Digg users, and create sockpuppets to anonymously attack their critics, so what are we really seeing?

But I think there is good news for libraries. When they allow user generated content, these issues are less likely to appear. People in New York aren’t going to go to the St. Paul Public Library site much, so it will really be more truly community-driven. And the context of a library site is different from the context of Amazon. Amazon is just some big website that ships you books, while libraries demand by their nature to be a place of thoughtfullness and respect, and I believe that will extend to websites. Wouldn’t you feel worse attacking someone on a library page than in a worldwide forum?

The same issues could still pop up, of course, so precautions are fine. Librarians should be able to approve or deny patron book reviews, so that things like “OMG this book sux, LOL!!!1!” can be rejected. And I’m not sure how much this flags privacy concerns, but it is possible to have posts also reveal where the IP address comes from geographically. It’s not always accurate, but it’s worth considering.

My bottom line on the book is, I hope this isn’t all that 2.0 skeptics are reading, for the same reason Keen is worried about people switching from newspapers to blogs — just listening to the side you already agree with isn’t a good idea. I hope that skeptics reading this also read Wikinomics or some other such book. On the other hand, for people who are more technophiles (like I am), this book does have some good reality checks to get you thinking about how to make sure we’re doing things the right way.

——

E-mails:

From me: Andrew,

I’m reading Cult of the Amateur now, and I have a critical but (I hope) polite question about it that I was wondering if you would answer. It’s primarily about the anti-Wikipedia example you gave about William Connolley being placed on parole there during an edit war with a less-informed global warming skeptic. Now, at first I thought fair enough, point against Wikipedia. But as I was going to the next page, I stopped myself and realized that you hadn’t actually detailed how that arbitration hearing ended, which made me wonder if the story has a happy ending after all that you decided to leave out. Sure enough, after looking it up, it did end in Mr. Connolley’s favor and he’s now an admin at Wikipedia, and while he’s still critical about it he does see benefits. And where did I find that information? Yes, Wikipedia itself, on Connolley’s entry, though I did click through to the New Yorker article to double check.

So I guess my question is, wouldn’t you agree that Wikipedia gives a more nuanced and even-handed description of this incident than you yourself do? And isn’t that a little ironic, given that one of your primary complaints about Web 2.0 is the lack of reliability of the information out there? I read an interview with you where you said “this is a book written for a mainstream, non technophile audience…who are troubled and confused by the Web 2.0 revolution,” and I’m worried that you’re just feeding them one side of the story that they most want to hear, rather than giving challenging them to think about these issues by giving both sides while still being critical.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’re able to reply.

-Chris

—-

Andrew:

Hi Chris — Nice to hear from you and thanks for such a polite and interesting note. You may well be right on the long-terms consequences of the Connolley example (my book was pretty much finished by the Fall of 2006, and I haven’t researched the later developments of all the examples in the book) and, yes, it does show the potential of Wikipedia to self-correct. A couple of thoughts however. Firstly, I suspect that the Connolley example only had a just outcome because it was so well publicized. Secondly, what Wikipedia is clearly good at is commenting on itself — thus the Connelley entry focuses more on his Wikipedia career that his scientific achievements.

Overall, I’m much less critical of Wikipedia than I was. It is a valuable resource if used sceptically. And, as I told Wales when we had a public debate last year in San Francisco, I’d really like Wikipedia if it did away with the anonymity of its editors and if they figured out a way to pay these contributors.

Anyway, glad you are finding the book stimulating. You are exactly the kind of person (open-minded and critical/sceptical) for whom I wrote the book.

Best regards,

Andrew

—-

My reply:

I do appreciate the quick reply, and I agree that Wikipedia can be annoyingly self-referential sometimes. Whether that incident is encyclopedia-worthy is another question in itself, though it did certainly satisfy an information need of mine. I just finished reading it today, and though I was ambivalent about some of your early examples such as that one, I did find myself with a lot of the things in the middle, especially the concerns about corporate manipulation of user generated content. I was also pleased to see you view DRM as part of the problem instead of the solution. Why punish the people who are actually playing by the rules!

I’m glad you consider me an ideal audience for the book, though maybe I should add that I’m reading it as part of a library science class on libraries and the Internet, where we read a book off a list and blog our thoughts for our classmates. So that might make me one of the monkeys banging on infinite typewriters. But I guess you could also argue that I am gaining expertise in readers’ advisory.

-Chris

This topic reminded me of something I’ve thought about before. Your business (or, for the sake of argument, library) has created its own Facebook page. Good for you! What happens next?

I’ve fanned a good dozen-plus things in my Facebook so I headed over to that part of my profile to remind me just what goes on there. I’m sure this won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s studied social networking stuff at all, but I mostly fanned things that have to do with identity. That is, favorite musicians, TV shows, local businesses that I like…Firefox because using it makes me cool. Fortunately, I do think libraries fit in that identity/positive association/makes you cool niche for many people, so gettings fans shouldn’t be too hard. Not sure if that applies to academic libraries, seems like the identity part would come from fanning the larger institution.

So once you have fans, what do you do with them? Some of the businesses I’ve fanned do look like they’re updating fairly regularly, with events and news and such. However, I didn’t know about that until investigating for this post. They suffer from the fatal problem of not getting pushed onto the news feed, so I’m not sure how much good that does. Probably some but not a huge amount. If I wanted to look up hours or phone numbers I would look to their Web sites instead of the Facebook page, just out of habit. Maybe that will change, but since I’ve thought of these pages so rarely after fanning them, probably not.

But there is one way to get things out, through pushing updates. Those show up to everyone who’s fanned you. The TV show Weeds did that every time they had a new episode this year, and I’d say that worked, my awareness was raised! So that’s my vote for most useful feature. As long as the updates aren’t too frequent, I think people who’ve gone to the trouble of fanning you would appreciate getting the latest that way.

This is one of YouTube’s most famous videos. National Geographic even made a documentary about it, and it has its own Wikipedia page. I love it.