Social Media
emjohnson | December 6, 2009Nonreligious Nerd is hosting the latest edition (we're up to #130 now) of the most ungodly carnival in the blogosphere. Take a moment in between hymns to check out the selections on your iPhone. Just tell the other parishioners that you're praying for them.
jdupuis | November 30, 2009...present of public and academic libraries?
What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post,Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities.
In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity.
Like record stores and video rental places,…
jdupuis | November 28, 2009From the most recent issue of Locus magazine, November 2009, talking about his most recent novel Makers:
The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That's totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It's a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you're riding the wave and some scary things.
The Information Revolution is not bloodless. There's plenty…
jdupuis | November 24, 2009Obviously, Strategy+Business is not going to be core science books, but I've always included social media, technology and innovation books in my very broad definition of science books. There are a couple of categories that have some very fine books on recommendation.
Technology
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
Marketing
Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in…
jdupuis | November 18, 2009Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2.
A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue.
Of course, I don't believe either…
jdupuis | November 16, 2009Sort of related to my ongoing series of Best Science Books 2009 lists, here's a nice list of the top 5 social media books I found on Mashable, via Tara Hunt. They're all 2009 books, after all.
The list is from Steve Cunningham who interestingly frames the five books in terms of the lessons we should take away from them.
You Need to Build Trust: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
Turn the Bullhorn Around: The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt
Learn the Pillars…
emjohnson | November 9, 2009
Seattle-based hip hop artist Gabriel Teodros performs his song Third World Wide that connects the issues that affect people of color in the US with those struggling against injustice around the world. As if to emphasize the point that racism is far from over, during his recent trip to England to perform at the University of Kent, he was detained by UK Customs officials and denied entry to the country on highly suspicious grounds:
I got detained, fingerprinted, arrested, for the first time in my life. I was in the holding room for 8 hours before being told that i'm getting sent back to the…
emjohnson | November 4, 2009You heard right. Now for the low, low price of, well, nothing you too can interact with other primates in the human zoo from the comfort of your own computer. Admission is unlimited, so sign up now. Be the first to comment and you can be in charge of where the conversation goes.
emjohnson | November 4, 2009In the latest TED Talk, anthropologist Stefana Broadbent suggests that the technologies of social media--such as blogs, facebook, and twitter--are actually promoting greater intimacy between people rather than sucking time away from social involvement as is often supposed. In this unnatural environment we've constructed, with regulated time schedules, overseers--er, I mean, bosses--and artificial friendliness mandated as professional behavior, we long to reach out and connect with a community we identify with. In the short talk below, she suggests that this technology allows us to escape,…
jdupuis | October 25, 2009Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here.
Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250.
I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar.
I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him!
There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…
jdupuis | October 13, 2009A silly title to reflect some overhyped posturing found, guess where, on the Internet.
First up, Joe Murphy on librarians and their proper relationship to Twitter: "it's reprehensible for information professionals not to be on Twitter."
A loaded and diva-dramatic statement like that is a sure sign that Twitter has jumped the shark. Time to pull a Miley Cyrus, if you ask me. (Friendfeed discussion here, here and here)
On the other end of the spectrum, from Steven Bell over at ACRLog, on the use of social networks by librarians:
A passionate academic librarian would be so immersed in their…
emjohnson | October 5, 2009K'Naan - "Soo Bax"
K'Naan was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and was there when the Somali Civil War broke out in the early 90s before emigrating and getting his break in Canada (w00t!). Since then he's worked with Nelly Furtado, Mos Def, The Roots, Dead Prez, and Pharoahe Monch and released two studio albums (The Dusty Foot Philosopher and Troubadour).
"Soo Bax" is one of his earliest music videos in which he offers a scathing critique of the politicians and warlords that perpetuate a desperate situation for the people in his home country. "Soo Bax" is Somali for "Get Out."
To learn more…
emjohnson | October 2, 2009
I had the opportunity to see this live in April. I had never heard of Lawrence Lessig prior to this presentation, but I haven't been able to forget it. I'm so pleased to have found it online.
jdupuis | October 1, 2009In a reputation economy, social media can provide a powerful set of tools for establishing and enhancing your reputation. An enhanced reputation can lead to enhanced opportunities, in the form of job offers or other professional opportunity.
Academia is a reputation economy, of course, but really any knowledge economy/creative class job is going to be easier to get if you have a good reputation. Which brings us back to social media.
It seems to me that in a competitive job market, students can really make their own applications stand out if they can refer potential employers to a really…
jdupuis | September 24, 2009Predicting the future is tricky business. Trust me, I know.
But there's two ideas I always like to keep in mind when I put my futurologist's hat on:
The future will be at least as diverse as the present, probably more so. But not likely less.
There's no guarantee that things will change for the better. There's also no guarantee that things will change for the worse. The only thing you can be sure of is that it'll be hard to get any agreement on which is which.These two ideas are closely connected in my mind, compelling me to (hopefully) think realistically and honestly, if not always…
jdupuis | September 16, 2009I haven't done one of these in a while, so there's quite a backlog to clear.
Reports
Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends
Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Strategic Outsourcing and Cloud Computing: Reality Is a Sober Adversary
Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America
XC User Research Preliminary Report (Extensible Catalog)
Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology
Beyond Scientific Publication: Strategies for Disseminating
How Teens Use Media: A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen…
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
jdupuis | August 20, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out.
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Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:
First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:
So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is
grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…
jdupuis | August 18, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from January 13, 2009. It ended up being pretty popular and was the reason that ALA Editions initially contacted me about doing a book.
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This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site?
First of all, a brief note…
jdupuis | August 12, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping.
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It's interesting times in the world out there.
And not surprisingly, the world of the internet is thinking about the implications. One of the big implications is that it's going to be harder to get a job, and that's going to be true librarians as much as anyone else.
As it happens, I've been collecting some…