If You Like It, Bookmark It!

Delicious - the most popular social bookmarking site

The best way to describe del.icio.us is to let it describe itself:

"Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet." [by Delicious]

I wish I discovered delicious before! Why? Cos it's great service for saving and sharing bookmarks. Now I can see why is so popular in the blog world by making it easy to put information hounds that collect hundreds of links to interesting web sites in once place. More of why is so cool, for me:

• bookmarks are taggable
• I can also attach a short note to each bookmark
• searchable
• easily accessed in multiple ways through any browser or RSS reader

But my experience is very short to have a right opinion so I found a good examples why and what for we could use del.icio.us from experienced delicious users:

"Delicious is, basically, a social bookmarking service. In a nutshell, that means that Delicious stores lists of bookmarks for me and tens of thousands of my closest friends, and we all get to see and search through each other's lists. Let me try to explain why this is so cool...
RSS is also well implemented throughout the site, so my Delicious list becomes a handy way to communicate. For instance, I'm currently working on a project with a friend in another state, so when I come across an article or website that I think he should read, I bookmark it with Delicious, add a unique tag that we've agreed on, and the new URL will show up in his RSS reader. Likewise, I can tell whenever he's bookmarked something with the same tag. We could just email these links to each other, of course, but once we add more people to the project, email becomes more of a hassle..." [by Stuart Maxwell (who is busy building The Louveture Project and running Seattle Real Estate Talk)]

"Del.icio.us can be approach on several levels and I believe that this is key to its success. Here are the levels as I see them:

1 - Users can go to the site and see the most recent and most popular items. This is the way that most people get started. Along the way they can't help but learn a little bit about the fact that the site uses tags to organize the items inside.

2 - Users decide to participate, and use the site to store and share their bookmarks. To do this they also have to start tagging their posts.

3 - Users start to retrieve by tag, retrieving items under their own tags and under the tags left by others, to stay abreast of a topical area.

There's a mental tipping point that comes into play here. At first people are rightfully sceptical of the entire tagging process, especially those with any familiarity or experience with the development of ontologies. The first thought is "this can't possibly work. We worked for years to design an ontology for System X and it still wasn't quite right." After a while people see that the tagging
model can and does actually work, and that it produces useful results even though no one is in charge..." [by Jeff Barr (Web services evangelist at Amazon.com and founder of Syndic8.com, an RSS aggregation service)]

“del.icio.us is compelling to me and others for the same reason the Flickr is. You can get a lot out of the system by simply using it for yourself. However, there's a lot more "social infrastructure" there if you want to tap into it. In del.icio.us you can see what other people think is popular, which tags, they use, etc...” [by Jeremy Zawodny (well-known member of the Yahoo! team and author of the interesting Zawodny's Blog)]

SlideShare a typical Web 2.0?!

SlideShare:

"it’s like YouTube but with slides instead of video"

"largest social network dedicated to presentations"

• What are your thoughts about the tool?

SlideShare is a free service that allows me to upload presentations in the most common formats, such as Microsoft Powerpoint or OpenOffice. Once presentation is uploaded, they are converted into Flash format (it takes no more then 15 minutes) which is ideal, as it means that the viewer need not have Powerpoint installed in order to view the presentation. Full-screen viewing option include. Anyone can sing, I was thinking; maybe librarians from UL could sing there set up accounts and share presentations through our contact list - just an idea.

• What particular benefits to your Library are there from using Slideshare?

Library could use it to store many presentations in one place and share it! as I mentioned above! The ability to convert to the Flash format is useful to watch them at home, especially if you don't have presentation software to be able to view collogues work.

• Did you find any interesting presentations that you would like to share?

Have a look at my previous post.

• Did you find any other users from a Cambridge University or College library?

Do you mean presentation like this :

The Cambridge 23 Things programme - presentation to EBSLG

View more presentations from priestcam.

OR document like that:

University of Cambrigde Information use on the move

View more documents from Fred Zimny.

• Will you use Slideshare in the future?

YES!!! if I will have interesting or useful PRESENTATION, DOCUMENT to SHARE! :)

The True Value of Social Media

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The True Value of Social Media

View more presentations from Brandon Murphy.

The word "creative" is over used!

For Things 9&10 I,ve created a Flickr account and did my contribution towards Creative Commons "a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.". I did upload some of my photos and I have given them all Attribution-ShareALike License which means: Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; and Remix — to adapt the work! Now I'm waiting what will come up out of that and exploring one of the library-related web 2.0 projects I have been most impressed by in general the Flickr Commons. It has been up and running for few years now and contains a vast collection of photographs from libraries and archives all over the world, all made available via Flickr. The first incarnation of The Commons was a pilot project created in partnership with The Library of Congress, which has enormous photo catalogue, containing over a million photos. The Library team has chosen about 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections to show on Flickr. Then other institutions started to paricipate like: George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum, National Archives UK, State Library of New South Wales, and Smithsonian Institution, National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, LSE Library. and so on... The goal of the license is to "firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." I think example of Library of Congress contribution to Flickr Commons is a fantastic example for other libraries how libraries and web 2.0 sites can work together to promote and increase access to resources, not only to their traditional users but reaching out to a worldwide community of web users!!

PS
It was great to discover word art program: Wordle and Tagxedo that allowed me to upload strings of text or tags and create tag clouds - brilliant!!

Flickr - library!

Last few days I spend hours on internet trying to see how other library trying to associate with Flickr. Finding very often problems of faceless libraries:

"My point is that we have so much legalese that comes in that it cripples a library’s ability to operate in this way. You can’t put people’s picture on flickr because of their rights (even though they don’t care). It’s no wonder that libraries can often seem faceless or uncaring. All the legal makes it so you can’t do very much or you violate someone’s privacy. Libraries are afraid to use a patron’s email to let them know about an event at the library or services they may be interested in. The only pictures we can use are of the building or inanimate objects. The only video can be of library staff. I understand the privacy issue. However, the LIBRARY is faceless as a result."

or

"Carson covers the best ways to use photographs taken at library events and in the library for promotion:

It is clearly a violation of the right of publicity to use photographs from library programs in order to market or advertise the library or to call attention to future programming. You should always get written consent if you plan to use images for these purposes. If the subject is under 18, the parent or guardian should sign a consent form.

One way to get around this problem is to take photos that don’t include identifiable people. For example, you could take a picture of the crowd from the back of the room. That way, you won’t have to worry about being able to see faces...[more]"

I think we should be aware of copy rights and responsibility of taking the images. But still some libraries do the great job when it comes to promotion of their existence and events, like Lester Public Library!

How would you feel if you came across similar pictures of your library?
Well it's a tricky question, I think I would be proud that people try to capture moment or a piece of brick from the UL. But I wouldn't be happy if they would try to still a photo of a Manuscript or just 20th century book, there should be a limits of freedom!



About Flickr

Flickr - me!

My Flickr

I could spend endless hours wonder on flickr, it's one of very few Web 2.0 special to me!!! Lost in image creation of our minds!! You can find everything and sometimes nothing but today I decided to show you two examples one that brings nostalgia and other of great creativity:


This flickr collection of patterns from various modes of public transport around the UK from around the world.

Some will trigger nostalgia, while others are more an experiment in a special, geometric kind of visual assault.

Click through for more

Sub-blue is a photostream by one Tom Beddard, who likes to play around with home-brew programmes that can generate pretty pictures:

Tagging - great minds think alike!

Tagging - done!!
And now look at my tags and tell me if you think the way I do?
(If NOT; am I original with organizing my data or am I stupid?)

Tagging allows social groups to form around similarities of interests and points of view

You were asking me what do I think about Clay Shirky's essay "ontology is overrated"
Well; it's hard to fallow him all the way through and try to understand an organic concept of delicious about which I will have wait to know it better in few weeks time! So I won't go dipper into that!
But when it comes to categorization I do agree with him that it can exist only when we have: expert cataloguers (mind readers and fortune tellers). There is too many factors that makes the ontology a bad fit. People making ontology or doing categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. And in reality it's not easy to adopt it in web 2.0, because it's too big corpus, users are naive, not coordinated and there no authority or judgement. The closest we get was Yahoo with their file system and hierarchy and still we argue that is not good enough!