Originally posted on June 16, 2008.

Well, I’ve been working hard on productivity issues related to 2.0 technologies, in part for my “steal-this-idea” session on Friday (Where Do We Go From Here: Managing Your Identity in Social Networks). A part of managing your identity turns out to be managing information overload. So many 2.0 applications and social networks are pushing information to you–which is better than having to go and ferret it out. However, the time it takes to go through all the blogs, and tweets, and friend updates, and News Feeds, and now Friend Feeds, is daunting. Even keeping up with my own activity–the blogs I’ve shared and want to file or re-read, the articles I’ve tagged to file for projects, the research I need to return to–is overwhelming. As I mentioned, FriendFeed has been great in tracking my own activity. For others, it’s been great keeping up with friends or colleagues. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Steve Rubel has been ruminating on how FriendFeed may replace traditional news feeds as a way of getting selected, trusted information.

It appears that a step in that direction may be RSSmeme, which primarly aggregates shared items from Google Reader (for those who have “registered” their feed). This tool gives you sites that have the highest number of “shares” in a certain period of time (now, today, this week, etc.). I’ve registered my Google Reader feed, and I’m now in the mix. RSSmeme will give you stats on the top share-ers, as well as the top authors being shared, top sources and top tags.

Additionally, it will aggregate your Friend Feed, showing you just the top stories tagged by your friends. This allows you, of course, to create that nirvana Steve Rubel was pointing to in his posts…perhaps. I don’t have enough friends to make that data meaningful, but knowing the top stories tagged in RSSmeme is still helpful. Perhaps because the people being aggregated share my interests. Like Digg, it’s rating stories, but unlike Digg, this is a passive process. Which makes it (in my mind anyway) time-saving and possible to be part of my information flow, rather than an addition to it.

I’m not sure what it all means yet, but it’s in my sandbox.

Another fun thing I’ve run across in my blogs today is Wordle. I love a tag cloud–I’m a very visual person and love visual representations of all kinds. For this you can cut and past documents into it, or select a del.icio.us username (mine is acp_lex) to create a cloud representing the central ideas in the text. You can imagine having students cut and paste their papers into Wordle to see in a graphic representation the ideas (and/or repeated words!) in their papers.

Can’t wait to see you Friday!

Well, along the lines of both my conference topic of managing your identity in social networks, and revealing the contents of my 2.0 sandbox, here are my initial thoughts on FriendFeed. So the way it works–you can set up an account for yourself by putting all your personal RSS feeds in it. I’ve put all of my work-related RSS streams in it–from Google Reader, this blog, another blog, Twitter, Flickr, LibraryThing, etc. And after I’d done it, I liked the idea of being able to see everything I was doing. But, as with most things, I didn’t really get it right away…

Until I read Steve Rubel’s blog today, I didn’t realize that you could subscribe to other people’s “lifestreams”… Instead of reading Steve Rubel’s blog, he suggested that we just subscribe to his FriendFeed. Wow. You can subscribe to someone’s FriendFeed and follow everything they are doing on the web–their twitter, their blog, their del.icio.us bookmarks, items they’ve shared on Google Reader, articles they “digg”, books they add to LibraryThing, YouTube videos they upload or comment on, etc. Of course, it would have to be someone pretty interesting to want to know all of that about them. Like maybe your best friend. Or Steve Rubel, who is certain that FriendFeed will “Change Journalism, PR and Marketing.” Over the next several days he’s going to discuss his ideas about how FriendFeed offers an alternative way to get information from a trusted source–potentially replacing traditional news venues, etc.

You can also create “rooms” where folks of like interest share info about specific topics. A great one (especially for this blog!) is the FriendFeed Newsroom, where I discovered a way to get FriendFeed on your mobile device at FF-to-Go. (I’ve finally gotten a smartphone–though not the new iPhone 3G, which I may be regretting…)

So, I’ve got a FriendFeed, and you can follow it.

I’m not promising anything earth-shattering…I’m just playing in my sandbox for now. Looking for library applications…maybe a creating an “imaginary friend” feed for a subject librarian???

originally posted June 11, 2008.

Almost every speaker I’ve heard on the subject of training staff on how to use 2.0 technology for libraries talks about the need for a “sandbox”—a place for library workers to play, to learn about the technology, and then to imagine how it might be useful for the library. As the reference librarian at MSU tasked with exploring Emerging Technologies for Public Service applications, I realized yesterday that I’ve made my own sandbox. Or I’ve collected toys to play with anyway. I’ve added a “sandbox” section to my whiteboard of stuff to do (I’m a visual learner…lol). Looking at it, I thought that I could start a sandbox-ish meme in this blog to explore and share some of the technologies/ideas currently on my list.

The first idea on my list came because I learned recently that you could migrate your Facebook Group to a Facebook Page without losing subscribers (the Academy of American Poets sent a notification about this to their Facebook Group).

The MSU Libraries have a fairly successful Facebook Group, but Facebook Pages have advantages such as tracking page hits, directed advertising, etc. We made a Facebook Page for our annual Ragtime Festival this year, so we’ve dipped our toes in that water already. A transition like this is like an appealing prospect to consider. And in staying true to the sandbox idea, it is possible to create and work on a Facebook Page without making it public.

I haven’t yet started playing around with it, but I have started considering whether it would be useful and how it might work. I’ve emailed the information to our Library 2.0 Committee to get it on everyone’s radar. If we did something like this, planning for a transition like that would take careful consideration. We don’t want to lose any of our subscribers—we’ve worked hard over the past nine months to grow the group to its current level (200+ members!). Also, we would want to be sure we would not be losing any functionality. So far, it looks like we would be able to do everything we can currently do with a group. One feature of the Groups that has become important in the way we use Facebook is the ability to create events and invite the members of the group. From our experience with the Ragtime Festival, I know this feature remains largely the same.

In going forward, we would want to be sure we were also taking full advantage of what Facebook Pages have to offer. One advantage I’d like to explore is the ability to add RSS feeds to a Facebook Page. The Library maintains several RSS feeds, including those for our Podcasts. It would be great to find another location to promote our podcasting program. It is also possible to add some (though not all) Facebook Applications to a Page, which has a significant appeal, too.

Anyway, it’s on my list…anyone have any thoughts?!?

Originally posted May 15, 2008.