LIBR 246-12: Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools (Fall 2008)

This week, I don't really have a great blog to recommend, because the best one on the topic hasn't been updated in many months. Still, some of the old posts could be really useful for your assignment due next week. LibCasting is a blog all about library screencasting written by Greg Notess, a librarian in Montana who has written a number of books, columns and frequently speaks about web searching and library technologies.

I really like what The Alden Library at Ohio University is doing with their podcasts.  The audio tour is a good idea.  It is available in a number of languages and the time necessary to complete the tour is clearly outlined.  I am very curious how many students download this podcast and in what language. 

Since our topic this week is podcasting, it made more sense to draw your attention to podcasts by librarians rather than blogs about podcasts. While a lot of librarians are creating podcasts to provide useful or entertaining services for their patrons, there are a number of podcasts that are also created for librarians. They're great professional development tools that you can listen to on your commute or while at the gym!

Here are some of the ones I've been really impressed with:

The two blogs I'm recommending this week both look at social networking software from an academic perspective.

Unit Structures is the blog of Fred Stutzman, a PhD student in the LIS program at UNC Chapel Hill. He has done some interesting research on how populations use social networking software, and his blog frequently includes information about his own research or links to other research related to social networking software.

Grow Your Wiki is written by Stewart Mader (and contributors) who used to work for Atlassian as a wiki evangelist. Atlassian is the company that makes Confluence, an expensive enterprise wiki platform. This blog is associated with the Wiki Patterns site (whose companion book is written by Stewart) you'll be looking at this week.

Programmable Web is THE site for mashups. They also have a blog where they feature lots of interesting new mashups available out there. I don't subscribe to Programmable Web because a lot of the mashups they mention aren't particularly useful to me. However, it's a blog I check out every once in a while to see what's new in the world of mashups. They find some out-there mashups I'd probably never have found otherwise.