LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

1. How has your view of social software changed since starting the course?

I don't think my general attitude toward social software has changed. I started out considering it useful and even game-changing. It's far easier to network and stay in touch with friends and acquaintances now than it's ever been before. I've fallen out of touch with old college friends and former co-workers that I would have stayed in touch with given today's social software.

I have a couple of resources this week:

The first is about getting buy-in from your organization for adoption of social software. Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond from ReadWriteWeb supplies a list of ten objections to social media tools with replies and concessions you can offer to those objections.

When I did the marketing critique assignment for this class, I chose to critique the online presence of Sacramento Public Library (SPL), the library system I work for. I talked about SPL's very active Facebook page and our Central Library branch's interesting and active blog grandCENTRAL.

Slashdot take an interesting approach to moderating their online forums. Their moderation responsibilities are distributed over their membership. Regular and long-time members who are positive contributors may be chosen at random to receive 5 moderation points (10 for members of highest rating/exceptional karma) that they can use to raise or lower the scores of posts, incidentally raising or lowering the poster's karma as well. Posts are only visible when they are at or above a threshold set by the reader. Anonymous posts start at 0, which is below the visibility of most readers.

I'm reading the book Managing Online Forums by Patrick O'Keefe. Published in 2008, it's current and seems to be a good practical manual for doing exactly that: managing online communities and moderating their forums. It covers all the nuts and bolts including:

This week I'd like to share two examples of very active online communities. I participate in both as a regular lurker and occasional poster.

Blogs and forums are two powerful tools for building online communities. Both are asynchronous and share other similarities, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

When it comes to making use of user-generated tags as an enhancement to a library catalog, LibraryThing seems like an excellent model to follow. Their tagging goals coincide with those of libraries: mainly to help users find books. The quality of their tag collection is such that many libraries have adopted it for their own catalogs (LibraryThing for Libraries).

Google Image Labeler is an addictive game that Google uses to crowdsource labels/tags for images they're indexing on the Web.