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

You know, what I've been most surprised by in this class is the potential of Web 2.0 technologies. It's not that I didn't use them before, even think highly of them before, but I didn't realize what could really be accomplished over the Web. I guess it's an issue of both delving deeper, and also seeing first hand some prime examples.

Need help in developing your social software experience?  Visualize what you want.  At least that's what Marshall Kirkpatrick is recomending over at ReadWriteWeb.

In Marshell's article, Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three Aproaches, we are given the following slide from a presentation by the coin-er of the term Folksonomy, Thomas Vander Wal:

Number two and number four really touch upon similar themes for me. Specifically, through this course, I see the intersection of the greatest barriers of successful social software implementation and the typical causes of failure that libraries experience when implementing social software.

Hey all,

After seeing the awesome Fauxlibrary Facebook site, I thought that it would be fun if we all had our own Facebook page, so I created one:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=114683551900277

It would be great to have a place to share information after the class.

Ryan

Something that really struck me in Chrystie Hill's Web Junction presentation is the overall commitment that the folks have at Web Junction for building community. From reading our blogs over the past week, it really seems that the notion of on-line community as community is just starting to click for all of us (I know it sure has for me).

I really like this article on communityspark.com, because it is clear in stating that on-line communities are communities, and they require hard work just as any community does. For some reason it seems like something on-line is just going to be easier, but it's not the case.

Interestingly enough, on-line community moderation has come up two times outside of class in the past week.

BoonEx Dolphin is an open source on-line community software, that seems pretty great from a couple of angels.

Its open source, and seems popular enough that it will be around for awhile.  The software is attractive and the demo is based of the default settings for the software, which gives a great feel for the possibilities that it has to offer.

Ryan

So we've build the perfect on-line community, but where are the users?

I thought that it would be interesting to look around and see what people are saying about attracting people to your on-line community.  Here, at the site Community Spark, they say that the number one way to attract users is through quality on content.  That, and:

There are many different technologies to use for on online community, and it's difficult to pick out and sort out which one is going to best serve the online community that you are trying to build and facilitate.

In our group discussions for the group project, what clarified which technology we wanted to use was clarifying exactly what we wanted to accomplish with the technology, and it wasn't until we had an exact grasp on our own objectives that we could find which technology fit best.