This afternoon, I’ll be co-presenting a session with Steven M. Cohen (people, make sure you spell his name correctly – I’m just saying!) about blogs versus wikis. We’ll look at the Open Internet Librarian Blog and the Internet Librarian Wiki and compare what’s working and what isn’t for both types of tools. The session will be a bit improv, but here are the thoughts I plan to share:

Advantage: blog

• Easy to post information
• Chronological order
• Automatic RSS feed
• Comments can be attached to each post
• Only blog authors can edit the content of a post

Why might the blog work? Because it gives non-bloggers a place to post thoughts and it could be easy to audioblog.
Why might the blog not work? Because bloggers already have a place to blog, and non-bloggers don’t want to blog.

Advantage: wiki

• Anyone anywhere can contribute
• True equalized collaboration (when accounts aren’t required)
• Can create any order/flow to the information (sometimes chronological order doesn’t work well for the type of content)

Why might the wiki work? Because anyone at the conference or offsite could add content.
Why might the wiki not work? Because no one is sure what to put there (versus somewhere else) and wikis are still a little difficult to use (see Meredith Farkas’ advice?). Plus, they need a password to edit it, which might be too much of a barrier at this point.

Personally, I think the tool that ended up working the best in this situation was Technorati. It was the one spot everything was pulled together.

Advantage: Technorati (view the IL05 tag)

• Automatically brought together all pieces that were posted anywhere (as long as they were tagged and the sites pinged Technorati)
• Made it easy to find things; one-stop shopping

I would also argue that we’ve had a lot of fun and socialness with Flickr. Of course, you had to know about Flickr, have an account, and know what you could do. I wish we could have done a whole session just on Flickr.  :-P

Advantage: Flickr (view IL05 photostream)

• Mass tagging
• Human beings
• Fun, fun, and fun!

asked how many in the audience were blogging the session – several hands; there were no hands two years ago
gave example of a conversation she overheard in the hallway in which one person said, “I just Flickred a picture of you and Stephen Abram”
it’s big when it’s happening in the hallways and not just on the podium

Technorati just indexed its 20millionth blog – an elementary school in France

Liz is going to blog her own talk – later, because she hasn’t figured out how to do it in real-time yet

loves The Long Tail
librarians have always been good at the long tail

information retrieval isn’t going to be used to replace the human touch, but to augment it
we’re circling back around; it’s not we need to teach the machines to think better, but that we need to teach humans to search better
most of the tools these days suck in terms of usability and interfaces; they’re frustrating and confusing to use
we need software that makes it easier to do hard things, but that doesn’t mean make the software dumber because the users are dumber
can’t make the users smarter, so let’s make the tools foster better use (which is hard to do)

the things that are making search better aren’t better software, but better social
searched “clay” on Google, didn’t pull up the right thing (“Clay Shirky”); the same search in Yahoo’s “My Web” shows all Shirky hits on the first results page
the social side provides “beyond information discovery”
Yahoo’s My Web does a 2–degree social search
del.icio.us isn’t about being my friend, and not everyone is equal; there are plenty of people I know quite well who I wouldn’t trust to make web-based recommendations; but they can still have my IM screen name

why can’t your library be the one I subscribe to?
shout out to La Grange Park Public Library!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
how do tools like this allow you to become a social information filter for your patrons?

most people want it to be far easier than we want it to be for them; they want you to use all of these tools for them; we like the thrill of the hunt, but most people don’t
on the other hand, they do want to know what we found because it helps them
so what if there was a button on a library’s web page that said “add the library’s del.icio.us bookmarks to your network,” except that they won’t know what that is, so what if it said something like “add the library to your trusted social networks”

what if I could filter my medical searches through my doctor’s or my local university medical staff’s bookmarks?
Yahoo’s My Web should say “filter this through people,” or even better, “filter this through people I trust”
there are no bad links when I search My Web because it’s people in my trusted network

so where is the risk? it’s very easy to close yourself off to new stuff and the serendipity of discovery; have to be careful to balance this out
that’s why people (and librarians) are so important

Liz has 1200 bookmarks in del.icio.us because she wants to share them; she would never have 1200 in her browser

tagging:
still have a ways to go, although it’s not going to go away
tagging is NOT letting you see the long tail, because good folksonomies depend on critical mass and you’ll lose the smaller pieces
nobody cares enough about that obscure government document to tag it
when building tools, can look at what people call things on del.icio.us and then use that in the tools
what happens when people start relying on these tagging tools

do I really want a majority rules approach to information retrieval?

showed the ESP game
lowest common denominator approach to naming something
surfaces interesting biases; do we want these biases to drive the tagging?
talked about a racial slur within the game as one of the risks

showed 43 Things and LifeHacker when talking about continuous partial attention
just because it’s bad for you doesn’t mean it’s bad for everybody
this is a genie that isn’t going back in the bottle

made some references to telling college students to close their laptops, look at her, and pay attention (similar to the Chronicle article!)
at what point did we decide we are owed attention? it’s a form of capital; I can’t demand your attention without giving you something in exchange; but you’re going to find a way around that
used to count the ceiling tiles, and now the bar is higher; it’s not necessarily a bad thing
if that means speakers have to work harder to engage me, that’s okay
now she doesn’t care what the students do as long as it’s not loud or disruptive, but the grades didn’t go down, they didn’t get dumber
why do we want to fight and control attention?
we don’t get to do that anymore - the technology won’t let us
so we have to find a way to be invited in and be part of that continuous partial attention
“Meet the LifeHackers” in the New York Times Magazine, which is stupidly behind their pay firewall (October 16)

research shows a 44% increase in productivity when you use a bigger screen!

there are tips, tricks, and tools for managing this continuous partial attention

pay attention to:
tagging - don’t try to make it away but do try to make it better
social bookmarking
don’t let this stuff overwhelm you - find the tools, tips, and tricks that help you get it under control
– you don’t have to be a geek or do everything; figure out the things that will help you and use them

Technorati tags: IL05, IL2005