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Slide 1: Social Software:  Using Technology to Manage Your World Ed Sperr Program Director, Digital Solutions NELINET, Inc
Slide 2: Roadmap • What is Social Software? • Blogs, Feeds and Wikis • Bookmarking the World • Taking your documents online
Slide 3: What is Social Software?
Slide 4: What is Social Software? • Last year's marketing slogan? • A revolution in human consciousness? • Tools that assist in the sharing and organization of information
Slide 5: Why should I care? • Social Software is trendy • All the cool kids are doing it • Social Software is genuinely useful
Slide 6: Focus on Tasks, not Tools
Slide 7: del.icio.us
Slide 8: Social applications fall into functional categories Sharing Images/Video •Flickr •Photobucket •YouTube Blogging •Typepad •Blogger •Wordpress Storing/ Sharing Bookmarks •De.licio.us •Digg Sharing Documents •Zoho •Google
Slide 9: "Save the time of the reader" -S.R. Ranganathan
Slide 10: Usefulness comes first (socialness comes later)
Slide 11: Requirements for successful social applications • A compelling use case • Enough users to leverage network effects
Slide 12: Social Applications evolve from their context • Tough to invent a category – easier to build on existing applications • Concepts (such as "tagging" or "friending") get re-used across categories • Applications are in "constant beta" – functionality runs together as things become popular
Slide 14: If an application is useful for you then use it Otherwise, don't bother
Slide 15: Blogs, Feeds and Wikis
Slide 16: What’s a Blog? … a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order. —Wikipedia, accessed 5/22/06
Slide 17: What’s a Blog? • Soapbox • Personal Journal • Outreach/Marketing • Newsletter • Archive
Slide 18: Blogs can also be… • Mechanism for feedback • A conversation • A community of practice
Slide 19: Searching Blog posts… • Technorati • Bloglines • Also many general search engines: Google, ask, etc.
Slide 20: Finding Blogs… • Hard to miss 'em – Technorati (supposedly) tracks more than 70 million weblogs. Back in 2005 Walt Crawford found 238 of them in librarianship alone • Find one or two you like: look at their "blogroll" and see where they link to
Slide 21: Creating your own Blog First have something to say – Walt Crawford • Think about the who and why, then the how
Slide 22: Creating your own blog… • Hosted Solutions: – No muss, no fuss – get started right away – Sometimes free – However, no control over the host (if it goes down, all you can do is wait) – Applications include Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com
Slide 23: Creating your own blog… • Software on your own server – You have control – Installation can be complex – Applications include Movable Type and WordPress
Slide 24: Let's give it a try… Where it is: http://forums.nelinet.net/blogs/class Username: vermont Password: vermont
Slide 26: Blogs in Libraries • Brown University Library News • Library News and Subject Blogs– Georgia State University • UThink at University of Minnesota
Slide 27: Too much information? RSS to the rescue!
Slide 28: RSS (and Atom, and etc.) • RSS = Really Simple Syndication • aka Feeds • Uses XML (but the user doesn't see it)
Slide 29: Feeds… • Are machine-readable XML • Allow you to subscribe to content using an aggregator – Can go one place to keep track of content from many providers • You Subscribe to newspapers, blogs, newsletters…the sky's the limit
Slide 30: Types of feeds • You can subscribe to newspapers, blogs and most other things you can imagine… – Open Access News – Boston Globe – Food Stories – MBLC Job Listings – Univ. of Alabama Libraries New Titles - LC class QH – PubMed Search: "HPV"
Slide 31: Using Feeds • Dedicated Feed Readers: – Bloglines – Google Reader • Personal "portal" pages – My Yahoo! – Pageflakes
Slide 33: Using Feeds… • Natively in many browsers • Showing them on your own pages using feed2js or other tools
Slide 34: Wiki Wiki! “In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the process of creating HTML pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states.” retrieved 4/24/06 from Wikipedia
Slide 35: What is a Wiki? • Wikis are typically collaborative – folks can add content and even edit one another's stuff • By design, Wiki documents are always in flux
Slide 36: Blog or Wiki? • Wikis are documents, blogs are content streams • Blog posts have an individual voice, while wikis represent the collective • Both are just essentially rudimentary content management Systems (CMSs)
Slide 37: So, you want a wiki? • Why do you want one? Make sure you're solving a problem • Create policies – Public resource or private? – Do users have to log in to edit? • Train and promote – rinse, repeat
Slide 38: Wiki Software • Again, one of your biggest choices is between hosted applications – SeedWiki, pbwiki, etc… • …and those you install yourself – MediaWiki, TWiki, etc… • Many (many) more can be found at WikiMatrix
Slide 39: One Wiki app in particular… • PBwiki (http://pbwiki.com/) – Easy to use – Hosted for you (free or premium - free version includes Google ads) – Multiple editors – RSS – Tracking and custom CSS templates available (premium) – Lock down who can view content
Slide 40: Let's give it a try… Where it is: http://nelinet.pbwiki.com Invite code: library
Slide 42: Wikis in Libraryland • Library Success Wiki • Stony Brook HSC Library Intranet • Biz Wiki
Slide 43: Bookmarking the World
Slide 44: Bookmarks are… • Hard to search / organize • Non-portable • Better stored online?
Slide 45: Bookmarks + Public availability = Social Bookmarking • Del.icio.us • Simpy
Slide 46: Using social bookmarks for discovery • Things on del.icio.us tagged "reference" • Works best when a community comes together to (formally or informally) agree on a tag
Slide 47: Social Bookmarks in the Library • PennTags! • Italian Studies page at TCNJ del.icio.us feeds) (fed by
Slide 48: Moving your documents online
Slide 49: The web is your “office” • Many different types of files can be stored online (many times for free!) – Presentations – Documents – Spreadsheets and Databases
Slide 50: Advantages of online storage • Get to things from wherever you are • Several folks can collaborate on a single project
Slide 51: Some places that will host your documents • Zoho • Google Docs • Slideshare
Slide 53: Let's give it a try… Where it is: http://www.zoho.com Username: nelinet_class Password: library
Slide 54: Questions? Ed Sperr sperr@nelinet.net 508.597.1931 800.635.4638 x1931