• Meta science blogging, London style : LabLit.com
  “Bootleg video of the Fringe Frivolous Unconference, 21 August 2009: On the evening of Friday, 21st August 2009, about 40 bloggers and interested hangers-on gathered on a rooftop terrace in Farringdon, for the Science Online London FringeFrivolous Unconference.”
  (tags: Solo09 soloconf_09 ScienceOnlineLondon2009 video)

• Welcome Workperch into the World! « Workperch!

  Launching tomorrow tonight at Midnight! “Workperch was built over a single weekend… We were born as a result of Startup Weekend Chapel Hill. Workperch aims to connect entrepreneurs and others in need of short-term office space with office space in their area.”

  (tags: startupweekend startupweekedchapelhill startup startups blog announcement workperch)

• claimID weblog – Manage your online identity. » Archive » Library Journal on ClaimID
  Fred highlights the claimID article on the claimID blog.
  (tags: claimid identity libraryjournal lj)
• Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World [OCLC - Membership reports]
  “The report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S.” 280p.
  (tags: toread oclc SocialSoftware socialnetworking socialnetworks privacy trust report)
• Chapel Hill Startup Weekend — November 2-4
  “Startup Weekend is an idea, an experiment, a chance gather the tech community and create a company over one jam packed weekend.”
  (tags: startup startupweekend)
• Unit Structures: ClaimID in Library Journal
  Fred’s announcement about the article on his personal blog.
  (tags: libraryjournal lj identity claimid)

• Corey Reece » Blog Archive » Walled gardens no more. (A unified social network and the makings of a plan)

  I met Corey at BarCamp and we got to discuss this idea. I look forward to seeing where he takes it next.

  (tags: microformats openid socialnetworking xfn social_networks socialnetworks)

• RDU Start Up Weekend

  There was a brief preliminary meeting at BarCampRDU.

  (tags: startup startups barcamprdu barcamp unconference barcamprdu2007)

• Pew Internet: Tagging

  An older report. Just saving it for later: “A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts.”

  (tags: tagging statistics pewstudy Folksonomies folksonomy)

• Thingology (LibraryThing’s ideas blog): Tagmash: Book tagging grows up

  This is a major move forward in tagging: “In getting past words or short phrases, tagmash closes some of the gap between tagging and professional subject classifications.”

  (tags: cataloging folksonomy library2.0 tagging Folksonomies librarything)

• Tagmashes from LibraryThing. Many-to-Many:

  Weinberger’s take: “With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.”

  (tags: Folksonomies folksonomy librarything metadata cataloging tagging)

• Lulu Partners with ImageLooop for Slideshow Widget Offering

  (tags: lulu widgets)

• Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Abstract: Modeling the role of blogging in librarianship

  The abstract for Michael’s dissertation. I really look forward to reading it.

  (tags: michaelstephens blogging library2.0 librarianship librarians dissertation)

Faceted Friending is a term that I have started using to describe what I see as one of the next major stages of how tagging will improve social software. In his recent post titled Sharing and Following/Listening in the Social Web, Thomas Vander Wal discusses how networks are beginning to allow users a deeper level of granularity into how their defined relationships effect their sharing. For example, the Family, Friends, and All distinction in Flickr is built into how information is shared. Thomas’ post highlights some of the top level distinctions that people are making along these lines. While many of the following points will overlap with what Thomas is writing about, I believe that I offer a different perspective on many of the same issues.

One example he uses is “Geo Listening and Sharing”. Basically this includes sharing and listening to people in your geographic vicinity. I had the pleasure of working with Thomas on a mini interactionary at DCampSouth. There we were broadly tackling how to improve status updates and Facebook feeds. One of the ideas we came up with was to allow sharing within a geographic area.

The concept of faceted friending is being employed elsewhere on the web as well. The subscription function in del.icio.us is another popular example. I don’t necessarily want to subscribe to my contacts bookmarks about cats and local politics, but I might want to subscribe to their bookmarks on folksonomy and tagging. In fact, with resource sharing applications like del.icio.us, the utility is highly diluted when employed as a straight network. This is why at BiblioCommons, tagging and subject headings are the bonds that hold the network together. Rarely do I care about all of the topics that a person is reading up on, but I often am interested in one unique facet of our shared interests.

This is also important in more social instances. This became particularly noticeable to me when Facebook opened up to the world. Before, I primarily used Facebook to interact with local friends, friends from college, etc. All of a sudden half of my Facebook friends were librarians. While they are librarians who I consider friends, they don’t necessarily need to know my local happy hour plans and I don’t necessarily need to know about stuff they are doing outside of our shared participation in the library world. This background is how the idea of being able to focus status updates by shared personal facets or geography entered my mind when working on the design challenge with Thomas at DCamp.

One of the tricks to employing Faceted Friending is to make the process simple enough that users take advantage of it. That is why our group decided to minimize the facets that could be attached to a status update to those that would be most useful to that feature. Given that students often use it to share their whereabouts, the geographic importance of status came through as a major facet. The difference between core friends and acquaintances came through as a second, which lead us to the concept of a VIP status update that is only sent out to a core group of friends.

A second way to get people to take advantage of faceted friending is to automate the process as much as possible. So for example, when I add someone as a del.icio.us contact, the system could compare our tags, offer up the most common shared tags, and then offer that I pick tags to follow. Again, BiblioCommons is doing this very well and a lot of my belief in this concept comes from my time with them.

Another example of automating this process is through automatically determining geographical information. In the Facebook status updates example, Facebook could determine a users whereabouts by IP address and share their location oriented status updates with friends in that vicinity. Of course GPS can be used similarly.

A third way to simply the process of faceted friending is through embracing and developing open standards that can allow people to maintain categories of friends across social networks. Beginnings of this can be accomplished through adoption of creative uses for microformats such as XFN. This is a topic Chris Messina brought up at last years BarCampRDU that has been gaining increasing traction lately.

I hope to host a session on Faceted Friending at tomorrow’s BarCampRDU. Unfortunately, I will miss the morning sessions, but will pitch the idea for the afternoon.

I plan on writing a lot more about this topic, but was just trying to get a preliminary sketch of my ideas out there. I will be writing more on faceted tagging as well. Ultimately, I see the intersection of faceted tagging and faceted friending as fueling the next generation of social software.

• Startup Weekend
  I am interested to see how this spreads. Could libraries use this method? From the site: “Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?”
  (tags: startup startups unconference)
• Startup Weekend Boulder
  Blog for the first Startup Weekend.
  (tags: startup startups unconferences)
• vosnap :: coming soon
  The product/company birthed at Startup Weekend: “VoSnap is a social voting tool that reduces time wasted on decision-making, makes sure everyone in the group has a voice, and gives instant feedback on fun or serious decisions.”
  (tags: vosnap startup startups)
• Webology: Contents, Volume 4, Number 2, 2007, Web 2.0, Folksonomy and Ontology
  (tags: folksonomy Folksonomies metadata tagging toread)

• user-interface – Microformats – Social Network Portability
  Section on useing XFN, hCard, etc. to create a portable social network. I wrote about this idea over a year ago after a discussion we had at BarCampRDU 2006.
  (tags: barcamp barcamprdu microformats xfn openid social_networks SocialSoftware)
• VuFind: Home
  “July 18, 2007 – Villanova University announces VuFind, a next generation library catalog, is now freely available as Open Source software.” Looks very cool. I need to spend more time with it though. Update: I just checked out the demo. This is really nice. It employs excellent faceted search with a clean interface and incorporates first stages of some social tools.(tags: opensource OPAC library2.0 faceted facets)
• Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats at LIS :: Michael Habib
  
  
  The earlier post discussing portable social networks. (Second half of the post) Two equations were discussed:
  XFN + OpenID = portable network
  XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks(tags: openid microformats socialnetworking social_networks SocialSoftware barcamp barcamprdu)

• BarCampRDU: Sign up for BarCampRDU 2007
  This was a great event last year. If you can make it, go. “BarCampRDU 2007 will take place August 4, 2007 at Red Hat Headquarters in Raleigh, NC – just like last year. We’re fully sponsored (thanks!) and looking forward to a great event.”
  (tags: barcamprdu barcamp unconferences unconference)

Unconference in Second Life! I can’t make it because of my Master’s Paper, but I hope some Librarians can attend and take notes for the rest of us. Apparently a RootsCamp is an unconference for progressive organizers.

Via Fred Stutzman at Unit Structures:

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/11/unconference-in-second-life.html

From the organizer Ruby Senreich:
http://lotusmedia.org/rootscampsl-off-to-a-great-start

Join the Second Life group: “SL Netroots”

Sign-up and add suggestions at the wiki:

http://rootscamp.org/RootsCampSL

Help organize at the Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/rootscampSL

Pass it on! – http://rootscamp.org/RootsCampSL

I also hereby propose a Second Life Library Camp to happen at some point in the future.

, or, Robert and Maryam Scoble on “Ten Ways to a Killer Blog”

They began by pointing out that, as far as they can recall, this is the first time that they have given a talk on blogging together.

They set out with a simple goal, but the discussion oriented nature of the conference led to many interesting tangents. Below are my notes and thoughts on the talk.

1. Write from the heart – I missed the actual quote, but the idea is one we have all heard before. Write what you are passionate about.
2. “Read other blogs” – Robert points out that if you read blogs and don’t feel the impulse to write your own, then you probably shouldn’t be blogging. I can relate to this. Even though I read blogs on and off for a while before I began my own, there was always a little part of me that felt left out of the conversation.
3. “Pick a niche you can own (be different)” Maryam pointed out that Robert always says that there are two types of bloggers. One type has a desire to change things and is writing for an audience. Robert fits into that category. The second kind are those bloggers, like Maryam, who blog just for the sake of it. Either way, it is important to hit a unique market. Robert discusses the importance of branding your niche so that people begin to relate you and you niche.I have tried to do this with Academic Library 2.0. While I cover many related topics, I always come back to this one. As Robert was discussing this, I began to think of how social networking services increasingly need to focus on niche markets.
4. “Link to other blogs” (and comment). – When Maryam began her blog, she told Robert not to link to her because she wanted to earn her incoming links. Even so, Dave Winer linked to her blog on its first day and brought 3,000 unique visitors to her site. Don’t underestimate the power of linking. Also, don’t underestimate the power of link love. Robert points out that the internet rewards. They also stressed the importance of linking to material covering both sides of an issue because you automatically gain a level of authority above someone linking only to one side.
5. “Admit mistakes” – Maryam said that Robert has earned her respect on this one. Robert also mentioned the importance of keeping private data sacrosanct.
6. “Write good headlines” – Robert says that he moves items straight from his aggregator to his link-blog based on the headline alone. Similarly, he deletes most other posts coming through his aggregator because they have uninteresting or uninformative titles. Interesting to note, Robert said that he mostly subscribes to feeds for searches rather than individual blogs. I too have found ,myself doing this more and more. The eye tracking study that shows people look for keywords in headlines was mentioned. They point out that people love lists and are more likely to read posts with a list title. Jokingly they say that this is why they used a list for their presentation! Maryam points out that her most popular post is titled, “In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek.
7. Use other media - Robert is convinced TechCrunch was discovered because Michael added a graphic to every post.The internet is a gift economy. I contributed my story about how I wanted to share my concept models. Instead of putting them on my blog, I put them on Flickr because I new there was a much better chance of someone discovering them. In fact, I had a pretty good idea that the more well known Library 2.0 bloggers would see it there. Michael Stephens did find it on Flickr and linked to the Flickr image. I lost some traffic to my blog, but I got my ideas out there, which was most important. My basic point was that social networking services can be a powerful way to share your work. Given that more people are subscribing to searches for tags, this is even more important. Ed Cone backed me up and said it was a really “powerful point.” Then Maryam threw a t-shirt at me because of the importance of my contribution. This was especially cool because many others had contributed, but I was the first to earn a t-shirt! Robert moved from this point straight to Second Life. As he was listing all of the things that you can put in Second Life, I, given the confidence from the t-shirt, yelled out “libraries”. He spoke a lot about what was covered in an article in The Economist a few weeks ago.
8. “Have a voice” – I think the saying they used was, “If you want to dig a goldmine, you need to use some dynamite.” Sometimes you have to take a stand for good. They discussed how Robert stood up against Steve Balmer surrounding Microsoft’s support, or lack there of, for a gay rights bill. He mentioned that he asked Maryam if it was okay to take the risk of getting fired. After she read over his post, she said it was okay. I really liked this story. It points out the importance of standing up for what you believe in, yet it also points out that sometimes you need to think of the consequences beyond what might happen to you.
9. “Get outside the blogosphere” – Go to events. Meet people. They then ran out of time and threw up their last few slides. They actually ended up having 15 suggestions.
10. “Market yourself”
11. “Write Well” – Spell check, check your state of mind.
12. “Expose Yourself”
13. “Help other people blog” – Don’t play hierarchy games.
14. “Engage with commenters”
15. “Keep your integrity”- Robert said it is important that “You are what you seem you are.”

I asked the last question of the session. I asked Robert if he had any advice on how one might pitch the idea of having a public blogger. The scenario I gave him was making the pitch at a job interview with a large company. He pointed out the importance of sharing original unscripted content. He also said it is important to point out (to the company) that they can’t control the world.

Given the tardiness of my coverage, a few people already have some excellent posts up about this talk. So if you want to learn read more about the Scobles’s talk, check out mistersugar’s take on BlogTogether or Daniel’s take on Xark.

Technorati tags: scoble robertscoble maryamscoble bloggingbloggingtips convergesouth convergesouth2006