I’m experimenting with a beta screencasting site called Flowgram . Thanks to Greg Schwartz for the heads up and the beta invite.
I’ve used the very simple web-based editing tools to create a little screencast called Adventures in Microblogging . The embed code, which I’ve inserted below, seems only to be a link to the site, but it’s beta and – who knows? – it may be a full screencast by morning.
I can see great potential for this to be used to answer user enquiries in our libraries. If Jing is a simple woman’s version of Camtasia Studio, then the editing side of Flowgram feels like a simple woman’s version of Captivate.
In the screencast, I explain why I am oh so sad that we keep seeing this when we try to use twitter:
I outline the main alternatives that have sprung up in the last couple of years, their pros and cons and why they don’t work so well for me. I finish with a look at Open Source microblogging site identi.ca . I explain why – if it can scale – it may well be the place wher my twitter network migrates, if they need to become microblogging refugees. I *hope* however that twitter comes through this because, as I explain, it does the few simple things it tries to do with great ease of use. (when it works).
Within 3 minutes of it happening, I received this message from one of my Twitter friends. “BREAKING NEWS – Reports of an earthquake in London streaming into the BreakingNewsOn center. working to confirm. Stay for Coverage “ It came from a profile based in the Netherlands called BreakingNewsOn.
Being an old-fashioned net-citizen, I checked out Google and then Google News. Not a sausage about any London earthquake – although 16 hours before, Lloyd’s of London had predicted that Israel was at risk of an earthquake:
So – I turned to my new favourite tool, Tweet Scan (thanks Sue) – which searches posts (tweets) to twitter. Searching on “earthquake” retrieved an instant snapshot of how it was affecting people in the UK, including the poor guy with the really old property who believes that God hates him personally.
Google doesn’t have the instant goods. Blogs don’t. And the next edition of my local newspaper – once the most up-to-date news source available – won’t be distributed until about 12 hours after the earthquake happened.
As librarians, we need to be familiar with the way information is created and transmitted – and how this is changing. We need to know how to use new tools to mine these new sources. We need to ask questions about the accuracy of such sources, and try to work out where archiving fits into this.
I’m wondering how many librarians would pick up the inherent weakness of Tweet Scan as an information tool. Tweet Scan only indexes those Twitter accounts that are public, not accounts like mine, which only my friends can read. If you’ve been on the inside, in there playing with Twitter, you’ve probably worked this out. If you’ve been watching from the outside, you probably had no idea.
Of course, my earthquake search is a great illustration of how the information rich live. Twitter can only be accessed by people with skills and time – both time to spend twitterwatching and the type of day with the leisure to be constantly interrupted by twitter. To me, this makes it even more important that librarians understand how this works and are able be a conduit to the information poor .
If you are in an academic library, your clientele probably includes some of the most information rich – and young and privileged- people around. I love this videoclip that provides a glimpse into the way these kids are changing. Bear with it for the first minute or so, and you will be rewarded with some very interesting perspectives on print, email and wristwatches. Are you relevant? (found via Stephen’s Lighthouse )
Advance notice – this post contains adult concepts and the phrase “photocopy their bums”. If you want sweetness and light instead, the Happy Little Elves are over here.
“New Media Douchebags” is not my choice of term….nor one I endorse…. but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since October when I saw Kelly Stewart‘s parody on the Common Craft videos and up-themselves new media types, New Media Douchebags in Plain English. It’s also been posted to YouTube (clip below) by persons unknown: New media douchebags . I mentally ticked the “I am a NMD” box when I realised that I knew most of the services listed at the end of the clip.
Yesterday I raved about the general fabulousness of new media – or at least explained how it can have impact on librarians. Today I saw something that confirmed my prejudice that a species that uses the office copiers to photocopy their bums, will do the equivalent with new media tools. The prevalence of vampires and zombies and the bl**dy SuperFunWall on Facebook kind of had me convinced already.
About 4am UK time, mid afternoon in Australia, there was a mass migration of a mob of bored twitterfolk to watch a self-broadcast show on Ustream.tv . The attraction? A very, very drunk host who was singing about “Naked Time”, and who then stripped and hung freely before the audience’s eyes. Either it was a deliberate bid for publicity by the host or he’s really, really embarrassed right now…I’d rather not mention the host’s name or web company if either is the case. If you really want to see an excerpt , check out this Techcruch post.
Ustream.tv streams output from a webcam to the users’ screen with a chat room at the side, where viewers can converse about the content. There is also a telephone number that callers can phone to interact live with the host.
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OK – so my first geeky kind of thought was – “wow! this would be great for education”, then it was”is this guy’s hair green?”, then “isn’t this kind of a waste of bandwidth”, then “hey, some twerpy spammer is pushing the same URL into the chat box over and over”, then “people are discussing this as if it is an unusual occurrence on the internet – what about all those porn sites legislators are constantly in a moral panic about?”, and finally “this just proves the whole mob of us watching are NMDs”.
It reminded me of the dystopia created in Ben Elton’s latest book, Blind Faith . Characters with Second Life kinds of names (Caitlin Happymeal, Princess Lovebud, Caramel Magnum Moonbeam) are compelled by social, religious and governmental pressure to “tube” their entire lives. The most intimate moments are expected to be broadcast, with neighbours cheering on participants and offering suggestions. Family disputes are aired for congregational judgement in a cross between the Jerry Springer show and a baptist revival meeting. The story arc deliberately follows Orwell’s 1984, much the same way as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty follows Forster’s Howard’s End.
Collaboration using new media isn’t just what we have always done, only faster. It is different.
For librarians, this affects how we can collaborate with each other, but also our role in archiving and retrieving content.
OUR OWN COLLABORATION
We can form consensus and influence each other as ideas are being formed. The truly joint effort continues further in the collaboration process than before. The formal co-ordination and “getting a first draft” role, which was generally performed by just one person, can be done by many people working together simultaneously.
If you look at the work involved creating a report, for example, the stages are pretty much:
Work out what will be said
Say it
Review, tweak, edit, add citations
Publish it
When librarians who couldn’t get face to face collaborated in the past, the collaboration usually happened at the “Work out what will be said” stage and the “Review, tweak,edit,add citations” stage. The “say it” bit often happened in isolation – with someone writing up something for others to review. There may have been a bit of bouncing back and forth during the writing, but generally it was done in isolation.
With tools like wikis, twitter and Seesmic, the collaboration happens also at the “say it” stage. For example, I’ve been watching a (rather silly but fun) discussion of slogans for the Library Society of the World. The conversation is moving from the Meebo chat room, through twitter and on to the wiki. There is a lot of “working out what will be said” work going on. Should someone want to rise above the frippery and turn it into something more formal, much more of the “say it” work is already done.
We also get to see each other’s raw ideas much earlier. I used to look at conference papers if I wanted to see the most recent professional thinking – as they tended to be more recent than journal articles. Now I look to blogs for liveblogging of library events, slides from presentations and ideas that are germinating. Twitter, meebo etc, gives me access to much more immediate professional thinking (and a lot of fun noise also, of course).
TRACKING IT
New media collaboration will also affect our ability to archive and retrieve important information for others.
Two things to think about:
1. The assasination of Benizar Bhutto was reported on Twitter far earlier than it reached the mainstream media. As Dennis Howlett points out at ZDNet, communication like this will have the ability to influence world markets in the future, as news of disasters, political unrest or corporate crises spread much faster than we are used to. Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter’s utility
2. Seesmic takes it up a notch. This is more or less twitter using webcams. It is currently in alpha testing. Like twitter only makes sense when you are using it with friends. Basically people make teeny tiny videos, often in response to previous videos, that all patch together in real time to form a conversation. Other video sources can be fed in, for example YouTube clips…so right now there are quite a few excerpts from news broadcasts talking about the Bhutto assassination.
If you do not have a seesmic account, then you can still see individual videos, although not the responses or the context. Here’s an example I made before Christmas, Watching seesmic evolve .
Twitter, being text-based, can be searched via keywords. Conversations on seesmic often have just a video title, with little clue to the content. It will probably have tags as the service evolves. Although sometimes semi-private, this is still a form of publishing…how do libraries handle something like this?
The rules are simple – 140 people take turns to add up to 140 characters to a continuing fiction story. When we hit 140 entries the story is over. As lines are being written they are added to the wiki page.
If you recognize the leetspeak of the title, then you know about I can has cheezburger? – an anarchic site that captions photos – mainly of cats, but sometimes of walruses, gerbils and invisible things. It’s not all fluffy bunny, sometimes they are in very adult situations.
Twice a year or so, I read something so funny that tears roll down my cheeks, I have an asthma attack and giggles bubble out for the next couple of hours. This was one.
It’s got me thinking about the informality, injokes and creativity I’ve seen online in the last couple of weeks. For me, it’s moving away from blogging, reading blogs and commenting on blogs and into more synchronious collaboration, read/write and re-mixing. If what the young kids have been doing is reaching the olds like me, I wonder what the young’uns are doing now?
The main place I’ve been hanging out is still twitter. I think it’s beginning to get a bit quieter but at its peak, links and lives were flying backward and forward at a very fast pace, and just as the Perth blogging contingent would begin going to bed, the US biblioblabbers would be most lively.
Lolbrarians was a link thrown out by Steve Lawson to twitter that sent everyone off to look at the lolibrarians site, comment and then create their own post. As a mix of erudition and junk culture it is only second to the Shakespeare lolcats.
The Library Society of the World is the best, most efficient, egalitarian and effective alternative to any library association ever. Why? Because we say it is and we are not taking it seriously. After the ALA election results were announced there was the usual malcontent expressed via twitter by people who would love to make a difference but don’t have time…why can’t things be different?, can’t we have another association? Yada yada.
So Joshua Neff put up the wiki. Heaps of people have joined and chosen our positions (I’m Antipodean Antibibliorthodoxist). During the brief blip of collaboration, here’s the policies that were nutted out:
No Parliamentary Procedure
No one chairs meetings; no one motions; no one seconds. Just change things and see how the rest of us respond.
No Elections – Just give yourself a title and we’ll accept you!
No Budget Process – If you give someone a donation, they are going to keep it and spend it how they like.
No Unnecessary File Types -If the information can be displayed well in HTML, use it! Links to PDF and Word files are frequently unnecessary and inefficient.
No Policies – oops. I was just kidding about that first part. Sort of.
It’s fun. It’s more useful than I thought. It’s not for everyone. It can be a timesink. It can feel like a popularity contest (par for the course with social networking sites). You can still get spammed.
twitter asks “What are you doing?” and people use 140 characters or less to answer, callled a “tweet”. All day. With their friends. It’s microliveblogging.
You can tweet from your mobile phone, or your IM client or via RSS or directly on the web site. From my homepage on twitter, other people can see all the tweets from the people I am following in a huge stream-of-conciousness yawp.
I fiddled with twitter a while back, but like Fiona, I didn’t find it very useful. About a month ago, as twitter began tipping toward mainstream, a mob of bibliobloggers started experimenting with it. I tried again.
I “friended” some of the names I recognised from the biblioblogosphere. Not all of them friended me back, so they don’t see my tweets. This gets frustrating when I want to tweet back to something interesting. Reminds me that we are rethinking privacy and boundaries as sites get more social and immediate. Why should they friend back someone who they never met in another country? Why does it bug me when they don’t? (Because it reminds me of being excluded from the big kids’ games as a kid? I think it’s time to get over that. )
It is exciting to be peeking into other people’s lives. Even hearing about them making udon noodles is interesting. I almost stopped twittering because there are only so many ways you can say “Avoiding housework”, but felt that the price I paid for their trivia was sharing mine.
Then it began being used in other ways.
I watched CW‘s progress as she took an overnight trip to a regional campus.
Rochelle Hartman asked for feedback about her plans for a staff retreat and some of us checked it over and emailed her back
Meredith Farkas was twittering about a problem she was having with Elsevier and Michelle Boule, who was in a meeting with an Elsevier rep was able to ask a tricky question about it.
I mentioned a really interesting place I’d found in Second Life and one of my Twitter friends (who I’d never met in RL or SL) popped in to SL and we rode some kangaroos around Cybrary City II.
Simone posted a request from our state newspaper to interview twitterers
The Virginia Tech shootings were reported almost as soon as they happened
Currently the twitterati are at the Computers in Libraries Conference 2007, and twitter is being used for liveblogging, to find each other in crowds and people arranging to meet for drinks/meals afterward. There is a separate Twitter user called “cil07” who has been friended by twitterers at the conference so you can subscribe to the feed and see what everyone is doing.
The key to this working is a critical mass of people with a joint interest twittering constantly. I don’t know whether this is sustainable, but it’s fun watching it evolve. If you want to experiment, feel free to friend me.
