Daily Thoughts 8/3/2011

"Robert Browning," oil on canvas, by Michele Gordigiani. 28 1/2 in. x 23 1/8 in. (724 mm x 587 mm). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Daily Thoughts 8/3/2011

Today I checked the displays, updated the Twitter and Facebook page, and checked the gift books.  We are getting a security upgrade for the computers right now.  I also printed up some civil service position announcements which go to the reference desk.  There are going to be 4000 openings for Fire Fighters in New York City soon.

We had the Internet Job Search Hour this afternoon from 2-3 p.m..  There was a person working on their resume, and another person was working on business related material.
I am also going to a conference tomorrow called The Social Media for Nonprofits Conference.  It should be very interesting.  http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Tech4Good-a-NetSquared-group/events/25337891/

The book, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne has come in for me to read.

Curation Nation How To Win In A World Where Consumers Are Creators by Steven Rosenbaum

Curation Nation Why The Future of Content Is Context How To Win In A World Where Consumers Are Creators by Steven Rosenbaum

Steven Rosenabum is describing a major shift in how media is being delivered.  Consumers of media are increasingly becoming prosumers and creators of their own content.  People create a variety of sites based on their interests from cooking to baseball.  Steven Rosenbaum runs Magnify.net which aggregates video content on the web so many of his ideas come from his direct business experience.

A prosumer is a consumer who proactively chooses what and how they will consume.  A good example of a prosumer might be someone who buys green products, or only buys from the Better Business Bureau.  Increasingly prosumers are becoming creators of their own content based on what they are interested in. 

The tools of content creation are becoming cheaper and easier to get access to.  Social tools like Twitter, Youtube, blogs, podcasts, and other social media tools are easy to get access to.  It is not just the software and web which is becoming cheaper, people now can easily afford smart phones, laptops, and inexpensive video recorders.  People can use these tools to spread their ideas and opinions.

The difference between this book and other books is that Steven Rosenbaum takes it one step further.  He describes how to curate content, picking out and organizing materials for blogs and websites.  He even describes content strategy citing Kristina Halvorson's book Content Strategy.

Then Steven Rosenabaum talks about how curation scales with aggregation mixed with selective content on websites like The Huffington Post, Blog Her, and Linked In. This creates a larger picture of curation both on the small individual level and on the larger scale of big commercial websites.

None of the material is particularly new.  However, how it is presented is new. This is a solid overview of how to organize social media tools.  It pulls many disparate threads together to create a picture of a strategy to manage and organize social content. The book can be a bit diffuse at times.  This book would be useful for people interested in new media.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

This book is an introductory text on information architecture for the internet.  The information in this book clarified and defined many ideas from this emerging profession.  It is quite relevant to librarians.  According to this book 40% of information architects come from a library science background.

Many of the concepts that were being described came right out of library school.  I remember reading about search engines, indexes, and classification in my cataloging class.  This book takes it one step further and describes how information on the web is turned into metadata, controlled vocabularies, and labeling systems. It also describes how indexes and search engines are designed.

It is more than just information systems, it is also the language of the nonvisible parts of websites.  It describes things which a chief information officer or a senior developer might talk about; web blueprints, taxonomy, wireframes, and content maps.  This is the planned architecture of enterprise websites.

The reader also learns the vocabulary and professional interests in education, strategy, and selling the profession.  Reading this was eye opening.  It gave me a description of how enterprise websites are created like evolt.org or the MSWeb intranet.

After reading this, I am beginning to get a context of how complex websites are put together.  There is the content strategist who puts in all the different kinds of content in the site, and the information architect who creates the framework on which an enterprise website is built..

This was an incredibly useful book.  It helped me understand the internet in ways which I had not done before.  I would highly recommend this to people who are interested in technology.

Smart Start-Ups How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Benefit by Creating Online Communities by David Silver

Smart Start-Ups How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Benefit by Creating Online Communities by David Silver.

David Silver is a venture capitalist and an author of over 30 books on business. This book varies between being a strategy guide to start an online community and a stream of ideas for starting a variety of online businesses. The book describes online communities as being both on the internet and on mobile phones.

I found the sections on how to start an internet company quiet interesting. He was focusing on social networks like myspace.com and twitter. Social networks are described as being successful because of the ability to generate mobs of people and focus on user generated content. David Silver describes them as requiring very little capital to create.

He argues for a different strategy in creating communities. His view is that it is important to be part of the crowd, not appear to have a lot of money, ask for tips, try to encourage people to provide content for you, and create services which people will pay for.

Part of the strategy he is describing is appearing to be in opposition to large media companies. For example if you are selling ebooks, you might tell people why you don't like paper books, or if you are selling music downloads, suggest why compact discs are obsolete. Being persuasive and generating controversy, even lawsuits will generate even more interest in your sites as well as money.

Where the book did not do well with me was the constant stream of ideas which he proposed. It is easy to generate ideas but it is much harder to show how to execute on them. David Silver talked about everything from online legal arbitration societies to social sites on how to reinvent the American car. This was distracting. The sections on strategy and implementation were much better than the suggestions for new businesses.

I liked his ideas on how to create an online business strategy. It very much describes how to think like a social networking business person. The book was written in 2007 and seems to have been right on target for 2010. If you can get past the constant stream of suggestions for new businesses this book is worth reading.

Creative Surplus Creativity and Generosity In A Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Creative Surplus Creativity and Generosity In A Connected Age by Clay Shirky

The central idea of this book is that because of social media people are able to pool resources in their free time to create unique digital projects.  These projects can range from free encyclopedias like Wikipedia to lolcats which is a collection of funny pictures of cats.  Social media in this book expands beyond computers to include smartphones and cell phones.




Clay Shirky is arguing people are moving away from passive forms of entertainment like television to more interactive forms of entertainment like the internet.  He compares television to gin which is a bit far fetched but entertaining.  This change represents a shift in values which should create a more interactive future.



I found the book to be very positive and a bit evangelistic about the benefits of social media.  He dismisses the disruption caused by deprofessionalization when amateurs volunteer to do many jobs that were professional in nature.  Clay Shirky touches only briefly on the concept of digital sharecropping where writers and other creative professionals work for free or very little money on blogs and other digital projects.



The description of the benefits of social media is the best part of this book.  We learn how cell phone use makes government more transparent, how people created open source software, and how computers are making us more connected.  He points out that services like http://www.meetup.com/ extend social networks into the real world and allow people who had only met on computers to meet in person.



This book had a conversational tone that spoke directly to the reader.  It tried to connect with peoples every day experience of using the internet.  I found it to be easy to read.  It was also well researched with extensive notes and an index.



Clay Shirky also wrote Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  He is considered an internet guru and is a professor at New York University.