virtually a librarian

Des Walsh has posted a comprehensive round-up of blogospheric writings on the recent Australian Blogging Conference. Check it out.

It seems my (and others’) hesitations about Second Life might be justified:

A new study from Yankee Group finds that the hype surrounding Second Life is considerably bigger than the virtual world’s real-life relevance.

The study showed that Second Lifers spend an average of 12 minutes in-world per month, compared to the 186 minutes Facebook users typically spend on Facebook per month.

Commentary on the study seems to be focussed on the PC-centric nature of Second Life and the role this has played in SL’s failure to realise its full potential.

…for virtual worlds and metaverses to achieve greater potential in the marketplace and grow beyond early adopters, the experience must be untethered to meet the needs of the Anywhere Consumer™. Companies that provide remote access—through mobile devices or other means—to their web experience will have a greater impact than pc-centric companies.

Lots for us to think about here. Time to start pondering how we can deliver to mobile users, me thinks.

Via iLibrarian.

From November 2006 to June 2007, I was lucky enough to project manage a trial IM reference service at my former POW, which ran in conjunction with National and State Libraries Australia’s AskNow virtual reference service. An article on the trial was published in the May 2007 issue of Australian Library Journal, and you can check out a pre-print on the NLA website.

The trial was a great opportunity to really test the viability of the concept of IM reference, and to nut out the logistics of operating IM reference in a geographically dispersed collaborative. We collected quite a significant body of data related to user and staff experiences as well as usage trends. During the trial, we interacted with users in more than 1400 sessions, and we conducted in-depth analysis of over 600 of those transcripts.

The result? We proved that there is absolutely a demand for IM reference and that the ‘presence’ characteristic of IM can lead to increased repeat usage and can facilitate true point-of-need assistance. What we also proved, though, was that it’s not feasible to operate a large scale, high usage virtual reference service without some of the functionality we’re used to seeing in proprietary chat reference tools, such as queuing or routing of users and the ability to have multiple librarians servicing incoming sessions.

So, where to next? Well, as part of the trial, we developed a system architecture for collaborative IM reference. Part of this architecture needs to be built, while open source solutions are available for other components (like a Jabber IM server). NLA developers are currently working on developing the routing module that forms the core component of the architecture.

Stay tuned for an update on the status of the NLA project at VALA 2008.

Have other libraries had similar experiences with IM? I’d love to hear about the challenges and triumphs other libraries have encountered. Leave your thoughts in the comments or drop me an email.

I missed the concurrent session on business and corporate blogging, but I heard it was great. This session was facilitated by Nick Hodge, Des Walsh and Joanne Jacobs.

Nick Hodge has posted his notes from the session, and some slides. Go check them out.

The conference, on the whole, was really worthwhile. Best of all was the opportunity to spend a day surrounded by other bloggers and blog readers. Apparently they’re looking at making this an annual event, which would be really good. As Duncan Riley said during the opening panel, we need to promote the Australian blogosphere, and our fellow bloggers. So share the link love, and get yourself to the next BlogOz!

You can find more BlogOz goodness via Technorati.

Discussion leaders: Duncan Riley and Yaro Starak
(This session was pretty much a dialogue, so some attribution is undoubtedly missing)

How to get a better blog?

• Riley: Must have comments, preferably unmoderated, and don’t make people create an account to comment - comment is value-add, it’s where the really interesting stuff happens.
• How do you get people to comment? Have a WYSIWYG editor, label commenting functionality clearly. Get involved. Go out and comment on other blogs in your niche area, link to posts from other bloggers in your niche area. Build community and relationships with readers and potential readers.
• Starak: Blog carnivals: one person hosts the carnival, their job is to review all the submissions to that carnival, on a particular niche topic. Person who’s choosing picks the best to be featured in that week’s carnival. blogcarnival.com. Carnival of Australia are interested in new content. Talking about the effectiveness of carnivals - can plateau out in terms of new authors. Requires traction, need critical mass of users for it to work.
• Riley: It’s good karma to link to other people. Even a linkroll is a good thing to do. Not as many people have linkrolls these days. If you link to someone without expecting anything in return, it’s gonna come back to you.

How can a blog help a business?

• Riley: everybody has a story, no matter what you do you can blog about it. Customer testimonials (but be careful about tone, needs to seem authentic), news about the industry, can help you improve search engine results, blogs get page ranked higher than a static page because Google likes fresh content.

Importance of knowing what’s going on in the blogosphere

• Riley: Feed readers - know what the competition is doing, you absolutely need to use a feed reader to do this. Gets through 300 blogs in under 20 minutes every morning [note to self: read faster!]
• What do I blog about? Well, you can blog about what other people blog about, for a start! Attribution is obviously important.
• In niche, technology areas, you really have to be on the pulse with what’s happening, right on time.
• Keeping on top of what’s happening and being a great, popular blogger takes time - lots of good bloggers don’t sleep much!

Corporate efficiency and blogs; how can companies use blogs?

• Riley talks about Microsoft and IBM’s use of corporate intranet blogs for development ideas. Wikis are huge in corporate environments. Twittering is being used by companies now. Blogging can facilitate anonymous, honest feedback from staff.
• Blogging is a tool, in a marketing perspective it’s a tool for communicating with customers.
• Wikis are great for business. Blogs are great for discussion, but wikis are great for working documents and referring back to etc.

Mistakes you can make as a blogger: the don’t list

• Starak: There are some ‘don’t go with’ people for blog services. WordPress is great, Typepad is good for hosted.
• If you’re taking blogging seriously, you need to own your blog (ie don’t go for one of the providers that effectively own your blog) and have your own domain name. And as a next step, to even host it yourself. namecheap.com for domain names.

How important is design?

• Not that important an issue because design is easy, especially if you’re using something like WordPress, for which there are tens of thousands of templates available. You can get a good template designed for you for a few hundred dollars.
• elance does good templates.
• You do want to have a professional looking blog. An ugly site detracts from the content, no matter how good the content.

What is good design?

• Decent sized font, no white text on black [ohhhhh!].
• CSS compliant - people use other browsers, test on other browsers, firefox is pushing 40% market share in Australia now - CSS compliance should go a long way to ensuring accessibility.
• Unique Blog Design are doing really great work at really low cost. Start off with a template and modify it, then get people in to help you when you hit a road block.
• Columns: maximise readability, have your content up in top left hand corner; if you’re looking for add revenue, adds on the left, content on the right.
• SEO: title of your blog post is the most important element in terms of blogging. Riley: put the post title at the top of the browser, not your blog title. WordPress plug in called “SEO title tag” can do this for you.

Managing the back end

• Are there people who will come in and look after the back end for you? Yes, but when you’re starting out it’s good to do stuff yourself and learn. Starak: There are people who will do it for you really, really cheap. eg Ninja Blog Setup (set up company) - will come in and set up your blog for you with all the plug ins.
• Riley: If you’re passionate about blogging, it doesn’t hurt to know about the back end and how all the technical stuff works. He says he’s a better person for knowing how it all works! Never done any courses, he’s just experimented and taught himself as he goes. But he says if you don’t have a lot of time, you’re better off using it for developing content rather than tweaking code.

Newsletters

• Good for sales oriented blogs to pull people in, follow up on leads, create a buzz. Not necessarily as useful for content driven blogs.
• Starak: what would happen if they added a newsletter to TechCrunch? Not that they need to… Not trying to sell a product, not trying to build up numbers because they’ve got heaps of subscribers, it’s a brand of it’s own.

Establishing a brand

• Riley: TechCrunch is an amazing brand… smart stuff - look at what they do with quarterly parties, TechCrunch40… Build a brand if you want to be big in blogging. If you really want to cut through, the blog should be about the brand, not about you.

How often should you blog?

• Depends on what you’re trying to be. If you’re a news source, you need to blog a lot.
• What do you want to achieve? What is my objective?
• Riley: wanted to be a Technorati Top 100 blog. It took him two and a half, three years to get there.
• Riley: It takes six to nine months to establish a blog, 12 months to really see results out of it.

Can a media release help with blog readership?

• Yes, if you’re doing something unique, geo-targeted… it can work. Maybe we do need to do more of this, if we’re going to promote the Australian blogosphere.

Any successful blogs in the university area?

• PhD students blog about their research, famous in the academic community, but probably not breaking out of that area.
• What about internally? Lecturer to student. Blogs are used a lot for online learning, at QUT in BlackBoard, for reflective practice.
• One participant mentioned that he uses a blog for students to post their tutorial papers, and the comments act in lieu of interaction face-to-face in tuts - face-to-face interaction becomes secondary to the dialogue that happens in the comments.

Advice on tone, person/voice to write in?

• If it’s a personal blog, first person; if you’re trying to be newsy, then use a journalistic style. But sometimes you can mix it up, start out with a journalistic, reporting style, and then move into ‘and I’ve used this and this is what I found…’.
• No style guide for TechCrunch.
• Blogs are personal, people expect a conversational, humanised tone.
• Starak: the more opinionated you are, the more attention you’ll get.
• Riley: most people respect your right to have an opinion, as long as it’s well researched and well founded.
• Starak: work your personality.
• Riley: be yourself. People will catch you out if you’re being inauthentic.

Academic blogs: blogs for research output?

• Put it in a paper or put it in a blog post?
• Concept of the culture of amateurs.
• Access to information - blogs can enable the discussions of academia [they make academic thought available to the public]. Equal platform, equal access.
• More people are writing, reading as a result of blogs, which has to be a good thing.

Are people in Queensland less likely to read and write blogs?

• Apparently so…
• Why? Because the weather’s nicer here? Because broadband access isn’t great everywhere?

Ethics of anonymous blogging?

• Some people do it for therapy. As a ‘tool’ to enable defamation? Sure, people do it. Is it right, no. But it’s logical that if you’re going to defame someone, you’d be smart to do it anonymously.
• Blogging under an alias - eg the shoe blogger Manolo.
• It is possible to blog privately, to a selected group of invited members.
• Facebook as an example of private blogging (not anonymous but private), micro blogging on there, and it’s a reasonably closed community - pretty much only your friends can see it.

Ethics around altering a post once it’s published

• General rule is you don’t do it, unless you use a strike through or an update note, but lots of people do it from time to time.

Opening panel - Senator Andrew Bartlett, Duncan Riley, Professor John Quiggin and conference chair Peter Black

My stream of consciousness notes from the opening panel session. Square brackets are me thinking…

Reflecting on the evolution of the blogosphere over the last five years; how, why evolved, why has it become the phenomenon that it is?

John Quiggin: always attempted to update websites daily, so unsurprising that blogs with their ease of updating have had the success they have had. Diarising has flowed on into Facebook etc. Public debate - historically big barriers to access for the public; small number of newspapers; difficult to get a slot in the public debate, when people do get them, they tend to hang onto them. Blog technology universally available, even the mass media now using them [kinda ironic really given that they've probably evolved in part as a response to the difficulty of establishing a public voice?]. Breakdown of the divide between the people who do the listening and the people who do the talking. Early blogs, no commenting, lots of linking. Comments allow dialogue, allow people who don’t necessarily want to maintain their own to have a voice, you get to this point where people become regular commenters. Group blogs are they way of the future [hmmmm...]

Senator Bartlett: obviously interested in political blogging; diversity and social networking component are the aspects he finds particularly interesting. The ‘viral’ aspect of blogs, something that can feed and spread through communities, just another way for information to get out. Over exulted as a new frontier that will democratise social interaction - not so, but definitely another way for people to connect in a society where a number of the traditional ways of connecting have broken down. Discussion of issues and concerns, dynamism and diversity, the real value of blogging. Comments - sensitivity - parliament likes to see themselves as the only ones with the perceived wisdom. Concept that anyone else could even have a clue foreign. Slowly being broken down by blogging. Insularity of sitting and breathing and living the ‘bull shit’ that happens in govt, being broken down; almost an alternative commentary emerging. Cross fertilisation in main stream media, not always with attribution to blogs. Value of comments is not just the straight two way, but the cross fertilisation of commenters coming from different philosophical perpectives, is where the real value lies. Best thing about blogs is their authentic, right there, straight, unvarnished - that’s the particular value for anyone, no matter where they’re coming from - not going through a middle person, only filters are those that the author applies themselves [this is interesting for those of us who blog about professional issues - how do we censor to maintain distance in our work-professional lives (should we maintain distance in our work lives, can we?) from what we blog in our personal-professional lives.]

Duncan Riley: single blogs are the bread and butter of the blogosphere. Group blogs at the top of the long tail, but not the way of the future. Burma - blogs are where the decent news is coming from. Australian media has a phobia that bloggers are the enemy and are going to take them down. Sees bloggers as a threat - ’shit cans’ bloggers. In the US, journalists are bloggers and bloggers are journalists. Not so in Australia. Some media blogs illustrate that the media is trying to be pre-eminent bloggers in Australia - not really doing a good job! How do we take Australia over the tipping point and into the future of blogosphere? Facebook and MySpace as micro blogging, as access to a blogging platform. How do we break out? Senator Bartlett a wonderful example of what politicians should be doing in the blogosphere. We seem to have missed out having a stand out blog that blows people away. Dog eat dog mentality, cliques. Hope that what comes out of this conference is contacts, cross links. People haven’t got the audience because we’re not doing enough collectively to say, we’re here, we count, and we’re producing this great content.

Senator Bartlett: Has a MySpace page, been thinking about doing it for years, finally got one earlier this year. Points out that you can put it up as just a billboard, but it is a great way for people to connect with you who otherwise wouldn’t. [lightbulb for libraries. We put up these MySpace pages and they act as sign posts, but we need to interact with our users there. What's the point of sticking up a sign that points back to the library, when we can actually let people access us, and access them and their ideas and get them engaged in the library]. Great blogs around literature and the art in the Australian blogosphere, eg on Indigenous art. Easier for someone from a smaller party to blog. Opportunity for him to get info from people that’s different from the focus group, survey type work govt does. Authentic information from the ground. The more people can cross connect, the less they get fed directly from the mainstream media, the better. Positive is there’s always someone out there who can keep you honest - [ha ha this session is off the record, he presumes? in a room full of people who are blogging as he speaks]. Can also have a gag effect, if he’s gonna end up on YouTube five seconds after he says something, then he’s going to be more careful about what he says, which could be both good and bad.

John Quiggin: academic blogging - blogging time consuming, starting out a drain of time. Been involved in academic publication in the past, responds to what’s happening in his field on his blog, which leads to being invited to write journal articles etc. Blog has lead the way to getting involved in opportunities for academic research. Big investment in establishing a blog and getting involved, but it has had a positive pay off in academic terms, and certainly doesn’t chew up every waking minute.

Peter Black asks what is unique about the Austn blogosphere?

Duncan Riley: We’re opinionated, not afraid to give our opinions, but we’ve been more reserved than the US. Still not as ‘out there’ in media (eg reality tv) etc as the US, and that’s showed in blogging. Reservation would be the downside. Australians have a much more global perspective, whereas for the US, the world stops at the Canadian border. We’re better at taking a broader world view. We’re inclusive of others and we write for a global audience. Limitations, haven’t quite got past the tipping point in Australia, but globally, we have a massive audience. Bloggers have an amazing ability to connect with others overseas, particularly when you get down to some of the niche topics.

Question from the audience: Traditional media incredibly influenced by commercial interests. To what extent is that a danger in the blog world? In terms of shaping editorial.

Duncan Riley: numbers game, some people can be shaped or influenced by sponsors or commercial influence. Most bloggers pretty ethical. He has a personal view that he isn’t influenced. Doesn’t write editorial for money. Asked the audience who writes editorial for money? Couple of hands raised to laughter.

John Quiggin: authenticity is hard to fake. So perhaps it’s harder for this to occur in the blogosphere. Plus, the number of people who make a living from blogging is tiny. Not worth it commercially, doesn’t pay off.

Duncan Riley: far more accountable to readers than the media.

From the floor: noted that she has criticised QUT (her employer) at a time when she was applying for a different job at QUT, and she received an email suggesting she should consider what she writes about QUT before applying for any further positions there. So not just happening in the commercial world.

From the floor: question about politicians rushing to get into spaces such as YouTube and MySpace. What has the response been? Is it working, or are kids saying this is my space and I don’t want you in it.

Senator Bartlett: Not convinced that there are a lot of votes in it for the federal election. Points out that there’s a difference between blogging and being on MySpace. Surprised more people don’t do it at local council level because he thinks it would suit that. Points out that politicians in this environment (social networking) are prolific in the UK, but not so here.

Peter Black: idea of invading these spaces. As a teacher, are students willing to engage with him in these spaces? Reluctance to engage with him in a discussion in these spaces, sense of ownership there. But they do read his blog etc. What’s the role of teachers in these spaces?

John Quiggin: real sense of ownership in MySpace and Facebook as opposed to YouTube.

Senator Bartlett: YouTube is being used to get media attention. Eg Howard’s use of YouTube. He doesn’t have to turn up and answer questions, just feeding the media. Facebook much more about interacting. Authenticity always an issue. Politicians using MySpace can be seen as a gimmick.

Duncan Riley: on one hand, anything politicians can do to get rid of some of the apathy that surrounds politics in Australia is good, they’re getting people engaged to some extent; on the other hand, John Howard doing a YouTube video in a suit is just ridiculous. It’s a media gimmick.

More talk about commercial aspects. Someone from the audience spoke about his experience with being paid to blog, and pointed out that it is legitimate.

All about ethics, what’s legitimate, what isn’t, certainly not clear cut.

Interesting discussion this morning. The rest of the day is in streams, which is a shame, because I’m keen to catch all of this conversation. I’m sure I’ll pick up what I’m missing through other bloggers’ summaries.

Tags to come.

I’m at the Australian Blogging Conference today. See the participants list here. Lots of laptops in the audience so I’m sure there will be loads of summaries floating around soon…

Two posts on a similar theme popped into my feed reader today. Both centre on the concept that, for our users, the library website is not be the be-all and end-all of resource discovery.

While munching on my lunch today, I came across a post on Library Web Chic titled The future of web services isn’t the library website. I’m somewhat preoccupied with online services atm, given that my current priority at work is developing the concept of the online library, so this title grabbed my attention. The post talks about how for the author, the website redesign she’s recently been working on is not so much about ‘fixing’ the existing website as it is about

defining the types of content the library has to offer its users and getting that content into pieces that can be reused and repurposed elsewhere.

Interesting. I’ve been pondering the idea of content that can be dynamically pulled into various places in the library website, but this post started the cogs turning in a bigger picture context. What if libraries were to make their content and metadata mashable, repurposeable, RSSable, third-party-searchable… in a much larger setting than the library website? What a way to truly get ourselves into the line of vision of non-users. And what a way to make our services more relevant and accessible to our existing users. I made a note to do some more thinking about this idea.

And then… I just opened up my feed reader again on getting home from work and discovered a post from Lorcan Dempsey about the idea that “discovery happens elsewhere”. What exactly does this mean?

No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. Increasingly people discover websites, or encounter content from them, in a variety of places. These may be network level services (Google, …), or personal services (my RSS aggregator or ‘webtop’), or services which allow me to traverse from personal to network (Delicious, LibraryThing, …).

Hmmm, doubly interesting. Two posts in one day… I wonder if the universe is telling me something?

Certainly, libraries need to put some energy into making our content and metadata accessible from third party services. We’ve already seen some great examples of this (such as Libraries Australia seeding Google Scholar with data from the National Bibliographic Database). But there are so many more opportunities for all of us.

I sense I’ll be spending a lot more time thinking about this one… But no time for that right now! I’ve got a conference paper to finish that I’ve been seriously procrastinating about.

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter posted this week on how the ‘newness’ of Library 2.0 is the power shift(s) it represents. This is a spot-on response to the Library 2.0 ‘dissenters’ who argue that L2 is just about a swag of new tools, and that the user-centeredness that Twopointopians champion is, in fact, nothing new (they’re right, it’s not).

Greenhill summarises the shifts in power balances as she sees them:

• The power of the user to choose
• The power of the librarians to control code
• The power of the user to create their library
• The power of librarians to speak with our own voices
• The power of librarians to be in our users’ space
• The power of librarians to risk
• The power of librarians to collaborate
• The power to use our library buildings in a new way

So, the unique, new, innovative thing about Library 2.0 is that it has caused a realignment of all sorts of power balances, for and between all groups of stakeholders (users, librarians, vendors…).

This is a definition of L2 that really works and is certainly a valuable addition to the L2 discourse. Read the whole thing, it’s good stuff.

Then, go check out Casey Bisson’s response for an interesting analogy. He ends with a question all libraries should be asking themselves in order to avoid going the way of the trains: “Who are you competing against?”

Web Worker Daily is consistently a blog that I not only find interesting but that also offers up practical gems that help me do my job better, smarter, faster, more creatively.

One post this week really resonated with me and I’ve been mulling over it all week. This particular post asks “Is desire a priority in your site?”. And it got me thinking, is there anything about our library websites that really draws our users in and engenders in them a desire to explore what we can offer them?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that desirability has probably not been a big focus for libraries in developing their websites. And the fact is, our websites are pretty much the gateway to a lot of what we do. Want to find a book? Search the OPAC. Want to read the latest newspaper from Chile without leaving the house? Log on to the library website and check out an online resource. Want to see what events the library is holding? Check out the events page. So it would make sense for us to spend energy building desirability into our sites, because to use the library, people need to use our website.

The WWD post relays three tactics for creating desirability, as outlined by Kerry Bodine in a recent Forester report:

2. Focus on aesthetics:
As much as people laugh at me for being bothered by formatting, design and general prettiness in my work, I know that looks do mean something. Some websites are just so unappealing that I’m really not interested in using them (think internet banking, for example). I’m a visual person, and I need visual stimulus, but even those of us whose brains aren’t hardwired to glean meaning from the visual are (consciously or subconsciously) influenced by the way things look. Good design is not a luxury; it is an absolute essential. We cannot afford to focus solely on content and functionality. Graphic designers may be expensive, but can we afford not to use them? At the very least, we should acknowledge the skills of our more creative colleagues and involve them in the design process.

3. Incorporate elements of game design:
As the WWD post points out,

[i]f your visitor is playing, chances are, she’s staying. That may mean creating a system of challenge and reward or developing a narrative structure to motivate visitors to interact with the site.

How can we learn from game design to build tutorials, interactive help and self-service reference tools?

According to Bodine,

many Web sites make users struggle to complete simple goals, have little to no emotional punch, and fail to embrace the diversity of consumers’ wants and needs…

Is this true for our library websites? Admittedly, not always. Some libraries do a pretty stellar job of creating dynamic, engaging websites that address the needs of their users.

But these tactics definitely offer food for thought for a lot of libraries.

Know of a library that’s doing a great job at drawing users in to their websites? Drop the URL in a comment…