Update: Here’s Knol-ly

Google has finally unveiled their Wikipedia competition, called Knol. There are a good number of articles already written and the authorship of articles remains a very impressive feature. The ability to have closed collaboration and feedback from users that can be taken into consideration, allows for a much less volatile system for editing.

I will be curious to see how far this project goes towards attaining the role of a timely and peer reviewed collaborative encyclopedia.

Related posts of mine:

Knol’s Fair in Love and Wikis

User Feedback Model from Starbucks

Michael from Tame the Web posted his thoughts on the new Starbucks user driven idea site.  Basically users can share their ideas for more effective services and products, vote on other people’s ideas, and see the results made by the company.  This is done in one site, and seems to have a general turn around time of 1 week or less.

For those of us who have seen good ideas in libraries get swamped under the mountains of bureaucratic posturing, all to often found in libraries, wouldn’t it be nice to utilize a system such as this to gather external, expedient information?  The ability for the user to be a part of their own environment gathers their trust in the library and can then lead to a stronger connection for future needs. Though there is a growing concern for students having too much sway in their educational practices, I think implementing something like this could transform many stagnant areas of library services. (But not all, as I would hate to leave things such as collection development and circulation policies hinging primarily on student feedback alone.)

I may be putting this on my plate soon, as this is a form of assessment and planning.  We shall see.

Social Media in Plain English

Thanks to Cliff for sharing this with me. The group over at CommonCraft have done it once again with their original and informative manner of explaining concepts. (You may remember them from their other popular video, “RSS in Plain English.”)

I may have seen a library who tried to mimic this style of presentation for some of their library instruction videos. Making the message simple doesn’t have to be tied to this form, as making your point in a clear and understandable way is the key to effective communication. Metaphors and allegories work too.

Cloudy days for searching?

In the competition for online search dominance, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has unveiled a new way to search the web in Search Wikia.   For a full description of this revelation you may want to read the PC World article from Monday, January 7th.

For those who don’t know, Wikia is a socially driven collection of topic based community wikis.  Or in layman’s terms–people talking about the same thing and editing the information about that thing in a shared web site. About Wikia.
The search side of Wikia is meant to remain true to the aims of open-source and provide free information, controlled by the people who know it best.  It also rests  on the concept of user generated feedback being a force in crafting the content; thereby removing the reins of some proprietary company (insert corporate name here: Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.)  The concept is sound but requires quite a bit of input before any acknowledgeable results are seen.

The results are displayed with a “mini-article” at the top, if there is one created.  (Though they seem to frown on personal blogs and individual mini-articles.)  In essence, the “mini-article” is a light version of a Wikipedia entry and may be edited by those associated or with some factual knowledge.  The information also may contain images, which can be uploaded and applied by individuals.  To the right a result box for people matching your search terms appears.  This information is generated through the Wikia profiles you create in order to use the system to its fullest.  For instance, if someone typed in Google as a search term, then the “People matching “google” results may include a programmer who works at Google or maybe someone who really loves GoogleMaps, and put that in their profile.

I really like the social aspect being brought into the mix, but fear that it will only get so far as it takes so much to get input from  the public at large.  Of course all great concepts have to start somewhere, so if you have the time give it a whirl and see what you think.

I did want to mention how much this move reminds me of the Google Knol project and the possibilities I hinted at for Google searching with Knol.  (See my other post here.)

Libraries and Organizations in Facebook

As reported by the LibrarianInBlack, Facebook recently began to provide an outlet for the institutions many of the student members had been associated with.  Their new “pages” section allows for universities and, more importantly for us, libraries to have a space dedicated to reach out to the community.  The amount of useful applications for the “pages” is still rather small (in comparison to the typical profile offerings) but the few libraries who have taken the first steps are providing some wonderful examples.

Facebook pages for libraries:

• Hennepin County Library
• UNC Davis Library
• Odum Library @ Valdosta State
• Ryerson University Library

{The Engineering & Science Library page for Carnegie Mellon will be on this list soon enough.}