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.

A Community Shyft?

A post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus section highlighted a new trend in online feed reading. Author Hurley Goodall raised the question as to whether new web services such as Shyfter, Twitter, Slashdot, or FriendFeed would ultimately lead to the demise of individually created blogs.

In the words of Stowe Boyd,

conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Where I would agree that for a certain segment of the online population, the “forum” format is a more immediate and comfortable way to communicate, but there is a bit of difference in an informational blog post and a conversational forum post. In truth I could easily see the channel working both ways as I may post forum conversations on my blog and my blog posts on a forum. The real key is keeping the pathways to the original author clear and easily traveled.

Eavesdropping on a sorely missed conference (CIL2008)

Being the tech-junkie I am, I was pleased to find some fellow library bloggers talking about the presentations they were attending at the Computers in Libraries 2008 conference. Though being there to hear with my own ears would be preferred, hearing the opinions of my colleagues is nearly as good.

Librarian in Black

• Computers in Libraries 2008: Widgets, Tools, & Doodads for Library Webmasters
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Technology Training for Library Staff: Creativity Works!
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Fast & Easy Site Tune-Ups
• Computers in Libraries 2008: User-Generated Content
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Web 2.0 Services for Small and Underfunded Libraries
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Lee Raine’s Opening Keynote

David Lee King

• All his posts so far from CIL2008

Tame The Web’s listing of CIL2008 posts

David Rothman’s One stop RSS feed list for CIL2008

LibraryWebHead’s Report on Day one

As I find more I will keep updating the post.

MS FaceBook

Announced on 10/24/2007, computer giant Microsoft won the bidding war with Google to become a 1.6% shareholder in their company. Seen as a business venture for Facebook to increase their advertising revenue, one wonders how this will affect the user experience and integration of third-party apps.

In my opinion there may have been more to gain with Google, after seeing how their many and continuing research projects have changed the way we use the web. Who knows, maybe now Google will go after more chances with Facebook rival MySpace. For more on the MySpace plan see my earlier post.