LIS 9763

One thing I caught on with many of the readings, particularly Karin Coombs and Michael Sauers is that part of the marketing we need to do isn’t just towards our user base: we need to market any web 2.0 technology we wish to implement to our staff, and in a way I can’t help but think this may be harder to do than market to our users.

Maybe I spend too much time online (actually no, I definately spend too much time online), but I was raising my eyebrows while reading David Lee King's blogpost about how advertising on MySpace pages might be construed as endorsement.  Do people really still worry about this?
 
 [updated 4/3/09@8:25am]

My first experience with Facebook was a few years ago. It was about 6 months prior to facebook being open to business and high school registrants, and then later to public registration. When I started using it, only my post-secondary education peers were able to access and create profiles. In the short time between then and now, Facebook has exploded into more than a gossip-, homework-, and image-sharing tool. It's become a resource for unofficial background checks, family reunions, and, yes, library reference.

Of the readings this week, the Farkas blog entry identified what I consider to be the most relevant thing libraries should keep in mind when exploring the possibilities offered to them by social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. While Mack, et. al.

Do libraries have a place within online social networks? I say yes, there is great potential to reach current and potential users in a variety of meaningful ways, but we must tread carefully into this territory. As Roush (2006) illustrates, there are huge numbers of inhabitants in social networks – 95 million MySpace users in 2006…and then came the ridiculously successful advent of Facebook. If all of these people lived in one physical place, they would make up one of the most populated countries on the globe!

I don’t actually understand the way Myspace works, so AADL’s Myspace page is just plain strange to me because of this. The oddest thing about the AADL Myspace page is that it has 284 billion friends. I am not sure how that is even possible since there are only about 6.8 billion people on earth. Who are these friends and where did they come from? 

 As I read this week's articles I started to reflect how my teenage daughter uses mySpace and Facebook.  I'm not convinced that MySpace is used more by teens and Facebook by Undergrads - this may have been the case a few years ago, but today I'm being told that everyone is using Facebook and that MySpace is more for music. 
 

I have to say this week's readings appeal to me much more on a theoretical level (related to sociology, cultural studies, info & media studies) than on the practical level required for this course.  I found Danah Boyd's article particularly insightful; it comes as no surprise she is considered an expert on social networking sites. 
 

I think that the biggest reason for libraries to be aware of and be active in social networking was reported just this Monday.  On Monday, Nielsen Online reported that blogs and social networking are consuming more online time than checking and writing personal email.  Ok, this does not have to be a large deal, but it does show that there is a large amount of people participating in social networking.  This environment is also free and fairly easy for libraries to insert themselves into as show by our case studies.  Social networking sites such as Facebook and myspace mo

Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of social networks. Oh, I certainly don’t see anything wrong with them- although I don’t think I had much respect for MySpace prior to Boyd’s article- it’s just that they were never my cup of tea. Currently, I have an account on Facebook, but I really don’t use it much: I pop in once every other day, if that, to read updates, but otherwise don’t bother.