Thoughts on Web 2.0

I suppose the best way to summarize my thoughts on the program i to look back at all of my posts here.

At times I found the process of working through web 2.0 tedious at best for tools which I will never use, like technorati. At other times, I found the resources valuable like Zotero which i don't think i would have found without doing this exercise.

For the most part, I find the Web to be an unorganized land-fill of opinion. It is too big to be controlled properly for useful data mining. But some of these tools give us the opportunity to bypass the garbage; wikis (controlled and managed by experts who care), Rollyo, (allowing only certain trusted sites to be searched thus eliminating t-0shirt ads) and Zotero, (a wonderful organizational tool for research writing) have made this journey worthwhile.

Do not be surprised to see more ramblings on my blog.... not about using these tools, but ramblings that are enhanced by implementing these tools

Signing off of 23 things.

-Dan

Pandora

My favorite way to get through work is to hook my droid up to the stereo and pick an artist I like and let Pandora create the radio station. i have stations for most of my favorite artists and have the power to expand or combine stations. Through Pandora's indexing, the company randomly picks tunes that are related to my band of choice, I then get to choose whether I like their choice or not. If not, I click a thumbs down, and never do I have to hear that tune again!

As I have been commuting from Rochester to Buffalo four days a week. having Pandora hooked through my droid and my car stereo has been a "godsend".

My favorite thing about Pandora?... If I hear something new, I can log onto my laptop and get all of the details necessary to begin research into discovering new music.

A Library 2.0 perspective

John Riemer's article To better bibliographic services is fantastic. Without dealing with the wasteland of information on the web, he gets down to brass tacks about how technology can be used to build better library systems.

As i read his article I began to envision, through the use of Worldcat, and Library 2.0 a single research library. One that may have many buildings across many geographic zones. One that may have duplicate items in the same building or duplicate items in many buildings, but one that only has enough of all the items to be useful and resourceful. A library with a singular system for locating, accessing and possibly delivering information quickly and easily to any researcher anywhere.

One can dream

Zotero

At last, Something that functionally works like 'notes' from mac. This is going to take some more exploration, but to be able to capture full text research articles, organize them, note them, and cite them across many formats (Word, Blog, shared documents) WOW. This cuts the countless hours of tracking and citing sources in their correct formats simple.

Why did you save the best thing for last 23 things? WHY?

OK, just starting with this thing, i already have a folder set up for my bibliography class (Beethoven... and yes there is nothing in there yet) but I have 5 articles about technology in library settings which can be found right here... Dan's Zotero.

Rollyo

My Politics is a search roll that I created to get insight on both sides of the political spectrum for issues. Rollyo is a nice tool, it can be great for reviews from trusted sources, weeding out the unnecessary. I see this as being much important to a librarian as a personal tolated tool for acquisition and discovery. It could be great for linking searches related to new trends in libraries amongst good librarian blog rolls.

Library Thing

As I forge ahead and try to complete 23 things, most of which are old hat or not helpful, save google tools and wikis, I find Library Thing. This is a wonderful site for catolging my own collection and really finding more books that will interest me. it allows for talking with others of common interest. It is much more organized and easily managed than most web tools and makes me happy.... I am attaching a widget when I figure it out..... Oh, here it is...

adendum to google tools

Yes I also map with Google earth. Just good stuff all around.

Google Tools

Yes, I'm becoming a fan. I struggle sometimes to learn new methods, but i have to say that Shared documents are amazing. Especially when tracking who changed them and archived versions are available. Furthermore. Google Calendar is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Booking numerous bands with multiple people and multiple availabilities is a breeze with Google calendar (provided the humans keep their calendars up to date. My wife keeps me informed through the calendar. These types of tools make email look like snail mail.

Wiki, a change of tune... or an old tune resurfaced?

As I rail on open source information and the influx of useless or cumbersome tools that try to organize the junkyard of words and images available to us all... The i get the wiki exercise for my LIS 506 class, and while there are still major cons with the wiki situation, it is a tool that I actively use for information retrieval.

First, let me address the major pitfalls of wikis... they are too open! Like specialized encyclopedias 9which are closed to specific authors) there is no real editorial policy and contributors can submit some really awful stuff. As Stephen cobert has mentioned, anyone can create their own wikiality - their own reality by posting it on a wiki (wikipedia was his target).

That said, there is a real upside to wikis that i haven't seen in many other 2.0 sharing tools. That is organization and cataloging. This helps information on wiki be policed better, even though their remains no editorial policy.

What do I mean?

So I am interested in elephants. putting a google search for elephants, wikipedia will be among the first hits that come up. It is easy to find my subject (and it is easy for experts to find my subject as well) The community of experts in any field, or subject have a vested interest in having their subject reflected accurately in the most of popular forums and given the easy access they have to finding and correcting information on this platform they can police their subject.

The format, and organization of wikis are the aspect of control that is lacking in tag generators and blog searches. Is it perfect? no, but it better organized and serves a specific online community of users. It is a good example of a public domain digital library.

OK, the philosphizing is over. Why do i have such a glowing review of wikis when all my other posts on web access are awful? One site IMSLP. The International Music Score Library Project. It is a wiki devoted to capturing, storing, cataloging, and retrieving digital images of public domain scores. It is linked with Sibley Music library (which had a $200,000 grant to digitize its scores) so the Sibley collection can be uploaded to IMSLP and accessed by scholars world-wide. Furthermore, the same scholars that use this as a resource post their scholarship in other sections of IMSLP. You can see research and get bibliographic links to your favorite composers or historical aspects of music. Again, because of the organization of the wiki (subjects easily accessible) and the community of users (music scholars) the users police themselves.

This wiki is probably among my top 5 resources for music research and shows how effective an open source, open use digital library can be when it is organized correctly.

Technorati

I think i blogged earlier in my rss feeds post about how unmanageable Technorati was. I could not find an easy way to search tags. There was a way to search for words in content and titles of blogs, but all in all it is another unwieldy tool trying to organize the infinite volume of cyber-chatter (of which this blog is part of) on the web.

According to Milton Babbitt, there are two subjects that everybody thinks they are qualified to opine on, regardless if they have actually studied them, Music and Politics. He says that no one would dare express opinions on physics papers without actually having a background in physics, so why should they be allowed to have opinions on the subjects of music and politics which they know nothing about.... WELL. Technorati is here to dispel the myth that those are the only two subjects uneducated people can opine on. And, technorati makes finding the actual scholars in these subjects difficult to find as it provides a platform for the ignorant.

Maybe it's my cynical nature, or my lack of sleep, but the more I explore web apps for learning 2.0 and library applications, the more I think that the web and its apps have become an information landfill. If you're willing to spend a lot of time there in the stench, you MIGHT find something of worth.

It's Delicious!

So, onward with my learning 23 things for web 2.0. Next stop is Del.icio.us. A social bookmarking tool similar to Diigo. There are some neat features that allow you to track other Delicious users (or scholars). A couple of philosophical issues rear their heads. First, it is too easy to rely on specific users and slant toward biased research. Second, the categorizing and indexing of links is purely subjective by users and not professionals. The problem with this is clear; as tags build on any specific link they get too great to be useful, or conversely, if they are not tagged extensively enough in the first place, they don't get found.

This seems to be the common theme I am finding in Web 2.0... But I think I get to write more about that later.... stay tuned

RSS search engines

Warning, this is an opinion piece regarding the usefulness of trying to find anything through an RSS search-engine:

Not a fan of Topix. Tough to search for useful categorized information. The syndic8 website was so horrible I didn’t even want to try to search for anything useful. Technorati was a little better, and Realtime search was also awful.

I don’t subscribe to the popular, because I find the popular is misinformed and looking for sensationalism. The problem with the RSS generators is they rank stuff by popularity and not by useful categorized information. Furthermore, how many RSS feeds can any individual get before they are, once again bombarded with so much useless information to weed through in order to get useful stuff, that they just stop paying attention to everything in their feeds.

There has to be a simpler, efficient way to target information that is useful without fighting through mountains of meaningless words. Navigating the web through these sites is like taking a card catalog, dumping all the cards on the floor, mixing them up, and then trying to find the one you want. It’s not useful.

rss

If this is the most difficult thing to do in 23 things then I'm Scott free!. I like the Google reader and search functions, Very quickly I found a number of great Zappa feeds, and musicology feeds. The Alex Ross feed will probably be the most used in the bunch.

Uses for libraries are great. Public libraries can keep their constituents informed of goings on and new acquisitions. One great application for scholars would be to notify when "moving walls" move, or updating users of released electronic journals. This could be even more useful if you could sort Journal entry feeds by LCSH.

Problems exist though, how many feeds can one sift through? Again I confronted with the notion that while we can have more information sent to use quicker than ever before, how much of any of this can one human mind process? This is the persistent question in the technological age.

Librivox

I was directed to a nice site, Librivox. Their goal is to get every book in the public domain into audiobook form. There is some great stuff here, but they are also missing some important works. On of the first books I looked for has been essential for my research, Plato's Laws wasn't there. Many of Plato's works were and I suppose I could volunteer to read for an entry. Unfortunately I do not have the time, and like most of my favorite sites like IMSLP they operate with no maoney and acquisitions and submissions are a labor of love.

Anyway, for giggles, I am downloading Jabberwocky by various readers just to get new interpretations on Lewis Carroll's nonsensical masterpiece.

Podcasts

I don't subscribe to podcasts. It's just one of those things like TV, that if I get a chance, I will listen. I probably should pay closer attention now that I have an FM transmitter for my car radio and droid, and therefore can use my drive time between Buffalo and Rochester productively, but then again there is much to say about down-time.

Regardless, there are some podcasts that I download individual shows from regularly. Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Sound Opinions are my favorites.

For my exercise in my info technology class I went looking for a podcast dealing with issues in digital music libraries... no luck... but serendipitously I found a podcast of lectures from the Library of Congress on Music and the Brain which is absolutely fascinating.

Youtube 23 things

Youtube has become a go to place. With tags one can find the info they want very quickly. It’s kind of a neat experiment as it takes some of the tools that information professionals use and puts it into the hands of the user. The user who uploads a video needs to know how to tag, index, and classify their video if they want it to be viewed. Also creating simple titles that will include common but specific words that will promote their video to the niche they want. For example, “Library Tutorial” could be a great tag or title as someone who is looking for info on how to search catalogs could find your video easily. The problem then lies in the reality that “Library Tutorial” could also link you to tutorials about other things, but are offered in libraries. The solution that I like in Youtube is playlists. If I create a playlist for Library Tutorials, a number of videos present themselves, and I can easily browse through the sub-categories for the specific tutorial I want.
Kind of unrelated, but not really, I use Youtube as a music player. Instead of digging up random playlists on Pandora, I can immediately seek, through tags and titles the music I want. The problem here is the numerous violations of intellectual freedom and copyright laws. There are more bootlegs on Youtube than in a serious Deadhead’s tape collection. Gail Zappa (wife of the late Frank Zappa) hires people to scour youtube and pull videos of her husband which are violations of copyright…. But she can’t keep up with them. Here’s my favorite Zappa Video (Music conducted by Pierre Boulez)

3rd party FilckR site

Just playing around on my 23 things to do and discovered that the montage tool, while really cool, only works well wiuth good tags and good photos. So instead I thought I'd use http://flickrslidr.com/index.php to set up a slide show of my January trip to LA. Enjoy!!!


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.