Finally, someone with a (thoughtful) voice of reason on Twitter. And it’s from Kathy Sierra (of Creating Passionate Users). She likens Twitter to gambling at a slot machine and notes that the rewards one gets from using Twitter are hollow and empty.

[Twitter] can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing.

I say Twitter is the Paris Hilton of the social web. Slutty and unfortunate. The basest manifestation of the culture and systems it represents.

I’ve received no less than 14 Twitter invitations from people whom I respect deeply and I have to wonder, why the **** are they using this? Who cares if you’re sitting in traffic, doing your homework, going to a concert, performing a bodily function, or reading a book?

I, like Kathy, am probably in the minority here, but I just hope we don’t get too distracted by this piece of candy 2.0 because, in the end, we really have better things to do. At least, I hope we do.

A few days ago, I asked whether libraries are mainstream. I pointed to popular culture to try to make the point that libraries are no longer considered to be the penultimate (oops) source of knowledge and enlightenment (insomuch as the everyman seeks enlightenment these days). That locus resides elsewhere in the minds of our population.

I was at the doctors office the other day and while I was in the waiting room, I was half-heartedly watching the TV in the corner–the Ellen DeGeneres Show. I wasn’t paying much attention. The sound was off and closed-captioning was scrolling by on the screen. Then I noticed she now has a segment on viral video–selections plucked from the tamest of the tame (dogs doing flips, or some shit). Then I thought about the idiots down in Texas who filmed themselves as they coerced a two and five year-old to smoke marijuana–a video that is in wide circulation both online and in the news (I refuse to link to it).

It’s an entirely new flavor of discourse when video of children being abused like this percolates into our consciousness.

The debate over whether the video should have been released in the first place is, by and large, a journalistic one (and I’m not so sure there is any debate to speak of anyway). Libraries have, however, along with journalists championed the open, transparent flow of information and media. So, perhaps we need to accept the horrifying along with the bizarre, intelligent, and the hilarious. If that’s the case then are we completely divorcing ourselves from content and grafting ourselves to a new model of distribution?

I’m not sure how to answer that, nor do I really know how to answer the question, What does it mean for us? Well, first, I think the job of disseminating and housing the data is taken care of as well as it possibly could be. So what remains? In this feedback loop of viral content and network effects, are there needs being left unattended, are there gaps in the experience where libraries can reside? There are some practical changes to be made, for sure.

The blog, Picturephoning, came onto my radar several weeks ago and since then it’s been holding my attention firmly. Not because of the videos it links to, but because the stories it covers begin, over time, to reveal some very interesting characteristics of this new media and, thus, the profound implications they have for our society and media. The stories range from the superficially humorous to the horrific. All reported with stark impartiality. It’s a gem of a site if what you’re after is a pulse to put your finger on.

It’s from there that I was referred to the Mail & Guardian online who, with their new service, The News in Photos, have begun to actively solicit photos from their readers. Their reasoning?

“This is our most visible step so far to embracing audience participation in the news,” says Vincent Maher, the newly appointed digital media strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online.

“As the power to crystallise reality shifts away from traditional media towards social construction by users of the Web, our role as a media company is shifting from one as a provider to one as a facilitator,”

Bingo. Shifting from provider to facilitator. I mentioned that there were some practical things we can do if we choose to participate in this media, and this is it right here.

I’ve written before that no matter how fabulous our collections are, they will ultimately be unremarkable. Our capacity to allow our users to engage in this new media is what will cement our position as a vital community resource, going forward.

That means many things, like providing the equipment and expertise to let them participate. But it also means, somehow, providing a sense of appropriateness and propriety that befits our institutions and the dignity of the human condition.

I realize that a statement like that flies in the face of library neutrality, but I do feel that we have a responsibility to not just connect our users to this new layer of content, but to also advise them in their endeavors so that they can produce content that is significantly richer than average. We also need to be prepared to stand by them when we will be, inevitably, called to account for what they do.

I was re-reading Dion Hinchcliffes post, “Social Media Goes Mainstream“, yesterday and it occurred to me to ask myself, “are libraries mainstream anymore?”

I don’t know. In so many ways, libraries are still very traditional organizations, entrenched in a very one-dimensional business model–that is, we lend material, answer reference questions, and provide a repository–ok, shelf space–for books that may, or may not, ever be touched (run a report on items that have not been checked-out in over ten years).

I think the library, as an institution, has slid, somewhat, into the periphery of our society’s sight. For example, despite Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code (”I need a library, quick!”), references to libraries in popular culture continue to be steeped in iconic images of the shushing librarian and annoyed patrons who glare at an offender who dares raise her voice above a whisper. When a library is portrayed in a movie, we see little old ladies fetching dusty tomes off some hard-to-reach shelf in an effort to help the protagonist track down esoteric knowledge of a demon lost to the annals of time. Contrast that with the number of times we see scenes of hot actors basking in the glow of their LCD panels.

I know these Hollywood generalizations are inaccurate and unfair, but I’m sure I’m not the only one of us that has noticed the characterizations we’ve been given. It’s important to take these into consideration because Hollywood is actually a fairly impartial depiction of America’s psyche (and when it’s not, it’s telling Americans what should be in their psyche). After all, most of our population shapes its world view around what it sees in the movies and on TV, sad as that may be. While we may hold this type of self-actualization in disdain, the American public are the very same people our public libraries serve, and also from whom we receive our funds.

Now, with the rise of Web 2.0, our users have thrust the social media into the mainstream. This has happened because the “networked environment” Hinchcliffe talks about is itself very much mainstream now. In fact, it’s so mainstream that it has begun to help define what aspects of our civilization become mainstream and thus, by default, which do not. and so, we now live in a society where the content that is in high-demand is readily available, pretty much anywhere. I’m talking about content like this:

(Link)

The Candy Mountain video has been circulating for almost a year now and it’s a prime example of how network effects are allowing society to disseminate, in this case, popular culture, and ultimately the bulk of information deemed “important” by our fellow citizens. And so, I’m left scratching my head (just like I was after I watched Charlieee’s adventure) wondering what the heck we’re supposed to be doing with our libraries.

So in the meantime, I’m thrilled to be with one of the libraries that is experimenting. There are a number of radical libraries that are casting about for a new direction. It’s dead reckoning for now. But we’re coming to some new realizations now that are intriguing. We’re thinking about physical space in a whole new way, we’re reaching out to our youth in ways that were never before considered, we’re fiddling around with the chemistry of the net, looking for some new alchemy that may ultimately lead to a new dawn for us. Is your library part of this?

I casually mentioned the semantic web the other day at the OLA Superconference in Toronto while speaking on a panel wth Michael Stephens and Amanda Etches-Johnson. I was trying to drive home the point that, as libraries, we ought to be much more clued in to such inevitabilities than we are (and if the semantic web doesn’t unfurl like Tim Berners-Lee envisions, it will be something equally as potent).

Late October, I also spoke about the “Semantic Library” at a Connecticut Library Consortium symposium.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon this gem:

(link)

via Seth Godin (and Alan Gray).

I had a great chat with Jon Udell and Ed Vielmetti last week during a recorded podcast that Jon has made available on his new blog. Jon is a great podcaster–he has the ability to make a session feel like a conversation and less like an interview which makes for a very interesting and enjoyable experience as one of the participants.

Anyway, we talked about superlibrarians and superpatrons within the context of Eric Von Hippel’s notion of “lead users.” This is an area that should be of great interest to libraries–specifically, how do we identify those lead users, then enable them to mash-up, remix, and create services, tools, and content. We can learn a great deal more from our users than we are currently used to and Von Hippel shows us how in a series of online videos and papers.

I mostly talked about PatREST–its history, what it is, where it might lead, and my decision to build a patron-oriented API on top of our existing ILS. Ed shared some interesting insights into his perspective as a consumer of PatREST and other non-standard distribution channels made available on AADL’s system.