Social Software: Using Technology to Manage Your World Ed Sperr Program Director, Digital Solutions NELINET, Inc
Social Software To Manage Your World
Nov 01, 2014
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Social Software: Using Technology to Manage Your World
Ed Sperr
Program Director, Digital Solutions
NELINET, Inc
Roadmap
• What is Social Software?
• Blogs, Feeds and Wikis
• Bookmarking the World
• Taking your documents online
What is Social Software?
What is Social Software?
• Last year's marketing slogan?
• A revolution in human consciousness?
• Tools that assist in the sharing and organization of information
Why should I care?
• Social Software is trendy
• All the cool kids are doing it
• Social Software is genuinely useful
Focus on Tasks, not Tools
del.icio.us
Sharing Images/Video
•Flickr•Photobucket•YouTube
Blogging
•Typepad•Blogger•Wordpress
Storing/Sharing Bookmarks
•De.licio.us•Digg
Sharing Documents
•Zoho•Google
Social applications fall into functional
categories
"Save the time of the reader"-S.R. Ranganathan
Usefulness comes first (socialness comes
later)
Requirements for successful social
applications
• A compelling use case
• Enough users to leverage network effects
Social Applications evolve from their
context
• Tough to invent a category – easier to build on existing applications
• Concepts (such as "tagging" or "friending") get re-used across categories
• Applications are in "constant beta" – functionality runs together as things become popular
If an application is useful for you then use it
Otherwise, don't bother
Blogs, Feeds and Wikis
What’s a Blog?
… a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order.
—Wikipedia, accessed 5/22/06
What’s a Blog?
• Soapbox
• Personal Journal
• Outreach/Marketing
• Newsletter
• Archive
Blogs can also be…
• Mechanism for feedback
• A conversation
• A community of practice
Searching Blog posts…
• Technorati
• Bloglines
• Also many general search engines: Google, ask, etc.
Finding Blogs…
• Hard to miss 'em – Technorati (supposedly) tracks more than 70 million weblogs. Back in 2005 Walt Crawford found 238 of them in librarianship alone
• Find one or two you like: look at their "blogroll" and see where they link to
Creating your own Blog
First have something to say – Walt Crawford
• Think about the who and why, then the how
Creating your own blog…
• Hosted Solutions:– No muss, no fuss – get started right
away
– Sometimes free
– However, no control over the host (if it goes down, all you can do is wait)
– Applications include Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com
Creating your own blog…
• Software on your own server– You have control
– Installation can be complex
– Applications include Movable Type and WordPress
Let's give it a try…
Where it is:http://forums.nelinet.net/blogs/class
Username: vermont
Password: vermont
Blogs in Libraries
• Brown University Library News
• Library News and Subject Blogs– Georgia State University
• UThink at University of Minnesota
Too much information? RSS to the rescue!
RSS (and Atom, and etc.)
• RSS = Really Simple Syndication
• aka Feeds
• Uses XML (but the user doesn't see it)
Feeds…
• Are machine-readable XML
• Allow you to subscribe to content using an aggregator– Can go one place to keep track of content from
many providers
• You Subscribe to newspapers, blogs, newsletters…the sky's the limit
Types of feeds
• You can subscribe to newspapers, blogs and most other things you can imagine…– Open Access News
– Boston Globe – Food Stories
– MBLC Job Listings
– Univ. of Alabama Libraries New Titles - LC class QH
– PubMed Search: "HPV"
Using Feeds
• Dedicated Feed Readers:– Bloglines
– Google Reader
• Personal "portal" pages– My Yahoo!
– Pageflakes
Using Feeds…
• Natively in many browsers
• Showing them on your own pages using feed2js or other tools
Wiki Wiki!
“In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the
process of creating HTML pages
so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states.”
combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time,
retrieved 4/24/06 from Wikipedia
What is a Wiki?
• Wikis are typically collaborative – folks can add content and even edit one another's stuff
• By design, Wiki documents are always in flux
Blog or Wiki?
• Wikis are documents, blogs are content streams
• Blog posts have an individual voice, while wikis represent the collective
• Both are just essentially rudimentary content management Systems (CMSs)
So, you want a wiki?
• Why do you want one? Make sure you're solving a problem
• Create policies– Public resource or private?
– Do users have to log in to edit?
• Train and promote – rinse, repeat
Wiki Software
• Again, one of your biggest choices is between hosted applications– SeedWiki, pbwiki, etc…
• …and those you install yourself– MediaWiki, TWiki, etc…
• Many (many) more can be found at WikiMatrix
One Wiki app in particular…
• PBwiki (http://pbwiki.com/)– Easy to use
– Hosted for you (free or premium - free version includes Google ads)
– Multiple editors
– RSS
– Tracking and custom CSS templates available (premium)
– Lock down who can view content
Let's give it a try…
Where it is:http://nelinet.pbwiki.com
Invite code: library
Wikis in Libraryland
• Library Success Wiki
• Stony Brook HSC Library Intranet
• Biz Wiki
Bookmarking the World
Bookmarks are…
• Hard to search / organize
• Non-portable
• Better stored online?
Bookmarks + Public availability = Social
Bookmarking
• Del.icio.us
• Simpy
Using social bookmarks for discovery
•Things on del.icio.us tagged "reference"
•Works best when a community comes together to (formally or informally) agree on a tag
Social Bookmarks in the Library
•PennTags!
•Italian Studies page at TCNJ (fed by del.icio.us feeds)
Moving your documents
online
The web is your “office”
• Many different types of files can be stored online (many times for free!)– Presentations
– Documents
– Spreadsheets and Databases
Advantages of online storage
• Get to things from wherever you are
• Several folks can collaborate on a single project
Some places that will host your documents
• Zoho
• Google Docs
• Slideshare
Let's give it a try…
Where it is:http://www.zoho.com
Username: nelinet_class
Password: library
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