Thing #2

What is Library 2.0?

"Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future." -- Meredith Farkas

According to this entry in Wikipedia, a guy named Michael Casey coined the term Library 2.0 in his blog LibraryCrunch. Casey had an interesting entry on October 30 -- he talks about the 37,000+ people who were part of the Twitter group following the Mars Phoenix lander. The @MarsPhoenix updates on Twitter have now gone dead -- this sounds like it would have been a really neat thing to have been a part of.

Rob Horning reports on a different type of experience in an entry in PopMatters titled "Twitter: the ultimate advertising medium." Horning says "My personal Twitter experiment has failed miserably. I created an account and tried to post for a while; I even set it up so that I could post messages with my phone. But I discovered I had nothing to say in that forum. I didn’t want to share what I was doing with the world, and I didn’t have enough witticisms to keep it thriving. It was tiring trying to think aphoristically—it turns out that most would-be aphorisms require a lot of developmental context to be comprehensible."

Following the update links in Horning's article, we find, via this post in Mother Jones, which says that Twitter has ruined Robert Scoble's life! He has Twittered away 2,555 hours in the past year! Mother Jones contributor Kevin Drum concludes "one of the problems with Twitter: like Facebook, it doesn't really make too much sense unless you spend a lot of time with it. It doesn't have to be 2,555 hours a year, mind you, but both Facebook and Twitter strike me as things that are perhaps moderately useful if you use them occasionally, but potentially highly useful if you're logged into them constantly and use them as primary tools for keeping in touch with people. That's unlike the blogosphere, where most people pick three or four blogs to follow and read them once a day for 20 minutes or so, and it's one of the things that makes these services hard to 'get' unless you're totally committed to them."

Meanwhile, one of Robert's friends is calling for an intervention.

...(later)...OK, I just stumbled on this interesting blog entry by Meredith Farkas, who works in Vermont, and has spent a lot of time in Florida libraries. Meredith states: "Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future" is at the core of Library 2.0.