Web 2.0, Hip or Hype - A Library Perspective

Chad Fennell & Shane Nackerud University of Minnesota Libraries EQS 2007 May 2, 2007 Web 2.0 Hip or Hype

10 years later...

Semantic Web Proposal
Enrich every piece of the data on the web with metadata conveying its meaning
Added context will help computers and users find more meaningful data
Berners-Lee Proposal from 2000
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/DevelopmentProposal

Web 2.0
Coined by Tim O’Reilly in September 2005
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Web based applications that allow for collaboration and sharing of information
Web 2.0 applications change based on user expectations
Perpetual beta
Web 2.0 applications allow for the reuse of data
Mashups
Web 2.0 applications are easy to use
Web 2.0 applications encourage users to help build the information environment
User trust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

What does Web 2.0 encompass?
RSS
Wikis
Blogs
User supplied reviews
Podcasting
Tags and Folksonomy
AJAX
New interfaces
Social networking
Social bookmarking
Gaming
Mashups
Recommendation functionality
How have libraries reacted?

Library 2.0
Library 2.0 is all about library users -- it's about participation -- involving users in service creation and evaluation.
http://www.squidoo.com/library20/
Creating user friendly services that people expect, and encouraging participation
Any service, physical or virtual, that successfully reaches users, is evaluated frequently, and makes use of customer input is a Library 2.0 service.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html
Areas of change: policy, programming, physical spaces, and technology

Focus
Technology for technology’s sake is wrong
What are you creating a blog for? A wiki? RSS feeds?
Hopefully to meet a user need
What are our goals with these technologies?
How can we really “add value”?
Improve the user experience
Get in the flow of the user

Attention and Workflow
Then
Resources scarce, attention abundant
Users built workflow around the library
Now
Attention scarce, resources abundant
The library must build its services around user workflow
Lorcan Dempsey – “Getting into the Flow” (2007)
How does Web 2.0 fit in?
Users expect it
Users prefer it

What can you do?
Easy Stuff
mashups, reuse of data, RSS feeds, using external 2.0 technology
Challenging Stuff
building your own 2.0 projects
Hard Stuff
meeting expectations in existing applications

Catalog/Amazon Mashup Want to use it? http://www.lib.umn.edu/site/firecat.phtml

Add your catalog to search
Add your catalog to Firefox 2.*, Internet Explorer 7
OpenSearch Technology
http://www.opensearch.org/Home

Easy to build search box Blog RSS Feed Aleph X created RSS Feed LibData RSS Feed

Our home pages are widgets Universal Widget API from netvibes: http://dev.netvibes.com/

Challenging Stuff Building your own 2.0 applications

Wisdom of Crowds
British scientist Francis Galton went to the fair
Watched the crowd try to guess the weight of a fat ox
The ox weighed 1,198 lbs.
The crowd’s average guess (about 800 people) was 1,197 lbs.
No one person got close, but the crowd collectively made the best guess
Critical Mass

Benefits
Promotes intellectual freedom
Connects the library with the traditional academic enterprise
Over 50% of the active blogs on the system are class based
Helps the library retain the cultural memory of the U
Google PageRank
Changes perceptions
Creates relationships

Benefits
Allows for tagging in local systems and better control of data
Ties better to UPenn link resolver
Creates local communities / classroom communities
Extending code to do more
Image collection ala Flickr
Does it contain the critical mass needed? Is that important?

Staff Wiki

Benefits
Chance to learn technology in a non-threatening way
Revolutionized staff pages
Gives all our staff the chance to give a major 2.0 technology a try
Encourages staff to consider new ways to use the technology
Are wikis appropriate for public web pages? In a library setting?
Do we have enough “radical trust”?

RugLinks http://alerts.ub.rug.nl/

Create RSS feeds

Benefits
Mashup of two different technologies: SFX and Metalib
RSS feeds are created to go through RUG proxy server
Creates RSS feeds for journals that don’t have feeds (and some that do)
Gives the user one interface to master
Includes email option for people unfamiliar with RSS
Is it perfect? No.

Hard Stuff Meeting expectations with existing applications

Plymouth State University – WPOpac

North Carolina State University

In conclusion
Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 memes have been valuable
Forced libraries to reevaluate services and tools
Re-focused library tools and services on users
Ease of use
User contribution and participation
User needs and goals
There is much more work to be done

Web 2.0, Hype Alert!

Disclaimer Fear, uncertainty, and doubt ( FUD ) is a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt

What the Heck Does 2.0 Really Mean???
“ The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness.”
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/21.html

(vague, nebulous cloud)

Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0
“… I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. “
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206.txt

Looking at a 2.0 technology - Tagging
folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages , photographs and Web links , using open ended labels called tags .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy#Origin

“ Organizing” Things
End-User Style

Pay Me Now

Or…Pay Me Later http:// del.icio.us/mendel?settagview =cloud

Controlled Vocabularies
Pros:
Makes finding stuff easier for everyone
Help users find “everything” – good recall
Cons
Hard to keep current
High up-front cost
Terminology issues - “Neoplasms,” not “Cancer”
Relegated mostly to the realm of “Professionals”

“ Folksonomies”
Pros
Low Up-Front Cost, Low Barrier
Participatory
Best for “Personal Refindability”
Amateur friendly
Cons
Terrible for helping me find your stuff
Deferred Cost Will Be High, Eventually

Build it and they will come?
On Architectures of Participation

Even High Volume Sites Fail at Tags
“Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff.“
“If Amazon with its unsurpassed traffic is having trouble, can other ecommerce sites hope to make tagging work?”
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php

On the Subject of “Social”
Is “Social” Synonymous With “Good”?

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/11/spam-farms-social-web.html

The “Digg Mafia”
“ People have started to question the efficiency of its voting system; a system that lets a small minority i.e. ' The Digg Mafia ' decide what makes it onto the homepage or not; something that a wider user base should do. “ -Ajay D’Souza
http://techtites.com/2007/02/17/why-the-digg-mafia-will-cost-kevin-rose-millions/

http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_The_Digg_Mafia_Will_Cost_Kevin_Rose_Millions

“ One "games a system" (for example, the tax code) when one acts in such a way that one gains tax advantages by exploiting a tax rule that was intended for some other purpose.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequence#Purposeful_gaming_to_achieve_unintended_consequences

Extortion, Threats and Lies
Buying and selling of feedback itself
Feedback “extortion” –threats to leave negative feedback unless sellers lower prices
Retaliatory negative feedback
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3587651

So is Web 2.0 Hype?
You decide. Hype is about someone else telling you what to think.
Make your decision based on
What the Technology IS/DOES
What you or your users need
Think Like a Designer
Design: “to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan” –Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary

Still, I Design for Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Contextualized
Code Snippets
Aimed at educational technologists, course designers and web geeks – unobtrusive and puts the user in control
Puts library-generated course pages into users’s context
EthicShare
Scholarly needs drive the requirements
Not social for the sake of being social – designed around scholarly activities and practices

So, Hip or Hype?
You tell us………………
Chad Fennell and Shane Nackerud
University of Minnesota Libraries
[email_address]
[email_address]

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Web 2.0, Hip or Hype - A Library Perspective

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