collaborative vs individual

• group - group of people, not the usual suspects
• interactive - information gets processed, massaged and analyzed
• cyclical - newer information gets assimilated into older knowledge

Think mailing lists, reading groups, professional organizations. next

bricks vs bits

Info seeking behavior, a lesson from library school. Then ... and now.

going to the library is more about getting facts, it's harder to get opinions/conventional wisdom. Why?

• publishing often reflects publisher
• fringe and radical more often misrepresented than not
• tough for sound bytes to reflect nuanced and complex facets of what's really happening -- people can see this
• microcontent and current events very hard to track down effectively

next

making it personal

Getting the facts is easier and easier, but how do you make the facts meaningful...?

Blogs good for personal and personalized info; group blogs +/-; online is better for getting a fuzzy feeling about a topic ... "the living web"

• webrings, warblogs, peaceblogs, livejournal "friends", buddy lists, etc
• Cass Sunstein [who wrote a book with the title of a URL he does not own...] says that the Internet is polarizing people to be like each other, more like themselves
• people collboratively collate information and turn it into knowledge
  "There's a difference between information and knowledge. It's the difference between Christy Turlington's phone number and Christy Turlington."

next

collaborative synergies

Newsweeks pioneered this in major media [to the best of my knowledge] with the CW index ... but whose opinions are these?

Collaborative information systems [formerly called collaborative filtering]

• blogs take news and make it personal
• group blogs &c take the personal and make it communal
• surveying these can give you a better indication of how groups feel about issues rather than reading tired old corporate media, or any advertiser sponsored media [NPR I am looking in your direction]
• serendipitous discovery of issues "more like this" or the berrypicking model

next

about berrypicking

1. Query is constantly shifting
2. As search continues, new ideas and directions emerge
3. Value of the search is in bits and pieces picked up along the way

next

the where, there

• metafilter.com & the filter family [book, music, war, sports]
• slashdot.org [group blog with editors, heavy commenting, reputation]
• plastic.com [group blog with reputation and "publishing"]
• lisnews.com [group blog with specific editors, commenting]
• fark.com [blog with comments & community]
• boingboing.net [group blog with editors, bbs style comments]

salient points overall

• editors and users/commenters
• reputation and/or non-anonymous usage
• open source platform & ease of use
• throttle control

next

the google comparison

Google -> Daypop [and others technorati.com popdex blogdex]
G. Directory -> dmoz.org
G. News -> newsblogs, daypop word burst
G. Images --> photoblogs, American Memory, community indexed photo archive

next

see also

So ... the very real threat isn't that people will stop going to the library and only use the internet.

The real "threat" to the library as an institution is that people will be using their CISes to investigate topics and ideas in much the same way information professionals can guide and inform and suggest.

This paradigm shift itself is what can be making libraries and librarians less relevant to their former jobs [and much more relevant as archivists and preservationists], through no fault of their own.

CISes can create knowledge and provide useful pointers to existing sources, but the sources still need to be there to be accessed.