Category: me!

How was your day, dear? myspace and irc and blogs, oh my!

Posted on by jessamyn

It’s been a while since I talked about what I do all day. Now that I’m a bit more outspoken about the work I do at MetaFilter, I’ll wrap that into my little daily report. This is from yesterday.

I got up around 8 or 9, drank water and coffee and turned on my laptop (yes, it’s off at night, until I have an office, this will be the case, the darned thing GLOWS otherwise). I checked through MetaFilter to make sure that 1) no one did something terrible overnight, where terrible = vandalized or otherwise abused the site 2) no one had any questions that need an admin attention (there were a few, nothing terribly difficult) 3) no double posts or other guideline-breaking posts needed attention. This is managed through a flagging queue where people can bring a troublesome or excellent posts or comments to the moderators’ attention. The guy who runs the site, Matt Haughey, is on the West Coast so usually I am awake before him and before most of the site members, it seems. Now that he has a young daughter, that is less the case.

Once I made sure that things were running smoothly, I checked my email. The MetaFilter email all goes into its own gmail folder. It’s another way to see if there is anything not visible on the site that I need to know or deal with. Sometimes this is people alerting me to broken HTML or otherwise needing editing assistance. Yesterday it was a site user complaining that another user was taunting her and otherwise picking a fight with her. I went in to the thread and removed a few comments. I’ll check for anonymous posts that need to be approved, project posts that need to be approved. Once that stuff was all set, I downloaded the newest songs from the newest part of the site, music.metafilter.com, which is the first podcast I’ve ever really listened to. On a site with 40,000 members, a milestone we hit yesterday, keeping up with the creative work the members are doing is more of a pleasure than work.

There really isn’t a sense of “on the clock” or “off the clock” in this job. I’m paid for about 20 hours a week and me and my boss both think I work about that much. Once I’m done with admin stuff I might answer a few Ask MetaFilter questions or maybe just go do something else online or off. How many other librarians get to keep a list of all the questions they’ve answered?

I also have a few writing projects I’m working on: one book chapter, one book introduction, one training session happening at the end of August, and the freegovinfo.info post on open access to government information which took quite a bit of time.

I drive to the school where I do the drop-in time around 12:30. I’m available for anyone who needs help with computers from 1-4, twice a week. Once the school year starts I’ll be there two days after school to help the kids in the Adult Diploma Program get some tech skils in-between all the credits they need to graduate with a diploma instead of a GED. I have keys to the school but there are usually some people there in the Summer. My students yesterday, all of whom are in their seventies, included

  • The woman who just got an ipod shuffle and is trying with moderate success to get her classical music on it. We walked through the iTunes preferences to make sure it was acting the way she wanted it to. She brought her own laptop to drop-in time.
  • The woman who was selling a copy of the album Paint Your Wagon on eBay. She was having trouble with her digital camera, a cheapie $20 deal someone gave her. It turned out that the batteries were in backwards (her vision is not great and she’s vain and doesn’t like to wear glasses) and then that the drivers for the camera weren’t installed. Then we STILL couldn’t get it to work, so I took a picture with my own camera and emailed it to her. She also brought her own laptop, an ancient Compaq that she got from a computer recycling store. It was running Windows ME when she got it, but she couldn’t get it to work with any of her other stuff, printers, camera, so she took it back and they put Windows 2000 on it. Every time something goes wrong with it, she drives 22 miles to the fixit guy to get him to repair it. There’s only so much I can do. Last month she sold a Montblanc pen on eBay for $700. I taught her pretty much everything she knows.
  • The woman from the garden club who has a Mac running OS9 at home but wants to be able to work on text files at the drop-in lab as well. She bought a thumb drive and has a copy of the garden club mailing list. I showed her how to save it as a text file and tried to explain why the ClarisWorks files were mumbo jumbo when she tried to open them on the lab PCs. I suggested she think about getting a newer computer (I have several older iMacs that would fit the bill, I think) or a copy of MS Word. Her computer guy will come to her house, something I don’t do, and charges her $90 an hour. He installed FileMaker Pro for her to maintain the mailing list which I think is a bit of a mistake.
  • The woman I know from the pool, the one I went to the emergency room with when she had a gall bladder attack last year. She has a new Yahoo email account and met some people in Costa Rica who she played bridge with. They now send her a metric ton of stupid joke emails per day, some of which she loves and some of which she hates. I taught her how to forward an email (and how to remove all the extra header information before she does) and how to send an email to more than one person. Every time I teach her a new thing that yahoo can do, she always acts like I’ve taught her how to levitate.

I also had my chat window open, and I talked to Meredith about a colleague and made some plans to hang out next week. I chatted with my MetaFilter boss about a few problem users and what to do about a few site questions.

After I got home, I had dinner and hung out and played human dictionary for some of the local kids and my landlady who were playing Scrabble. After she went to bed, I helped her former foster kid take a good picture of himself for his MySpace account. He wouldn’t put a shirt on, but he did insist on wearing baggy jeans which he then had to hold up with one hand. We got to spend a lot of time talking about MySpace and what he likes about it, and I helped him change his stylesheet to something not quite so ugly.

After everyone had gone to bed, I hopped on IRC to chat with people I know from the loose MetaFilter universe (actually a spin-off site called MetaChat) and we actually wound up talking about — surprise surprise — libraries. Here’s a small excerpt:

[0:12:37] <n****> i left my camera in a starbucks next door to the library and left town for the weekend before i realized. the starbucks people wouldnt answer their phone, so i called the library and one of the librarians went over to the starbucks, got the camera, and held onto it until i could get someone to go down there and grab it for me
[0:13:59] <f**> I don't think any of the librarians at my library would even check the coffee shop that's IN the library. hahaha.
[0:14:51] <n****> what kind of library do you work in?
[0:15:26] <f**> Well the problem with my library right now is this. It's half librarians that have been there for 30+ years and then a group of young ones.
[0:15:26] <jessamyn> I don't, I teach email to old people at the local vocational high school and do outreach to all the libraries in the county who send kids to that school [it's regional] and help thenm use their computers
[0:15:41] <f**> And the older ones aren't really jumping on what the younger ones are saying.
[0:15:47] <n****> oh cool
[0:15:48] <jessamyn> yeah that's a classic problem

I stayed up just long enough to make a post of my own to MetaFilter on the eve of its seventh birthday — a nice post if I do say so myself — and then went to bed.

Contest – help me with a guest blogger spot (closed)

Posted on by jessamyn

No, not here. For the last tumultuous month I have been a guest blogger over at Freegovinfo.info, that great site dedicated to maintaining and preserving free access to government information. I’ll be the guest there this month as well. I’ve made a few posts that I’m really proud of, about ALA resolutions, food recovery, identity document policy and, of course, the EPA library debacle. However, the area of government information, while very interesting to me, is not my specialty. Also, I am cleaning my room, like really cleaning it.

The way these two things are connected is like this: I am getting rid of some of the accumulated librarian schwag I have gotten over the past year. You can see the annotated schwag here. I would like some suggestions for good things to write about on FreeGovInfo as I am looking in my own usual places. I know that people around here are generally friendly and helpful anyhow, but I thought a few Read rings might sweeten the pot… or not. In any case, leave a comment with your suggestions — doesn’t have to be overtly political but should have some relevance to freegovinfo’s mission, needs to be about government information, not just goverment or just information — and I’ll pick a winner over the next few days. Winner gets mailed all that great schwag (I’ll email you for your mailing address) and gets a link to their blog/site/whatever in any post I eventually write. I may use more than one topic, but I’ll pick one winner just to not be mushy and equivocal.

Thanks for helping, and say hi to the FreeGovInfo people, they run a great site.

Answers, we have Answers

Posted on by jessamyn

Sarah points to an article on SearchEngineWatch by Danny Sullivan about Yahoo Answers.

I’m interested in this particularly because I moderate and contribute to a similar but more blog-oriented site called Ask MetaFilter. The idea is simple. It’s a place where the 38,000+ members of the MetaFilter community blog can go ask each other questions and get answers. You can categorize and tag your questions, and everyone in the community gets to ask a maximum of one question a week. There’s a feature for marking “best answer,” marking favorite posts to keep track of, and asking anonymous questions which is quite popular. Each question has its own RSS feed. So does each tag. There’s a $5 [lifetime] barrier to entry that keeps the site from becoming just a one-off “free questions answered here!” site and there’s a group we informally call the MeFiBrarian Posse of info professionals (some of whom I’m sure you know) that answer questions like this one that I answered this week which seem like more typical reference questions. I’ve answered over 2300 questions since the beginning of 2004 and you can read every one of them. Going to where the user is, indeed.

I don’t know much about the traffic side of things, but MetaFilter is one of Technorati’s Top 100 blogs and AskMetafilter gets about as much traffic as the main part of the site. I spend a lot of time there keeping questions on track, helping write and organize the FAQ, putting out fires, enforcing the community guidelines, and being one of the human faces of a very effective website. I am the only librarian on a staff of three. I know I spend an awful lot of time talking about my small libraries and their trials and tribulations, but it’s worth knowing that there are also jobs in the online world at all that can test the mettle of even the most super-social and savvy librarian.

social, prosocial, anti-social

Posted on by jessamyn

I wanted to call this post, “blogging trumps life” but since that’s not strictly true, allow me to explain.

I had dinner with Meredith Farkas and Brian Smith last night, and we had a bang-up time talking about social software, libraries, television, arborists, etc. I’m in the middle of finalizing my schedule for ALA and I’m also in the middle of a mostly mutual split with my longtime partner (more details may wind up on my personal site, they will likely not be here). The reason this is apropos and these things are linked, is that I started this relationship before the dawn of most social software and the ubiquitous presence of “network” in my life, and I’m ending it afterwards.

This means that I need to figure out not only who gets the change jar, but also whether I should call myself single on my MySpace account [Did you know there is no way to leave your relationship status blank on MySpace?] or whether it’s possible to write down things that are happening in my life without stepping on toes or turning into a heart-on-my-sleeve tell-all blogger while at the same time, making sure I let my friends know what’s up with me. Do I take my ex off my buddy list? Do I remove his blog from my RSS feed reader? Should I stop commenting on his Flickr pictures or block him from commenting on mine? How many passwords do I need to change? Do I deauthorize his computer from my iTunes store? Miss Manners has very little guidance on these matters and yet in my world many of these choices have implications as deep or deeper than if I was pillaging his CD collection or changing the locks while he’s away (metaphorically speaking that is, in Vermont I don’t have a key to the place I live).

In an age where many people in the online world voluntarily give up certain amounts of privacy in the name of connectedness, figuring out how and when to get that privacy back — if you even want it — really drives home the social part of social software. This post began as a draft a few weeks ago which was just a list of the different ways that me, the real human who writes this site, exists in the multifaceted online world since I figure some of you are there too and maybe we could hang out, so I’ll wrap-up with that. If anyone is interested in connecting either in the real world of ALA or Vermont or elsewhere, or the online world of all these other places, please say hello.

Jessamyn’s Social Spaces
[in rough order of frequency of use]
chat: jessamyn_west at MSN/Yahoo, iamthebestartist on AIM, jessamyn at gtalk/gmail, iamthebestartist on Skype
blogs: this one, abada abada, booklist. I use livejournal to keep up with my friends who blog there, and I spend a little time at Vox [want a Vox invite? Email me]
jobs: Metafilter, moderator and user jessamyn
social stuff: Flickr, del.icio.us/jessamyn, Wikipedia, Technorati, LibraryThing profile and catalog, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, CouchSurfing.com, Facebook

It’s a long list, but rest assured I still take long walks by the river and read books in my actual public library. I’ve found that the balance between the super-techie online world and my wonderfully offline local area is one that suits me. See you at ALA, or see you online.

SFPL and the idea of network

Posted on by jessamyn

I wasn’t sure what to do yesterday afternoon in San Francisco, so I went to the library. The downtown San Francisco Public Library has a number of interesting exhibits

  • Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album – Featuring Personal Albums Documenting the 1906 Earthquake and Fire
  • The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966: 40th Anniversary Commemorative Exhibit
  • Kalligraphia 2006: An Exhibition by Members of the Friends of Calligraphy

You can see a few of my pictures on Flickr with the SFPL tag. While I was there, I ran into a few people I sort of knew and made some plans and hung around.

Today I went to brunch with a few of my favorite librarian pals and then I went for a long walk. I left my camera and laptop at home. Since I don’t have a cell phone, this meant I was totally untethered to any of the devices I often have around me to connect me to my larger network. Sure, I had a list of phone numbers in my pocket and I’ve long since memorized my calling card number, but in general I was on my own. In Vermont I’m on my own a lot, but I’m often tethered. I have a camera, laptop, Internet, loaner computer, whatever. When I’m on the network I chat with friends, answer reference-type questions, respond to work emails, consolidate and aggregate and clean data, take notes, look at pictures, share pictures, contribute to Wikipedia, write presentations, coordinate projects, make plans.

I’m also often with Greg, and when we’re together, we co-experience many things in that “Look at this neat rock I found” sort of way. I realized today as I was walking alone with no particular destination on a lovely sunny day in a beautiful city that even while I was on vacation from the many things that I do when I’m connected, there was a sense in which I missed being in the network because I feel so darned useful when I’m there. Not that I’m not useful to the person on the street corner trying to figure out where Trader Joe’s is, or that I’m not useful to ME by getting sun and exercise. However, there is a sense of being part of something larger, of flow that I get when I’m connecting with people and information that I just started to realize I get now when I’m online as well as when I’m interacting with people in real life. Social software is, as many have said “software that gets you laid” — or, put more broadly “making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.” In the same way I noticed when I started communicating more with friends who had email than those who didn’t, I now notice that I’m making more last-minute plans based on blogs and IM and chance meetings with plugged-in people who say “Yes let’s hang out” than the “Well I’ll see if I’m free next Thursday, let me call you back” crowd. I’m not saying this is admirable, I’m just observing that this is true.

This has to do with libraries for a few disparate reasons

  1. if the Pew Digital Divisions Report is to be believed, having broadband access is now a stronger predictor of online behavior than level of experience. Meaning, loosely translated, that people who have faster network connections do more online than people who have more (but slower) experience online. Libraries provide that access, librarians (can, could) provide guidance and know-how for those people who are diving into fast network all at once.
  2. When I was at the library yesterday, a librarian I’d met briefly while giving a talk months before invited me to his house for dinner, on the spot. I hung around after work, got a backroom tour of SFPL, went over to his house, met some nice people, ate some great food. Without network, befriending friends-of-friends and some degree of trust of strangers, I would have missed out on a great time. It’s not quite “getting laid” sure, but I’m 37 and fairly settled down. Think of what 20 year olds can do with this kind of power.
  3. On the way in to San Francisco, from the airport, I told the cab driver that I taught email to older people. He said he was having trouble with his email and I suggested going to the free classes that SFPL gives. He didn’t know they had them and said he’d stop in, that sounded like a great idea to him. Before I got out of the cab, he gave me his band’s MySpace URL.