Extremely rewarding slide presentation by a Google UX researcher.

Main takeaways for me:

• “Make no mistake about this. Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites. Whether you like it or not.” (biggest surprise from our recent usability study is the repeated call for “personalization” of our services)
• Social networks are not only about “friends”
• Strong ties = typically 4 people you care about the most (range: 2-6)
• Weak ties = 150 people max.
• Temporary ties = librarians, instructors, etc. (a connection which is highly influenced by trust)
• People generally have 4-6 groups of less than 10 people based upon various life stages (college, a particular class, family, a community) which probably don’t overlap much, if at all.
• People make decisions based on their interactions with the above groupings. In other words: networked critical thinking

Found via elearnspace, here is a useful article from apophenia on the three types of social networks along with an important caveat:

1. Sociological “personal” networks
2. Behavioral social networks
3. Publicly articulated social networks

“We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another.”

• An article published in Code4Lib Journal called “User-Centered Design and Agile Development: Rebuilding the Swedish National Union Catalog“.

“Finally, we would like to conclude that working with user-centred design in combination with iterative development is a better, faster and cheaper way of software development, compared to traditional models. Better – the product being released at the end is a more up-to-date and bug-free version than had we worked with a more traditional approach. Faster – it is our conviction that with traditional methodology we would not have finished on time, or at least not with the same amount of features implemented. Cheaper – if the same number of people are able to do a better job in a shorter amount of time, it is a more cost-effective way of getting the job done.”

• A fascinating look at the trend of using social proof to help develop AI in robots. This is only tangentially related to libraries, but I do think there’s a connection.
• ACRL has published a new book titled Academic Library Research: Perspectives and Current Trends

Part II features two chapters on recently developing evaluation methods, including usability testing and measuring library service quality through LibQUAL+. “Academic Library Research” is designed to be useful to scholars, practitioners, students and others interested in current trends in academic library research.

• I’m a fan of user personas, but building personas for applications is an interesting idea.
• SocialStartup.com identifies five fundamental social patterns:
  • Public Timeline
  • Asymetrical Follow
  • News Feed
  • Re-blogging
  • Social Proof
• Via the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog:
  • The Electronic Library 26, no. 6 (2008): Includes “A Metadata Manager’s Role in Collaborative Projects: The Rutgers University Libraries Experience,” “Usability Study of Digital Institutional Repositories,” and other articles.
• Good editorial article on how Libraries are Becoming Community Living Rooms

• James Robertson writes about Practical Ways to Assess CMS Usability including the following:

1. Vendor demo
2. Involve end-users
3. End-user training
4. Demo sites
5. Reference sites
6. Proof of concept
7. Usability testing

• Gizmoto review of Sony’s PRS-700 ebook reader:

Unfortunately, the “improvements” have taken away the very essence of the Reader—the easy-on-the-eyes screen. … Seriously, this thing has a fatal design flaw. The translucent layer that adds both the touchscreen and sidelight functions picks up so much ambient light from every angle, it’s impossible to read with even the most lowly of night-stand lamps turned on.

• The Electronic Library journal has an article called Usability Study of Digital Institutional Repositories which I don’t have access to yet. I’m still waiting for this one to arrive.
• The WordPress blog reports the Results of Project Icon which placed several icon designs up to a vote by the community.                                          ==>
• The companion website to the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces is working on a Social Pattern Library that shows promise. Included are links to other pattern libraries.

• iPhone users frustrated with mobile news website design
• The UKSG completed a 3-year study finding that link resolvers are driving article use among academic library patrons [doc]
• Southwester College student newspaper reports that single students hogging study rooms is impolite
• Michael Lascarides, the new usability analyst at NYPL, writes about the work of Willliam “Holly” Whyte and the goals of usability
• Yale Library’s Usability and Assessment department starts a new blog
• College of DuPage library responds to user complaints of study room use
• The science library at Wesleyan gets a new student lounge which was designed by students
• Letter to the editor complaining about noise in the University of New Mexico library
• Steve Toub and Martha Whitehead talk about User Generated Content and Social Discovery at Access 2008 [slides]

• Activity in the library increases at Wake Forest U. after Starbucks is added. Increased social opportunities cited.
• The Bibliocommons team describe some of the findings they’ve run across by talking to users. Lots of very interesting points are made.
• New to me: Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) which is released under a BSD license and features utilities and controls written in javascript.
• Analyzing libraries as ecosystems, complete with interactions between professionals and users. Who wouldn’t want to be classified as a “feral professional”?
• Medicine Hat College Library features a “user of the month“.

Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as:

The purchaser role was described in the survey by the statement “the library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases,” the archive role by “the library serves as a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources,” and the gateway role by “the library is a starting point or ‘gateway’ for locating information for my research.”

It’s certainly not a surprise that the library as gateway is being disrupted by public search services in the minds of faculty. This is evident in the findings where faculty are decreasingly likely to rate gateway services as “very important”:

I’ll be honest, the first thing I think of regarding gateway services is federated searching. It’s not surprising that faculty are considering this service as decreasingly important. The fact that 60% still think it’s very important leads me to believe (hope) that there is still time to address the problem. Another facet is that the science grouping, followed by social science, is leading this trend:

It makes sense that everyone values the “buyer” aspects of libraries. But in terms of gateway services, the humanities may still be reliant on libraries because of a preference for monographs. If the Kindle, or something similar, starts to gain traction then the humanities may follow science’s lead in finding their own gateway services.

There is a lot more to the study and it is well worth a read. They recommend shoring up the visibility of library services, concentrating and customizing for different faculty user groups, and taking advantage of network solutions (especially for smaller libraries.)

… and by “fail-safe” I mean safe to fail with minimal consequences. That’s the question I’m wondering about after viewing this Cory Doctorow lecture a couple of weeks ago:

The transcript can be found here: http://craphound.com/cambridge_biz_lectures.txt

A few key quotes:

The Internet turns out to be much better at allowing people to form groups than it is at allowing people to copy. … The dream of universal access to all human knowledge – the notion that we can take pieces of information, stick them on the Internet and that they can pervade every corner of the world, almost instantaneously.
…
This is a pretty amazing thing, and it’s understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human knowledge is nuking collaboration costs – getting rid of the cost of getting people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.
…
And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn’t do it, and if you did do it, you certainly couldn’t do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form of success before you’d venture to do anything.
…
Most of the things that we now think of today as very successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come into existence; from the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel – every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion, certainly never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

This ability to fail with little consequence makes me wonder if self-publishing will take off pretty soon. I was messing around over the weekend with feedbooks.com while investigating the epub format. I was surprised to come across Doctorow’s short story “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” on this site. Since he’s made the story open source it is now spreading out across the web and accumulating its own communities. This makes me wonder what value publishing houses are even offering anymore. Walking through Barnes & Noble this weekend I was struck by how dead it feels. The Science Fiction section is slowly being taken over by fan fiction (star wars and Forgotten Realms, etc.) and it was really difficult to get excited about anything.

When you combine the new ebook formats (epub, mobi, kindle, etc.), the increasing number of platforms available for access (like the Kindle, Sony PRS505, blackberry, palm pilot, and iPhone/iPod Touch) with the inherent viral qualities of the Internet I’m wondering what downsides there are to self publishing? Plus, reading Doctorow’s short story on a laptop using Adobe’s Digital Editions was actually a fairly pleasant experience.

If the cost of publishing continues its trajectory towards zero, the potential for, and ease of, creating reader communities continues to increase, AND the social-proof value of publishing house sponsorship diminishes, then it’s quite possible that self-published fiction will really take off.

**UPDATE**

This isn’t really fiction, but I think furthers the question: 20 free ebooks about social media

]]> http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/08/18/is-self-published-fiction-becoming-fail-safe/feed/ 2 http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/ http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:52:51 +0000 Steve McCann http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/ A quick bookmark post on Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 speech from last week. It’s a great read in its entirety. Here are my favorite sections: So I tell [a television producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. [...]]]>

A quick bookmark post on Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 speech from last week. It’s a great read in its entirety. Here are my favorite sections:

So I tell [a television producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

The “masking” in that quote refers to the place television holds in our post-industrial revolution lives.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

But this takes the cake:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Free-time web-surfing as “cognitive surplus” is a great concept. Shirky talks about a potential model for the social web as:

But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

A site I stumbled upon tonight that shows this tendency perfectly is Young Me – Now Me. One look at the site and you understand it, you want to view all of the pairings, you want to create your own, and you want to share.

—

Update: Jay Rosen weighs in with a thoughtful piece.