Don't Ask Me To Censor Myself - It Makes Me Grumpy

It's a couple of days now since I got a comment on my work blog asking if I could put "UK ONLY" in the title of all of my posts. My first reaction to this was bemusement but the more I thought about it the more angry it made me. In effect, the commenter was asking me to censor my own content. To restrict the group of people who are able to gain value from the content I post. I hope that I've thought about it enough now to put together a rational post rather than a rant but I apologise if I do end up venting spleen!

The Boring Bit

First, a bit of background. My work blog is very specific. It's a summary of every book and journal that I buy for the library. The entries are tagged with subject, format, and location tags as well as some unique tags that allow me to feed the entries back to the library web page. At first, I was dubious that the blog would get any hits but it did start to get readers. Soon, folks started to comment on the books and putting links to allow readers to request books and journal articles from the blog entries has led to a steady flow of requests - which at the end of the day is what it's all about.

The company that I work for is large. In excess of 300,000 people around the globe. My library serves the UK but, due to licensing for e-resources and practical considerations for hard copy, we can only supply info to the UK. In light of this, the request to restrict blog entries to the UK may seem reasonable. Or does it? Why did it irk me so? And why will I not be putting off people who can't borrow my resources from reading about them?

Let Consumers Decide What is Useful

Well, even if people aren't able to access my resources it can still be helpful for them to know about them. The blog has had many comments from people all over the world who have asked for more information about how to access the resources. In some cases I've been able to put them in touch with local libraries. In others cases they've bought copies from Amazon. Whilst the aim of the blog is to increase local use of resources putting it on a global forum allows others to reuse and benefit from the information.

Unfettered User-Generated Content Is What It's All About

In a broader sense I think it's important for Web 2.0 content producers not to second guess who might derive value from that content. User generated content, for me, is what Web 2.0 is all about. In a sense, there's no such thing as bad content because what Web 2.0 gives us as consumers of information is the ability to select the information that's relevant to us and ignore the rest. It's up to the content users rather than the content producers to censor the information. If content producers start to censor or restrict access to their information the amount of information in the system is restricted and Web 2.0 starts to fall over. By all means use tagging to target your user group and help users to filter out your info if they don't need it, but don't put people off of reading your content.

I can see that to anyone used to a traditional way of working asking someone to restrict their readership geographically may seem reasonable but it seems that Web 2.0 has changed the game - allowing content producers to benefit users that were previously out of reach and consumers fine control over the information that they are exposed to. I, for one, will not be censoring my own content.

RT @DarthVader "Come to the dark side - we have cake"

Just how, you might ask, is the statement above of any use to an information professional? And you'd have a point. Personally, it made me laugh, so that is good in itself but I can see that to justify using Twitter in the work place a lot of folks will need more business justification than just getting a chuckle every now and then.

I've been using Twitter for a couple of weeks now and it's made quite an impression on me. This post is an attempt to clarify how I've found it so far and work out some of the pro's and con's as I see them.

Email, instant messaging, phone, visitors blog comments - why on earth would I want another distraction from my "job"?

So, how did I come to Twitter? Well, I'm finding that if you using one Web2.0 application tends to expose you to others. In my case I've been blogging about new resources inside the firewall at work for about 2 years now. Inevitably, I was exposed to other blogs and some I now read regularly (as well as browsing recently published posts every now and then). I feel I've received far, far more useful information than I've published but that's one of the benefits of Web2.0. When you get a group of active users adding content there is soon going to be a massive store of information that everyone has the potential to benefit from. Recently I've seen quite an increase in the number of blog posts about our internal version of Twitter, to the point where I decided to check it out, again as a means to publicise new library resources. Initially, I just wanted to scope out the scene so I posted a "hello world" and sat back to observe the etiquette and norms. Alot of the chat was very technical but every now and then someone would post a question that I was able to answer. This felt kind of good. One of my favourite bits about being a librarian is answering questions. Wheras my initial interest was about promoting new books through microblogging I soon found that it had the potential to be another channel for users to communicate with the library. To answer the question above: put simply, the distractions are my job.

Joining Twitter outside the firewall was sort of serendipitous. I'd posted a comment on librarything and one of the responses (from @jmgold) led to my first dipping my toe into Twitter. I still maintain that he'll be contacted by my lawyers re: the rehabilitation costs.

Effect on connecting with new users, good. Effect on workflow, stress levels and time management, v. bad!

This might just be me but I've found that opening any new channel of communication is very stressful and disruptive. I won't lie, the last couple of weeks have not been my most productive. BUT, I have stuck with it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I went through exactly the same when I first tried Second Life at work, and when I first started blogging. With the blog, I've found that as you get more experienced with the medium you work out how to manage it. With Twitter there is a very strong compulsion to check for new messages every five minutes. This kind of wears off after a while and learning to manage who you follow and getting a good sidebar viewer helps alot. I've even found that posting a sentence about what I'm doing every now and then helps me to focus on the task. My second reason for sticking with it is that I have proof that it is generating new library users. At first it was hard to guage the effectiveness in promoting new resources until the other day, literally seconds after tweeting about a new ebook I got an IM requesting an ebooks login. They said they love the book tweets and often follow the links to the library blog. 1 new user seems like a small payoff but I've been in this game just long enough to know that if 1 library user contacts you, there are probably another 10 who are accessing your resources without making themselves known. Sure enough, when I checked ebook usage today, it's well above average. If you manage it correctly the overhead is low. Posting a 140 character message takes what? A minute?

Who cares what you had for breakfast?

Talking to users and other librarians, I've heard quite a few objections to using Twitter. One is the shear amount of rubbish information on there. And to be fair, this is true. However, the point is that it is very easy to filter the information. At work, the user base is low enough to follow comment on the tool. Outside the firewall, you don't really want noise from a population equivalent to a medium to large country. Particularly, if you are using it in a professional capacity, you soon learn to only follow Twitterers who give good value. Everyone posts the odd whimsical post but most of the Twitterers that I continue to follow also post useful links, provoke discussion or raise awareness of important issues (or just have a different take on things). As a solo librarian, I have to say one of the main benefits of Twitter is that I now feel just that little bit more connected to my profession.

Social Media - the clue is in the name!

Another, criticism that I've heard is that it's hard to get the right kind of people following your Twitters. This can happen - for example, I seem to have collected a moderate following of spammers and life coaches!?! I think there are some ways to minimise this though. Firstly, get over the concept of using the Internet as a broadcast medium. The social web is just that - "social". Think quiet chat down the pub rather than standing on a soapbox with a megaphone. In practical terms I think this means following the sort of people that you want to follow you. If you complain about getting the wrong "types" of followers but make no attempt to connect with your library users (or potential users) then I think you're kind of missing the point. If you find it hard to justify spending work time "friending" people on the net just think of it as customer research. The penny pinchers love terms like "customer research" and who knows, you might learn something new about your users!

The second thing is to tweet. If you tweet about your field (i.e. library stuff) you will find relevant followers. More accurately, they will find you as one of the techniques for finding people to follow is to search entries for keywords. If your tweets contain relevant keywords and hashtags then people interested in the #library will find you. I guess relating to this, use your existing network. People who already follow you are likely to have contacts who would also be interested in following you.

To summarise in 140 characters or less...

Well, to be honest I can't, but here (as briefly as I can) are my pro's and con's:

I love Twitter because of...
Reaching new library users;
Finding out more about library users interests/ needs;
Professional awareness/ networking;
Useful sources of information, links, etc.;
Promoting resources

Twitter sometimes does my head in because...

Checking in with it can become addictive;
It's another channel of communication to "learn";
The spammers and life-coaches are sometimes annoying

Can you think of any other pro's and con's? I'd love to hear them if you can.

p.s. I rarely eat breakfast as I'm not a morning person :-)

ScribeFire rocks

Just discovered ScribeFire which should make blogging a lot less hassle and a lot more fun. It's a plug-in for Firefox. Once it's installed you can fire it up from your browser, pick from any blogs you've configured and just start typing. You can also drag and drop pictures in from the browser pane above - so, in theory, if I want a picture of the ScribeFire logo I can wizz of to find one at say Flickr (this blog entry stays open in the bottom half of the screen).

Here goes...

Ok - didn't like the selection at Flickr so I'm off to the ScribeFire site instead...

...and Robert's your mother's brother.

It's also really easy to switch blog mid-post. If you've got more than one post and you decide mid-post that you want to switch the one you're posting to, you just click on the blogs tag and that changes the blog you're publishing to (this is also a good way to copy posts from one blog to another - by loading up a previous blog from one blog then switching blogs and hitting the publish button).

As far as editing goes it offers you three flavours of text editor - rich text, html and preview - although the preview doesn't actually show you how it will appear in your blog. My only criticism is that you can't easily see previous tags you've added to your blog when tagging an entry. There doesn't seem to be a typeahead or any way to list that blogs tags. As I've only been using it five minutes though I've probably missed something.

I'm hoping this will have applications I can use at work to make blogging new books and journals easier - this could well be one of the pieces of the jigsaw. Great tool - I've been using it five minutes and I thoughroughly recomend it.

Brainstorm Interlude

This is a brainstorm really. I've managed to lumber myself with doing a presentation on a conference call on the benefits of blogging. I've been having random thoughts on this for a while and now it's time to start to organise these. Bit of background. I've been doing a new books blog for 4 or 5 months now and have changed my opinion of web2.0 from reserved skepticism to avid evangelist. Here, in no particular order, are my pros and cons...

+'ves

1) It gets the message out there. The way the corporate blog works is that every time you post you go to the top of a list of recent posts on the front page. More and more people are hitting this page so if you post regularly you are going to get to a whole bunch of people who never knew you existed.

2) It makes you think about your stock - I've got the process fairly automated (basically the blog posts are cut and pasted from catalogue records with a bit of personal opinion thrown in if I feel strongly that it's a good book). However, I'm always aware that I'm selling these new books to a highly critical bunch of users. If a book doesn't cut the mustard it will be spotted and comments will be made. I've had to learn to justify the stock that I select and that's a good thing. It's reached the point now that when I'm preparing shortlists for acquisitions I often ask myself "Would I be comfortable blogging this book".

3) It's generated requests direct from the blog pages. This equals more issues and is GOOD FOR THE STATS.

4) People read the blog then walk to the library. This nearly knocked me off my chair the first time it happened. The aim of the blog (and other web2.0 stuff planned for this year) is to accept that folks are busy and can't always make it to the library. I saw blogging as one way to take new books to people's desktops... BUT there have been many occasions when people have seen a book and been driven to come over to the library and add their name to the paper waiting list (I know this because they tell me). Invariably they walk out with a different book while they are waiting for the new book to do it's time on display. This again is GOOD FOR THE STATS.

5) Social Bookmarking. My eyes have been opened to this a bit more just this week. I made a fairly idle comment speculating on ways to improve the information retrieval of user generated tags. One response was that the point of tags is not purely an information retrieval thing, it's a social thing. In and off itself. This has taken me a long time to grasp. One word of advice is to let go of librarian sensibilities - tags might not be the best for searching to find information but they rock when it comes to relating one piece of information (or person) to another. They also provide a simple way for end users to label their own information. Most of the hits (excluding direct hits from feedreaders) come from being featured on other blogs. I think this is down to meticulous tagging.

6) Even a specific blog (like one themed on new books) will raise the overall profile of the library. Pretty much any publicity is good publicity for libraries right now and if it shows that libraries are on the cutting edge of communicating information then that might help to challenge a few stereotypes.

7) Reading blogs is a good way to find out what others are interested in. In a corporate environment it helps you to find out: what people are working on, what they are interested in, what tools they are using (basically what information they need). Beware though - it's very easy to get distracted.

-'ves

1) You have to have a regular source of something to blog about. If you don't post for a while you'll still get hits (from searches on tags and people scrolling back through thier feedreaders) but you won't get nearly as many as if you're posting every day.

2) It takes time. I happen to think it's worth it but it does take time.

3) It can be addictive. Because you get feedback in the form of a count of the number of people hitting the pages and even comments from readers, it can be tempting to keep logging on to see what the response is. It takes a while to get disciplined about this. Like with email, it pays to manage your time blogging. Because you can manage a blog in relatively small chunks of time it is easy to fit around other tasks but it is also easy to get distracted (see 7 under +'ves!).

I'll edit this post as and when I think of anything else...

Cut & Paste, Cut & Paste...

Cool. That works. Now to cut and paste the old posts into the new blog and get them feeded back into the widget...

Quiz week

This blog is definitely going to move to Blogger. There's no way (that I can find) to tag entries properly and as I'll need to be looking back on these posts when I put my portfolio together I MUST AND SHALL HAVE TAGGING.

The plan is to set up a blog on Blogger then send an RSS feed back to MySpace in a widget (like the one for...

...from Spring Widgets.

On the chartership front these few days are all about quizzes. Tonights the annual Cilip quiz night at Goblet's in Southampton. Not sure what to expect but the pub is good and there's free food involved!

Aside from that I'm trying to put together an Xmas quiz at work to get people using some of the library's eResources (and some of the book resources) - hopefully it'll use up some spare freebies from a recent training event as prizes but the uptake could be poor as folks are very busy towards the end of the year trying to make their targets... We'll see.

Lots happening on the corporate blog and had another request directly from the blog this week... This works so much better than the old book of the month which never earned a request in 9 months and was a complete waste of time...

The MySpace page here is sort of a proof of concept for where I'd like the library webpage to be - a collection of feeds brought together in one place... That way by updating the different sources the library page is dynamic and gets people to come back. I want current awareness (e.g. news headlines) and new books feeding onto the homepage as that will draw people back and lead to use of other resources. Long way to go yet though.

p.s.

Or it maybe that blogging on MySpace isn't as easy as I thought it would be - in which case this may be the shortest blog ever...