Well actually that title is misleading, not many people seem to say Ning any more, and it is a Silly word if you ask me.
From what I read online it seems that Nings were a lovely free way to set up community websites, but they then ran out of cash and demanded payment like the drug pusher who gets you hooked before raising the price and this annoyed a lot of people.
So rather than concentrating on one failed platform I will talk about all the other lovely community sites you can make, particularly those that have impacted me, which are free forums, wikis and sites like google docs.
Frankly these days one is spoiled for choice when it comes to the creation of information sharing sites and it seems to be mainly a choice of what features you would like to allow users.
While ning may have had it al in one package its not really that hard to link to a free forum or free wiki from your free website. Its a little messy with URLs but I guess if you want perfection you can just pay, I looked at Ning and some of the other sites listed on the page linked to from the State Library's Library Learning 2.1 site - Phil Bradley's Weblog - Alternatives to Ning. and some of those do design a site to your specifications.
Basically Ning and its fellow community site tools as well as the other ways to publish or form a community on the web for free, such as Blogs, Facebook groups, Google tools (Docs and G+ tools) mean it is getting easier and easier to set up a website. Nings have the benefit of looking professional and they are not too expensive but there are many options, and no excuses for any organisation with a community to serve or marketing to undertake not to have a useful web presence.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Evaluation of Evaluation
I am afraid this post is a little half hearted. I have tried some Google Alerts, and setting up a feedburner account, but I don't think these are really tools that can be tested on their own. I mean, they are all about evaluating that important project you are undertaking, so if there is no project, and you are not evaluating it over a period of weeks, there isn't much to test.
I admit it seems like a good idea to be able to find out who is using your blog etc, and for what, and once I do start a project I will endeavour to remember to use these tools. They do seem to be set up in an easy to use, friendly way. It is just unfortunate that I have no real stats to measure yet.
I went to set up a survey monkey survey for the fun of it but decided against due to the terms of service/privacy policy/request by them to send me yet more spam.
I admit it seems like a good idea to be able to find out who is using your blog etc, and for what, and once I do start a project I will endeavour to remember to use these tools. They do seem to be set up in an easy to use, friendly way. It is just unfortunate that I have no real stats to measure yet.
I went to set up a survey monkey survey for the fun of it but decided against due to the terms of service/privacy policy/request by them to send me yet more spam.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Delicious
Delicious caught my imagination for a while, as an alternative to Google when browsing in areas of interest it has its good points. By starting with a basic search of tags you can go to peoples lists and find things you may never thought of looking for. It has a nice magical mystery tour vibe in this way.
However I have also found I ran up against a lot of dead ends when trying to browse through, basically it seems like something for a lazy day when i have an awfully large amount of free time to waste, and those are rare at the moment. There are also an annoying number of oddly categorised pages (sometimes possibly just a different idea of meaning, but sometimes seemingly deliberately miscategorised to bring up adult pages when looking for, say, jewelery)
It seems to come down to the folksonomy thing, looking at what has caught other, possibly similar peoples eye, leading them to tag and share, versus finding things through Google with its secret search algorythms. I have found a few interesting pages that I would not have been likely to otherwise on Delicious, but in the end I have found alot more by Google searching, with less dead links and misdirection.
I have never remembered to share anything on Delicious when browsing, I probably should.
Delicious does however remind me of Folksonomies. Letting the public add their own tags to your collection, the way of the future? Dangerous? meaningful? or useless? One thing I really enjoyed for a few hours at least was looking at the user created tags on the Powerhouse Museums online collection.
I recommend the Powerhouse museums online collection anyway for people interested in artifacts from the past. But it is also interesting from the standpoint of collaborative tagging. Along with their 'proper' subject headings, and machine produced subject headings, they feature user tags. I found it very interesting to follow the user tags, generally not to find items, but more usually to try to work out what the reason may be for placing such tags. There were a lot of peoples names tagged, or 'I like this' or a date, or some phrase that seemed to show people were using the tags for their own purposes to bookmark items. In that way it kind of reminds me of unofficial Delicious, but it muddies the waters a little for other users. There were a number of just plain wrong tags as well, describing the object with misleading names or colours e'g' 'green shoe' on a pair of brown boots.
But I like to hope that one day folksonomy and its friends will become more useful and serve a function a little like Delicious, where people can add their own classification input which lets items be found based on transient headings like subculture tags and so on, seeing things in a different light, with different possible uses, and sharing that with others should be good, but maybe a little more organisation would make such exploration quicker.
However I have also found I ran up against a lot of dead ends when trying to browse through, basically it seems like something for a lazy day when i have an awfully large amount of free time to waste, and those are rare at the moment. There are also an annoying number of oddly categorised pages (sometimes possibly just a different idea of meaning, but sometimes seemingly deliberately miscategorised to bring up adult pages when looking for, say, jewelery)
It seems to come down to the folksonomy thing, looking at what has caught other, possibly similar peoples eye, leading them to tag and share, versus finding things through Google with its secret search algorythms. I have found a few interesting pages that I would not have been likely to otherwise on Delicious, but in the end I have found alot more by Google searching, with less dead links and misdirection.
I have never remembered to share anything on Delicious when browsing, I probably should.
Delicious does however remind me of Folksonomies. Letting the public add their own tags to your collection, the way of the future? Dangerous? meaningful? or useless? One thing I really enjoyed for a few hours at least was looking at the user created tags on the Powerhouse Museums online collection.
I recommend the Powerhouse museums online collection anyway for people interested in artifacts from the past. But it is also interesting from the standpoint of collaborative tagging. Along with their 'proper' subject headings, and machine produced subject headings, they feature user tags. I found it very interesting to follow the user tags, generally not to find items, but more usually to try to work out what the reason may be for placing such tags. There were a lot of peoples names tagged, or 'I like this' or a date, or some phrase that seemed to show people were using the tags for their own purposes to bookmark items. In that way it kind of reminds me of unofficial Delicious, but it muddies the waters a little for other users. There were a number of just plain wrong tags as well, describing the object with misleading names or colours e'g' 'green shoe' on a pair of brown boots.
But I like to hope that one day folksonomy and its friends will become more useful and serve a function a little like Delicious, where people can add their own classification input which lets items be found based on transient headings like subculture tags and so on, seeing things in a different light, with different possible uses, and sharing that with others should be good, but maybe a little more organisation would make such exploration quicker.
Twitterphobia
I resisted Twitter until forced by my Uni course to create an account and follow 5 people.
Once I had had my arm twisted behind my back to look for some interesting people to follow I did find the occasional interesting thoughts, and decided to keep my Twitter account and check back from time to time.
I have not checked back, that was 3 months ago... at this point I don't know if I will be checking back.
After pondering I have come to the conclusion that my dislike of Twitter stems from being uncomfortable with small talk. Personally I have no need to share my daily menu etc with people, and when it comes to anything deeper, 140 characters usually doesn't do things justice. And when it come to finding info I look at the masses of people, the masses of information, with so much of it meaningless to me, the thought of wading through it to find the gems makes me feel quite tired. Especially as so much of Twitter seems to involve reading conversations, following questions and answers and other peoples comments, trying to keep track and having to follow references to other comments and ideas. And finally I think about myself getting involved, needing to keep checking back to see if i have been answered, or need to answer someone else's Tweet, and it seems like a bit of a time-sink.
I will happily follow links and find new interesting ideas from artworks on Flickr, so maybe part of the problem is my visual emphasis. This may be why I tend to find more satisfaction from blogs, as they are more likely to have pictures.
In Twitters defense I can see there are uses for a stream of brief information. The much mentioned library updates for one. I also see people sharing tweets from some of the library talks I have been to and I guess this could be interesting, getting the first thoughts and responses out there. I understand people connect thoughts with Hash-tags etc to more effectively share info on a subject. And people who actually like chit chat are probably in Tweeting heaven.
All this leads me to feel I should be able to use Twitter to learn, and to meet new people (or at least hear about and follow new people). But when faced with the choice of reading Twitter or a blog or an article or even a book, Twitter always loses.
Anyway, in conclusion, while I could probably do a 'just the facts' Twitter stream for a company, Twitter is not my cup of tea.
But if you want a chat while building a Romanesque Theatre, Monster avatar or something equally weird in Second Life, I'm your gal.
Each to their own
Once I had had my arm twisted behind my back to look for some interesting people to follow I did find the occasional interesting thoughts, and decided to keep my Twitter account and check back from time to time.
I have not checked back, that was 3 months ago... at this point I don't know if I will be checking back.
After pondering I have come to the conclusion that my dislike of Twitter stems from being uncomfortable with small talk. Personally I have no need to share my daily menu etc with people, and when it comes to anything deeper, 140 characters usually doesn't do things justice. And when it come to finding info I look at the masses of people, the masses of information, with so much of it meaningless to me, the thought of wading through it to find the gems makes me feel quite tired. Especially as so much of Twitter seems to involve reading conversations, following questions and answers and other peoples comments, trying to keep track and having to follow references to other comments and ideas. And finally I think about myself getting involved, needing to keep checking back to see if i have been answered, or need to answer someone else's Tweet, and it seems like a bit of a time-sink.
I will happily follow links and find new interesting ideas from artworks on Flickr, so maybe part of the problem is my visual emphasis. This may be why I tend to find more satisfaction from blogs, as they are more likely to have pictures.
In Twitters defense I can see there are uses for a stream of brief information. The much mentioned library updates for one. I also see people sharing tweets from some of the library talks I have been to and I guess this could be interesting, getting the first thoughts and responses out there. I understand people connect thoughts with Hash-tags etc to more effectively share info on a subject. And people who actually like chit chat are probably in Tweeting heaven.
All this leads me to feel I should be able to use Twitter to learn, and to meet new people (or at least hear about and follow new people). But when faced with the choice of reading Twitter or a blog or an article or even a book, Twitter always loses.
Anyway, in conclusion, while I could probably do a 'just the facts' Twitter stream for a company, Twitter is not my cup of tea.
But if you want a chat while building a Romanesque Theatre, Monster avatar or something equally weird in Second Life, I'm your gal.
Each to their own
Thursday, August 2, 2012
First post
Hello brave new world. So Library 2.0 has been trumped by Library
2.1 and I am sure somewhere out there people are already latching
onto Web 3.0 and the semantic web etc with Library 3.0....
But there is no handy online course for that yet... so until there is... on with the Library 2.1 learning journey.
This is my new blog for this exercise. I had a little fun with the background, but when faced with gadgets... not so much fun. For a minute or two there was a small box of fish in the right hand column, but frankly it felt a little silly. I have decided to add a list of other interesting blogs, as I tend to find that the most useful gadget on other blogs I read.
The first I am adding is badscience.net. I thought the book Bad Science looked interesting when it was returned at the desk in the library, and since starting have been unable to put it down. The book looks at how people manipulate or fake research in order to sell their ideas through the media today. It is an interesting mix of lessons in media/marketing as well as scientific theory and evidence based medicine, and has influenced the way I read glossy magazines health articles as well as the packaging of some of the herbal remedies my dad loves to try out and try to force on me. I feel this book has library significance because it points out the way many people can be easily manipulated by people with an idea to sell in the media and online especially if the misinformation is presented in a glossy, easy to digest, convenient way (and often wearing a white coat). With more and more of the population now able to access the web, getting info online, judging for themselves if it is worthwhile, it is important for libraries to change from being seen as holders of information to guides which help people find and interpret information themselves.... because without info/data literacy the internet can be a dangerous minefield.
But there is no handy online course for that yet... so until there is... on with the Library 2.1 learning journey.
This is my new blog for this exercise. I had a little fun with the background, but when faced with gadgets... not so much fun. For a minute or two there was a small box of fish in the right hand column, but frankly it felt a little silly. I have decided to add a list of other interesting blogs, as I tend to find that the most useful gadget on other blogs I read.
The first I am adding is badscience.net. I thought the book Bad Science looked interesting when it was returned at the desk in the library, and since starting have been unable to put it down. The book looks at how people manipulate or fake research in order to sell their ideas through the media today. It is an interesting mix of lessons in media/marketing as well as scientific theory and evidence based medicine, and has influenced the way I read glossy magazines health articles as well as the packaging of some of the herbal remedies my dad loves to try out and try to force on me. I feel this book has library significance because it points out the way many people can be easily manipulated by people with an idea to sell in the media and online especially if the misinformation is presented in a glossy, easy to digest, convenient way (and often wearing a white coat). With more and more of the population now able to access the web, getting info online, judging for themselves if it is worthwhile, it is important for libraries to change from being seen as holders of information to guides which help people find and interpret information themselves.... because without info/data literacy the internet can be a dangerous minefield.
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