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December 17, 2006
You and TIME
Time magazine has named "YOU" as the TIME Person of the Year. The article is interesting in that it 'gets' the role user generated content is playing in today's world. It also gives a strong tip of the hat to Web 2.0 and the transformational effect unbounded conversations, content in context, opinions, tags, RSS, blogs and the rest are playing in this emerging world. For example:
"It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution."
"Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas."
There's the usual references to the web celebs of the moment, YouTube, Second Life, Wikipedia and MySpace. All three parts are interesting in that TIME sort of way.
What's the library angle? We've been talking user-centered development for decades. Now the world is catching up and we need to invent and create faster.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at December 17, 2006 9:45 AM
Comments
The library angle is probably many-angled, but one vortex points to Tim Spalding and Library Thing . Tim's not a librarian, but he's very in on libraries and is one of our best friends right now, thinking up some creative ideas.
Posted by: Jane Hyde at December 17, 2006 11:24 AM
Librarians can also catalogue a few examples of how these technologies can be used to get students/patrons engaged.
This clip...for instance...shows a great way to use YouTube to share the documentary of a revolutionary project (and democracy in action!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL7Jo_1Z3Y8
Posted by: Kathy Shaughnessy at December 19, 2006 10:19 AM