Well, that’s interesting – what did it mean? Then I read the comments below it and Jason had commented the following:

“Rules of the game: grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence AS YOUR STATUS. AND POST these instructions in a comment to this status….
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book.”

What a fun, great idea! I grabbed my closest book (it was “Wonderland, the Zen of Alice”), turned to page 56, sentence 5 and wrote as my status: “Go home to your mother”. To be honest, I wanted to cheat and use sentence 6: “The little gangster had simply lost his way” but I was good…

Then I thought “Why not expand this to Twitter?”. It is perfect for Twitter, it would be short and sweet and interesting to read what other people post. And it would be slightly mysterious too

So I’m going to post mine on Twitter with a tag of #Page56 and see what happens. I hope other people do it too!

Go home to your mother,
~Susan Mellott

As you are probably aware, it has been a rather trying 1.5 years. In late 2007 I discovered that my father’s ex-wife, with whom he was still living, was misusing him and his money and from that point until this August, when he died, I have been going through lawsuits, nursing homes, medicaid, etc. in order to gain guardianship over dad and to try to recover some of his money and to find a way to pay for his nursing home and medical needs. And to give him as good a quality of life as I could in his final days.

So I had not been blogging or writing with any regularity, although I am on the computer most of the day with twitter, facebook, searches, etc. And now that dad has died and I find that I have free time again, I miss writing and blogging. I REALLY miss it.

So stay tuned, I will be writing again very soon. I have lots of things to say and ideas to discuss and neat things to look at. And thanks to everyone who hung in there during this time and also to everyone who continues to find and use and enjoy my blog, even though I haven’t updated much at all for a long time, it is these people who prompt (dare I say, compel) me to start writing again. It is somewhat embarrassing to get accolades like being written up as one of 100 Must Read Blogs …by Women! in Feb of 2009 or being included in Women in Technology – Fifty Powerful Females in July 2008 while not actively contributing a significant number of new technology posts.

All that is going to change! There will be good things to come. I guarantee it! So stay tuned and keep watching this space. In the meantime, take your shoes off! Stay awhile. If you haven’t read my blog before, check it out!

And as always, take care,
Susan Mellott

Did you know that your library very well may have a presence in Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, IM, Flickr, YouTube, wikis, FriendFeed and more? Do a search in any of these tools on libraries and see what you find. Libraries, in my experience, are quietly paving the way for institutions to have a real 2.0 presence.

I had originally planned to do some examining of some of the ideas first, so I could provide some useful, additional information but then I realized that I would never get this post out if I waited until I had explored all of them. So what I will do now is give an overview of the library camp topics and discussions and go into depth on some of the ideas in future posts. After you see the agenda, topics, discussions and ideas, you will see why! So here is how my day went. If it seems a little scattered, it is because I was frantically scribbling on a handout and am trying to translate and organize what is essentially a completely covered paper, with writing between and around every line of print. So bear with me.

This post will be a general overview to what we did and how the day was divided up. Part 2 will contain specifics from the Pecha Kuchas and discussions and if that post gets too big, Part 3 will have the afternoon sessions and a wrapup observation.

ACPL Library Camp design was based on the Unconference model, with the addition of a guest speaker and Pecha Kucha presentations.

The event started at 8am (with continental breakfast beforehand) and lasted until 5pm when several people went down to J.K. O’Donnell’s, our local Irish Pub to continue visiting and discussing.

From 8-9am, David Lee King, the featured speaker, gave a wonderful and thought-provoking presentation Managing the Digital Branch. Here is his post re: Library Camp which includes links to his presentations and to some of the other library camp resources such as the wiki that was set up for Library Camp. Here is the ACPL Library Camp on FriendFeed.

And here is a link to the ACPL Library Camp 2008 twitter feed. This was used in a very interesting way as it was being displayed on a large screen at the front of the auditorium and updated as the event proceeded. That provided an interesting mix of information on the proceedings and “backchannel” talk amongst the participants and observers. I can see this being used more and more often as the idea proliferates.

Everyone had been asked to bring 13 (I think it was) business cards with them and after David’s talk, there was a 2 minute card exchange where everyone was to meet and pass out their business cards to each other and to get to know new people. I really liked this idea and it worked really well. People got up, mingled, met, made contacts and just generally interacted with each other. I don’t have “business cards” as I am basically retired, but I really wish I would have made up some cards with my Clear Blue Dei site and my personal information on them. I got one “personal card” from someone with their own personal blog site on it and I am definitely going to go take a look. Perhaps a sign-up sheet (or site) where people could add their blogs would be nice as I always enjoy finding and read people’s blogs. I think I would even do this twice, once at the beginning and once later in the day after people got a chance to discuss and share ideas.

Then it was time for the Pecha Kucha presentations. In a nutshell, the idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one day/period. Therefore the 20×20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up. There were several presentations during the Pecha Kucha session, which I will list and go into in more detail in Part 2. For now, I’ll just say that this was a highly successful and invigorating format and one I think people should consider trying at their next meeting, conference, staff day or event.

Then David Lee King presented his next talk called Climbing out of the Box: Mashing up our Community.
As part of this presentation, David had everyone divide into groups of 4 or 5 and gave us 10 minutes for each group to come up with an idea of a way to reach out to the community. Again, an extremely successful session with many new and innovative ideas in just 10 minutes. See Part 2 of my Library Camp posts for the ideas and discussions.

Following this, we continued the Unconference model (An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose) by having the participants discuss what ideas they would like to meet and discuss and an ad-hoc agenda for the afternoon was designed by the group for afternoon. There were 3 sets of 1 hour sessions, 2 per hour (in meeting rooms A and C). A facilitator from the group was designated for each session.

Everyone went to lunch after David’s presentation at various places in town (we went to Munchie’s Emporium, aka Mad Anthony’s for microbrew and good food and conversation) and then we all met back, picked up the afternoon agenda and made our choices as to which sessions we wanted to attend.

Kay Gregg (ACPL videographer and Sean’s cohort in crime for all the creative YouTube videos, etc), Sean Robinson (Head of ACPL and my husband) and David Lee King split off to videotape a Conversation with David Lee King, one of the ongoing series of “Conversation” youtube series that they are creating. This should be coming out in about a month, stay tuned.

I attended some of the sessions but had to leave so I missed the wrap-up session 4:30-5pm, but I heard that Sean did a great job wrapping up and that he put people on the spot, asking them “what one idea from this camp do YOU plan to do?” I’m sure that was interesting… From some of the buzz I’ve heard afterward, people really enjoyed the Library Camp and found it invigorating and inspiring. I know I did!

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

I will start posting again when I can.  Until then, I hope you have a happy and peaceful holiday season.

~Susan Mellott

With the many popups that come up when on the web and knowing that it is not a good idea to click on a popup that you do not recognize, I’m sure many people ignored the popup and had no idea that Facebook was gathering information about their purchases and sharing it with their Facebook friends.

This caused some Facebook users to find out what they were getting as gifts for the holidays and others to have items such as their movie purchases distributed to all their friends without their knowledge. I’m sure that there are people on Facebook who would prefer that the movies they buy are not shared with everyone who knows them on Facebook!

Facebook users rose up in protest and Facebook announced that it would change its policy to one of ‘opt-in’ instead of ‘opt-out’. In other words, you would have to specifically agree to share your purchase information as opposed to specifically saying you do not want it shared.

Here is some information from MSNBC in a post called “Facebook does an About-Face on Privacy Policy” on the purchase gathering and distributing that Facebook implemented about 3 weeks ago:

40 commerce Web sites using Beacon
More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.

Unless instructed otherwise, the participating sites alerted Facebook, which then notified a user’s friends within the social network about items that had been bought or products that had been reviewed.

Facebook thought the marketing feeds would help its users keep their friends better informed about their interests while also serving as “trusted referrals” that would help drive more sales to the sites using the Beacon system.

But thousands of Facebook users viewed the Beacon referrals as a betrayal of trust. Critics blasted the advertising tool as an unwelcome nuisance with flimsy privacy protections that had already exasperated and embarrassed some users.

Some users have already complained about inadvertently finding out about gifts bought for them for Christmas and Hanukkah after Beacon shared information from Overstock.com. Other users say they were unnerved when they discovered their friends had found out what movies they were watching through purchases made on Fandango.

And an apology was offered:

“We’re sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans,” Facebook’s Paul Janzer wrote in a posting addressed to Beacon’s critics. “We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends.” Janzer also acknowledged Beacon “can be kind of confusing.”

I think that “kind of confusing” is Facebook-Speak for “deliberately misleading”.

This is not the first time Facebook has had users rise up over privacy changes. Last year, Facebook rolled out a “news feeds” tool that tracked changes to users’ profiles. After thousands of users rebelled, Zuckerberg issued a contrite apology and added a way to turn off the news feeds.

I saw that on my (and other friends) Facebook and thought that it was a bit iffy. And actually, I still have it on mine and so does most of the people I know. Even though Facebook offered a way to turn it off, that doesn’t mean that they made it easy or clear. I really didn’t even know it could be turned off until I read the article from MSNBC and I still don’t know how.

And there was the whole debacle about Facebook making people’s profiles available to search engines. I went through the process to do what they said so my profile was not shared, but it was extremely complicated and I really don’t know exactly what I ended up with.

I am so totally against the whole ‘opt-out’ style that Facebook is going with, especially since it is doing some really devious things without people’s knowledge. Yes, there are changes all the time to various social networking sites in order to improve their services. But I really don’t see how Facebook can stand there and say that these fall under that category. Either they don’t care, or they think their users are too stupid to know what they are doing, or both.

These are things I don’t think Facebook should be doing in the first place. But at the least, they should be something that Facebook users can choose to implement only if they want to, and can easily turn it off if they decide against it. Still, I think it is shady to even have it as a part of Facebook.

Facebook has come a long way from when it started and it was a safe and secure site for students to congregate. And while it is nice that it has opened up some, I really don’t see it as being much different from MySpace anymore and in some cases, even less reliable as far as privacy and respect for its users are concerned.

While almost all of the Web 2.0 social networking sites have been pretty decent and relatively trustworthy in my opinion, I am having serious doubts about Facebook. And I think Facebook users should too. It is not what it once was and I’m not sure that Facebook users realize that.

UPDATE: Here is a link to another interesting article called “Takesies Backsies: Facebook Flouts User Privacy… Again“.

~Susan Mellott