In another sign that social bookmarking is hitting the mainstream, the BBC has added a social bookmarking options to their stories, allowing users to quickly bookmark stories to del.icious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
All the rest
Delicious gets a makeover (and drops the dots)
Del.icio.us, the social software I probably use the most, is undergoing a facelift and, for such a simple interface, it’s headache inducing to see how the team went about the redesign. 2.000 post it notes on a whiteboard. Yikes! I thought my whiteboard was a mess.
One enhancement is the addition of the the url delicious.com. You can still reach the site using the now famous del.icio.us url, but by adding the delicious.com domain name it should help ease url confusion for newcomers. On more than once occasion when I show off the software to people, I have had users adding a .com to the url and ending up at some default landing page.
I’m hoping the search engine is much faster, as has been reported. I’ve been frustrated, and somewhat baffled, by the slow speed of the search engine, considering that Delicious is owned by Yahoo, which should know a thing or tow about optimizing search engines.
The new design is still in beta, but you can get some details and screenshots on Webware.
Warning for Facebook users using third party applications
VeriSign iDefense is warning Facebook users to beware when installing third party applications.
While no specific applications have been named, VeriSign says that the potential is there for third party applications to gain access to sensitive personal data.
On one hand, it’s nice to have security people issuing warnings like this to raise awareness that there are risks of having their personal data used in ways they don’t expect. On the other hand, why single out Facebook? This kind of blanket warning can apply to any web platform that allows access via API’s.
While there might be some technical hurdles to overcome before our information is safe online in applications like Facebook, the authors tend to think the problem has just as much to do with user attitutdes as it does with technical problems. Do all users go into using online applications like Facebook with their eyes wide open to the possibilities of how their personal data could be used? The authors don’t think they do.
However, Olson and Rick Howard, director of intelligence at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs, said a longer-term problem is users’ openness with personal information on public forums.
“They seem to have no sense of privacy,” Howard said. “We think it could go two ways. In the future, they’re either going to decide they’re embarrassed by all the information they’ve put out there, or they may decide it’s just the way it is and (that) it’s OK to put information out there.”
I wonder how many users are aware of how to fine tune their privacy settings in Facebook or of how Facebook controls personal information? Rather than rely on technical solutions from developers to solve the problem of keeping our information private, I think the better solution is to work on educating users about the nature of open and social networks.
Virgin, Creative Commons and Flickr
Virgin Mobile in Australia is creating a bit of a buzz by using photos they found on Flickr licensed using the Creative Commons license in advertising campaigns, including as the basis for their Virgin website Are you with us or what?
A Flickr Group called “Virgin Mobile – Are you with us or what” has started up in response to the campaign, and Australia’s Triple J radio has posted a podcast looking at the issue.
Virgin has followed the spirit of the CC license and given attribution on the photos. It seems most of the controversy revolves around the issue of whether or not the people in the photos have given permission for their likeness to be used.
As far as I know, this is the first major marketing campaign that has been built upon CC images and you have to think that commercial photographers are now either a) quaking in their boots at the thought of having to compete with millions of other photographers in an open forum, or b) salivating at the though of one of their pics getting snagged and used in a marketing campaign by a big company, thus cementing their reputation and giving them the ability to charge even more for their products.
In either case, you can expect that this campaign will go a long way to clarifying exactly what CC licensing is and help people understand the different levels of licensing that CC offers. And we can expect to see many more large ad agencies search the Flickr pool before dishing out thousands of dollars for a stock Getty image.
Librarians rock
According to a recent article in the New York Times, librarian is quickly becoming THE career of choice for progressive information technology thinkers.
With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”
Not that I needed a New York Times style article to validate it, but librarians are the information technology specialists of our time, regardless of their cultural “hip” status.
Living in the information (overload) age, anyone who can help me find, filter, organize and contextualize the content onslaught is pretty much a god in my books, and librarians help people do that everyday.
And if you think librarians are redundant in this age of Google, then check out 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important.
Social Networking and Web 2.0: Who is doing it?
Business Week has done a nice bit of research pulling together some demographic information to come up with profiles on who uses the current crop of social web services and how they use them.
Overall, social sites are growing at a huge rate, but for many of us it seems that we just want to lurk and are not actually contributing anything. Only 4.59% of Wikipedia users actually contribute any content, while the numbers for sites like Flickr (0.2%) and YouTube (0.16%) are surprisingly low.
Not surprising, the major contributors to social sites are in the 12-26 age group. Business Week calls them the Creators. These are the people who publish web pages, blog and upload videos to sites like YouTube. This group also has the largest percentage of social network Joiners with between 51% to 70% participation rate.
What is surprising to me is how consistently low the level of the Collectors is across the board. In every demographic, the rate of people who are tagging or aggregating, collecting and remixing content via RSS hovers between 11% and 18%. While it is encouraging to see some consistency across the demographic board with taggers and aggregators, overall it tells me that people have yet to see the value of both syndication and tagging.
For me, collecting it is one of the most exciting features of social networks – the ability for me to take all these disparate pieces of information and mash them up into a form that makes sense to me. It allows me to become my own editor, to begin to create my own mediascape and filter my own information.
Tagging is really what puts the social in social networks. It is through tagging and folksonomies that you begin to harness the power of the collective. As content gets tagged, it begins to take shape and organized into a coherent system. But in order for tagging and folksonomies to work, there has to be a fairly diverse and large group of users. Until that happens, the value of tagging and folksonomies run the risk of being tainted by a small group of sophisticated users.
BBC to put one million hours online
The BBC is working on an ambitious plan to put nearly 1 million hours of it’s audio and video archives online and there is some fascinating stuff here.
Some of the highlights include an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. that aired on the day he was assassinated in April 1968. In the interview King says: ‘The important thing isn’t how long you live, but how well you live.’
As a music buff, I’m also interested in the John Lennon/Yoko Ono interview that was broadcast in January 1981 and never heard again.
Technically, archiving the material is not a problem. However, the Beeb is running into hurdles negotiating copyright clearance for some of the archives. Despite owning the copyright and having rights to originally broadcast the show, it looks like they do not have the right to repeat many of them. So the time consuming process of negotiating with actors, agents, composers and presenters is throwing up some hurdles.
The educational value of this material is immense. Unfortunately for those of us outside the U.K., it looks like the archives will only be available to licence-fee payers free of charge. No word on whether there will be a fee charged for those users outside of the licence-fee area.
A Fair(y) Use Tale
This is a short film put together by some folks at Stanford that I thought you might appreciate. It’s about 10 minutes long, but it is fantastically well done.
Basically, to illustrate copyright laws in the US, these filmmakers have edited a whack of animated Disney movies together to create a new work – a documentary about copyright.
Even if you don’t have any interest in copyright law, the editing alone is wonderful.
Hmm, wonder what Disney is going to say about this? How far will fair use and satire carry these guys against Mickey?