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March 18, 2005
CIL Thursday: Social Software 101
K. Matthew Dames is a man to watch. His presentation clearly shows that he has a mastery of the potential of social software, or what he prefers to call digital collaboration, and how it fits into technology and initiatve planning in the future.
Social software applications, technologies like instant messenger (IM), peer-to-peer (P2P), networked games, and smart phones (especially using short message service, or SMS), support social networking, connecting people through group interaction.
If you look at it from Mr. Dames's perspective, seeing tools such as wikis, blogs, smart phones (as PDAs and for SMS) as digital collaboration tools, you can see how it supports the better definition of "helping people work efficiently across distances," especially since most social software right now is being used to collaborate in business, academic, and other collaborative environments (like libraries), as opposed to interaction for everyday people.
What roles can and should librarians play in bringing social software, and/or digital collaboration, to your library? He focused on a common theme I'm seeing here at the conference (it popped up in Stephen Abram's presentation on Wednesday), the 3 Cs:
- Community: Libraries as spaces offer this
- Context: Librarians put information in the proper context, whether it be in person, on a blog, on a wiki, on a flat site, on IM, and
- Collaboration: A trend of evolution in today's work environments, and social software/digital collaboration apps are an integral part of this evolution. As an example, a library that used IM for ready reference actually noticed that more students actually came to the library, so it may be that using things that, on the face, seem to keep out of the library, will bring people *in*.
Check out the presentation slides and notes, and keep an eye on his firm's blog at SNTReport.com.
March 18, 2005 8:28 AM