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October 31, 2006
The revolution will not be televised
Political candidates with MySpace pages targeting young voters. Blogs to target online readers and get the word out about a campaign, a court decision, a new trend. Google Bombing against candidates from members and supporters of the other candidates.
On NPR's Morning Edition today, there was an interview with Joe Trippi (he authors a really interesting blog, too), author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, where Mr. Trippi talked about how social networking on the internet, and the rise of new technologies in society, are affecting the political climate, and the behaviors of voters, and potential voters. I recommend you listen to this news bit (it should be up after 10am EST today).
If you haven't been paying attention to social networking and other communication technologies, now is the time for you to catch up. If politicians are seeing fit to use the technologies to reach voters, it must be something that *works*. The same way politicians are starting to use technologies to reach people, librarians need to understand the technologies and how to apply them to reach out to patrons and *potential* patrons.
I did a presentation (.pdf) on October 16 (I neglected to mention it ahead of time here, my apologies) at the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries (NAHSL) conference on new web technologies, and it was basically all about social social software on the web, how the blog publishing paradigm has pretty much formed a base for interactive technologies on the web, and how it's more about adding social software bits to your sites than about how to build your site with DHTML or AJAX or whatnot (still important technologies, but not as important to Joe Internet User).
If you're new to social software, this presentation is a good place to start, but you also want to pay special mind to slide 14, with further reading and resources.
On an side note, NPR Classics in the Morning is playing the score from Harry Potter this morning. Happy Halloween and Happy Samhain!
October 31, 2006 8:49 AM