October 2007 Archives

I got back into Second Life a few days ago; so far I'm enjoying it. I was in SL before, just a few times to check out Info Island, but I never stuck around. First off I was using my old computer and by that time it was already starting to die. The sound eventually quit on that computer and I saw no point in doing anything inside SL after that. There's a whole mess of reasons why I decided to try again, I think the recent ASIS&T conference really sparked my interest in it. I attended a leadership session which included SL which I found interesting, and the thing I found most interesting was a mention of SL in an open science section where the session speaker talked about how he's had poster sessions in SL. I like the idea of reaching out to people in SL and educating them on things that interest you. Just last night I told Alex that he could build an NMR in SL since I won't let him buy one (I'm not mean, they're big and cost lots of money). Without even thinking about it he already had ideas for running simulation experiments and showing how the chemistry worked. So at least I know what an NMR looks like since I've visited Alex's lab a number of times, but there's plenty of people who don't, and without getting off on a tangent, interest in science related fields keeps falling, I think science awareness is a worthy cause to support.

My very first impression in SL left me feeling very overwhelmed; I think that's another reason why I didn't return for a long time. This time I've been working through a new book I checked out of the library, Second Life: a Guide to Your Virtual World, and that has seemed to help out a lot. Things I like about this book:

• Nice color pictures (I'm attracted shiny and colorful things)
• A companion world was created to supplement the book to keep up with thing that change
• The book doesn't try to be definitive

I feel less overwhelmed because there are suggestions of places to go and things to see and I'm not left wandering around aimlessly in a world I know nothing about. My husband also created an avatar so last night we went to a few places together, which was nice!

I've heard people have had problems with Vista but I haven't had many problems running it on my computer. As a matter of fact, it's pretty fast and I can still multi-task (because I really can't stop anyway). I do have network issues when I'm on the wireless connection so I have to be plugged into the LAN, although Alex doesn't seem to have those problems on his computer with the wireless. Last night we were on SL at the same time, I was plugged in and he was on the wireless, and we didn't seem to have any problems that way.

So I'm just hanging out in the world right now and trying to get familiar with everything. Alex wants to build a house with me, and I told him I want a sailboat, maybe even a lighthouse, that would be cool.

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I have way too many books going right now, but I started reading this one at work and I'm enjoying it so far. Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a parody by the fake Steve Jobs is hilarious. I think fans and non-fans of Apple will certainly enjoy this book.

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Just a few words about my experience at ArbCamp yesterday (A2's un-unconference), I had a great time! Thanks to those who organized, it was really well put together. I talked to quite a few students there, I know there were several that came from all over Michigan, and being a student myself, I was felt so welcomed at the event and I do appreciate that.

I didn't take a whole lot of notes at ArbCamp, I think I was noted out after ASIS&T, but I did have a lot of wonderful conversations with people the entire day.

I enjoyed Mitten's enthusiastic talk on Grids in Web Design. I wasn't aware of Blueprint Grid CSS but I am now! I'm a big fan of generators (or anything that will do things for me for that matter) so I found a link to one while I was listening to the discussion. Also mentioned was the nifty Firefox extension It's All Text! There were other great tools being bounced around here, but I actually missed the rest, I think my internet cut out toward the end of the session.

Before lunch we went to Ed's Lunch 2.0 which mostly just turned into a chat session with an SI student at Michigan. Garin from SI explained the Community Information Corps, a weekly lunch featuring speakers in the Information field. It's too bad I normally work on Fridays, the speakers sound fascinating and I wouldn't mind attending some time. From here on until after lunch I met and talked with several interesting people.

After lunch I started in the Photography & Social Networks session but then ended up in the Library Camp session after a few minutes. Sometimes it's just so hard to decide. My friend Sarah stayed in the photography session though. During the library session we talked about some interesting ideas of small libraries or personal libraries. Peer-to-peer circulation came up. As it was being described I almost envisioned it as a library social network, within your library network you're able to share library books with one another or see what your friend has, bypassing the hold/checkout process at your local library. The advantage to the library would be that your patrons bypass the circulation process and deal directly with one another, saving circulation costs and freeing up shelf space (if the library allows items to stay out until they are needed by somebody else). In a Library 2.0 dream world this sounds like a fabulous idea, but l know that libraries would never buy in to this. It's hard enough getting things like RSS in catalogs and social features in our systems scare most librarians. It's too bad.

LibraryThing also came up a lot. I find LibraryThing interesting but I'm not a user myself. One point I mentioned at the discussion was that since I borrow most of my books from libraries and don't actually own them myself, that has always been a perceived barrier for me to start to use LibraryThing. I did start a LibraryThing account to catalog our sheet music a long time ago though; I wouldn't mind trying to start that process back up again. I wanted to catalog our sheet music and then also our classical music CDs so finding corresponding pieces would be easy to cross reference between the two collections. Since we don't play much anymore this hasn't been high on my priority list. Anyway, one reason why I would start using LibraryThing would be to contribute to the collective tagging data on materials. Some libraries are starting to import LibraryThing tags into their catalogs and I think this is potentially more beneficial than trying to integrate tags on their systems themselves.

After then was Derek's discussion on Social Media 101. Some of the topics included a rundown of the popular social networking tools, a brief discussion on privacy, as well as a list of potential uses for the tools. I'm sure I'm missing a lot. I use a lot of the tools already, but one thing I did think during this is that I will probably want to figure out what I'm not using anymore and clean all that up. Network portability came up and this is something I'm interested in. Probably not so much portability but just some way to know what it is I'm signed up for and a more efficient way to aggregate my online presences. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of choices in various networking tools and also the fact that I'm not even sure what open accounts I have out there anymore.

Sarah and I spent a good while talking to Andy, a neogeographer, which is a title I find fascinating. I also enjoyed talking to Andy at ABC later that evening.

All in all it was a good day; I met a lot of great people, had a lot of interesting discussions, and took my husband out with me for some beer and more great discussions at ABC later. Although I think today is the first full day I've spent at home in over a week so I'm actually enjoying this time too.

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I cancelled my MySpace account just now. The comment spam has been driving me nuts, not just in my name but I've been getting the same sort of thing from some of my friends. Today I changed my spam settings and it happened again so I'm done. I don't really do much on MySpace, I'm not sad to see it go either. Sorry if any one of you were my friends on there, but if you really want to keep track of what I'm doing, feel free to add me on Facebook instead.

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Starting Sunday I'll be in Milwaukee for the ASIS&T Annual Meeting. I'm pretty excited about going for several reasons.

1. It's in Milwaukee! I went to college near Milwaukee, most of my friends live there, and it kinda feels like I'm going to my second home for almost a week.
2. This is my first ASIS&T conference and I'm hoping it's a good one. The overall theme of the conference is "Social Computing and Information Science". Fun! I'm supposed to be volunteering but things have been weird getting that set up so we'll see what happens.
3. I'm staying with friends. Friends are great! They will actually be gone for the weekend when I show up but they mailed the key to their apartment so I could still stay there. Friends are great!
4. I'm going to an author event with a college friend I hadn't seen in a long time on Saturday. We've been using Facebook to set things up this whole week. It should be a good time and we can swap library stories since we both work in public libraries.

So barring any unforeseen circumstances (like my car breaks down on the way, it's been moody lately and hasn't made the trip to Wisconsin in close to 5 years), I should be there from Saturday to Thursday.

Then two weeks after that I'm going to Milwaukee again! My friend is getting married and we're going for the wedding. It actually would've been Milwaukee 3 times in a 6 week period if it hadn't been for me working on the weekend of Homecoming. That would've been about 2 weeks ago. Apparently Milwaukee is calling my name this month.

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Yesterday I came across an article called, You Are Not My Friend, from TIME Magazine. This article bothered me, but it also got me thinking about a lot of different issues of social networking, some related to the article, some not. First, there seems to be a lot of people who fall into the category of "I just don't get it," like the article's author. But like the author, they have to proclaim how much they don't get it in some sort of public way, criticizing the rest of us who do participate. Maybe this is the real heart of my issue with this article. It's like people who criticize the music I listen to or the books I read, to which I say "if you don't like it fine, but leave me alone to enjoy it."

The original quote that caught my attention was posted on Library Stuff:

Until we can build some kind of social network where we can present our true, flawed selves - perhaps some genius can invent something that takes place in a house over dinner with wine - I say we strip down our online communities to just the important parts.

To this I sort of agreed, I think that's what compelled me to click on the link. Andy supplied a good link in a comment to the del.icio.us post to a post about authenticity. Do we represent our "true, flawed selves" online? I can't say I know the answer to that for everybody, but I like to think that I do, but I also like to think of myself as a work in progress anyway (online and offline). What I may disagree with in the above quote though is stripping "down our online communities to just the important parts." What is important to me about an online community doesn't sound like what would be important to the article's author.

In my head though, I think I've been able to narrow down a few key issues to all of this stuff; privacy, contact grouping, fatigue, and authenticity. I have comments about each of these that I will save for another time, but first I want to comment some more on this particular article.

But now we're definitively friends, having taken a public vow of friendship on friend-based websites, wearing metaphorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, the punky MySpace, the careerist LinkedIn and the suddenly very Asian Friendster.

First off, how we use the word "friend" in an online environment has changed. The author is quick to point out that this is a bad, almost superficial thing, but I disagree. The internet has done more to connect people than any other technology thus far. Social networking has removed the limits of geography, why do I have to limit my so called, "friends" to where I live or to whether I've met them personally? I don't think I have to.

This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take up too much of my time. It's weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person--whom I propose we distinguish by calling "non-metafriends."

So it's great that you enjoy hanging out with your so called, "non-metafriends," but if you're worried about your time and the energy it takes to maintain a relationship with a "metafriend", then why are you even bothering to participate? This is what I don't get. I seem to have no problem managing metafriends and non-metafriends. Knowing the mundane details of their lives doesn't even bother me. Maybe that makes me weird? But I think it adds to the authenticity of a person's online self. It's ok if I miss a few days of a metafriend's Twitter stream or status updates on Facebook if I'm busy, but when I'm not I enjoy "dropping in" on them to see how they're doing. I guess my point is that it doesn't have to take up too much of your time if you don't let it. Of course maybe I have no clue because I am 73% addicted to Facebook anyway. Do I have time? Maybe not, but I seem to still have a life outside of Facebook so I'm not worried about it. Is it a matter of priorities? Probably so, but I know where my offline priorities are too. My life is just as much online as it is offline and I intend on using both of those to my advantage.

Also, you're a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say, "Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me"? Or tell me he'd colored in a map of all the places he'd ever been?

Here's the part where I started to think that the author is completely wrong. "Would a non-metafriend call me and say...?" Maybe not so directly but I think the answer is more yes than no. Let's think about it, we're by our very nature selfish people, and even superficial. I recently bookmarked a link to Lifehacker on Four Rules to Understand What Makes People Tick. The four rules (originally via lifehack.org) didn't surprise me either:

• Rule One: People Mostly Care About Themselves
• Rule Two: People are Motivated by Selfish Altruism
• Rule Three: People Don't Think Much
• Rule Four: Conformity is the Norm

We're not talking metafriends here; we're talking about real people. It seems almost natural that this behavior be transferred over into real people's online habits too. Not only do the rules not surprise me they don't bother me. While I'm generally empathetic I would be lying if I said I didn't care mostly about myself, and I actually think that's the way it should be. This works only because of Rule 2, we are motivated by "selfish altruism"; this is the balance to the first rule. This is probably a topic for a whole other blog post though, but I do think it directly relates to how we are as people, not just online people vs. offline people. The people are one in the same; I think that we're just more transparent online than we are offline.

The horror is, I can't opt out.

Yes you can. Don't sign up for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, or fill in the blank. It doesn't sound like you're going to miss much anyway.

I do have more to say about this but I'm going to save the rest for another blog post. My blog is in desperate need for something other than del.icio.us links anyway.

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