On the precarious nature of our lives

Most of us, most of the people I know, are quite comfortably off. Some rich, some poor, most somewhere in between, but we all have a home and the wherewithal to put food on the table 3 times a day and still operate a mobile phone and watch a bit of telly in the evenings.

But yesterday, I discovered how easily all that can be lost, and just how far down a person can go in a short space of time. At the back of my mind I know that, in my own case, I’m only a couple of pay checks away from bankruptcy: mortgage must be paid, credit card will only get you so far, etc. Fortunately I have (I hope) a secure job, so no worries. Not so with a couple of friends of ours, who of course will remain unnamed, but people who were part of our social circle last year. Let’s call them Susie and Mum.

They went interstate, and were doing ok until the Global Financial Cock-up happened, and Susie’s company shut down operations and left her without a job. Susie works in an industry where — before the GFC — things were booming, and are expected to be booming again. Eventually. In the fullness of time. But, unfortunately, not yet.

So anyway, they left the town where they’d been living and set off on something of an odyssey across Australia, looking for work, led on by Centrelink staff who’s message was the same at all stops: “no work here, why don’t you try up at X, have you thought about fruit picking or driving a truck”. Only to find at X that there was no fruit to pick, no trucks in need of drivers.

Eventually, after a journey of thousands of kilometres, and after being sadly ripped off by a “friend” they were trying to help out, they arrived a few days hence back in Adelaide, so flat broke that they didn’t eat for 3 days. But still trying to tough it out and dig themselves out of the awful hole their lives had become. It was only after some cajoling on our part that they were enticed around here last night for a good meal and a chat.

Now, of course, I know that people get into such strife, and worse, all the time. And I’ve probably been heard myself to wonder aloud why, in this day and age, people have to live without at least shelter and a square meal. That family living in their car in Port Adelaide? Surely there are social services they could turn to for assistance? Well, yes and no. There are services, but they are often unable to help. Emergency housing? Sorry, full up. Centrelink? Sorry, you have to register and then come back in two weeks. Church ladies? Yes, they actually gave them $20 they were able to buy some food with.

But the thing that most struck me, and the thing I can’t get out of my head, is this: “Susie”, last year a happy, strong, vital and confident young woman, sitting on my sofa yesterday morning, with that blank stare into nothing that only the completely crushed in spirit have. Such a look of utter defeat, I could hardly bear it. Her life turned upside down, she’d tried and failed, tried and failed to get back on track. But you can only do that so many times before total despair sets in.

We’ll do what we can to help, and I know other friends will also rally around as best they are able. But, next time you hear of a case of homelessness, just remember: it’s never as simple as you think, and the solution is never as easy as you think, and however blessed we might be in this country with services and safety-nets and such like, there’s always a case for a little compassion and a helping hand from you and I. Because next week it could easily be us.

The Top Ten Things Library Administrators Should Know About Technology | TechEssence.info

The Top Ten Things Library Administrators Should Know About Technology | TechEssence.info.

Excellent short summary, good for passing on to your senior people, esp. those giving you grief.

Social Networking explained

Tomorrow I have to give a presentation to Library staff (and some others) about Social Networking, and how we might make use of it. Unusually (for me) I’m struggling to find a way to present this. I usually just sit down with Powerpoint (actually Open Office Impress) and start constructing, and it all just organises itself. But this is not working for this topic. It’s too big, too amorphous. So I’m writing down here what it is I want to say.

I want to begin with analysing why we want to be social anyway. In the “real world”, we’re social because we want to be known, to meet people, to promote our services, our ideas, and to participate in events and causes. Online, we’re social for exactly the same reasons. In fact, we’re simply using the technology to expand and enhance our potential for social interaction.

OK. So what do we mean by Social Media and Social Networking? Some definitions are in order.

Let’s start with blogging, one of the oldest social media tools. Probably everyone knows about blogging by now: it’s a means for an individual – or an organisation – to share ideas, thoughts, impressions on any topic that interests the writer. Apparently, there are 200,000,000 blogs in the world, but what’s extraordinary is that 54% of them are updated regularly. Yes, a lot of blogs are personal, perhaps not well written, and perhaps unread. But blogging is now so well established, with so many good, interesting, intelligent and well-informed writers, that it threatens to take over from the established news media.

Next is micro-blogging. Which I might categorise as blogging for people with ADHD. Except that it has actually evolved into a different animal. According to Wikipedia:

Microblogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to [share] brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips … submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web.

In its simplest form, micro-blogging is exemplified by Twitter, which some of you have probably heard of, and which we’ll look at a bit later. The basic idea is that you don’t always want to express yourself with a lengthy discourse. Twitter (etc.) allows for a short and sweet, pithy and pointed remark about something that you want to share – in 140 characters or less. And the point about that is that 140 characters is all you have if you are tweeting from a mobile phone using text messaging. You can “blog” on the go. And indeed that is what people do, with 80% of twitter use coming from mobile phones.

Since Twitter is only text-based, other tools have emerged to allow sharing of interesting stuff in other formats as well: pictures, video, and audio. An example of this is Tumblr.

And speaking of sharing interesting stuff brings us to another topic, social bookmarking, where instead of simply adding a bookmark (or favourite) in your browser, you add it to a social bookmarking site, such as Delicious or Digg. By doing that, you contribute to a global pool of interesting links, and by adding tags to categorise the link, you make it easy for others to find. This is cataloguing for the web, and can be turned into a powerful tool for libraries. We’ll look at this later too.

And finally, let’s talk briefly about “Friends” on social networks. Who are these people? Actually, the definition and the terminology varies depending on the context and the service we’re looking at. Twitter uses the term “followers” rather than “friends”, and that reflects its intention. If you find an interesting tweeter, you follow them to see their tweets in your stream. To them, you are a follower. They may or may not choose to follow you back. (You can use Twitter without ever tweeting yourself.) You get to choose who you follow, and if someone is annoying or boring, you can unfollow them. On other sites, such as Flickr (the photo sharing site) you have “contacts”. And on Facebook you have “friends”. But basically they all mean much the same thing: someone you find interesting enough to want to see in your stream. Facebook friends are a little different, in that the relationship is always two-way : if you friend someone, you follow them and they also follow you. Which makes Facebook much more of a conversation.

Speaking of which, finally we come to “Social Networking”, which specifically refers to sites such as Facebook and My Space which are designed to facilitate all of these kinds of social interaction in a single platform. You can meet new people, have conversations, share stuff, promote yourself and your services, get involved and generally have fun. All without the tedious business of getting up from the couch and going out!

One last definition before we launch into some demos: the Profile. Any site you join will provide some means for you to identify yourself, and it is here that you need to pay the most careful attention. This is your online identity. It’s up to you how much or how little you reveal of yourself, and some common sense will be in order – e.g. you probably want to keep your home address and phone number to yourself! But if you want to attract friends or followers, you need to provide enough information about yourself and your interests that they can judge if you’re worth the effort. Also, you need a picture or avatar for your profile. A blank photo on your profile marks you as a non-participant, and you won’t get any friends. (An avatar is a picture that represents who you are, rather than being a picture of yourself. E.g. a cartoon character.)

OK, now to some specifics.

First up we’ll look at Twitter, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately, even though it’s been around since 2006. Ignoring the personal trivia which makes up the bulk of twitter use, it can be used as a promotional and informational tool by organisations. For example: ABC News, Mike Rann, New Scientist. In a sense Twitter is the new RSS. But there’s a problem : twitter is immediate and ephemeral. Yes, it is possible to find old tweets, but who would bother? Sometimes, tweets arrive so thick and fast that older tweets are quickly pushed off the bottom of the screen. And unless you are looking constantly at your stream, things are easily missed. Which is why desktop widgets are popular for following twitter : new tweets will pop up briefly on your desktop while you are doing other things (such as work). Without such tools, twitter becomes almost pointless. And you also need to be very selective about who you follow. Those who follow hundreds or thousands of tweeters are kidding themselves, because there’s no way you could keep up.

Next, a quick glance at Delicious. Not only does this provide a sophisticated way for you to keep track of your bookmarks, and to share with others. It also provides, for the Library, a very neat way to compile finding aids for specific topics. For example, this link to my delicious list of ebook collections.

And finally, we’ll look at Facebook, which continues to expand at a staggering rate – adding 3.5 million users in the past 2 weeks, with a current total of over 267 million active users (making it the 4^th most populous “place” in the world). In Australia, there are 6.5 million users, almost 1/3 of the population. And that’s about the same ratio of library staff. How can Facebook be used by the Library? We’re already using free WordPress blogging software for the library’s News, and for the staff Social Club (Interface). Facebook offers ways to extend that potential. In addition to personal profiles, Facebook provides for organisations and other entities to have a promotional Page, which attracts Fans rather than Friends. We already have a page for the library, with 1200 fans, making it the fifth most-popular academic library page on Facebook (out of about 400). Using tools provided by Facebook and others, we’re able to feed our News blog directly into our Facebook page, which means it acquires content and activity with no extra effort on our part. In other words, it costs us nothing to do this. The page also offers us the potential to use it for discussions and surveys with users, although this is something we have yet to explore, and requires a significant fan base to to make worthwhile. And pages allow creation of event notices and posting of updates about significant items to fans. In short, this is another way of reaching our users for very little effort.

Another use of Facebook I think worth exploring is for our social club. We’re using the Interface blog for this purpose, but – if all social club members had a Facebook profile – we could use Facebook to provide a richer platform for this purpose, with much greater interaction : more sharing, more discussion, and more involvement by all. So, if you don’t have an account on Facebook, sign up! It costs nothing and will take less than 2 minutes using your email address. If we can all library staff on Facebook, even if they are minimally active, we can take advantage of this platform’s ability to enhance communication.

And with that I think I’m out of time.