Social Media

Sometimes two posts just collide in my brain. I thought I'd share a recent case of this phenomenon. First up, marketing/PR/social media Rock Star Mitch Joel on taking the best advantage of the inherent evilness of social networks like Twitter in The New Media Pecking Order. Newsflash: the world is one big pecking order. My friend - the rock star - travels infrequently by plane. I'm a loyal customer of the airline. It doesn't seem fair and it doesn't make sense. C'est la vie. Klout, PeerIndex, Twitter Grader and others simply bring to light something we've all known for a very long time: it's…
This one's pretty funny, but in a painful way. I'm sure this one rings true for a lot of people out there. I like Number 8: 8.) Self-Entitled Social-Media HotShots Who You Are: Your license plate reads "SCLEXPT". You spend all day teaching computer illiterate people how to create a facebook pages and twitter logins and you mock anyone who doesn't spend three hours a day updating their FB status or tweeting photos of their lunch. You have about as much "expertise" as 24-hour online certified priests, but tout your "knowledge" like a peacock on parade. What's the Remedy: Make somebody money.…
Following on from the last three days, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Countdown Questions: Question 1: What are the similarities or characteristics of thought leaders that you know? Tell us about the attributes that your ideal thought leader would have. I don't think any one person could actually have all the qualities of the idea thought leader but there are some commonalities across the ones I've encountered. Originality. A thought leader needs to bring something new to the public sphere, or at very least take an established idea and present it in a fresh, original way…
I have written and deleted this post. Twice. But damn it, it needs to be said. I'm here in charming Montreal for the North American Congress of Epidemiology. It's a good-sized meeting, as far as epi meetings go. The site notes that it's a joint effort between four major Epi organizations: The American College of Epidemiology (ACE); The Society for Epidemiologic Research; the Epi section of the American Public Health Association, and The Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Collectively, those associations represent a lot of epidemiologists. The conference started off well.…
Following on from the last two days, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Coundown Questions: Question 1: How can experience of failure contribute to making an effective thought leader? Failure is useful for a thought leader in the same way that it's useful for everyone. We can learn a lot from our failures: how to dust ourselves off and start over, how to rethink what we've done before and learn from our mistakes, how to put what we do in a larger interpersonal, organizational and social context. After all, just as we rarely succeed alone, we also rarely fail alone. Sure, the…
Following on from yesterday, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Coundown Questions: Question 1: What should we expect/demand of our thought leaders? I'm not sure I like the way this question is phrased, preferring something like, "What do thought leaders actually do?" We certainly shouldn't demand anything of our thought leaders, it's not like we're paying them to do their jobs. Even "expectations" seems like a strong word. To a large extent, thought leaders just are. I'm not sure we can speak of "followers" having "expectations" of leaders in the same way we could in a…
The very fine TEDxLibrariansTO team is counting down to this Saturday's big event with some daily questions for us all to consider. The topic, of course, is Librarians as Thought Leaders! These are the questions for Day 5. I'll attempt to answer them and every day's questions very briefly. I figure if I go for extremely brief answers, there's actually a chance I'll get to them every day! Question 1: Name one thing we could do right now in order to be perceived as thought leaders outside the profession. My Answer: Predictably, perhaps, I'll answer that we should mostly (but not completely)…
From the BBC: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google boss Eric Schmidt have warned governments worldwide not to over-regulate the internet. Mr Zuckerberg said governments cannot cherry pick which aspects of the web to control and which not to. *snip* "People tell me on the one hand 'It's great you played such a big role in the Arab spring [uprisings], but it's also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people'," said Facebook's founder. "But it's hard to have one without the other. You can't isolate some things you like about the internet and…
Yes, the TEDx whirlwind is coming to libraryland! Later this month on Saturday, June 25th, TEDxLibrariansTO is coming to Toronto. About TEDxLibrariansTO Who inspires you? We live in a time that is in need of inspiration. The aspirations of both individuals and society have always had a home within libraries and have traditionally found a voice through librarians. The theme for TEDx LibrariansTO is Librarians as Thought Leaders. Come to the event and experience this incredible opportunity to hear librarians speak to the differences we make in the world and how we have, can and do lead and…
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I did a short presentation on Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Case for Social Media as part of a panel for a York Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarly Communications Series. And yes, I was the Twitter guy, although some of the other presenters did talk about their use of Twitter. Basically, my point was that Twitter and blogs can be part and parcel of the research and research outreach life of academics. I mostly concentrated on Twitter, but I did try and make the same sorts of points about blogging as well as I spoke. Anyways, I thought I would share…
I'm doing a short presentation later today on using social media as a researcher. It's part of the York University Faculty of Graduate Studies' Scholarly Communications Series. This one is titled Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Faculties of Graduate Studies and Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, along with the York University Libraries, are collaboratively facilitating a series of information sessions focused on scholarly communications intended for all graduate students and faculty members. The series will address issues related to research skills and research dissemination,…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, is from August 14, 2007. (Weinberger left a detailed comment at the original post, for those that are interested.) ======= David Weinberger's…
Twitterers of the world. We've all heard the questions. The murmurs. The doubts and whispers. "Twitter is a waste of time," they say. "People are just talking about what they ate for breakfast, or what their dog is doing." "No good can come of it, no way to spend work time, turning us all into ADHD cases." The mother of all social media doubter articles came out a little while back, The New York Time's Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap: I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World, is from November 19, 2011. ======= OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a…
Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is: The conventional system is legible: you can count and measure a scientist's production. The incentive is to produce more of what the elite wants. In a publish-then-filter system nobody cares about quantity: only the impact…
I'm not usually a big fan of Seth Godin's guruish pronouncements, but I thought this one was a pretty good encapsulation of what it means to be a public professional or a public academic in the 21st century. In other words, Why bother having a resume? If you don't have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? And we shouldn't kid…
A while back I posted some semi-coherent ramblings inspired by the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess concerning how libraries were able to license ebook collections for their patrons. I'm not sure my ideas have changed or solidified or evolved or what, but I've certainly come to a slightly different way of articulating them. Here goes. At a certain level, libraries -- public, academic, institutional, special, whatever -- lending ebooks makes no sense at all. If a library acquires a digital copy of a book there is no good reason why every person in that library's community (school, town, city,…
And perhaps student tweets complaining about professor tweets also reaches an all-time high! Anyways, here it is, 11am on a holiday Friday morning and all I really want to do is relax and read a book. But what do I have to do? Write a Friday Fun post! What a drag. So, if I want to get the dreary chore of trying to be funny over with as quickly as possible, where do I turn? The Cronk News of course! Professor Tweets Complaining about Student Tweets Reaches All-Time High Twitter has become a popular way for faculty and staff to complain about the students with immediate gratification by "…
Welcome to the latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the world of higher education and scholarly publishing. This time around it's a bit different with the circumstances being a little unusual. Last week I did a back-of-the-envelope tweet about the Twitter habits of senior academic administrators and my experiences creating a list of those administrators. The uses of social networks in education is an area that really interests me and the habits of those senior administrators was something I'd been wondering about. Well, my old blogging buddy Stephanie…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart, is from April 12, 2008. ======= You know how I'm always complaining about business-y buzz/hype books & articles? How they're 1/3 repetition,…