In 1968, famed pop artist Andy Warhol said that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” He was partially correct. With the advent of Web 2.0, information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web, people can be famous, or infamous, for a lifetime! Every day, people eagerly upload anything onto the Internet that will showcase what they profess to be their skills, talents or their million dollar smiles.
Chapter 10, in John Burke’s technology guide for library staff, leads us into a new chapter of how people all over the world interact with each other on a daily basis. A great way to anonymously try your hand at writing about your favorite singer, dancer or event in history would be by submitting an article online to Wikipedia, the multilingual free-content encyclopedia. Second Life, an online virtual world, allows people to interact with each other as if they were face to face. Some universities have used the “world” to connect with visually impaired students by using speech synthesis technology. A mashup, an all-in-one type of digital media, combines text, graphics, audio, video and more. From the comfort of my couch in Chicago, mashup programs like Google Maps can take me on a trip to my hometown of St. Louis to see the activity around Busch Stadium while providing me with the latest statistics on how the Cardinals are performing against the Cubs. My favorite mashup is LibraryThing, a social cataloging application that allows me to showcase what books I have read, add reviews about those books and find out what my fellow bibliophiles have to say about the titles that they love or hate. LT’s connection with the Library of Congress and Amazon.com allows me to choose the exact edition and/or cover of the book I want to display on my virtual shelf. Consider signing up for your own LibraryThing account at www.librarything.com. It is a great tool for librarians and anyone else interested in joining a community of readers. You can add me as a friend/follower at www.librarything.com/home/LaMaestra72.
Creative ways for people around the world to express themselves seem to be growing every day. From Skype which allows you to do free video conferencing/chatting with friends and family who also have online accounts to Twitter, a type of microblogging form of social network in which friends send text-like messages called “tweets”, there is no reason why people cannot stay in touch. The content of the conversations may not appeal to most, but the idea of Web 2.0 is you write or post or upload whatever you want. I think YouTube, the video-sharing website where people submit the widest range of videos I have ever seen, is the best example of what society is and who we have become. I have watched some of my favorite crochet tutorials, 80s pop videos and crime dramas on YouTube. Who knows why people are drawn to that website or any of the other forms of social media in this modern-day platform of Web 2.0? What we do know is that all of it has changed our lives forever.
I will have to get back into using my librarything account, when I do I will "friend" you. I wish Skype had been available when I was in college, I would have saved myself a lot of high phone bills :)
ReplyDeleteI am quite behind on my LibraryThing account, updating it with new items, that is. I look at it, see what cool books there are to read, but I need to list the ones I've read. Even children's books. I can't remember if I mentioned somewhere in this blog that I met Jennifer Cervantes, the author of the children's book Tortilla Sun, on Skype. My young adult novel professor knows her, and he called her one night while we were discussing her book. How cool was that?!
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