OCLC Symposium at Online
The only thing that interested me at Online this year, apart from a few encounters with old friends, and seeing Brian 'IWR Information Professional of the Year' Kelly of UKWebFocus fame clutching his Oscar-like award, was the OCLC Symposium, Who’s watching your space?
Three speakers, John Naughton, journalist and academic at the Open University, Matt Brown of Nature Network and Cathy de Rosa, VP of Global Marketing for OCLC addressed us. John was keen to emphasise how much journalists have hyped the more well-known social networking sites, and how much they ignore anything outside MySpace and Facebook. he identified the known business models as being advertising or monetising eyeballs as it is elegantly expressed, viral marketing, subscriptions, share-cropping and the walled garden approach. He thought that the growth of social networking had implications for privacy, for how were understand friendship, that they might challenge conventional authority structure's and might allow more efficient information sharing. But he thought that there would be a collision between the walled garden model and the open nature of social networking sites, and he also cited the 'what next?' problem, where users, after the initial excitement of signing up to a network and discovering their friends, then wonder what to do next. He thought there might be possibilities for harnessing social networking in education, in corporate organisations and in libraries.
Matt demonstrated the Nature Network which was interesting, though I was left unclear about how hospitable it might be to other social networking tools. They have their open bookmarks and citations sharing tool, for example, Connotea, but I don't know how a Connotea user could share bookmarks with some who used del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, or citations with someone using citeulike.
Cathy highlighted some of the findings from the report itself, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our online world, downloadable from OCLC as a pdf. For librarians, one of the key findings is that there has been a considerable fall in the use of library websites since their last report two years ago. There's lots in the report, though the samples used seem a little small to me.
In questions, Brian Kelly asked if we were not in a very similar situation to that of the web in 1993, that that which was dismissed as hype then has now proved to be sustainable? John Naughton didn't answer the question, saying that he didn't think we could know what social networking might mean for serious applications. In response to another question, John compared the possible situation libraries might find themselves in to that of travel agents.
