On the other hand, searchrolls look keen.  If it can save searching through countless self-referential blogs to get a survey of what they are writing on a topic, then it’s heading toward the cancer cure level.   What is being written about privacy focusses first on political efforts to invade individual privacy.  Secondly, there is blogging about privacy being valued differently by older or younger people.   Younger people seem comfortable exchanging some privacy for greater access.  When the librarians speak of their own thoughts, they are about protecting privacy.  That’s the librarian’s instinct!

This video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uOKFhoznI

is a panel on planning for Library 2.0 at UC-Berkeley.  Looks really cool.  I want to watch this!

Podcasts, good ones, are a fine way to communicate to media-oriented users for the sake of orientation, announcements and training.  It’s also a fine way to present broadcasts from the collection if copyright issues are dealt with. 

What’s not to like about adding photos to library materials?  Pictures get and hold attention much better than text.  Could anyone resist looking at my twin grands in this picture?  How much more compelling would library photos be?  The problem is how to choose the right service that will be the standard for the organization, so that more than one person can manage the display of whatever it is.  You need several people who are facile in using the service.  The service has to be simple and flexible enough to allow for creativity to grow.  You need policies (hate that word) on what can be used and how to observe copyright. 

There already is, and in future will continue to be demand for computing power that is not tied to a specific station.   Apps built to enhance work that is free of a single workstation will succeed so long as the work is secure and private.

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MySpace and Facebook for the library?  If it serves to link users from those utilities to our offerings, that’s great.  To design a parallel universe for these utilities would be redundant.  However, they trigger ideas of where we could be heading with our offerings to make them more functional and appealing.

We’ve seen with other net applications that they start out great and get overrun by nuisance communications that undermine their usefulness and focus.  This is my main privacy concern.  The more open the resource, the more junk, the less productive.

Facebook and MySpace rely on intuition to guide the new user.  My intuition doesn’t always guide me to be able to do what I want on these utilities.  Some instruction, help buttons, explanations, in the right place, and also an overview, would be welcome.  There’s too much learning curve.  Also too much clicking and mousing to navigate.

A wiki can be layered with multiple pages on separate topics or for different purposes so that a higher order of organization is achieved.