Category: Web 2.0

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security Web 2.0

Your Web 2.0 App is a Security Threat

Read/Write/Web today has a story on the dangers of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. They are profiling a company called FaceTime that gives IT departments a way to add web application scanning to their network. Most IT departments do some scanning, at least at the firewall, for malicious applications and sites, but few do any kind of searching for web applications (think Facebook apps, Google’s Team Sites, unsupported IM capabilities, etc.). This company is offering a way to do that. RWW’s take on the matter, in the post Your Web 2.0 App is a Security Threat – ReadWriteWeb is:

Of course, when users become their own I.T. department, they’re unknowingly introducing inherent risks into the previously hardened network infrastructure. Just because a web app is easy to operate, that doesn’t make it safe and secure for enterprise use. As users upload and share sensitive files through these unapproved backchannels or have business-related conversations through web-based IM chatrooms, they might not only be putting their company’s data at risk, they could also be breaking various compliance laws as well.

And this is completely true. The problem isn’t really with the apps, though, it’s with IT departments that refuse to allow *safe* networking practices in their networks. User education, coupled with some monitoring of public sites for confidential information, along with sanctions for misuse of Web 2.0 tools (after the users are educated on proper use, of course) can make Web 2.0 apps part of the IT infrastructure and, consequently, much safer than if the users are off in the “wild west” of web applications, doing things themselves.
I’ve been working on a Tech Report for ALA discussing just how to use these Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with others – and one of the issues that I discuss is the fact that these are publicly facing tools with risks for unintentional leaks of data or confidential information. If your IT department is on the ball and willing to work with you, however, those leaks can be stopped and all of your data can be kept safe – even while you are using these tools to their best effect.
Want more about this? You’ll have to buy the Tech Report next year… until then, however, educating your IT department about the benefits of Web 2.0 applications in the organization will really help to make these things available – in a sanctioned way – for you!

Categories
Web 2.0

Native Tasks in Gmail!

Gmail now has a native task manager, if you go to the “labs” area of Gmail and turn it on. Once you click on that little green bottle at the top of your regular Gmail account (this is not something that is available to us as “enterprise Gmail customers” yet – BOO!!), you can see the tasks option on top. Enable it, refresh Gmail and find the Tasks link under the Contacts link on the left side of your screen. Click it and a handy little box pops up that allows for entry of tasks – with indenting – and basic task management capabilities. You can also automatically add an email as a task, with a link to that email included under the task’s title as “related email”. That is pretty cool!!

Categories
mashups Web 2.0

LinkedIn Applications

Well, it looks like LinkedIn is going the way of Facebook and MySpace and adding an application section to its offerings. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now and have just a few thoughts…
Wednesday morning – when the announcement was made – I jumped in and started playing. The applications available looked pretty interesting, but of the ones on offering, I took only the Slideshare, My Travel and Huddle Workspaces ones. I immediately hit a snag – none of them worked well (or at all, in the case of Slideshare) in my Firefox 3 browser. I reluctantly gave in and fired up IE7 and gave it another whirl. That seemed to fix the issues I was having, but it made me very unhappy…
And then I ended up posting this without finishing it, so I’ll do that now. I do love scheduling posts, except when I forget that I’ve scheduled them.
Anyway – it’s been a couple of days since the apps were added and I haven’t noticed any really outstanding uses of them – yet. I think the Huddle one – where you can create a workspace on LinkedIn and collaborate with your “connections” will be really interesting to watch. I may post again about this later if I find any really good uses of these – but it seems like I’m not the only one with issues getting them going, so I just don’t have a lot of “real world use” information yet!

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Web 2.0

Playing

I should be writing, working on a presentation or editing something, but I’m not. Instead, I’m playing with my two latest toys in an attempt to feel like I’ve accomplished something today (the Envisionware install was trying, to say the least… though it wasn’t really Envisionware’s fault, we piled too much onto the “to-do” list along with it). First, I got an account with Updating.me (http://www.updating.me) using the beta code BetaToUpdateMe (that will work until they shut the doors on it – no guarantees for the length of time that will be!) and then, thinking that a Ubiquity command would be just the thing to make Updating.me really, really useful, started hacking at some Javascript.
34 minutes (according to my FriendFeed posts) after I started whining about wanting to see a command for Ubiquity that would update my Updating.me account, I had it written, posted and tested. It worked! Except for the small fact that the Updating.me folks haven’t actually released their API yet, so it doesn’t actually update anything. They posted on their blog, however, on the 28th of August that an API would be coming soon, so all I have to do is change a single line in the script to point to their API “hook” and the script will be actually useful.
In case you are as impatient as I am, you can get the command (after you install Ubiquity, of course) at http://www.intertecdesigns.com/updatingme.html. If Ubiquity is installed, a drop-down bar will pop out of the top of your browser and ask you if you want to subscribe. Do be sure to subscribe to updates so that as soon as I make that little API hook change, you will get the full benefit of a working command to update multiple social sites with one single command.
Sweet!!

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presentations travel Web 2.0 Writing

Speaking and Writing and Working, oh my!

I don’t think I’ve completely updated my Presentations & Publications page with all of this yet, but if I do it here, I can just copy & paste later, right? This is my schedule for the next couple of months – if you are going to be around any of these places, look me up and say hi!

Sept 8-12 –National Association of Government Webmasters Conference – speaking on Sept. 11th on Web 3.0, but will be there for the whole conference.
Sept 17th – MaintainIT Webinar on making Public Computers 2.0-ready
October 1-3 – Missouri Library Association Conference – speaking on the 1st on Collaboration 2.0 (2:45-3:30) and Library Learning 2.1 (3:45-4:30) – but will be there for the whole conference, introducing speakers and going to business meetings….
October 19-22nd – Internet Librarian – since I somehow forgot to send in a speaking proposal, I won’t be speaking here – just attending!
Nov/Dec – Computers In Libraries – Article on how to use social media/2.0 tools to collaborate.

That’s it – so far! Hope to see you around at one of these places!!

Categories
presentations Web 2.0

Becoming 2.0

Bobbi and I finished up our 4-day workshop on all things Web 2.0 on Friday. I was surprised at how tired I got after each day of teaching, but it was also strangely invigorating, too. The students in the class were really engaged and willing to learn, although there was a lot of complaints about too-full-heads, I think they got some good information out of it and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do when they get back to their home libraries and get some time to put this stuff into practice!

Becoming 2.0 class hard at work
Becoming 2.0 class hard at work

Categories
Web 2.0 Writing

A new project for me!

Now that everything is officially official, I can let my loyal readers know what my next big project will be (besides 4 presentations in 3 months and a changeover from Exchange to Google hosted email)! While I was in Anaheim for ALA, I was approached at my table at the Social Software Showcase by an editor for the ALA Tech Source Tech Reports and asked if I’d like to write one for them. After some discussion of topic and timing, I can now say that the May/June 2009 issue of the Tech Report will be on Collaboration 2.0 (working title – it’ll probably change…) and will deal with using Web 2.0 tools (Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) to provide a platform for collaboration in libraries. I’m pretty excited about the project and am champing at the bit to get started! I’ll be doing some serious tapping into my social network to get examples of collaboration from my librarian buddies on Twitter, Facebook, Ning (starting to sound familiar?) and the like. Don’t feel like you have to wait to be asked, though, if you are doing some collaborative project and using these tools – feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you are doing any time!

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Web 2.0

Intermission

As a break from the tedium that is my description of my workweek, I’d like to answer a question/comment left on Monday’s post by the lovely Lori Reed (who I met at ALA, but didn’t get any time to chat with, really). She asked me to elaborate on my use of Remember The Milk and, specifically, if I was using the Gmail/Firefox extension. To answer her last question first, I’m using the extension and LOVE IT. Not only do I have my task list right there in my most-used inbox, Gmail, but I can tag an email with Action (per my GTD setup) and it automagically adds the tagged email to my RTM tasks. How freakin’ cool is that? If I want to add a task, but not tag it as Action, I can also create a task from an email via the “More Actions” menu in Gmail. That makes RTM the obvious choice of social task lists for me! Speaking of – I just blogged, for our Library Learning 2.1 program, about just this topic this week. Monday’s post was on social task lists and discusses my use of RTM in the post. I also link to a really excellent blog post from RTM on setting up your system to work with GTD (along with an explanation of GTD for those unfamiliar with it). Links to the Firefox extension and a couple of alternative list programs are included in that post as well.

Categories
mashups Web 2.0

Public Data Mashups

Hey – I just learned about a new “contest” being sponsored by the UK Government in which they are looking for creative and useful mashups using public data (crime, health, education data that is released by the government, but not in particularly useful ways). This is a fabulous idea!! What a great way to get people thinking about using the REAMS of data produced by the government! For a list of ideas that have been submitted so far, check out their Ideas page.
The winner of the contest will get their idea funded by the government and the chance for Internet fame and fortune – such as that might be… Wonder if this (in a stripped down fashion) would work for a library – we put out massive amounts of data about our collections, ILL information and more – or we could add pointers to public data ourselves and get civic-minded folks to do something with it!

Categories
socialseries Web 2.0

8. Blogs

Hmmm, you are reading this, so do I really have to go into what Blogs are? Well, here’s a textbook definition:

Weblog (blog) – a web page that consists of separate, diary-like entries that are arranged in a reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry at the top.

That’s it. That’s a blog. Of course, we expect certain other things from blogs these days, don’t we? At the least, they should provide an RSS feed so that we can subscribe to their content and read it through our feed readers. Oh, and most of ’em have archives and other ways to access past content as well as some sort of method for commenting on individual entries. Good ones are updated regularly with information that is timely, relevant to the audience and well-written.
Now that we’ve established what a blog is, let’s talk about what it can do for your library and your patrons. First off, it can be an amazingly efficient vehicle for communication for your library. And not one-way communication, either! Blogs generally allow readers to post comments – giving the reader some voice in the communication so that it becomes conversational as opposed to one-way announcements. For libraries that allow their patrons to post comments in an unmoderated (radical trust right there!) way, they give their patrons the feeling of openness and concern for what the patrons want and need – they tell ’em that the library is listening. Of course, if you don’t want to destroy that impression, you’ll need to post fairly regularly.
This brings us to the topic of time investment. All that writing, editing, finding the perfect picture and just plain old thinking up topics takes time. You can have one person responsible for it all, with a significant investment in time for that person, or you can split the work up and have multiple authors doing the work. Whichever way you decide to do it, there needs to be at least one person who is responsible for making sure that content reaches the blog on a regular basis. For some blogs, that will be daily – for others it may be weekly or even monthly, depending on the topic and the frequency of news about that topic. Irregular posting can cause some folks to assume the blog has died during your quiet times and unsubscribe to it – this means that they’ll miss the next big news or interesting take on a subject that is posted! At the last Internet Librarian conference, the folks behind the Hennepin County Library’s Bookspace site said that contributing to the Bookspace’s blogs was a job duty for several people – no contributions means that they aren’t doing their jobs and it will reflect on their job evaluations. That makes for some serious staff buy-in there!
Why go to all the trouble to create a blog for your library? As I said before, it opens a 2-way communication channel that is invaluable for getting patron responses to your programs, events, library news or whatever you choose to blog about. It’s also a great way to put information up onto your website that is completely reusable – and not just by you. We take our blog feed and post it on the home page of our site, just with a bit of teaser content, so that everyone who comes by our home page will see what the last 5 blog posts are. We also have a WordPress plugin that takes the blog posts and reposts them to the library’s MySpace page blog. This means that every time we post to our blog it is republished automatically to our home page and to our MySpace blog (as well as our Facebook news feed and our Twitter feed, but you get the picture…). We aren’t the only ones who could use this information, however. Since we publish our RSS feed, others can take that feed, run it through something like the new Google Feed Control Wizard and provide our blog posts as part of their website. Since we are a public library, this would be an excellent addition to a Chamber of Commerce tourism site (we have LOTS of programs going on all the time) or to a city-wide information network or to any site that wants to give their users a complete picture of what’s going on in our area. Just a bit of copy-n-paste from Google and you have an automatically updated source of information on your public library.
Blogs are even helpful if you don’t feel up to publishing one externally. An internal blog can disseminate information, provide staff with another communication tool and help teach your staff about tools that your patrons are using (feed readers, web pages, web forms, etc.). While using a free blogging service such as Blogger, WordPress.com, Vox or any of the thousands of others out there might be a bit more difficult for an internal-only blog, setting up a WordPress installation shouldn’t be too difficult for an IT department to handle. If it is, or if your IT department is reluctant to install it, give one of the blogging services that offer passwords a try. Blogger and WordPress.com do offer password protected blogs – but that’s just another password that your staff has to remember…
I could probably talkwrite for hours about how great blogs are and all of the fun things you can do with them to improve your patron/library relations, your staff/staff communications and your community/library information needs, but I’ve gotta quit sometime and this seems like a good stopping point. Anyone else want to write a book about what I’ve forgotten? OH! They have! Check out Jason Griffey and Karen Coombs new (and I do mean new – it’s not yet actually available) book about Library Blogging. Knowing those two, it’s bound to be incredibly useful and chock-full of great ideas/tips/tricks/things to remember about blogging at your library!