Commenting and leaving your website/blog info here and there on the interwebs can actually generate traffic. So sayeth my recent interpretation of the data I've been collecting on this very blog. Before you freak out, no, I can't tell exactly who you are, and if you're on the web you're spreading information about your surfing habits all over the place anyway. I left a comment over on Meredith Farkas' blog, Information Wants to be Free after the CIL2010 conference along with my blog address, and got a few clicks off it. That's certainly one way networking works, and why we should form connections online. (There's a building slowly on top of foundations metaphor here somwhere)
Posting links on certain days of the week, and times of day results in different levels of click-interest. I got a ton of clicks yesterday, and I suspect this is because people were le bored at work on a Monday. I'll have to devise a controlled experiment to test this theory. Maybe posting the same number of links of similar type every day? There are also notable changes in click frequency based on how I've "sold" the link in my tweet or text.
People are more likely to respond to a post or a link if they can see that others have done so before them. Facebook posts with lots of comments or clicks get shuffled to the top in the "Top Stories" feed, and if there are several comments saying "omg, so cool" and "this is great!" everyone else will click, too.
Which brings me to the irritating point that people are frequently more interested in visual content than in text. (this post is already screwed) This generally makes it difficult to communicate information to people because they are lazy or unwilling to go through all the trouble of reading. The blog Information is Beautiful takes advantage of this by posting awesome graphs, diagrams, charts and whatnot that are visually interesting, full of information, and make their point. I admit that I am also guilty of this trend. When I go through my Google Reader feed at lunch every day I beeline for the "pretty" items, the webcomics, and posts I know will be brief.
I'll just conclude by saying that posting interesting, wordy content and creating a reader base isn't as easy as one might think.
(if I put a kitten here, would you be more interested? another future study.)
Showing posts with label CIL2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIL2010. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Mobile:Library:Toy:CIL2010
I... am a lazy, lazy blogger.
Back in early April, I attended* the Computers in Libraries conference in Crystal City, took extensive notes, and then sat on them for the last few weeks. (Bad blogger, no cookie.) So, now that we've all had sufficient time to process, here's a quick run through of my thoughts from those two days.
CIL2010 was my first conference of any kind, and I admit that I was a bit starry eyed and excited about the whole business. I did not, however, feel out of the loop during the sessions, or as if I didn't fit in with the crowd (although the librarians who have been to a lot of these are a bit clique-ish). There were more sessions than I could manage to attend all at once (where's a time-turner when I need it?), but I got to one in every time block while I was there. In all honesty, the subject matter was a bit disappointing. I was hoping for more cutting edge stuff I'd never heard about, and instead I got... "cool blue alien hot stuff" and way too much hype about smartphones and ipads. In some ways, the conference solidified my desire to be some sort of special or academic librarian, not a public librarian. I'll try to reserve judgment on a lot of the conference on the grounds that it was my first and I don't know the presenters or the insider drama very well.
On to my notes!
The first session I went to was a presentation of a fancy, interactive, online, visual collection exploration application that was entirely fake. The Smithsonian Commons is this big idea for a way to get visitors into the collections from outside the physical museum, allowing them to develop personal collections and so on. But it's only a prototype! It's a huge project, oodles of effort and money spent on something that doesn't exist. Argh. Plus I disagree with the concept of an online version of the collection in the first place, but I'm just kind of elitist about museums and keeping things proper.
Which brings me to a question I had a lot: do people really want all this change, all this web 2.0, ebooks, mobile devices... or do they want Classic Library? It's certainly true that librarians are a bunch of geeks, and think that all this 2.0 stuff could be useful/cool/blue, but are they also forcing it down people's throats? I heard a lot about how books are dead. Well guys, personally, I can't afford a smartphone, or an ipad, I dislike reading on a screen, and I love collecting hard copies on my shelves. I'm not the only one (even if I can't find a supporting study right this second).
The counter argument is that librarians are "complacent," and are saying "we're great, why change?"
I also made long lists of things to research and understand better in the future: Drupal and OCLC, par example. I signed up for Google Analytics right away, and now I can collect ridiculous amounts of data on traffic to this very website. I'm a sucker for pretty charts and information visualizations, especially if it live-updates! Watson Library created a spiffy "dashboard" that does this kind of thing. Another neat tool I heard mentioned was the Google Public Data Explorer. (Further exploration and maybe a post on the Google tools later).
I just realised that this post will be epically long and dull if I don't cut it into bits. Consider this Part I.
*It should be noted that a very kind co-worker/mentor loaned me his conference pass for two of the three days, for which I am very grateful.
Classic library image from Trinity College Library, Dublin, by Candida Hofer.
Modern library image from Francis Martin Library, a branch of the NYPL. Design by 1100 Architect.
ps. Some of the random links in this are well-worth clicking...
EDIT/PPS: at some point the formatting got all screwy on some of my archived posts. Sorry about that, maybe I'll fix it all in the future... [9.7.2012]
Back in early April, I attended* the Computers in Libraries conference in Crystal City, took extensive notes, and then sat on them for the last few weeks. (Bad blogger, no cookie.) So, now that we've all had sufficient time to process, here's a quick run through of my thoughts from those two days.
CIL2010 was my first conference of any kind, and I admit that I was a bit starry eyed and excited about the whole business. I did not, however, feel out of the loop during the sessions, or as if I didn't fit in with the crowd (although the librarians who have been to a lot of these are a bit clique-ish). There were more sessions than I could manage to attend all at once (where's a time-turner when I need it?), but I got to one in every time block while I was there. In all honesty, the subject matter was a bit disappointing. I was hoping for more cutting edge stuff I'd never heard about, and instead I got... "cool blue alien hot stuff" and way too much hype about smartphones and ipads. In some ways, the conference solidified my desire to be some sort of special or academic librarian, not a public librarian. I'll try to reserve judgment on a lot of the conference on the grounds that it was my first and I don't know the presenters or the insider drama very well.On to my notes!
The first session I went to was a presentation of a fancy, interactive, online, visual collection exploration application that was entirely fake. The Smithsonian Commons is this big idea for a way to get visitors into the collections from outside the physical museum, allowing them to develop personal collections and so on. But it's only a prototype! It's a huge project, oodles of effort and money spent on something that doesn't exist. Argh. Plus I disagree with the concept of an online version of the collection in the first place, but I'm just kind of elitist about museums and keeping things proper.
Which brings me to a question I had a lot: do people really want all this change, all this web 2.0, ebooks, mobile devices... or do they want Classic Library? It's certainly true that librarians are a bunch of geeks, and think that all this 2.0 stuff could be useful/cool/blue, but are they also forcing it down people's throats? I heard a lot about how books are dead. Well guys, personally, I can't afford a smartphone, or an ipad, I dislike reading on a screen, and I love collecting hard copies on my shelves. I'm not the only one (even if I can't find a supporting study right this second).
The counter argument is that librarians are "complacent," and are saying "we're great, why change?"
I also made long lists of things to research and understand better in the future: Drupal and OCLC, par example. I signed up for Google Analytics right away, and now I can collect ridiculous amounts of data on traffic to this very website. I'm a sucker for pretty charts and information visualizations, especially if it live-updates! Watson Library created a spiffy "dashboard" that does this kind of thing. Another neat tool I heard mentioned was the Google Public Data Explorer. (Further exploration and maybe a post on the Google tools later).
I just realised that this post will be epically long and dull if I don't cut it into bits. Consider this Part I.
*It should be noted that a very kind co-worker/mentor loaned me his conference pass for two of the three days, for which I am very grateful.
Classic library image from Trinity College Library, Dublin, by Candida Hofer.
Modern library image from Francis Martin Library, a branch of the NYPL. Design by 1100 Architect.
ps. Some of the random links in this are well-worth clicking...
EDIT/PPS: at some point the formatting got all screwy on some of my archived posts. Sorry about that, maybe I'll fix it all in the future... [9.7.2012]
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