Teresa Koltzenberg has published a very thoughtful and thorough review of the Library 2.0 Boot Camp we are currently managing for the American Library Association. I am very happy to see that the program participants are gaining powerful new knowledge and connections through their immersion in a learning network built out of blogs, RSS aggregators, and podcasts.

Beyond the Prototype

Posted on 05/28/2006 at 12:45:24 AM by Teresa Koltzenburg

We have jumped into that laboratory experience together and are learning together. Ten project teams are formulating collaborative projects as a means of learning. As I look at those project statements and at the posts that share the ongoing thinking process, I believe that this work will have lasting value to us—individually and collectively—beyond the life of this particular prototype process.—Mary Ghikas: Library 2.0 :: Concept

More and more, I find myself filing posts on the ALA TechSource Blog under “ALA News” and “Library 2.0.” I expect that to continue. Controversy aside, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts (which, admittedly, is of little risk to me, as I have a Brobdingnagian—or maybe Homerian would be a more fitting fictional-element adjective—fondness for those dunkable delights), after the ALA Library 2.0 Innovation Boot Camp, you'll be seeing more ALA-related treks into L2.

But Back to Boot Camp

Er, I mean “Group Exploration.” (I liked the alliterative subhead better; if you haven't noticed, alliteration is a “problem” I have.) From interviews with four of the participants—two ALA members, Michelle Boule and Brian Gray; and two ALA staffers, Christine Taylor and Don Wood—it does seem that Meredith F., in Friday's post “On ALA Bootcamp and free access to online learning,” brings up a valid point about the projects' objectives. “I'm not in the course, so I may be missing something,” notes Meredith, “but it seems like a number of the participants were confused about what they'd be learning and commented that the course was focused on different objectives than they'd expected.”

Still, from the four students I talked with over the last couple of weeks, from some feedback a participant provided to Mary G. at a meeting they attended together (”At the end of a long evening of meeting, she commented on the ALAL2.0 project. She noted that it was changing the way she visualized working in the future—for greater impact, greater reach. That's value.”), and from watching this fascinating dialogue unfold, as an employee of ALA and a wanna-be techie, I'm heartened by this experiment. I'm especially excited that ALA, Jenny, and Michael are working together on it.

Project Ponderings

“I think everybody is pretty frustrated with their projects. But the main thing that I distilled out of all this is it's really not so different than when e-mail was introduced to the workplace; people got all uncomfortable, and they didn't know how to interact in a new environment. That takes a lot to get through,” Christine Taylor told me the other day when she came to my office to talk about this first crucible that cradles ALA's L2 Group Exploration.

Christine says, before the course, she'd never been “in” a wiki before, or posted to a blog, or listened to a podcast. With a smile, she tells me about her first blog post ever—vacuum cleaner instructions. “I just wanted to get something up there,” she adds, noting that it's not an easy thing to post “when you haven't found your voice.”

Christine and her team-2-mates are working through their project questions (”How are associations utilizing 2.0 technology? What has been the impact?”), but trying to navigate through the various technologies has not been easy, as team member Michelle Frisque explains in her May 17th “Barriers” post. “W[e] have too many ideas that go in very different directions and we are not sure how to focus it. The idea of barriers came up as we began to try to get a handle on all of the new technologies at once.”

Despite her own frustration, Christine remains positive and optimistic about this time she's spent in this ALA L2 “lab,” noting, “I think, over time, that it will be a golden first step that everybody will be like, ‘Wow, we did that.'”

The Blog Boondoggle?

When I spoke with ALA member Brian Gray earlier this month, he explained that he's been blogging for about a year. “I have an engineering information/education type of blog. It's more resources. Some of the items there develop some conversation, but they are more of the ‘Did you know about this?' kind of thing.”

Brian says the ALA L2 course has not only introduced to him various ways libraries are utilizing Web 2.0 tools, but the individual-blog part of the course has also intrigued him. “I've enjoyed having this type of blog, because there has been a lot of discussion back and forth. Now, I'm thinking after this is done, I might have to have two blogs.”

While Brian is enjoying his course-assigned blog, Karen Munro, who also has been posting to blogs long before the course commenced, shares her thoughts about the course's individual-blog component in her “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web…” post. “I'm not interested in investing much time and energy in developing this blog,” she states, “because to me it seems like spending a lot of time trying to teach ALA's German Shepherd to balance a cookie on its nose, while my own dogs get no love….If the point is for me to see what other teams are doing, fifty blogs isn't the way to go—a single shared blog for each group makes more sense.”

Tracking the Take-Away

ALA member Michelle Boule, who has been forthright in her frustration on her own Wandering Eyre Blog, told me during our phone conversation that, due to the course, she now has a better understanding of OPML files. “I really like learning more about OPML files. I didn't know anything about them before the boot camp started. It was just some mystery file thing to me. They have set up a tutorial for us about how to create our own OPML files by making a reading list for our group. It seems a little complicated, but, when this is over, I feel like I'll at least understand what the purpose of them are and some different uses—and what libraries can do with them. It's really about creating different kinds of content, putting it together, and then being able to push it out to people in different kinds of ways. It's really interesting; I had no idea that you could do that with it before.”

Brian explained to me that he thinks the individual and group struggles are of great value because, “It has really brought it down to a real-life situation. What's been neat about our group is that people are at various levels—in the profession or within technology or within their careers—so it's showing very different levels of understanding. We were given a bunch of technologies right up front and training to use those technologies, but we were also given a lot of supplemental information and reading assignments. Some people have been really overwhelmed because they've had to learn both. At least for me, it's helped me remember, ‘Yeah, you can implement these technologies, but these are the same things our users are going to go through'—half of them pick them up immediately, some of them might be using them already, and some of them might refuse to use them. It's actually been more real life than I expected.”

Another ALA L2 Group Exploration participant I had the pleasure of conversing with about the project is Don Wood, a sixteen-year ALA staff member. Don says, like Christine, many of these tools at the start of the course were brand new to him. “I knew about the technology, but using the technology—that was different. And getting up close and personal with it was a great chance, I thought. I wanted to be part of a project that's all about learning and seeing which tools work best for different projects.”

Don, as with most others participating in the course, has eked out time slots in his busy pre-Annual Conference and regular work schedule to devote energy to both his blog and his team 7 project (which addresses a not-so-easy concept, “Implementing current alert Webcasts for just-in-time training or assistance”).

From posting to his blog to the script he created for this team project, Don really seems to be into the process, despite the time constraints. “I love the collaboration in this. I think more and more, the opportunities to collaborate [will be] great. Like this Brian Gray—I haven't talked to him, but he sounds like a very interesting guy. I think it's a matter of getting to know each other—it's the human element. There is a human element to Library 2.0, or any 2.0. It's a matter of getting to know each other, building trust, and seeing that we're all, pretty much, on the same wavelength.”

While some might yet (okay, probably will) disagree about Don's “same wavelength” description—after all, as Georgia Tech reference librarian Brian Mathews notes in his podcast about Academic Library 2.0, one could ask several different people to define “Library 2.0″ and one would get back several different definitions—after talking with Don late this last week, I found myself contemplating his thoughtful responses to my questions about the course.

“I've worked around libraries all my life,” he told me. “I've found that librarians are some of the most helpful people on the planet. To me, the spirit of Library 2.0 has been around for a long, long time—you know, helping people, preferring peer relationships versus top-down, encouraging and welcoming diversity, listening as well as speaking, helping as many people as you can all at once or as often as you can. It's the tools—the tools are new, and we have to learn the tools. But once we learn how to use the tools, we're off and running. So, that's all this is; it's a big learning opportunity, but the spirit is there.”

Though I wonder what next post I'll be filing under both “ALA News” and “Library 2.0″ here, I don't doubt that the opportunity will come.

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At the Otter Group we have been working on narrowing and refining our product and service offerings. They now fall into two categories: learning networks for innovation and podcasting for learning skills. From time to time we work with friends and associates on small blogging projects that will help them with their various endeavors. I like to think of these as falling into the “Friends and Family” category of projects. They include a blog for a restauranteur who used to be my neighbor: Rendezvous Central Square; a blog for my favorite bike shop: ATA Cycle; and a blog for my best friend's classroom expeditionary learning project on kayaking: WillauerKayaks.

These have all been successful in helping these small businesses and a classroom showcase what are they doing. But the most clear-cut business case for blogging for micro businesses can be made for the Nitewinds Kennels blog.

A bit of background: My step-father, Jim Morgan, met Nitewinds owner Donna Jasper five years ago when he was looking for an English Cocker puppy. Jim is a relentless researcher and to find the right dog, he knew he had to find the best breeder. He went to all of the dog shows he could attend in the mid-west and interviewed all of the breeders he met at the shows. After a few months of research, he concluded that Donna Jasper had the best dogs available and that her emphasis on breeding for health and temperament would deliver a great dog for him. Enter Jim's dog Buddy:

Buddy was taken out of competition before he got his championship papers but he has become a wonderful pet companion for my step-father.

A year ago it was time for me to find a new dog and Jim highly recommended Donna. In May I brought home Dusty, my beloved puppy.

Here she is in the garden with my 12 year old English Cocker, Stanley:

Earlier this year, Jim asked me if I could help Donna do some marketing for her kennels. I accepted and recommended that we put together a blog/web site so that she could showcase her dogs and services and so that she could maintain the site herself without the help of designer/programmers. I asked one of our in-house designers, Aixa Almonte, to put together a friendly design that would give a feeling of a home-based kennel with an owner who really loves her dogs. Here is Aixa's design:

We created three basic categories for her services of boarding, grooming and breeding. We set up a side-bar component that linked to “Donna's Story,” her personal history and breeding philosophy. We set up a system for uploading and showcasing photos, and we created a contact component that gave people a means to find Donna right from the top page. (At Donn'a suggestion we just recently add a side-bar component that links to a pedigree database so people can research her dog's pedigrees.) Then we showed Donna how to post new articles and upload photos.

Once the blog was up, I set up a very simple Adwords Campaign on Google for Donna. Here is her Google ad:

We set a limit of $2.00 per day with most of our key word bids costing between 10 cents and $1.00. From February 23 to today, the campaign has yielded 114,000 impressions, just over 117 clicks, for a cost of about $30.00 per month.

Donna reports that she has sold four dogs now through the blog and ad campaign. (Her dogs average $1,000 per sale.) She has also gotten some new regular boarders for her lovely Lake Geneva, Wisconsin kennel. So for a total cost of $90, in three months Donna has a wonderful return on investment.

I am reporting about this here because I think that any small or micro business could use similar strategies with comparable outcomes.

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I'm looking at new kinds of learning network interfaces and am particularly interested in things that can be built with AJAX:

In the Library 2.0 Boot Camp we are running, Sherri Vanyek pointed out wonderful online registration system built in AJAX.

Here is how it is described by the developer Duo Consulting:

Web 2.0 gave us the answer through the development of an Ajax application for online registration. We also introduced a new layout and user flow, adding a “wish list” function to allow the user to select programs in advance. The wish list offers increased functionality and decreased server load on registration day.

So what were the results?

* 50% increase in throughput over last year. Thousands of classes were successfully purchased through the system – at the initial rate of nearly 500 registrations per minute!

* 10% decrease in bandwidth over last year.

* Decreased cart abandonment by 80%.

Because we were able to increase throughput without additional bandwidth, we saved tens of thousands of dollars in additional hosting costs – while creating a better experience for the user. That is just one example of how Web 2.0 can make a difference.

Here is a screen shot of the registration page:

You start on the left and select from categories of programs. For this example, I started with zip codes. Then you pick your zip and the program groups within each zip code open up in the next column. Once you have selected your group, you then pick the program and it is highlighted so that you can either a) complete online registration or b) save the program to a wishlist for walk-in registration.

I talked to the CEO of Duo Consulting, Michael Silverman in order to get an explanation of why and how AJAX made a difference for this project. He said, “The main reason we moved in this direction was to have smaller pages and faster page loading. The registration system has to handle a huge volume in a very small time frame four times a year. This was putting a large load on the hosting environment. AJAX worked well for this application because the information is sitting on the page rather than in a database on a server that has to be called on.”

AJAX is defined by wikipedia as: ” AJAX , shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. The first known use of the term in public was by Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. At subsequent talks and seminars Garrett has made the point that Ajax is not an acronym.”

For the Chicago Park District, AJAX also enabled better usability for site users. Fred Salchli, CTO at Duo Consulting explained, “The application economizes transactions between the server and client. We were able to define requests and corresponding responses to the absolute minimum of data transfer in both directions. The legacy application delivered an excess of information; the AJAX application delivers only what the users requests.”

Another by-product of the new design was the wishlist. “Users can scan options and save them to a wish list. When it comes time to register, the user comes back to the list, logs-in and brings up the wishlist. By using the wishlist people are signaling what they want to sign up for. This unexpected benefit gives the Park District the ability to monitor program popularity - providing clearly valuable information if acted on prior to registration.”

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Mary Ghikas, who is the power behind the ALA Library 2.0 Boot Camp currently underway, writes about her experience with Open Space Technology in her lovely blog The Green Kangaroo (added to the Learning 2.0 “reading list.) She says:

Open Space Technology is a method of self-organizing which allows the participants to create and manage their own working sessions. The “about” page(www.openspaceworld.org) says that “Open Space works best when the work to be done is complex, the people and ideas involved are diverse, the passion for resolution (and potential for conflict) are high, and the time to get it done was yesterday.” Sounds good.

Twice in 2003 I participated in meetings “built” by the participants using Open Space Technology. On return, I wrote up notes and passed them along to ALA staff — my version of throwing a handful of seeds up into the air. Then, I put this into my “interesting possibiities” bank and went on to other work.

Here is what I can tell you about the basic process — based on my own observation and participation.

-The group begins in a circle — whether it's 35 or 350 people, or more. It felt to me like starting with unity in our intent to work together.

-Participants self-identify topics for discussion — literally. You stand up, announce your name and topic to the group and write it on a flip chart page. You thereby take responsibility for convening the discussion — nothing more, nothing less.

-You attach your page to the wall (or the bulletin board or whatever's available).

-When all the topics are on the wall, all participants enter the “marketplace.” You express your interest in one or more (no limit) topics by signing your name to that page. There tends to be some consolidation during this phase as conveners with similar or overlapping topics agree to consolidate — or not.

-The next step is a self-scheduling process. A “matrix of opportunities” was pre-created (in my experience made up of “post-its” stuck on a schedule board)– essentially a matrix of available meeting places and available meeting times. Conveners filled the matrix with their topics — and, again, there was some negotiation as conveners tried to satisfy participants who discovered that the three topics of most interest to them were all being scheduled at the same time.

(Now, this may sound cumbersome, but my experience was that it took about an hour to get from circle to a fully-scheduled array of concurrent sessions.)

-After that, groups meet as scheduled. The person who identified the topic convenes. Someone agrees to take notes.

-The “rules” are few. One of the “rules” is that “whoever comes is the right people.” (Yes, that is how it's expressed, so please don't call in the ALA grammar police.) The “one law” is the “law of two feet” or “law of personal mobility” (applicable in any number of situations): If you discover you aren't learning or contributing, use your two feet and move on. Try another topic, another session.

(Another observation from my two experiences with this was that discussions were hard to “bound.” Often an interesting “side topic” would be raised. If most of the group found the side topic interesting, the group detoured. Often these detours were, to me, both fruitful and valuable.)

There are a number of books available. I have Expanding Our Now: The Story of Open Space Technology, by Harrison Owen. You might also check out Open Space Technology: A User's Guide (also Harrison Owen).

While this is self-organizing, it is organizing. Both times, there was unobtrusive (which means really good) facilitation. There is an Open Space “Guarantee,” that the issues of real concern of those participating will be discussed, that a written record will be created, that immediate next steps will be identified and, to the extent possible, responsibility for those next steps will be assigned. Sort of association-like, don't you think?

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Thanks for the reference from Stephen Downes regarding my description of a learning network in the attached pre-print: “Preparing for Intranet 2.0″ (written with Bill Ives):

Good paper showing how web 2.0 technologies (and especially blogging) can be used in a corporate context. Contains one of the best one-paragraph descriptions of a learning network I've seen: “A learning network uses the intranet as a platform to tie together a set of services that support collaboration and communication, and it uses the web 2.0 tools we ve described so far. Learning networks make information in networked databases easy to access and to combine and display in new ways.”

To download the paper, just click on this image:

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In our ALA Boot Camp, we have been discussing issues of online networks vs. online communities:

In my work with technology-enabled learning, I have come to believe that it is not possible to build a “learning community.” When I write and speak about technology-enabled learning, I use the term “learning network” rather than “learning community.” I think this distinction is important because using the language of community creates expectations and desires that cannot be met by online networks.

I am reading and writing about Yochai Benkler's new book, “The Wealth of Networks.” In the introduction Benkler describes the effects of working in what he calls a networked information economy: “The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organization their relationships through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.” Note that there is no mention of community in this description. Benkler talks about loose commonality with others and improved autonomy and capacity of individuals.

This morning I read a great article on Facebook in this week's New Yorker; In profiling Facebook founder (Mark Zuckerberg) the article gets at some of the key characteristics of social networks and online communities:

(Aixa's facebook page)

Here is how the initial facebook design is described:

“'Anybody with a Harvard e-mail address could join and create a profile, which consisted of a photograph and some personal information, such as the user's major; club memberships; taste in films, books, and music; and favorite quotes. There was a search box to help users call up other profiles, and a “poking button”, which they could use to let other people know that their profiles had been viewed; Users could also link to their friends' profiles.”

The article goes on to explain the appeal of facebook:

“By luck or design, Zuckerberg had tapped into a powerful yearning: the desire of hundreds of ambitious and impressionable young peopleto establish themselves and make friends in an unfamiliar environment.”

And:

“On most social-networking sites, a search box allows users to call up profiles of people anywhere on the site, a search box allows users to call up profiles of people anywhere on the site. Zuckerberg decided that Facebook members would be allowed to view only the profiles of other students at their own colleges, with one exception. If they obtained the permission of other students at another school, they could add that person to their list of friends. In retrospect, this decision was critical to Facebook's success, because it preserved the site's intimacy.”

And:

Zuckerberg says, 'one way to look at the goal of the site is to increase peoople's understanding of the world around them, to increase their information supply….They way you do that best is by having people share as much information as they are comfortable with. The way you make people comfortable is by giving them control over exactly who can see what'…..By altering the settings on their profiles, they can choose to make them visible solely to their friends, to other undergraduates, or to everybody at the university….'The problem Facebook is solving is this one paradox,' Zuckerberg said. 'People want access to all of the information around them, but they also want complete control over their own information. Those two things are at odds with each other. Technologically, we could put all the information out there for everyone, but people wouldn't want that because they want to control their information.'”

Yochai Benkler also addresses some of these issues in his chapter on Social Ties in “The Wealth of Networks:”

We are beginning to see the emergence of greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships. These may not fit the ideal model of “virtual communities.” They certainly do not fit a deep conception of “community” as a person's primary source of emotional context and support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants. It appears that, as the digitally networked environment begins to displace mass media and telephones, its salient communications characteristics provide new dimensions to thicken existing social relations, while also providing new capabilities for looser and more fluid, but still meaningful social networks.” The Wealth of Networks, (page 357).

While people first feared that the Internet would supplant human connections, Benkler describes more complex vision of our emerging social ties:

“Human beings, whether connected to the Internet or not, continue to communicate preferentially with people who are geographically proximate than with those who are distant. Nevertheless, people who are connected to the Internet communicate more with people who are geographically distant without decreasing the number of local connections. With the total number of connections continues to be greatest with proximate family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors, the Internet's greatest effect is in improving the ability of individuals to add to these proximate relationships with people who are geographically distant.” (page 364)

And the kinds of relationships that are forged over the Internet seem to have a new kind of character: “These relationships are more limited in nature than ties to friends and family. They are detached from spatial constraints, and even time synchronicity; they are usually interest or practice based, and therefore play a more limited role in people's lives than the more demanding and encompassing relationships with family or intimate friends. Each discrete connection cluster of connections that forms a social network, or a network of social relations, plays some role, but not a definitive one, in each participant's life. (page 365)

As we begin to import social networking systems into enterprises, I believe the characteristics that have emerged in Facebook and described by Benkler are absolutely critical to how these systems are designed.

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I am testing the new web browser Flock.  It has a number of interesting features.  It allows you to post to your blog directly from Flock.  So I'm posting to the Otter Group blog from a specialized window inside the Flock browser that lets me do all the things I can do from my blog's back end and then some. 

 Flock has a shelf where I can drag and save things like images and text. I saved this image of the flock shelf from the documentation and then just dragged it into this window.  Very nice.

Then I dragged this text onto the shelf for saving.  

The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later. You may find that dragging text, links, and pictures on and off the Shelf is faster and more convenient than traditional cut and paste.

The Shelf is especially handy for re-blogging bits of text from web pages. When you drag a text snippet from the Shelf into a blog post, it is automatically formatted as a blockquote with proper citation.

Grabbing content to use later - Flock Community

Flock automatically formatted it and gave it a proper citation.  I really like that.

Flock is very nicely integrated with Flickr so that if I want to grab a photo out of Flickr and post it my blog, all I do is use a built-in photo browser which pulls in all of my latest photos from flickr so that I can just drag them into my window.

And Flock is integrated with delicious so that I can tag and post things to delicious directly from this window.   I am going to do a podcast on Flock for the Learning 2.0 series.  Stay tuned.

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Rod Boothby expands on the idea of AIM Pages and how you might use what AOL calls snaggable modules:

First, AOL is using what they call “Snaggable” modules. I have written about this concept earlier. I called then AJAX Badges. The idea is to build web pages from widgets that are served up from multiple servers. Here's how David describes these tools:

But like I said, the best hook may be “snaggable” modules. AOL's version of widgets (little applets that are essentially a user interface on top of an RSS feed) are AIM Page modules. But unlike Yahoo's and Apple's, they aren't meant to live on your desktop. Like Microsoft Gadgets, they're designed to be housed on a page. But they're also meant to be super-subscribe-able, syndicate-able, even paste-able (Think YouTube or Flickr vis a vis MySpace). They're very lightweight and rendered by browsers.

One of the most interesting things about these interactive widgets is their ability to disturb the importance of a home page. Who cares if you host your home page on WordPress or TypePad if what really matters in the interactive widgets you have dropped into that page.

Rod goes on to talk about how these tools are going to be used for the new web office:

Second, AOL has realized that instant messaging and Blogs and Web 2.0 tools like social networks are simply part of the same communication continuum.

AOL is using AIM as a launching pad for their social network.

The insight is simple. Blogs, instant messaging, and email are all simply communication tools. Inside a large company, if you want to improve internal communication, you need to leverage each one of these tools.

If you want to improve internal communication, if you want to turn your company into an organization that produces emergent intelligence and if you want to generate a constant stream of innovations, you need to leverage every tool on the communication continuum.

AOL's AIM pages are a good example of how those technologies are going to be brought together.

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Here is a sneak peek at our new banner for the Otter Group site:

Many of the librarians in the ALA boot camp have customized the banners for their blogs. Here's a sample of what they've done:

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Here's a first look at the AOL's new AIM Pages. For a large, downloadable view of this image go to this flickr page.

I'm excited about AIM Pages because I think it could be a model for a new kind of starting place for online communities. David Carr's blog post on AIM pages describes it as “nothing less than an effort to create a modern network that's not dependent on a homepage, let alone a walled garden:”

But like I said, the best hook may be “snaggable” modules. AOL's version of widgets (little applets that are essentially a user interface on top of an RSS feed) are AIM Page modules. But unlike Yahoo's and Apple's, they aren't meant to live on your desktop. Like Microsoft Gadgets, the're designed to be housed on a page. But they're also meant to be super-subscribe-able, syndicate-able, even paste-able (Think YouTube or Flickr vis a vis MySpace). They're very lightweight and rendered by browsers.

AOL will implement a lot of its own content and services as modules, and is showing modules from Amazon, Flickr, Netflix, and YouTube. AOL described “programming your own TV network” by creating some intros and outros, and snagging some show content from In2TV.

And AOL says it doesn't want to compete so much with MySpace as let people publish to it. IM was the first social network, AOL reasons, but it was based on text messaging alone. Now it's time to take that big existing network and use it for more.

Ultimately, re-packaging AOL as modules is nothing less than an effort to create a modern network that's not dependent on a homepage, let alone a walled garden. This is truly visionary, especially coming from the company that still owns the biggest share of US users' time spent online. (See Figure 1.) But subscribing and linking should also bring traffic back in. (See Figure 10 “deconstructing your Website”.) AOL claims AIM is already one of the top five traffic drivers for AOL.com, and one of the top three for its News, Music, Movies (Moviefone), and RED (teens) properties.

This is the conceptual model for what corporate blogging systems need to follow. You need to give people a personal page that allows them to aggregate information that they believe is relevant about who they are and what they need now. I like the idea of building information based on RSS into widgets that are “super-subscribe-able, syndicate-able, even paste-able (Think YouTube or Flickr vis a vis MySpace). They're very lightweight and rendered by browsers.”

We are now one week into our Library 2.0 Boot Camp for the American Library Association. The discussion that has emerged is about the need for both autonomy and structure:

All of these comments have the common theme of the need for structure (but not too much) and frameworks so that trust can happen. Yesterday I was talking with Pito Salas, who is designing a library system for managing RSS readings lists, about the need for structure and framing for the technologies we are using for the boot camp. My biggest concern is the “everything is miscellaneous,” (the title of David Weinberger's new book) and that it takes too much effort to organize and frame the learning experience. I was moving in the direction of putting together a new kind of desktop for organizing all of this information but Pito wisely counseled me to let the browser be the framework. It is already well understood by everyone.

The conceptual structure of AIM pages may be just the right answer to this interesting problem.

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