Connections

The Web is a magical place. I joined the 2007 TBR Challenge on 43 Things yesterday. As an afterthought, I threw the post up on my blog as well. This morning, I received email from David Weinberger author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a book on my list! That's so fun that I've been smiling all day because of it.

That, and some other things, have me thinking about Steve Lawson's recent post on See Also..., Experts and Novices. Here's the bit that keeps coming to mind:

People who don't read a bunch of blogs and similar sites through RSS, who don't have any kind of online social/professional network must have a completely different experience of surfing the web from those of us who do. That's why they ask us questions like "how do you even know about all this cool stuff?" It ain't by Googling random keywords, that's for sure.

I have that experience with the library blogosphere and on 43 Things. I briefly had the goal "Lose 30 pounds" on 43 Things, until I discovered that as a community-making mechanism, that goal was useless to me--it drew too many adolescents who either had anorexia or wanted to have it. Not a healthy group and not particularly responsive to the preaching that is the first reaction of most adults when they encounter those posts.

A 43 Things novice might be put off by that and never come back. As a 43 Things expert, I knew there were better places for me to find the group I wanted. In recent surfing of goals (looking at the lists of people connected to me because they share one or more goals with me or because they cheered me on one of my goals), I had noticed a couple of people with the goal eat healthily. I noticed not because of any immediate interest in the goal but because, to my Midwest ears, that doesn't sound grammatically correct even though I suspect it probably is. It turns out that besides knowing how adverbs work, this group has a nice little community of people who encourage each other, share triumphs and failures, and offer tips.

The point of all these thoughts? Mostly gratitude for the connections I make through the librarian blogosphere and 43 Things. But also, this all reminds me that if I want to get more people to use Bloglines or another RSS feed reader (and I'm pretty much of the opinion that almost anyone would benefit from it, especially the people in academia who I work with), that I need to provide them with feeds to get started. From there, they can make connections rather than try to find their own way--encountering a Web that seems wild and wooly instead of magical.

Labels: instruction, social software

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