Introducing Web 2.0: social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians

Barsky and Purdon 67 In this last article in our series [1,2] introducing Web 2.0 applications to Canadian health librarians for the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, we would like to sum up Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 this way: Web 1.0 was almost all about commerce; Web 2.0 is almost all about people. Web 2.0 is about the architecture of participation. Using Web 2.0 applications, we provide a service, not a product. We encourage user contribution, we create collective intelligence, we make it easy to reuse and remix content, we focus on customer self-service, and finally we create a feeling of belonging to a community, as well as a sense of empowerment and ownership. Web 2.0 is about democracy. By now we have several examples that prove even amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system and tools to channel their efforts. Of these, Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is certainly the most well-known example. Experts have given Wikipedia mixed reviews, but we believe they miss the critical point — that it’s good enough for people to use and that it facilitates use. And it’s free, which means people can actually read it, and they do — daily, in droves. The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas but in their production. Have you ever noticed that content you read on individual blogs is as good as or better than the content you usually read in newspapers and magazines? We believe that Web 2.0 is not only about a crowd of geeks paying US$2800 per person to attend the sold-out 2005 Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where 800 people jostled in the doorways of sessions and workshops. It is about us — users generating content, rather than simply consuming it. And it is about open programming interfaces that allow everybody to participate. Looking at the recent Web 2.0 Awards (http://web2.0awards.org), therefore, we feel very proud. At the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia Library, where one of this article’s authors hails from, we use many of the award-winning applications to serve our clients’ information needs. We use Bl glines (http://bloglines.com) to subscribe to relevant really simple syndication (RSS) feeds in our areas of interest. We use PubSub (http://pubsub.com) to search future content appearing on our topics of interest and convert it to RSS feeds for future use. We use Furl (http://furl.net) for Web site social bookmarking. We share photos and make notes about them on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). We use Odeo (http://www.odeo.com) to record and share simple podcasts. We create discussion groups for our clients on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com). We use Rollyo (http://rollyo.com) to create specialized search engines. Moreover, we blog, read RSS feeds, and share content, and yes, we are still alive and have some time for fun. In this article, we will follow the theme of the excellent Canadian Health Libraries Association / Association des bibliotheques de la sante du Canada 2006 Conference in Vancouver and share with you some pearls we have come to know about social networks and social bookmarking and folksonomies.