Learning about social computing the “23 Things” way

Ellen Ward is doing the 23 Things. It’s a great way for anyone, including librarians and other information professionals, to learn about the social web by using free Web 2.0 tools. We’ve also done a similar thing inside our organisation to raise awareness of social computing amongst consultants.

The list of 23 Things includes:

Blogging – start talking to people online about the things you think about by blogging. Before you say, “why would I want to do that”, you should read the post I’ve written a blog post that covers that very question. If you find someone has written a good article, comment on it or even write your own thoughts about it on your own blog.

And if you blog, but find it’s not for you, don’t worry! The taxonomy of social computing lets us know that people play different roles – from creators to critics, collectors, spectators and even inactives.

Getting an RSS reader – so you can read other people’s blogs and get news updates from websites to you (rather than visiting them to find out about updates). Stephen Collins found an excellent introduction to RSS. Check it out! I use Google Reader, but I would much rather we have something similar at work with internal news as RSS rather than email spam.

Exploring Flickr – share your photos online with an online community that really cares about photography. I love to use it myself. When it comes time to share photos of our work’s public events, like WebBlast 2006, they went into a group on Flickr.

Understanding Wikipedia – learn how people can contribute to information without the barriers. When Andrew Boyd decided he wanted to create a topic there on knowledge worker 2.0 he just did! I’ve contributed to lots of topics on the wikipedia in areas of my particular expertise, including a social psychological theory called Double Demotivation.

Exploring tagging and folksonomies – classify the websites you find in the way that makes sense to you, not someone else, by using Del.icio.us (Ellen has a found a good “how to” guide on del.icio.us). With it you can manage your bookmarks by using tags. You can explore the other stuff people have found of value by exploring their tags. I share the things I find with colleagues at work using the tag smsmt. We then pull all the bookmarks with that tag from del.icio.us and display and share them on our internal wiki.

Checking out multimedia online – YouTube, podcasts and eBooks! Oh my! Today, you can read or listen to Harry Potter from your PDA or smart phone on the way to work or on the plane. You can catchup on that conference presentation you missed by downloading it and listenning to it on your ipod. And we all know you’ve been able to download Steve Jobs’ keynotes for at least the last two hundreds years!

Once you start to use these tools you might begin to wonder why on earth your own organisation doesn’t use them – that’s what I found. I also started to wonder why more businesses with outward facing stakeholders, like libraries, don’t engage with their users in these ways?

I started asking questions of other organisations like:

• Does your organisation make people come to the website to see if something is new, or does it publish its news via an RSS feed?
• When was the last time your organisation hosted a really great speaker, recorded it in mp3 format, and then made it available to anyone through an RSS feed? … both external and internal audiences?
• When was the last time your CEO freely shared her thoughts on an issue central to the workings of your organisation? Lots of organisations do this. If you’re not doing, someone else will beat you to it!
• Does your organisation seek comments on issues in an open way? Online? Some government agencies see blogging as an excellent way of discussing policy ideas.
• Is your business model like Amazon or the BBC News? They make all their information available for anyone to use and re-use. Do you?

Unfortunately, some people (and bosses) look at the 23 Things list and immediately think you’re just playing, wasting time, and wonder what the importance of these things are in a busy working world. But taking the time to learn about these things is very important because, as you can see, this is actually how many people now like to work, and want to work. It’s a way of working without boundaries. It’s a way of communicating to peers without gatekeepers of information. And its a need that is growing. Hopefully, the more of us who want to work in this way, and want to interact with people in this way, the greater the chance of adoption of social computing at all levels.

If you find some of these tools useful, but can’t use them from work, here’s my top five ways of being a Cubicle Commando and getting around the barbed-wire fences:

1. Download portable Firefox
2. Stick it onto your USB thumbdrive and run it from there (rather than using Internet Explorer)
3. Get the del.icio.us plug-in for your new portable version of Firefox. This will enable you to access all your del.icio.us bookmarks from work and continue to add more. Get your work colleagues to share their bookmarks with you!
4. Login to Google from home using your USB thunbdrive. This will add the cookie to your portable version of Firefox and could allow you to get to Google’s applications (like Gmail and Google’s RSS reader) from work
5. Login to Flickr and other Yahoo services from home, just like you did for Google. Now you should be able to access those services as well.

Vive la Socal Computing! Vive la Cubicle Commando!

M