Legal Research

Four New Things (for me) to Learn

By admin

Over the holidays I decided I needed to learn a few new things. I was feeling stale. So I picked four things that had been showing up regularly in my Google RSS Reader and went for it.

I was playing all too much with my iPad but hadn’t loaded much new in awhile. When my son got an iPad for Christmas he loaded a b8nch of new apps so I was delayed in trying out some other stuff on my list when I tried anything that he recommended for a few days. Anyway, playing around with iPad apps (and sometimes putting them on my iPhone too) was great fun.

So, the four things I decided to learn more about were:

For my iPad:

Flipboard (an iPad app for integrating social feeds and displaying them in a magazine payout format. In fact it calls itself “Your Social Magazine”)

Friendly (an iPad app for using Facebook since Facebook hasn’t offered their own iPad app yet. It’s not as good as FB’s iPhone app but it’ll do for now.)

For the Web:

Stumbleupon (A web service based around social recommendations that integrates with Facebook and
Twitter)

Quora (A web service based around questions that also integrates with Facebook and Twitter)

I think that it’s interesting that ost of these popular hyped apps and sites are well integrated with the major social networking sites. Clearly we’re going to see a lot of fuzziness on the boundaries between offerings in the future.

It’s fun to play again and catch up with some of the leading popular services that my travels delayed my adoption of the hot new trendy tools. I’ll bet many of you are seeig my play today as old hat. Oh well, it’s never too late to play.

I’ve been reading these blog postings to about the playthings above:

Why Quora Will Never Be as Big as Twitter

Seven Reasons Why Quora Will Be Bigger Than Foursquare

“1. People will always desire to build their profiles off what they know. Quora does this.
2. People want answers to their questions from friends, peers and those with expertise (Quora is building this)
3. People want digital services to work well across multiple platforms (Quora is off to a good start)
4. People like to show off what they know (check)
5. People feel satisfied when they know they’ve helped someone else. (double check)
6. People like when they can share across other social platforms (triple check)
7. People put value into systems which give value back.”

StumbleUpon Sent 700M Pageviews To Other Websites In Dec, Is Growing 20% Monthly

Fly Or Die: Does Flipboard Have A Chance?

Stumbleupon drove more traffic to other sites than Facebook and more than other sites combinedvia Next Big Future

“Stumbleupon has surpassed Facebook to become the number one website for generating social media traffic in the U.S, accounting for 43.34% of the market as January 2011 commenced. Stumbleupon also drove more traffic than Twitter, Youtube, Digg, Reddit and MySpace combined.”

I have to note that I see huge alignment between the goals of these sites and the mission of librarianship. There’s much to learn and adapt here.

I’m only just starting to explore these tools but it’s interesting and engaging.

Play. It still works for me!

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on January 06, 2011 (boomark / email).