I am taking a break from blogging for a bit.  Back before long. 

Del.icio.us annouced that it is now serving 1 million registered users.   “Not even a week after turning three, del.icio.us has just passed the mark of 1 million registered users! That’s more than triple the number of users we had just nine months ago. We can hardly believe it ourselves (although the smell of smoke coming from the server rack seems to eerily confirm it).”

UC Berkeley has just announced that it is partnering with Google Video to deliver free college courses, along with lectures and symposia. It is the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

I tried out the Bancroft Library Centennial Symposium video series, notably, The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

Having tried out the fun and easy geotagging feature on Flickr, I was very interested in Steve Rubel’s 9/26/06 post on Micro Persuasion titled:  “Location, Location, Location”  Although Steve’s focus is on geotagging’s potential impact on advertisers, he claims the feature will bring us closer together and he gives us a good description, “Geotagging is the process of adding geographical data to online content created either by individuals or big media. Usually it involves integrating a Google or Yahoo map into a site and allowing users to pinpoint where they reside. Sometimes it goes a step further by letting individuals ‘tag’ the content with the locations where their articles, photos, videos or blogs were created.”

He notes that aggregating the tags from millions of individuals into one view greatly increases the value of the information.  Using Flickr — one of the world’s largest photo-sharing sites — as an example also gives us an idea of the potential of this feature. In Flickr’s first 30 days of providing geotagging capability, 4.1 million photos were geotagged by users.  It’s as simple as dragging your photo to the map location where they were shot.  I can also personally attest that moving them around for fine-tuning is also easy.  I geotagged 136 of my travel photos in a fairly brief time. 

Steve predicts that “all of this is just the beginning. In the months ahead, geotagging will become part of virtually every website you can think of — from consumer review sites to news, blog platforms, search engines and more. It will connect disparate online sites into solidified virtual networks all based on location data.”

John Cook’s Venture Blog has posted that Microsoft Research is spinning out a social networking startup, Wallop, with the help of $10 million in venture capital.  The product is expected to compete with MySpace-type sites.

Former Microsoft employee Karl Jacob, one of the leaders, says, “Wallop is a full blown social network with even more features than what we have seen to date.  It completely integrates photo sharing, music sharing, blogging and all of the things we have become used to into one platform.” 

Designed to appeal to the 18-25 year-old set, people will have to be invited in order to participate.  To get invited, the Wallop site suggests you talk to friends who may already be members, look for soon to be announced Wallop parties in your city, or send an email telling them why you should be invited,

Wallop does not plan to make money from advertising. Instead, the Flash-based system will allow people to purchase games, animated backgrounds, slideshows, and videos ranging in price from 99 cents to $4, and then add them to their customized Web pages.

“The big idea here is that self expression has been driving a lot of Internet innovation, from web pages to blogs to now social networks,” said Jacob.

ALA Banned Books Week, September 23-30, 2006.  Books, authors, and more.

Companies and organizations are discovering the benefits of serving niches when designing MySpace-type communities.  One such, Community Connect  is not targeting the gamut of possible users, but, instead, has focused on a number of niche markets that when combined comprise a sizeable population. For instance, together, Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans make up about 33% of the total U.S. population, according to 2005 U.S. Census numbers. 

Community Connect claims to be the leader in online community destinations for US ethnic groups and the 18th largest US web property, measured in page views. They have more than 16 million registered members across three sites — AsianAvenue.com, BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com — and more than eight years of experience in building online destinations for US ethnic groups. At the sites, participants build relationships with people of similar backgrounds and interests, find jobs, and read about the latest in politics, culture, music, entertainment.

Community Connect’s core purpose is “Improving lives through the power of community. Amazing things happen when people share their backgrounds, life pursuits, dreams and ideas with one another. At Community Connect, we want to channel the strength of these real world communities into fun and powerful online communities. On our sites, members can start meaningful friendships and relationships, find important information and build their careers.”

Business Week Online (Sept. 20) reporter Jeffrey Gangemi says that 10-year-old, profitable Community Connect is “taking the social networking world by storm, one underserved niche market at a time.”  Community Connect co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ben Sun says social networking is still in its “primordial ooze phase” and that the business will continue to undergo differentiation, and even the big players will veer away from serving the masses.

Several people, including me (MySpace.com and libraries), have suggested that libraries focusing on social networking sites such as MySpace, might best take a niche-building approach (such as serving teens), rather than creating another general online library presence.  Can we, too, go after the underserved in library-land and build helpful, attractive places for a community of users (or non-users) to develop and play?

I am trying out some of the free social (sharable) software at 37Signals.   Some of the offerings have upgraded versions for a monthly charge, but you can easily get started — and maybe continue to be happy with — the free versions.  Right now I am using Backpack for a business purpose and Ta-Da List, always free, for a personal “to do” list as I plan for an upcoming event. 

But what I want to talk about in this post is Writeboard.  Writeboard is always free, and you can create multiple boards and invite as many people to collaborate with you as you please.  If you are going to create a number of Writeboards, 37Signals suggests that you use the Backpack service to organize them in one place.

Each Writeboard has a URL so it can be accessed from any computer at any time using a web browser.  Three browsers are guaranteed compatible with Writeboard: Internet Explorer 6.x, Safari, or Firefox. You sign up (it’s quick and easy) for an account with each product you want to use and get started immediately. 

Here are some things you can do with Writeboard:

• Copy and paste into it (but not import)
• Invite others and share your writeboard and its development – the software tracks edits and marks versions
• Easily follow changes and compare versions — guided by color coding
• Return to any previous version
• Send yourself or others any version of a Writeboard via email or export it to a text file
• Leave comments without editing the Writeboard, allowing you to collaborate and discuss potential changes
• Subscribe to the Writeboard using RSS and be notified anytime anyone makes a change

I have had projects in the past for which I really could have used this.  Working with colleagues and/or committees whose members are scattered to plan or develop a workshop, presentation, or event seems a natural.

Read/WriteWeb conductied “The Social Bookmarking Faceoff,” finding that the two dominant players are del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, leaving the rest, including Yahoo MyWeb substantially behind.  The post characterizes del.icio.us as building a hierarchy for people to browse (it does related relationships, etc.), while StumbleUpon is more of a random discovery system.

In the Sept. 18 post, Alex Iskold says, “The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today’s rich and social web ecosystem.”

He explains the methodology used to rate social bookmark sites in the post.  E-consultant and go2web20 lists of social bookmark services were used to initially identify companies.  There is a nice chart comparing the features of each service, along with pros and cons.  In the two days since the post appeared it has drawn many comments.

Links to some articles from 9-15-06 LibraryJournal.com:
“Google is not the net”  and
“The MySpace Gap”  

Institute of Museum and Library Services press releases:
9-18-06, IMLS Calls for Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant Applications
The program supports efforts to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians and the faculty who will prepare them for careers in library science. It also supports grants for research related to library education and library staffing needs, curriculum development, an early career development program for untenured, tenure-track library and information science faculty, and continuing education and training.

9-19-06, Libraries, Museums, and Public Broadcasters Collaborate to Improve Their Communities 
The grants encourage museums, libraries, and public broadcasters to work together to address critical needs in their communities. The award recipients will match the federal funds with an additional $2.7 million.