[WEB4LIB] RE: Top Technology Trends: Your Thoughts?

[Fiona Bradley]

It's interesting that technologies like IM have made a comeback. IM was
huge about 5 years ago after the death of IRC for anything useful, but
mostly in an individual sense. But now IM is back and becoming useful
for organisations. It's a great example of repurposing an existing
technology for a new use instead of constantly running after new
solutions. 

The main trends I see are in enabling community participation,
information sharing/creation and personal information management. 

Community participation includes IM, wikis, blogging, the wider
availability of low-cost technology for grassroots media (DV cameras,
editing software, digital cameras, podcasting, Internet radio etc)

Information sharing includes some of the above, especially wikis, but
also Open Access journals, blogs etc. 

PIM is coming up in a big big way, as a profession we've been looking
at information management on an organisational level for a long time,
but the personal aspect has not been examined so much until mid-2004.
There's now a plethora of tools to manage personal information, and
we're not talking book organising software here - we're talking projects
that can be customised and skinned and loaded up with plugins, metadata,
communities of managed information (flickr, del.icio.us, 43 things) and
so on. I think projects like Quicksilver, Haystack and Eclipse are going
to be very big in the next year or two.

Despite the increasing range of technology, m view is that there is a
move towards what is in some ways simpler technology, or technology that
allows you to get things done, instead of a steady procession of
gadgets.

I would definitely leave broadband in Karen's list.... especially for
users outside of the US. Most people I know here in Australia are still
on dial-up. I would take out flash drives and instead think about remote
storage, now that Google mail (despite all its failings) has 1gb
available and people are saving favourites to del.icio.us and photos
online, people will want to have their information available anywhere,
anytime.

As for the whole citizen journalist thing, I think it's something that
was for a long time around but not valid - for example, people who used
to write zines or independent magazines, or even crikey.com.au and
indymedia etc were not seen as being part of the media world. However in
recent times, the idea seems to have become more acceptable as people
also start to use blogs and non-traditional sources of information for
news. Mass media itself is also changing rapidly to keep up, with many
media outlets adding blogs and heading towards convergence to stay
relevant. 

This has turned out to be a rather long post, my apologies!

cheers,
Fiona

Acting Assistant Manager
SBS Radio Resource Centre
Locked Bag 028 
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

Ph: (02) 9430 2862
Email: fiona.bradley at sbs.com.au

>>> "Houghton, Sarah" <SHoughton at co.marin.ca.us> 12/01/2005 6:47:14 am
>>>
I would vote to definitely include IM--both IM reference and IMing
other library staff for intra-institutional communication.  I would also
add Open Source Software as a topic.  Open Source is allowing libraries
to take a packaged piece of software, often not expressly intended for
library use, and tailor it for their needs.  There are examples of this
all over the darn place (IM software, ILS software, toolbar software,
etc).

Sarah Houghton
e-Services Librarian, Marin County Free Library
Librarian in Black: http://www.librarianinblack.net