If you talk to anyone associated with one of my activities, I focus the discussions on people rather than the tools. I show the tools and the students play, but we also come back around to the user of the tool on the other end of the 'net. The tools come and go with no rhyme or reason, but the pull of people is driven by specific needs and desires! I feel for librarians and information professionals to be equal partners in the new web phenomena, we must understand the human drive or addiction to the social web.

I have seen the first talk/presentation/movie that really highlights the points I try to make. I am sure this video collaboration led my Dr. Michael Wesch does it much more eloquently than my attempts.

Anyone that wants to understand the viral nature of the web must watch this presentation. It is almost an hour but it beats any prime-time reality TV show I have seen recently.

By the way...
He talks about "gaming the system" where the middle frame of your video becomes the thumbnail that everyone sees. After watching this movie, you have to ask yourself did he purposely use the kids to drive traffic? Hmmm?

I thank Bill Claspy my colleague in the Kelvin Smith Library for making sure on added this to my consumption of everything web 2.0.

It also created a video on YouTube to promote it.

CALL FOR ENTRIES
SPARC Announces Mind Mashup:
A Video Contest to Showcase Student Views on Information Sharing

Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and Documentary Filmmaker Peter Wintonick Among Judges Selecting $1,000 Prize Winner

Washington, DC - July 25, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the launch of the first annual SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest to promote the open exchange of information. Mind Mashup, the theme of the 2007 contest, calls on entrants to illustrate in a short video the importance of sharing ideas and information of all kinds. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site or software application that combines content from more than one source.

Consistent with SPARC's mission as an international alliance of academic and research libraries promoting the benefits of information sharing, the contest encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the Internet age. Designed for adoption as a college or high school class assignment, the SPARC Discovery Awards are open to anyone over the age of 15.

Contestants are asked to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to the open exchange of information. Submissions will be judged by a panel that includes:

• Aaron Delwiche, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas
• José-Marie Griffiths, Professor & Dean at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Rick Johnson, communications consultant and founding director of SPARC
• Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC
• Karen Rustad, president of Free Culture 5C and a senior at Scripps College majoring in media studies
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Peter Wintonick, award-winning documentary filmmaker and principal of Necessary Illusions Productions Inc.

The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

Submissions must be received by December 2, 2007. Winners - including a first-place winner and two runners up - will be announced in January 2008. The winner will receive $1,000 and a "Sparky Award." The runners up will each receive $500. Winning entries will be publicly screened at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in January 2008 in Philadelphia and will be prominently featured in SPARC's international advocacy and campus education activities.

For further details, please see the contest Web site at http://sparkyawards.org.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC is a founding member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research - including research funded by the National Institutes of Health. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

Students will discover how libraries are using Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, social communities, podcasts, and various mash-ups, to give library users increased ownership in their library interactions. Students will investigate the major principles and applications, while developing an understanding of the library-specific issues. Topics of discussion may include privacy, trust or abuse of these technologies, policy considerations, factors to implementation, and optimization in the library environment. In addition, students will look at how users are creating tools to supplement and/or replace their experience with libraries.
Check out the Squidoo page I set up for the workshop. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please share.

The students for their final project will practice by using blogs, wikis, or other tools to create a web 2.0 environment for one of three scenarios - an existing or fictional library, employee training, or a virtual environment for a specific class or employer project. They will have a chance to keep it private on a library school run server or use one of the many free web-based applications. I am giving them the choice. If any of them decide to go public, I will share the results here.

Even better check out the same video using a website called mojiti. It allows a user to annotate and comment within the video. The author of the original video posted it and said give me your thoughts. How Web 2.0 of him/her!