Thing 21 – Other Social Networks

Gather.com. So… this is supposed to represent the social networking option of more intelligent discussion, the public radio crowd, as it were? Well, all things are relative, but the level of discussion on the few posts and comments I read failed to jump out as particularly articulate or perceptive. More’s the pity.

Gather includes an interesting bullet point on their homepage, “avoid the noise of other sites”. Amen. Many of the social sites do seem to me to be very noisy – by that I mean the ratio of valuable content to useless content is very low. As an example, in looking at what was ostensibly a books group at Gather, I found among the recent postings one about studying the kabbalah and another about the hanging gardens of Babylon. Umm... why? Noise to me. Same person, repeatedly writing off-topic posts, and no one commenting seemed to notice this. Weird. Even worse, it seems that the agents and publicists have taken over the book group space at Gather. One publicist, (who also reviews the books that she represents and admits she seldom rates anything lower than a five on a five point system – that’s chutzpah) had recently posted on several of the book groups and at least one of these posts was totally off topic for the group. Don’t these marketing types understand they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg when they contaminate the content with their blurbs?

To sum up - Gather.com was a real disappointment. I hoped it might actually be a useful social networking site, but in the time I spent, I couldn’t find anything compelling on it.

Goodreads – this I had seen before because patrons of our library had mentioned it in a survey as one of the websites they visited frequently. Maybe because it has a very narrow focus, this site looks like it really might be a fun site to join if you were interested in books and reading.

I read “Building a Social Networking Environment at the Library” by Steve Campion, of Pierce County (WA) Library. Very rah-rah. But at least he had some specific modest proposals linked to present library activities.

Although I was lukewarm to Mr. Campion’s article at WebJunction, I think WebJunction itself is a really good idea. It’s my impression that librarians like to share experiences and ideas with their colleagues and help one another learn new things – WebJunction looks like a good platform for that. But the discussion part of this website is not very robust and I didn’t see a lot of evidence of social networking. On the other hand, there does look to be a lot of other good information on it, and maybe the “social” part of this will grow.