While I wrote my previous entry about social networks and lifestreams, my thoughts went to the headlines of today’s newspapers that wrote about the death of an Finnish Idols song contest finalist, a 19 year old girl. On the web news sites reported how her Facebook profile has been filled with over 400 comments and farewells. Her FB-status was recently updated and her mini-feed is reporting how she became friends with someone.

Through social networks we can take part of tragedies all over the world and share our sorrow with others and maybe find comfort from strangers. But what happens to our profiles and our web sites, our content on the web, when we are gone? Only we know our passwords and the networks we are part of. Should we write our passwords in our last will with a request to update our status, for one last time? Are social networks modern, morbid tombstones or are they digital celebrations of our life, a true lifestream?

Have You stopped sometimes and thought about the amount of data and content that we all create on the Web? Keeping track of all of your friends in various social networks is becoming more and more of a full day job, but is it a job that we really want? A lot of my friends and colleagues are on Facebook, but some are on Orkut or Last.fm or LinkedIn or Xing or MySpace or … whatever. My brain is hurting from the information overload. Services like FriendFeed tries to help us organize the streams we and our friends create in various social networks. Lifestreams, someone has called these. FriendFeed aggregates the information we create to one place, so that you don’t have to go to all of these social networks to see what your friends are up to. Will services like FriendFeed be the next big wave on the Web? Are we really that interested in knowing what our friends are up to 24/7?

I think curiosity is human. We are all a bit of voyeurs too. Part of the charm with Facebook is to see who my friends friends are. This is probably something that we all have done. Don’t deny it. You have done it too. But for how long does this charm last? I’m already fed up with following my friends actions on Facebook. I just log on to Facebook occasionally to see if somebody has sent my anything interesting. I don’t read the news feeds anymore. So when I think about the amount of infromation my friends generate on Facebook and multiply it with the number of social networks that I know people in, I get the amount of information I would get on FriendFeed. Am I just too old for this or is there something I don’t get? Why do we want so much information about what our friends and our friends friends are up to? Do we really need this much information?

Online invitations have been around for a while, but I think Pingg does it better than any service before it. The service is really easy to use and design of the invitations is great. You can even register for gift registry at Amazon and use it on Pingg invitations.

Pingg is just one example of applications that seem to pop out to the blogosphere every week. It seems that every week there is a new and exciting web 2.0 applications that does things better than ever before and for free. Where does this leave all the small businesses, software houses that code all kinds of softwares for often a small clientel? Why would the companies pay for something that they can get for free?

The goal of this study is to investigate how libraries are using Second Life and to increase our knowledge about the use of a 3D virtual environment. The survey is for librarians and library staff that have some activities in Second Life or that are planning activities there. Please take part in our survey about Libraries in Second Life. Open the survey here.

Second Life is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc. This research is not affiliated with or sponsored by Linden Research.

Some time ago I wrote about traffic to my Web site (which is steadily rising I’m glad to add). I have now past a milestone in traffic, but it’s not traffic on my blog that I’m talking about. I’m talking about a presentation that I have on Slideshare and how many times it has been viewed. This is an updated version of a presentation I had at the City Library of Turku in December. The talk was about Library 2.0 and a bit of Library 3D or libraries in Second Life. Today, the presentation has been viewed over a 1000 times. I think I’ll celebrate with a cup of tea.

I’m falling a bit behind on covering the stories I find interesting in the blogospehere. The reason for this is that I’ve been writing on my thesis almost 24/7, at least it feels like it. Well, anyway, ReadWriteWeb reported (some time ago) of a WordPress plugin called PhotoDropper. PhotoDropper lets you add photos from Flickr in to your blog. Now you are thinking that what is so interesting about that. There are plenty of plugins for inserting images. Well, the catch is that PhotoDropper 1) makes it really simple to search for photos from Flickr and 2) it can search for photos under Creative Commons license.

I believe this to be a future trend. There are loads of user created content and information on the Web, but no efficient ways to extract the data and reuse it. The average user doesn’t know (or care) about copyright issues or is to afraid to use any material. Just think about what kind of a treasure chest LibraryThing would be for libraries. I think and I hope that we will see a lot more of tools that let us extract openly available data and easily reuse it.

This is also my first test of the plugin. Below You should see photos from my hometown, Turku (or Åbo in Swedish).

photo credit: ansik

photo credit: wheany

photo credit: Sándor

photo credit: Andrei!

photo credit: fooishbar