The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

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Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

From the First Monday website

Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.
Articles include:
* Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
* Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
* Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
* Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
* The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
* Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
* History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward


The effect of structural cues on user comprehension, navigational behavior, and perceptions (Note: PDF)

From the University of Washington website

Web authors need writing strategies based on empirical studies of real Web users, strategies that will produce comprehensible Web documents that facilitate readers on the Web. The study reported here investigated the effect of structural cues (text previews and navigational tab menus) on user comprehension, navigational behavior, and perceptions. Our findings underscore that good Web design must be context specific - structural cues that promote understanding are not necessarily those that promote exploration or enjoyment.


Mobile Access to Data and Information (Note: PDF)

From the Pew / Internet website

Anyone who doubts how important mobile phones are and will become as a platform and marketing medium needs only to look at the latest Pew Internet & American Life report. Cellphones are now more important to US adults than the internet, television, landline phones and email. In addition, an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for things other than voice communications, including accessing mobile internet content.
62% of all Americans are part of a wireless, mobile population that participates in digital activities away from home or work. Not only are young people attuned to this kind of access, African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are more likely than white Americans to use non-voice data applications on their cell phones.


Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World (Note: PDF)

From the OCLC website

The practice of using a social network to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground - shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location - is as old as human societies, but social networking has flourished due to the ease of connecting on the Web. This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:
* The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
* How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
* Opinions on privacy online
* Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking