Connie Crosby: Friday Roundup (Nov. 9/07): You Don't Expect to See Folk You Know

I don't always have time to post every day, so my first attempt writing about things I have been looking at went very well last week. So, I am back to share more! This week I was in Ottawa for a couple of days teaching my Social Networking Tools course for the Professional Learning Centre at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto (here is a link to the Toronto description). It was my first time teaching at the University of Ottawa facility so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Once we got a few to-be-expected first day kinks worked out, I had a fabulous time meeting and working with the librarians in Ottawa. They were all so positive and welcoming!

Here, then, is what I would have blogged about if I had had more time this week--

When you turn on the TV in the morning you don't expect to see folk you know. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mitch Joel on Canada AM talking about personal image on the internet Monday morning. Click here for the video from the CTV website. His visit coincides with the release of Microsoft's new Windows Live ID. Microsoft pulled him in as a third party expert in their press release, and he was quickly asked to discuss the concept of personal image by everyone. Most recently I ran into Mitch at Podcamp Boston where he gave a kick-off talk on building your personal brand. They couldn't have picked a better expert!

Speaking of which, check out the Podcamp Boston 2.0 music video put together by Mark Blevis. Look closely and you will see yours truly more than once or twice. You can also see Famous Librarian Andrea Mercado running around in the green t-shirt. She's a real spitfire! It was great to finally meet her after the Boston podcasters have been telling me for the past year I had to meet the "other" librarian in the group.

women 2.0 Canada - earlier this year at the mesh conference I discovered Beverly Crandon and Ana Gervasio, two lively entrepreneurial women in a big tech world, were helping to start up a Canadian version of women 2.0 based in Silicon Valley. The Canadian group have recently started up a blog and have become active running events in Ottawa. Unfortunately my visit to Ottawa this week did not coincide with a get-together, but I hope to participate sometime in the future. I have been added to their blogroll which was a nice surprise! I have reciprocated by linking to this blog and hope to get more involved in the future.
The new OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World - a copy of this new report came to me a couple of weeks ago. I only had a chance to crack the binding this week, and am slowly making my way through the report. It is quite substantive but actually quite a quick read. It talks about use of the Internet by the general public and by librarians, and talks about issues and opportunities for libraries with social networking tools. I hope to share some of the findings and my thoughts later on after I have absorbed a little more. But I encourage you to start reading it yourself--some great, useful information here. You can read electronically or print from the OCLC website, or order a hard copy.
Canada Post has opened a city in Second Life called Maple Grove. I wrote at more length about it on SLAW on Monday. The odd thing is no announcement or link was made on the Canada Post website. I asked around a few of my friends "in the know" about Second Life, and they didn't know who had put it together for them (i.e. who had done the scripting and animation a.k.a. created the buildings). I had a tour around. It is interesting, but mostly people stop in briefly to have a look around and then move on. There is not yet enough there to keep you there.
Some very interesting statistics about Facebook were discussed by Mitch Joel in Six Pixels of Separation, podcast #74 from last week. He also wrote about it in his Oct. 26th blog post Facebook Facts That Will Blow Your Marketing Mind . I hope to write a bit more about that in a future post, but if you are curious as to why Facebook is gaining prominence in both the tech and marketing world, you have to check it out.