Microblogging

James D talks about microblogging & Luis talks about a specific application for emergency services. I've noted my personal preferences recently but for me microblogging has got F.A. to do with blogging. My posts tend towards the terse but I generally break the 160 character barrier. For me, a blog post has to have an idea in there. It may not be yours. It may not be any good. But it's there.

I see Twitter & Facebook status info as presencing technologies and as James notes, they have more to do with SMS & IM than blogs & wikis. And these will have important uses for people working remotely from each other (i.e. increasingly all of us).

N.B. As a side bet, literary forms will emerge out of presencing technologies. SMS poetry for example.

Patrick Lambe's double whammy (1): extinction-level events

Patrick Lambe entitles his IIM keynote On Becoming Extinct. If I am listening correctly, PL basically wants to put a rocket up the information management profession because:

• The information management space is full of different roles from radically different backgrounds (slide 15) and the IM cluster (which includes librarians, records managers & knowledge managers) makes up a small part of this - because the IM cluster professions have failed to understand the opportunities open to them.
• Graduates in these professions are poorly equipped for their roles out there.
• IM professionals tell themselves & others that their roles are unimportant but in fact major organisational disasters of recent times (Challenger, Enron) have been failures of information.
• The IM profession needs entrepeneurs (infopreneurs?), boundary spanners - and its members also need suing (listen to the sound file to find out why).

PL articulates something I have felt for the past decade - since shortly before I got my MSc in Information Studies & Librarianship in fact. I have met infopreneurs over the years but too many in the IM cluster respond to the challenge of the new with "that's not my job, I can't do that".

There is a link here with the previous post on teaching. Teaching (in its myriad forms) is a profession that is being blown inside out by social & technological change. And the future for teachers is a world where most teaching is not done by them. The present for information professionals is a world where most information is not managed by them. What do they do about that?

Well, PL's call to arms is a good place to start.