I read a lot of blogs and find a ton of stuff I want to share. Too much stuff. Rather than drown people, I’ve decided to follow Steven Cohen’s lead and Tumbl it. You can see the newest posts to the right of the screen or head over to Too Much Information. If you’re interested, you can even subscribe to the RSS.
TLA Conference – an aside April 22, 2008
Just an FYI about a great resource I was re-reminded of at TLA: Talks@Google
Some that are particularly relevant for libraries include:
More informational videos are on the official Google Channel.
Going where our users are? April 11, 2008
I was at the College of DuPage teleconference today, Trends, Fads or Folly: Spotting the Library Trends that really Matter. It was mostly a Second Life sales pitch and I got myself so worked up that I decided to do some research and number crunching.
Before I rant though I’d like to qualify my tirade by saying that I think some organizations are doing amazing things with Second Life, my own college being one of them. I’m very hopeful that we’re going to open up at least a portion of our island to some of our programming students to use as a sandbox. With that caveat however, I offer the following statistics: (All Second Life stats from their key metrics excel file.)
- World Population: 6,660,687,784 (from census.gov)
- US Population: 303,831,195 (from census.gov)
- Registered Second Life Users as of February 2008: 12,671,638
- Number of Active Users: 526,915
- Active US Avatar Count: 182,698
- Registered Premium Second Life Users as of February 2008: 91,531
If every one of those registered users was actively using Second Life (which we know isn’t true) and was located in the US (also not true), that would be 4% of Americans on Second Life.
But only 35% of Registered Second Life Users are in the US. Thats about 4,435,073. Which is 1.5% of Americans. And only 182,698 of those are active users. That’s .06% of Americans. Not even one tenth of a percent. And we haven’t even discussed what percentage of those are companies or people with multiple accounts…
Well it’s what the kids are doing, right? Actually the 25-34 and 35-44 both out number the 13-24 and even the 45 and older spend more time in Second Life than the young’ns. Note that the teens make up less than 1% of all users.
And please note that most of this is talking about registered users, not actual active, habitual users. For more on the difference read Clay Shirky’s explanation. In short:
“There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.”
New Library Professional Development Blog March 18, 2008
I’ve just started a Library Professional Development Blog. So many of these opportunities come across my desk each day and I collect up the free and relevant ones for my library as part of my Staff Development Team responsibilities, but they go into a password protected wiki. Now they’re all available and tagged for general consumption. Feel free to spread the word or to submit items.
ellie <3 libraries 