Like a coconut
I just finished up giving a presentation to our staff about the practical uses of rss. Returning to my desk I encounter this on Walsh’s flickr stream:
The comments include this, from Han N.:
Those colors are amazing! Did you know that an octopus can make itself like a coconut as a defense mechanism? I always thought that was cool.
Here we have an honest to goodness information exchange - so much like the casual ones any public library worker has over the service desks all the time. Informal and invaluable and it occurs to me that
IF online tools allow users to communicate with each other .
AND People tend to turn to their friends (those in their communities) for new information (via).
THEN Via consolidation, RSS allows us to broaden our communities and therefore our information sources.
Conclusion: As our preferred means of information acquisition - ‘friends’ - becomes more reliable and stable, those outside of it become less and less important. (Yes, this includes so many libraries, I’m afraid.)
Tags: communication, flickr, information, Libraries, Services, and Librarians, octupus, reference, rss