Bit.ly, the reigning king of Twitter’s short URL service is taking a good hard look at malware. In a blog post published earlier today, the company announced a partnership with three security giants to beef up protection for the millions of Bit.ly short links whizzing through Facebook and Twitter every month. The company will incorporate Verisign’s iDefense IP reputation service, WebSense’s ThreatSeeker Cloud Service and Sophos’ Web Alert Services.

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In May, ReadWriteWeb covered Bit.ly’s win over TinyURL as the default Twitter link shortener. Since the company’s Twitter victory, hackers have been targeting the service as a vehicle for destructive malware. To combat this, Verisign’s service will help Bit.ly detect and defeat malware by incorporating a blacklist that includes URLs, domains and IP addresses. Web Sense’s ThreatSeeker will analyze content and links in real-time to prevent malicious and inappropriate content from being posted on or distributed from Bit.ly. And finally, Sophos will analyze the actions of potential spammers and monitor users for telltale attack patterns. In addition to today’s partners, Bit.ly also uses Google’s Safe Browsing API and several other link blacklists to identify threats.

While each of these services will alleviate some of the burden, they simply cannot hold back every attack that surfaces in this rising tide of malware. To further protect yourself from malware, check out ReadWriteWeb’s list of 8 Practices to Avoid Malware and consider installing a LongURL browser extension to preview links before you click them.

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Last week, I visited Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information to give the 2009 fall lecture for the Beta Phi Mu, International Library and Information Studies Honor Society, Omicron Chapter. The talk centered around my model of “The Hyperlinked Library.”

Based on our preliminary findings from the Australian CAVAL research project, “Measuring the Value and Effect of Learning 2.0 Programs in Libraries”, I’ve incorporated some new sections to my talks and to the model itself. One benefit of the program that has been mentioned again again in survey data and in focus groups is that Learning 2.0 programs often lead library staff to the process of augmenting their professional development with online tools like reading and writing on blogs or using an RSS reader to monitor news and commentary.

The survey question “What changes have you made to your personal professional practice because of the program?” yielded many statements focused on RSS, blogs and participation in a community, including this one:

“I now use RSS feeds all the time. I use Google documents for things that I share amongst others in my profession and I blog about library matters fortnightly.”

To me, this speaks to the importance of developing one’s Personal Learning Network (PLN) and using online communication and sharing tools to extend that network as far and as wide as possible. A PLN can include connections to people that we know in the profession as well as people at a distance that might share similar goals. We might also connect to those who we don’t always agree with to engage in open debate and provide an added dimension of thought. Take a look at David Warlick’s presentation at Slideshare on the topic for a practical guide to PLNs.

To illustrate the point of the talk, I posed a question to part of my own PLN - my Twitter followers:

“Hey Biblio-Twitterverse - what advice would you give the Rutgers library students I’m talking to this evening?”

In the few hours before the talk some wonderful responses came in. Many from students of mine but also from the larger crowd. They included:

Michelle in Australia: “Be open to new ideas, new technologies, new ways of doing things, but remember ultimately who its for - your users” 

Carrie in Illinois: “I would make sure to do a practicum. The experience & connections I made were invaluable.”

Denise in Illinois: “Tell them that working the circulation desk will be the best training for the ref desk they can get.”

Ameet in Georgia: “analyze user experience in your personal world and apply to professional/library realm”

Aaron in Oregon: “for students: don’t assume anything about what a library can do. watch people and solve their problems.”

Warren in Australia (my co-investigator on the CAVAL Project): “student advice: find your work-related passion and do whatever it takes to keep it alive. Passionless work is soul destroying”

And a favorite of mine from Rebecca in Canada:“be curious; when u r working understand the broad context in which ur work is occuring & the impact of ur work; laugh, yep, laff” 

I used these answers in the slides, which created some good conversation and some excitement from the crowd. Suddenly, it wasn’t just 100 people in a room at Rutgers, but a broader semi-syncronous meetup of folks from all a wide variety of locales. It illustrated the fact that ongoing learning is as easy as spending some time online once a day or once a week, connecting, and sharing with others in the profession. I was especially fond of Rebecca’s entry because she wrote it in Twitter shorthand. Not only was she speaking the language, she was also teaching a bit too–use abbreviations to deliver more bang for your 140 character buck.

I had a great time at Rutgers–speaking with library students fires me up like nothing else these days. I have high hopes for our future when I meet bright, up-and-coming professionals like the folks I met that night. What other advice would you give to them? And how have you developed your PLN lately?

The Rutgers slides are here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/239835/HyperlinkedRutgers.pdf

I’m still gathering thoughts about the Social media Predictions for 2010. Please share them here for a future post:

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/11/predictions-for-social-technologies-libraries-in-2010.html

School of Environmental Sciences establishes open access policy, press release, November 26, 2009.

… Researchers in the [University of Guelph] School of Environmental Sciences commit to making the best possible effort to publish in venues providing unrestricted public access to their works. They will endeavour to secure the right to self-archive their published materials, and will deposit these works in the Atrium [IR].

The School of Environmental Sciences grants the University of Guelph Library the non-exclusive right to make their scholarly publications accessible through self-archiving in the Atrium institutional repository subject to copyright restrictions.

This policy applies to all appropriate scholarly and professional work produced as a member of the School of Environmental Sciences produced as of the date of the adoption of this policy. Retrospective deposit is encouraged. Co-authored works should be included with the permission of the other author(s). Examples of works include:

• Scholarly and professional articles
• Substantive presentations, including slides and text
• Books/book chapters
• Reports
• Substantive pedagogical materials such as online tutorials

Works should be deposited in the Atrium as soon as is possible, recognizing that some publishers may impose an embargo period.

This policy is effective as of 11/05/2009 and will be assessed a year after implementation.

According to ROARMAP, this is the first non-library institutional or departmental OA commitment in Canada. (The libraries at Calgary and York have policies for their staff.)

In a post on his blog (link coming shortly), Leigh Blackall made a great suggestion for introducing people to social media that I want to contemplate here a bit.

He suggests that, rather than leap straight into course or curricular implementation of social media, instructors and staff should be encouraged to explore it within their own personal context first – whether this takes the form of research, professional development or something else.

I think this idea is really important to take on board, because it will help establish literacies and an awareness of the more significant aspects of social media – namely the networks, human dynamics, and the fluid, constantly evolving nature of the social media landscape, and its tendency to eliminate or alter contemporary social roles and relationships and replace them with something far more equalizing and democratic.

Otherwise, the absense of hands-on experience tends to see social media used in contrived, superficial ways – or worse still, compacted and distorted to suit traditional, more constrained models of learning and teaching in which the technology is seen and used as an after-thought or add-on rather than something meaningful.

Staff need to leave themselves the space to develop fluency in social media to the point where they are working and engaging through it and not just on it. That’s when the true values of the medium become most clearly apparent – and critically these lessons are arising through experience.

Posted via email from Mike Bogle

TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter’s new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter’s new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn’t allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck’s iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.

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Interface Tweaks

All of this added functionality could have cluttered up TweetDeck’s interface, but the team decided to redesign parts of the interface. A single ‘+’ button at the top of the app now opens up a new dialog that allows you to add lists and Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn columns to your view. From there, you can also start new Twitter lists.

TweetDeck’s Ian Dodsworth also told us that TweetDeck will soon be able to show its users composite profiles of TweetDeck users based on the social network profiles they have added to TweetDeck.

Auto-Updated Lists

As Twitter still restricts the number of calls a user can make to the Twitter API, TweetDeck’s competitor Seesmic decided to have users update lists manually. In TweetDeck, lists will update automatically and you can set the frequency of these updates in the app’s settings dialog.

TweetDeck also makes it easy to start new lists from existing lists, which is great if you want to extend somebody else’s list with your own picks, for example. TweetDeck will also suggest users for a list. We are not quite sure how TweetDeck makes these suggestions, but they seem to be based on the title of your group.

You can find a full lists of all the tweaks and new features in TweetDeck 0.32 here.

Battle of the Twitter Clients

The auto-updating lists currently give TweetDeck a slight lead over Seesmic, which introduced lists as a core feature of its desktop client a few weeks ago. Seesmic’s new Seesmic for Windows, however, can now be extended with Firefox-like plugins. Because of this, Seesmic can now farm out a lot of development to third-party developers and anybody can create a column for LinkedIn or any other social network.

According to social media monitoring service Sysomos, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client after Twitter’s own website. It took TweetDeck a while to release today’s updates and the company surely lost some users to Seesmic in the meantime. This new update brings TweetDeck back on par with the competition and even adds a number of new features - like the ability to clone list - that it’s competitors don’t offer (yet).

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Google Calendar has a new experimental feature in the works that allows you to check the availability status of people you’re inviting to an event. In our early testing the experimental feature looks utterly broken, but once working it should be great.

If you’d like to see how it works, open any event on GCal and click the “sneak preview” link at the top of the event listing. This ability to view someone’s busy/available status only works if they have a publicly viewable Google Calendar account, but many people do. Even as a work in progress, this is a reminder of how much room for innovation there is in online calendaring.

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The feature remains a far cry from the kinds of functionality offered by services like TimeBridge or Tungle, but it’s a good and simple idea.

With the sneak preview turned on, the busy or available status of invitees to an event appears side by side with your own calendar, viewable as you drag a translucent box over possible times to suggest.

Right now it doesn’t seem to work at all. Schedules aren’t viewable until after someone’s been invited to an event, the creator of the event is misattributed and a number of other problems have already come up.

It should just be a matter of time, though. If you’re interested in hearing about the bleeding edge of calender innovation, check out Jon Udell’s excellant interview this summer with Mike Douglass and Steven Lees, two men working on an XML standard for iCal. There is a whole lot of room for new developments in the world of online calendars, especially through cross-network standards that enable users of different systems to communicate.

We’d heard rumors about this new GCal feature for a few days but didn’t confirm its existence until tech blogger Orli Yakuel Twittered about how to access it this morning.

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Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA Join Michele Kimpton, CBO, DuraSpace for an “All About Repositories” web seminiar on December 16, 2009, and find out how your organization can participate in a pilot program that will test a new cloud-based service, “DuraCloud.” Please register for the free web seminar here.

Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the Internet. DuraCloud is a hosted service and open technology, which allows organizations and end users to effectively utilize public cloud services without having to maintain dedicated technical infrastructure.  The DuraCloud platform builds upon existing cloud infrastructure for the purpose of increasing durability and re-use of digital content.

DuraCloud leaves the basics of pure storage to those who do it best–storage providers– and overlays storage solutions with additional functionality that is essential to ensuring long-term access and ease of use. The service provides baseline functionality that begins with the ability to replicate and distribute content across multiple cloud providers. DuraCloud adds value over and above storage by enabling the deployment of services to support access, preservation, re-use, and sharing of content stored in the cloud.

To access information and presentations about DuraCloud please visit: http://duraspace.org/duracloud.php.

The newest premium research report from ReadWriteWeb is available for purchase and download now. Titled The Real-Time Web & its Future, the report is based on 50 interviews with engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time web technology.

This is about far more than Twitter and Facebook. From a little startup called Nozzl Media delivering real-time public records to newspaper websites, to Aardvark’s building a “real-time web of people” using social networks and IM, to the way the Red Cross uses the real-time web to save lives - this report will give you a broad and deep understanding of the state of the real-time web, directions things might go in the future and some of the key personalities advancing these technologies.

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Compared to traditional analyst reports, we believe this product is more affordable, more in-depth and more effectively forward-looking than anything you’ll find elsewhere.

The report features:

• In-depth case studies of 10 organizations leveraging real time in a way that illustrates best practices or demonstrates inspiring innovation. Examples include: Warner Bros. Records, The American Red Cross and Superfeedr.
• Profiles of 20 people you should know and understand in order to understand and participate effectively in this market. People like John Borthwick, Ron Conway, Chris Messina, Monica Keller and Brett Slatkin.
• Sector overviews of the most heavily populated parts of the real-time web: search, stream readers and text-analysis middleware.
• Charts, graphs, visualizations and more.

You can download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter at no cost, to get a feel for what’s included.

This report represents the best wisdom from thousands of hours of industry experience, compressed through hundreds of hours of interviews, now available to help you get a jump-start in this big new direction the web is moving in. 84 compact pages of research, all for a mere $300.

Below is a matrix of big issues discussed in various parts of the report. We trust you’ll find this research an invaluable resource.

Purchase The Real-Time Web & its Future here.

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Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now?

According to “Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy,”
a new report from Forrester Research, two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now:

The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace.

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Second, inefficiencies are swamping the enterprise with the need to create collaborative strategies that provide a more structured approach to how information is managed.

Four Key Factors

Innovation: The poor economy is playing an important factor in how companies view the ways they develop products. Management is looking for more efficient and creative ways to innovate. And they are looking to Web 2.0 technologies for answers. According to Forrester, discussion forums and idea management tools are the top two Web 2.0 technologies being considered and piloted by IT decision-makers this year.

Efficiency: Information workers are high-paid, valuable members of the enterprise. But they have a hard time finding information to get their job done, with 83% saying they waste time searching for information vital to their work projects. There is growing importance for tools that provide the ability to better find information and connect more easily with co-workers who can provide expertise to solve problems and drive efficiencies.

Email Woes: A huge need is emerging for better ways to reuse information that normally would be lost in email communication. Email is used to share information but it only goes so far as the people in the email chain. Once in the chain, it’s locked away. Changing email behavior is no easy task but collaboration technologies hold promise for more information to be shared throughout the enterprise.

Governance: Managing business information is becoming a legal necessity. Communication is becoming so widespread that it is becoming difficult to track. According to Forrester, only 20% of businesses report that they’re very confident that if challenged, they could demonstrate that their digital information is accurate, trustworthy and accessible.

Benchmarking For Success

Forrester’s report is designed to provide a framework for building a collaborative practice in the enterprise. Senior level executives came to understand in 2009 the need for better collaboration. In 2010, we expect structured formats like what Forrester proposes will be increasingly important for successful implementation of collabortion technologies in the enterprise.

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By Valorie Hollister, Director of Community Development and Director of the DSpace Project, DuraSpace

Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA Tim Donohue officially joined the DuraSpace organization as Technical Lead for the DSpace Project this month. Tim’s focus is to provide guidance and leadership to the DSpace Committers and code contributors as they plan, develop, test and release future versions of DSpace.

As a part of the DuraSpace team, he will also provide technical guidance and help lead strategic DuraSpace initiatives within the DSpace user community. Tim will also work with Fedora developers to find collaborative opportunities between the repository platforms. For more about Tim’s biography and background click here.

Partnered with Tim on the DSpace Team is Valorie Hollister, the Director of Community Development and newly appointed Director of the DSpace Project. Valorie will continue her work with the community, providing guidance and leadership to the broader DSpace community in order to promote and facilitate collaboration of all types. Valorie’s role now also includes DSpace project lead. As the primary point of contact on the DSpace project, she will coordinate closely with Tim to advance the needs of DSpace users.
Together, Valorie, Tim and the rest of the DuraSpace organization aim to be the catalyst for the continued success of open source software development, including the DSpace application, by providing a framework for the long term durability of digital information.