Different communities of bibliographic practice have grown up around different resource types: library collections of books and journals, archives, journal articles, and museum objects and images. As these resources and others become increasingly accessible through the Web, separation of the communities of practice that manage them is no longer desirable, sustainable, or functional. Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and object descriptions—across communities. Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments: Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity. In today's environment, bibliographic control cannot continue to be seen as limited to library catalogs. [Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control PDF]

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

Kristen Nicole (on Mashable) calls our attention to the relaunch of carmun, an academic, social networking, bibliographic, research space geared primarily at students, but also open to graduate students and faculty. Nicole describes it as "kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared." Carmun offers social bookmarking, study groups, social networking according to subject of interest, bibliographic reference management, and a research engine that will try look up any resources you identify at your own library. The list of university libraries at which it works is fairly long, and the way that carmun provides and promotes this functionality is a nice antidote to Facebook's apparent reluctance to let librarians build search applications for the Facebook platform.

There have been several recent attempts to use more advanced statistical analysis to judge the reliability of articles within Wikipedia.

The first is a color-coding scheme that gives the reader an idea of the reliability of parts of the article based on the number of times it has been revised. The basic idea is that if a certain section is constantly being revised, it's less reliable than a piece that has been virtually unchanged for a long period of time.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/wikipedia-color-coding/

As a companion piece to a hands-on campus technology expo, a group of us at Wesleyan recently put together a round-up of various Web 2.0 technologies including overviews, practical academic applications, references to live examples, and a few tips on how to get started. You will find our "Web 2.Xpo" blog at http://web20.blogs.wesleyan.edu/. Even if you are already acquainted with most of the content, and even if some of it is tailored to the Wesleyan environment, it might prove useful as a place to direct the uninitiated. And you can leave comments.

BibMe is a new web-based bibliography tool created as a software development project at Carnegie-Mellon. Unlike CiteULike and Zotero, two other powerful web-based bibliography tools that seem aimed at scholarly researchers, this tool seems geared primarily toward students. It strips down the bibliography process to simply typing in search terms. All one needs to do is type in a search term under the appropriate category, and a list of possible sources appears. Clicking on an option automatically generates a bibliography entry. Entries may also be manually entered if the source is not contained in the database. The tool lacks the social aspects of CiteULike, where one can peruse other users' libraries or browse through tags, but it does have a suggested reading feature where similar sources appear under the bibliography entries. Sadly, the bibliography can only be exported to Rich Text Format, and I didn't see an import option so that existing citations could be uploaded. It does seem like an interesting tool and probably useful for students.