The blog Friends:Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services recently described a new Facebook application called (Facebook) Librarian. One feature of the application is that users can go straight from Facebook to an array of research tools including Open WorldCat, Google Book Search, Wikipedia, etc.

In a posting entitled "Social Scholarship on the Rise," academic librarian Laura Cohen outlines a series of scholarly practices that would take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to make the processes of research and writing more public, more interactive, more collaborative, and more...well...social. Cohen's idealized portrait of the practice of social scholarship--from conceptualization to publication--is coherent and compelling.

The list of tools to help you avoid doing meaningful work just got  longer. Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), a platform that blurs the lines between blogs and instant messaging, provides an outlet for anyone who wants to tell anyone else who might care what they are doing at that very moment. In his essay "What are you doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest web senstion" Slate's Michael Agger does a nice job of describing what this new world is like, and wonders out loud about how all of this might help us live more purposefully. Agger doesn't ask how this might be useful in an educational setting. Twitter strikes me as interesting, not as a tool I would use, but rather--for the anthropologists and sociologists--a phenomenon to understand. Why would we want to share our thoughts and ideas with complete strangers on an hourly basis?