Yesterday morning the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom sponsored a session titled Your Brain on DOPA.  The program was designed to give attendees an opportunity to find out:

• What is happening with federal and state legislation related to social networking (and with technology in general).  John Morris, General Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology presented this part of the program.
• What current research says about child and teen use of online tools in the areas of cyberbullying and predation. Dr. Michele Ybarra, President of Internet Solutions for Kids presented on this topic.
• How libraries can educate their communities about the positive impact of social networking. This was the portion of the session that I presented.

(more…)

YALSA just launched two more ways for you to connect with the Division and its members:

• YALSA’s new fan site on Facebook (FB) gives you the chance to become a fan of YALSA and connect with YALSA and teen librarians.  If you don’t yet have a Facebook account, this might be a good time to set one up.
• YALSA’s new FriendFeed (FF) space is a one stop shop for finding out whenever there’s an update on YALSA’s twitter account, blog, additions to YouTube and Flickr that are YALSA related, and so on.  If you haven’t heard of FF yet, it’s an aggregator of social networks. Setup your account, add YALSA as a friend, and you’ll be able to see what’s new on a variety of YALSA social networking sites all in one place.

If you won’t be at ALA Annual FB and FF are good resources to keep up with so that you’ll be up to date on what’s up with YALSA during the Conference.  And, if you are at Conference, you’ll hear more about these tools at YALSA 101 and other programs and meetings.

My brain has been spinning for days thinking about the library’s role in the social graph. It started when on a recent TWIT podcast Kevin Rose, of Digg, mentioned the social graph. I’ve heard that term bandied about before, but when Rose said it this time I wondered if I really knew what it meant. A Google search led me to information on the social graph and the confirmation that this graph is really another way of talking about six degrees of separation. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is often quoted when people write about the social graph. For example, “Zuckerberg attributed the power of Facebook to the ’social graph,’ the network of connections and relationships between people on the service. He said, ‘It’s the reason Facebook works.’”
(more…)