Ok, I don’t know if this is cool or scary.
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Atlanta’s own Brian Mathews has come up with an innovative way to create unobtrusive library presence in the world of social software.
Brian, the Distance Learning Services and Mechanical Engineering Librarian at Georgia Tech, runs his “ubiquitous reference model” by searching GA Tech students’ Xanga and LiveJournal pages for library-related terms such as library, paper, and class. When he finds a student who’s talking about an assignment or class that he thinks he can help with, he chimes in with helpful information.
Many people are questioning whether the students find this method intrusive; Brian says that they don’t seem to mind, citing that the entire social software medium is based on random communications from new people.
Read more about his ubiquitous reference project at his blog, alt ref.
http://altref.blogspot.com/2006/03/intuitive-revelations-ubiquitous.html