The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

I certainly don’t mean this to be as snarky as it’s about to come out, but I love the fact that Isaak questions my claim that linkability is essential to online discussions (and thus, communities) with a link:

• Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities
  I really don’t know how linkability will build communities. But we really need to work on building support platforms for the public to interact with the library and promote social discussions, whether offline or online. Currently, the only way for such interactions is through the High Browse Online blog, but even then, there are not much discussion going on. Maybe librarians need to go in more often to post useful comments. And we might need to read this to find out how to solicit more comments on the blog. [link to High Browse blog added -- Casey]

The big challenge here is to realize that the entire web is an online community, unbounded by geography or even the narrow confines of a single website. And I’m not sure I could point to a better example of that than Isaak’s post. Rather than comment at my blog, he instead posted on his — with a link back to mine.

But hey, you’ve gotta love that they’re hosting rock shows in the library.

book discussions, book talk, community, conversations, durable link, findability, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, linkability, online community, permalink, social software

It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.

The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom. Fuzzyfruit’s comment spawned more comments about the book from Sarahq and Coffeechica.

We talk here and there about how “libraries build community,” but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online?

book discussions, book talk, community, durable link, findability, google economy, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, linkability, online community, permalink, social software