The future of the book is not a book. It's much more.

Doing my best to forget that we are in the middle of the summer, and also still in July, THE supposedly most inactive month of the Swedish calendar. Have to get focused and a little bit organized again after some very lazy vacation weeks...

I have been invited to give a talk at the #IFLA2010 Satellite meeting about Web 2.0 and marketing at the Stockholm University Library. Wow, a real honour I must say. This is my very first IFLA experience ever and it feels very special to have been invited to speak at the largest and the most international of all library conferences. It's going to so cool to meet people from all continents, not just Europe and the US, and share views and ideas about social media and marketing. Here in Sweden most of the social media input, what is being written, said and done, is delivered from the US and mediated through other english speaking countries of the world and packaged and translated into the Swedish social media scene. Unfortunately, so very little is known (at least for me) about what is going on in non-english speaking countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, China....

 

The name of my presentation is "Kista Idea Lab - Building a Glocal Social Media Community for User Driven Innovation" and it will deal with our ongoing efforts in Kista to establish an open user driven laboratory for library innovation in one of the worlds most multilingual and multitechnological areas. The unique combination of the high tech environment of Kista Science City and the high talented social capital inherent among the multicultural citizens of Kista: together they give huge opportunities for innovation. But in order to make the dream of a living library lab come true we need more than technological and social capital. We need real, passionate participation and contribution from a variety of individuals who care about the library of the future. We need to build a "multi-everything" tribe of individuals who are willing to work as ambassadors not only for Kista Idea Lab, but for Kista as a whole. Kista has the potential to develop into a vibrant and innovative glocal society. This is where the library has a crucial role to play as a "bridge between worlds". This is where the potential of social media gives hope, and this is where our great marketing challenges lie. The aim of my presentation is to share some of our successes and drawbacks in this project so far and maybe most important of all, to suggest some ideas about how we need to look at social media vs library services. Maybe social media isn't just about the web? And maybe social media isn't even a valid term any more?

Ok, it's about time I start putting together the presentation... let me see.... Kista Idea Lab from a marketing and a "webish" point of view... or maybe not that "webish"... ;)

In my last blog post I expressed doubts about the future of this blog. Now I know better :) It's a fresh move to a better blog platform that is needed, not another blog death... Therefore I have now migrated all blog posts from Blogger to Posterous and also redirected the domain to this new site. Feels good since I am a great fan of Posterous' minimalistic interface and it's endless connection possiblities. The main domain is the same as before: www.bibl.se. But if you use an RSS-reader you'll need to update your feed to the new adress. See you on Posterous! /Åke

Not much has been happening here for the last few months. A cardinal sin for a blogger, I know ;-) but I have been so busy with other things, well you know the story.... and I honestly don't know if there still are valid reasons for keeping this blog up and running. There are so many other channels. Blogging isn't forever, right? The web is constantly changing and so are we, right?

Several times I have thought of dumping Bibl.se but still I can't make up my mind. So I have decided to take this blog for a longer vacation (well it sort of started already some months ago, didn't it?) and come back later this year (autumn, perhaps?) and ask that same question again - are there still valid reasons for keeping it? - and see what that leads to.

So, until then, have an awesome summer! :-)

/Åke