Each year the Morning News does a Tournament of Books where some critics choose the top novel of the year in something similar to a braket system. This year Coudal Partners are letting you bet on the results. Proceeds go to charity and some winners receive the books in mention. More information at the Coudal site.
There were some questions recently about IM reference and one of the things I mentioned was running a jabber server locally and then connecting to the resources that the library needed to. One of the benefits of jabber is that the protocol is open and XML based so it is rather easy to parse and log. This gives the potential for some analysis of what is coming through to the reference desk.
Over the last few years I’ve seen an increase in authors creating blogs for their books, some posting portions of their books online for input from others. This has the benefit of creating a book that meets readers' needs while also building some word of mouth. Some authors are probably not as comfortable with such an active process. O’Reilly is taking this idea a step further and creating a revenue stream with it.
Regardless of your views on privacy you will likely agree that some non-identifying data keeping is ok. Things such as how many times an online journal has been used or how many times a book has been circulated. This data can be crucial in decision making. An article from OCLC in a recent Library Journal discusses this. They include some examples from WorldCat. The good news is that libraries don't come to this task empty-handed but with rich, structured information about the materials in our collections.
One of the problems with comments is that you lose track of the ones you make. I usually end up googling my name with various keywords to try to find them. I’ve also thought about using bookmarking services or some sort of other software hack to track them. A new service coming out called coComment hopes to solve that problem. Using a bookmark from the site it keeps a copy of the comments you make.
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Wikipedia has been in the news lately and has popped up in a few threads on Web4Lib. Penny Arcade has a great comic as usual. Penny Arcade is one of my favorite comics and I recommend it. Some of them do require some computer/gaming knowledge and the language may offend some but I almost always find them hilarious.
Casey gives a good description of Library 2.0 and why it’s useful. I’m in the camp that it’s a buzzword and might be overkill. However I reduce it to something really simple: change. By using the term I think it makes the statement that libraries MUST change. Admitting this can be hard for some but having an umbrella term can be helpful. Some things are already done in some cases but the discussion of the future is important and the required changes more so.