Another clever Facebook tool that has potentially significant benefit for libraries: Flog Blog. This Facebook application allows you to add RSS items to your Facebook profile, displaying the headline and lead sentence, lead paragraph, or a set number of characters. Posts as displayed in your Facebook profile can either link to your blog itself or to the Flog Blog application's "canvas page," within Facebook.

Flog Blog offers an easy path for posting your library's news, announcements, or what-have-you onto your library's Facebook profile. (You do have a Facebook profile for yourself or your library, right?)

One thing that Flog Blog lacks is a way to share a particular post with another Facebook user or to add a specific post found on another user's profile page to your own profile. That functionality would be a great boon to word-of-mouth library advertising.

Still, Flog Blog strikes me as a much more effective RSS tool for Facebook than two other's I've tried, Feeds and MyRSS.

Photosynth was demonstrated at the March 2007 TED Conference. A video of the demonstration blows my mind -- particularly the segment that begins about 4 minutes 50 seconds into this 8-minute presentation (well worth viewing in its entirety):

Imagine being able to take photographs of any place, building, or object from all the world's digital photos -- and map them together using tags supplied by people who have already viewed the image. The Cathedral of Notre Dame example in the demonstration is a great start... But think of the possibilities, not just globally, but also locally, in terms of bringing your community's experiences and knowledge to bear on any particular local topic.

Content, having reached the age of majority, has left home and is out trying to make its own way in the world. Some "digital parents" are reflexively clutching at their wayward bits, trying to keep on the on the home site. Others are preparing for the all-but-inevitable day, right around the corner, when content grows up and lives on its own, occasionally calling home to say hello and see if there are any updates.

We are on the cusp of what Steve Rubel terms the Cut and Paste Web. In this version of the web -- the building blocks are already there -- you can "you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want."

Rubel, who writes for Advertising Age, offers three strategies for thriving in this new era where content is consumed in places far removed from the web site:

1. Think web services, not websites
2. Connect people
3. Make everything portable

As our profession evolves from being gatekeepers to publishers of information, we need to work more actively to expand the ways our patrons use what we have. Or would use it, if only it were offered. Any online tool we build or buy for our library's patrons should be able to provide the same functionality in another venue. Our databases should be searchable (with authentication, of course, where required) from anywhere our patrons want. If someone is building a wiki on a subject, relevant search results should be included right there, live from the database. Ditto for the library catalog, without the authentication. And the same is true for any other tool we offer our patrons in an online environment. Of course, these tools should be equally accessible on a cell phone as on a full PC-based web browser. And the output of patron research should be available in open formats -- so it can be reused and republished. Licensing of content needs to reflect the realities of use, not the other way around.

Rubel concludes as follows: "In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site." Syndication is the next wave of innovation.