I’ve already written about how much I like the Seed Library of Pima County Facebook page, but I thought I would take it a bit further and interview the person behind it. That person is librarian Justine Hernandez.

The page — like the seed library, which opened Jan. 28 — is new and still growing. It now has 254 fans. Hernandez’s method is propelled less by premeditated strategy and more by an intuitive sense of who her audience.

“The project just really invites community. It’s about community,” Hernandez said by way of explaining what drives her social media use. “We are just really wanting to engage the community.”

One way that she does that is to post a lot of photos. She uses her iPhone to snap photos of small and often little noticed gardens, as well as volunteers hard at work repackaging donated seeds into quantities more appropriately sized for a single person.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge the faces involved,” she said. “People respond to visual things.”

The project involves a compelling mix of new and old technologies. The seeds are held in old card catalogs, long overshadowed by electronic databases. But electronic databases are key to promoting the project and ensuring its popularity. What is being promoted is not simply the library or sharing or even biodiversity, but also a renewed awareness of our agricultural past, Hernandez said. She herself is a new gardener.

Much of the funding the library received as part of the project went to buying books about gardening and seed saving. The seeds, which are all heirloom and open-pollinated seeds, were donated by local gardeners or seed companies.

So far, the promotion strategy seems to have worked. Hernandez says about two-thirds of the more than 6,000 seed packets in the library have been checked out and, she hopes, planted. Right now, librarians are encouraging people to get started, but eventually they will have to focus more on the return end of the check-out equation. “The idea is that it becomes over time self-sustaining” as people return seeds from their plants to the library and established gardeners continue contributing, Hernandez said.

The Facebook page was recently affected by the new Pima County social media guidelines, about which I hope to post more soon. The Pima County library branch pages now bear the county seal as part of the page’s main image, and employees posting to the page are called out by name in the Info section. There is also a link to Pima County’s social software commenting guidelines.

This is the second in my irregular series on Facebook pages maintained by Tucsonans.

1. Rockin’ Gourmet – Live From Tucson

It’s a project intended as an “indie twist on the Food Network.” The idea — spearheaded by Jamie Laboz and Cristina Williams of The Modeens — is that bands play live and share their favorite recipes. The Cleavers, The Cordials and Aaron Gilmartin have been featured so far, with only one episode and one “snack” posted. The videos are fun to watch and well edited, and it seems like there’s a lot to work with in the Tucson music/food scene. I look forward to more. You can watch the videos on Facebook or on their YouTube channel.

2. Tucson Urban Gardener

The couple behind Powhaus Productions — Jared McKinley and Nadine Roselle — are now at work on a plant-focused blog, a blog for “plant-freaks.” The subtitle is a pretty clear indication of the tone. I’ve found the posts thoughtful and thought-provoking, among them this one about the potential of dog poo in compost (really!). They, and I, also love video.

3. Seed Library of Pima County Public Library

A super cool convergence of old and new technology: card catalog drawers filled with paper envelopes of seeds, an exchange, an electronic publicity push. On the Facebook page, you can get seed-related literary quotes, photos of seeds entering their drawers and seeds sprouting in soil, and updates of the library system’s gardening-related events. The library branches are also active on Twitter.

4. Kuisine by Kathy

Our very own TucsonCitizen.com food blogger and Facebooking pro! Check out her page for photos, writings and recipes. Her taste runs Midwestern meets Southwest, although she’s just back from the Caribbean and says she gathered some recipes while she was away. Stay tuned for what she cooks up next.

Facebook has launched a new feature called Subscribe. If there’s a blogger you are particularly interested in following, you can subscribe to the posts they make public by clicking the Subscribe button on the top right side of their Facebook profile. For all this to work, the blogger must have activated the subscribe function (for which there are easy-to-follow directions here). I always like to hear about how you like to get your information, so if you have a preferred method that you think we could do more to facilitate, let me know. You’ll find all my contact info on the left side of the page.

In other news, Facebook has filed paperwork to form its own political action committee. Read: stepped-up lobbying. If you are interested in and/or concerned about privacy and the future of media, make a big note. The Hill reported that Facebook’s lobbying spending has totaled $550,000 for fiscal 2011.

Facebook is increasingly becoming the easiest or preferred way to log in to other applications. To use the popular music platform Spotify, you need now need to log in using Facebook. With Facebook apparently set to become your primary destination on the Internet, you will likely see this requirement more and more.

On a potentially more uplifting note, Mark Zuckerberg recently said at a Facebook event in Seattle (according to PaidContent’s Ben Elowitz): “The last five years have been about connecting all these people. The next 5 years are going to be about all the crazy things you can do now that these people are connected, and I think it’s going to be cool.”

It takes David Aguirre, the manager of Tucson’s Shane House apartments, a matter of hours to rent a place out. If a tenant gives him 24 hours notice before leaving, “No problem” is Aguirre’s response.

The last dozen or so times he’s had to find a new tenant for the Tucson Arts Coalition-owned digs, Aguirre has posted a Facebook status update notifying his more than 1,600 friends of the availability. He’s doesn’t want a deposit, but he does want a Facebook reference, a vouch from someone he actually knows.

“Instead of insurance, I’m getting assurance,” Aguirre said. “It seems to work. … It’s a much more personable kind of thing.”

Aguirre most recently posted a Facebook message about an open apartment Aug. 9. Within three hours, he was standing in front of the apartment with a Facebook friend who he didn’t know and one that he did. The deal was done.

“I felt comfortable with it,” Aguirre said. “It’s not a guarantee, but the second person takes some of the edge off. It could work the other way too. She (the tenant) might feel more comfortable with me.”

Sometimes one of Aguirre’s many Facebook friends replies to his posts. Sometimes the post is passed to a friend of a friend. Often he fills apartments by texting his current tenants a request for referrals. Craigslist, once the primo method of doing these things, is described by Aguirre as a “last resort.”

Why take a stranger when you could have a friend?

I got an email from a representative of Tucson Unified School District today alerting me to their Facebook page. That was interesting to me in part because TUSD has a Facebook page and also because they bothered to let me know. They certainly didn’t have to. And then I thought, why not do a little roundup of 5 Facebook pages that got my attention this week.

1. TUSD – I’m not a parent, and I don’t regularly cover TUSD as a reporter, so it’s not a page that came to my attention in the past. But when I checked it out, I found TUSD’s Facebook page surprisingly engaging and helpful. There’s info on bullying, on going back to school and solar panels. It seems a timely source of news that TUSD would like to get out there and a valiant attempt at putting other news out there to compete with the Ethnic Studies program and desegregation for domination of the local education agenda.

2. Tucson Community Darkroom – I know. How decidedly anti-computer. It may be a strange choice for this blog, but I’m enthusiastic. The idea is to have a darkroom where local artists can rent space. They’re passionate, and not everything has to be digital, right?

3. TEDxTucson – In the page’s own words: “In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is call TEDxTucson, where x=independently organized.” If you haven’t been watching the TED videos, you’ve been missing out. They feature smart people coming up with innovative solutions. You can watch the videos here. The local group’s first meetup was about local food and hosted by Janos Wilder at J Bar.

4. Tucson Food Trucks – Food on the move: I love it! Apparently, a Tucson food truck fest is under contemplation. And Dinnerware Artspace is holding its first outdoor food event this Thursday.

5. Powhaus Productions – If you’re interested in finding out about fun, creative stuff happening in Tucson, especially downtown, this is a good place to start looking. Powhaus does videos, live events and (whatever I put in this spot would be an understatement). Also check out their website.

Maybe I’ll even make this an occasional series. Tell me about your favorite local uses of social media. You can find me @carlibrosseau on Twitter.

On Independence Day, we celebrate our freedoms and those who fought for them. We celebrate the legacies of battles to define freedoms and the system that sustained a dialogue within which those particularly American definitions could form. On the Fourth of July, we pay homage to the United States of America, our history and most of all what it represents — to Americans and, less often, to the larger world. America, we say together in the glare of carefully engineered fire, the land of the free.

While enjoying the fireworks, the corn and the hamburgers, we would do well to remember that freedom is negotiated. Its definition is always in flux. Changes can happen in fits and starts or they can happen imperceptibly. But inevitably, change will come.

Over the past two weeks, a series of hacker attacks were aimed at the Arizonan iteration of freedom. When the hacker group LulzSec released hundreds of Arizona Department of Public Security internal documents, the members portrayed their motivation as the larger social good. They were protesting SB1070, a policy they view as racist and unjust.

LulzSec’s presumed successor Anti-sec released a manifesto — as part of a hack, of course — that claimed dedication to “the eradication of full-disclosure.” The leaks, the hackers say, are intended to point out carelessness in online security, an implied lazy self-satisfaction.

The next frontier in the definition of freedom is the Internet, the modern town square rendered global. The leaks highlighted the vulnerability of our personal information, much of which is stored online, but the lesson we should take from these attacks is much larger. How do we define freedom on the Internet? Who owns it and why? How do we reach agreement when the whole world and a lot of money is involved? They are big questions with very personal consequences.

Security and freedom sometimes seem to be friends and other times enemies. The hackers argue they are doing the world a service in providing incentives for improved security. Institutions must join the arms race or leave members susceptible to personal harassment — cell phone and Social Security numbers exposed. DPS officials were understandably annoyed to have their personal effects scattered on the information superhighway. But to what effect?

The bottom line in the Arizona hacks was that little information of operational consequence was released. DPS looked vulnerable, but if LulzSec was truly protesting the state’s handling of border issues, DPS — highway patrol — was the wrong choice. Encouraging agencies already inclined toward secrecy to clamp down on information seems a strategy of self-sabotage and counter to the venerated spirit of the First Amendment.

Freedom, as we’ve defined it, depends on information. You are unlikely to have chosen to buy local grass-fed beef for your celebratory burger without a label to tell you it was so, nor the security of knowing the FDA vouched the beef won’t poison you. It’s worth remembering that in our choices — from eating local beef to clicking the Facebook “Like” button — we define freedom.

More and more, people are using Facebook as a news source. Collectively, we spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. But Facebook tweaks the system often. Sometimes, a change is a temporary; other times, it’s more permanent. It’s hard to know how important a change is—or in certain cases, even that a change has take place—unless you’re paying a lot of attention.

One of the most significant changes in the past year has been in the filtering of what appears in your personal news feed. Thomas E. Weber of the Daily Beast posted a great explanation of his effort to get to the bottom of how it works. The story was reported a while ago now, and there seem to have been changes made since, but I think the logic still applies. The crux of the issue is that what appears in your news feed is a function of your past Facebook activity. Because the algorithm that determines what appears is secret—read Facebook’s explanation of it here—it’s difficult to know why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.

There is, however, a way to change the filter. If you suspect that you are not seeing every post your friends make in your news feed (and you want to), scroll all the way down to the bottom of your news feed. You should see an Edit Options link on the right side of a light blue box. When you click on it, a box pops up. There, you can change the news feed settings to show posts from everyone, rather than friends and pages you interact with most. In that same box, you can choose friends that you’d rather not hear from. So you can have it both ways. Sort of.

I’d like to hear from you. Did you have an issue with this? Did this explanation help you out in any way? Send me your burning Facebook questions, and I’ll see what I can do to get an answer.

Also, don’t forget to check out TucsonCitizen.com on Facebook as well as TucsonCitizen.com Sports Network on Facebook.

Test your knowledge with our very own quiz, the University of Arizona Basketball Vault Quiz. If you take the Facebook quiz, you’ll be entered into a drawing for blogger Steve Rivera’s book, “University of Arizona Basketball Vault,” which has been signed by former UA basketball coach Lute Olson.

Sample question:

1. P. F. “Pop” McKale, for whom McKale Center is named, coached Arizona football for 16 years. How many years did he coach men’s basketball?
A. 7
B. 14
C. 21

What do you have to lose? You might even learn a little. Act quickly, though. The quiz ends May 20. Check back after that date to find out who won.

We’ve launched a new Facebook app on the TucsonCitizen.com Sports Network Facebook page, the Arizona Basketball Vault quiz. If you play, you’ll be entered into a drawing for the book from which the questions were drawn, blogger Steve Rivera’s “University of Arizona Basketball Vault.”

The quiz will be up for a month, but we encourage you to take it soon and share it with your friends. The more the merrier. And a more educated fan is a better fan, no?

We at TucsonCitizen.com love trivia, and we hope you do too. Tell us what you think of the quiz and what you’d like more of. We’re listening.