Pick a mashup… any mashup

I browsed through the mashups of the day award winners & found a neat one called ‘Twistori’

“A social experiment inspired by We Feel Fine that aggregates updates from Twitter containing specific keywords: I love, I hate, I think, I believe, I …”

Reminds me a bit of some of the applications they have on Digg to monitor news stories, except this monitors Twitter, a microblogging application (posts limited to 150 characters or so). It’s fun to see what people are thinking. (“I believe in Mr. Grieves. But I refuse to believe in C++, CSS, or any of your tomfoolery, shenanigans, and bamboozlery”, “I believe that was my first and will be my only time to check out a book from a ut library. Weird.” “Off to take Rhianna to the hospital for her op… she’s fine about it but
I wish I hadn’t read up about it on wikipedia ;o)” and so on)

twistori is neat but it’s more of a time waster than something useful in terms of library work. With the Digg mashup you at least see what links & news pieces are popular online at the moment.

Head over to Rollyo

I did a couple of searches in Gabe’s libraryblogs searchroll on Rollyo. First I tried Ovid…1st page mostly Krafty librarian’s stuff, w/ David Rothman coming in on the second page. Then I tried PubMed. Interestingly, it was all Rothman this time. Finally I tried “stupid”. Though annoyed librarian turned up the most, there was a varied selection of blogs in those search results.

I’ve played with Rollyo before but honestly, I prefer to just use google & throw in some fancy hacks to narrow my results. but that’s just me. Plus i could just search my bloglines page anyway.

PodCasts

ADAM CURRY!!! Totally did not know he was an early adopter of podcasting. Other bloggers apparently were.

Odeo – things that caught my interest

medical minute from ABC news health gives 60 second podcasts on medical topics

del.icio.us mashups - Everything from del.icio.us/tag/ system:media:audio+mashup

Online hosted video – is it good enough?

I am one of those people that already have youtube videos floating around the web. I’ve also made online tutorials for library services using Camtasia software ( a Techsmith product) which are available on our website. Our off-campus access to online resources tutorial is very useful & I think people use it alot. The discussion for the midweek question this week was interesting. Some users prefer to simply look at a webpage or pdf file – they don’t have the patience to listen to a podcast or watch a video. However, I think that videos definitely work for user education , especially on navigating webpages or using online resources. The trick is to keep them short (under 2 minutes), both for downloading issues and attention spans.

I’ve been using Flickr since 2002, but only recently became a paid member. As you can see, I have shared 365Libs on the side of my blog. 365 libs is a group of libraries & librarians on flickr that are trying to catalog 365 days in their library. I like to share library events (especially bulletin boards & promotions) that we do when I can. This has become more difficult since my institution blocks uploading to Flickr. One can still browse the photos, but sending data to the site is verboten. (I found a loophole, however, in Flickr’s email to account feature. I just save the files to my Desktop, then email them into the account. The only drawback is you are limited in how large a file you can send.) Groups like 365 Libs, Library Desks, and other library related in groups show the possibilities of Flickr in our work. I’ll get comments from those communities when I share my ideas, and get ideas myself from these groups as well. It’s also a great place to get images for presentations and such, providing it is allowable due to copyright. I did not know of the Creative Common’s group on there. I have some pastoral scenes from a recent trip to Tennesee that I plan to share in there.

Another tool I use at home is Flickr Uploadr, which allows me to group edit & manage my image files. Some report it’s kind of buggy, but I’ve generally found it useful.

One drawback to Flickr is the limits on a free account (limited sets, etc). Upgrading is not that expensive, and as I recent subscriber to the site, I think the bennies (unlimited sets, higher bandwidth, etc) are worth it!

Now, I did add the Flickr App to F-book, however, i also removed it due to privacy concerns. People in my professional sphere (which includes connections I have on Facebook) do not need see pictures of last weekend’s party, my latest boring road trip, or invitations to events I’ve design ed for friends to use in online promotions. Flickr is a great application to share photos, to the groups I want to, when I want to. And Facebook has it’s own photo share feature that works just fine enough for me.

Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?

Open office tools are here, and they are going to stay. Whether they are “THE FUTURE” of all software products remains to be seen. There are many users that will just need a simple word processing program to tap out their paper, poems, novels, research articles. Not everyone needs, or wants, to share. I think the application of collaborative office tools will be most beneficial for small businesses or people who work from home that may not need a large suite of expensive office products, but like the idea of interactive tools available that are compitable with their stand-alone software.

The use of web office tools is certainly beneficial in personal, professional or business collaboration, and I think we will continue to see the expansion of their use in those spheres, as well as in add-ons to stand-alone products (ie: Office suite) that allows collaboration as well. Like all emerging trends, there’s alot of companies introducing products of this nature right now, and in the next several years we’ll see a battle over market share for this service.

Web Office tools: comments & observations

Zoho

I like that Zoho has a wiki addon. They look alot like google…enjoy that design asthetic….they have plugins for Microsoft

Google docs

I love & hate G-docs depending on what type of file I want to edit. I have trouble getting anything from PPT into their presentation moduel, and as a PPT power user I can’t stand the dumbed down options available in their web-based presentation platform. However, G-docs word processor is great: I’ve used it on countless projects…including in a statewide committee where we used it to create guidelines and other committee documents, as well as meeting minutes.

Here’s my opinion on G-doc’s presentation software

Which, for the record, doesn’t post so easily to WordPress blogs as an imbedded object. Figuring this is something they block. Annoying.

Here’s something I wrote for C&RL news on delicious, a social bookmarking tool:

This social bookmarking tool lets you store, organize and share online bookmarks so they are accessible later – from any location. This tool has changed my life! No longer do I waste precious minutes of the reference interview scurrying back to my office for a website saved on one computer. Gone are the days of digging through badly designed sites for an obscure document I encounter once in a blue moon. With Del.icio.us, it doesn’t matter if I’m at the circulation, reference, or at a conference in Kalamazoo. I just log in, get the bookmark, and find the answer. You can even download a plugin to your browser and add urls to your del.icio.us with one click. Makes this reference librarian’s mouth water.

• How can social networking be used by MLA to connect members?

I think the Fbook groups feature is being used by some MLA SIGs pretty effectively in fostering discussion. Plus you can see who is attending various conferences & have the ability to message people, which is great if you’re looking for a roommate or have a question about an event. True, you can do the same thing on MEDLIB or other dist. lists, the benefit w/ social networking is you can also see what a person looks like and if you have similar interests.

• Should your library have a Facebook or MySpace page?

Our library looked into a MySpace page & decided against it b/c it is a little too skanky for our professional library. OTOH, we do have a presence on Fbook, because we discovered that our newer students are all on there, and even have groups set up for their classes. (School of Medicine 2010, Dept. Physical Therapy 2009, etc) I joined oru school’s groups occaisionally post messages, to which I get responses. Students do look at these pages. Our next step will be to create a library group & I would also like to experiment w/ Meebo integration on my profile to enable chat through Fbook.

• Are there privacy concerns for individuals when using social networking sites.

Most definitely. However I think that the newer wired generations don’t care so much as older generations do. they are used to it.

• What did you like or not like about your experience with Facebook or MySpace.

I find Fbook a little less intuitive than MySpace, but also a little more legitimate.

What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? What sort of things might be better suited for a blog and better suited for a wiki?

While a blog is a tool to push content to users, a wiki is a tool more used to collaborate among groups. Both tools share knowledge. A blog is like a sounding board that distributes information to someone, while a wiki is more a platform where where multiple someones share knowledge.

For example, library news is much easier dispersed in a blog, where periodic updates are visually noticeable on the front page, while policies and projects might work better in a wiki, where some things might change, others may not etc.

I also like the idea of moving resource guides to a wiki format. In my example of a pda wiki specific to my institution, think of how much easier it could be if multiple users were posting problems, solutions, new resources and other experiences they have with their mobile devices on a wiki. I wouldn’t have to put on my code monkey hat and update our pda resource guide, b/c it would be updated for me! Of course detractors would be checking the authority of what’s posted, checking for spam, and so on, but sometimes the end users who are out in the field using these resources, experiencing & troubleshooting, are good points of knowledge. A wiki is a great place to share information when you can’t just eat their brains.

xo zombrarian

I experimented with changing a resource guide I already had into a wiki. Part of this was because I’m lazy, and copying & pasting the content seemed easier than creating an entirely new wiki. I used my Guide to Mobile Devices as my starting point for my new wiki LSUHSC Wireless Resources

I really like how wetpaint offers various template designs for your wikis. Especially cool is the ‘classroom’ template which offers space for syllabi, assignments, etc. It’s easy to set this up when you first create the wiki, however I couldn’t find it very easily after telling it “no thanks”. (oh wait, there it is, whenever you create a new page it is available as an option)

Other annoyances…while the copy/paste functions translate well, the ‘undo’ feature doesn’t always work. I lost about 10 minutes of work that way & discovered there’s no autosave, like I’m used to WordPress blogging software & various google software providing.

Welcome to the first post in my brand spanking new WordPress blog. This is probably the 6th or 7th blog I’ve started since I discovered the art of online belly button gazing in 2000. I’ve been on the interblag a long, long time.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are so useful for keeping up with your favorite websites, blogs and other online information sources. I’ve been using Bloglines to manage RSS feeds for several years, and really like it. As you can see, I track over 75 feeds.*

In lines with the assignment, I subscribed to the TOC of Academic Medicine, which publishes alot about assessing information literacy skills among medical students, one of my research interests. I organize my feeds into groups, and since this journal is work related, I filed in in my MEDLIB folder on Bloglines to look at later.

Then I added a RSS feed for a PubMed search to Bloglines. I’ve been aware of this PubMed service for awhile but hadn’t played around with it yet. The first thing to remember is that you need to log into myNCBI to use the tool. Once you do that, it’s just a matter of conducting your search (however simple or complex it is), selecting ‘RSS feed’ from the SEND TO drop down menu, and copying & pasting the unique url that you get to your RSS reader. I chose personal digital assistants for my topic.

There was a little bit of a glitch in Bloglines when I first added the feed, but I tried it again and it worked. I even created a new Bloglines folder called “PubMed Searches”, so the next time I use the PubMed RSS service I can plop it right in.

Applicability to medical libraries & our patrons

Blogs are an excellent way to keep users up to date, the trick lies in convincing them to read it. Our library has a blog, but our director won’t read it. Why? She doesn’t like to get her information that way. This is a matter of taste. Blogs are increasingly becoming accepted as a form of ’serious’ communication, especially as younger generations enter the work place. I think right now there’s still suspicion that blogs are a time waster, which is more than true for probably 95% of the dross out there.

RSS feeds save time and mouse clicks by offering all of your news sources in one location. Many academic journals and search systems have implemented this new technology as well (ISI is another company to offer RSS feeds for searches). The challenge here is the learning curve. Relatively tech-efficient users don’t have a problem managing RSS tools. (Heck, my mom even publishes family photos using a RSS feed on her Mac, so I might put forth that even the tech-helpless can do it.) Libraries should provide some type of education to those who need assistance utilizing these tools. Also my director should start reading our library’s blog. But that is just my opinion.

*This amount of information may look daunting, but keep these things in mind:

I don’t read all my feeds in one sitting, nor should you unless you want to.
Pace varies among feeds: news sites & active blogs can post up to 200 items a day, while other sites posts less than that one a month, or pictures, which don’t require much of time to glance over.

RSS Feeds are for current awareness
It’s ok to skim the headlines & only read what you want, that’s part of the time-saving benefit of using an RSS reader.

It’s ok to edit your feeds.
RSS Feeds break. Websites go inactive. Tastes & research interests change. If you no longer find a feed useful, get rid of it. No one will know.