Author: Robin

The week in Tweets

Back to work after ALA… Busy day of documenting IP addresses, updating server software and doing the yearly budgetary begging ahead! #
@Tweetdeck – I need an email address for someone who can give permission for screenshot use in a book. Reply to robin.hastings @ gmail, thx! #
@AJisaokay Feel like cataloging? We have a whole department of catalogers you could come visit next! in reply to AJisaokay #
I'm somewhere between a professional blogger and futurist/innovator… (March 2007) http://ow.ly/hJVM #
@ellbeecee Yeah, I'm almost on top of the futurist/innovator line, but not quite. I think a bunch of us started about about the same time? in reply to ellbeecee #
RT @mstabbycat: Thinking about making a ganache pie while I'm at @webgoddess's place this weekend. (I'm thinking that sounds awesome!!) #
RT @MoTravelMama: Missouri State Penitentiary tours and website now available. Check it out, this is a great tour. http://budurl.com/7fm8 #
@warmaiden Woot! Good luck Warmaiden. And if you need a collaborator for that conference in Wales… in reply to warmaiden #

Tags roundup, tweets, twitter

I was recently catching up on my blog reading, after heading to the ALA conference in Chicago for a week, and came across Leo Babauta’s post on Zen Habits called “What Google Chrome OS Means For Cloud Computing“. Reading through his thoughts, I find that they are pretty complementary to mine – the cloud is coming and will be the default method of computing before too long. Leo discusses the advent of online-only apps, such as Google Apps, and says:

These apps are lightweight but powerful. They aren’t as feature rich as desktop apps, but here’s what many critics don’t understand: in today’s (and tomorrow’s) computing world, they don’t have to be.

I’d like to take that a step farther and say that they can’t be. Desktops and laptops – even netbook laptops – are fairly expensive in the general scheme of things. To get truly ubiquitous computing, we’re going to have to be able to access the Internet – and our data – from much cheaper and less powerful machines than the expensive behemoths we have available to us now. It’s starting with cell phones with full web browsers and always-on Internet connectivity, and will continue until just about everything we touch has some form of connection to the Internet. At that point, cheap little low-powered devices to connect to our data in the cloud will be commonplace. They won’t be able to run MS Office -and even if they could, there is no guarantee that their owners will be able to afford the crazy MS pricing structure. They might not even be able to run OpenOffice – but they will be able to get to the Internet and access online documents and data.
Leo goes on to talk about the benefits of storing our information in the cloud – but that is something we are seeing now. Just as flash drives are getting seriously cheap, I’ve managed to make it so that I don’t ever need one! Any docs I create on my computer are stored in my Dropbox account (accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection) but most of my documents are in one of my 3 Gmail accounts (personal, work & school) and are available to me on even more devices – because I don’t have to have MS Office installed to read/edit them.
He finishes his article with a discussion on privacy and, again, I’m going to agree with him. If Google really wants to mine my rather boring documents so that they can place ads I’m not going to pay attention to (but only in my personal accounts – school & work are ad-free), I’ll survive. It’s not like there is a person actually doing the mining anyway – it’s all automated! As for the security/privacy concerns… I have a pretty good handle on computer security, but I’m nowhere near as good as the people that manage the security for Google – and I know it. While I can take my steps to secure my personal information on my personal computer, it will never be quite as effective as the steps that Google, with all of their big brains and expensive equipment, can take and so my data may well be more secure in the cloud. I know that there are a few stories out there about cloud-based document providers letting private documents become public for short periods of time, but if it is a document that is super-secret (or superseekrit, as the cool kids might say) is being stored online and unencrypted, well, you can’t really place all the blame on the cloud provider, can you?
As a final note, I was interviewed on camera for the TechSource blog (the post is not up as of this writing) during ALA and asked where I thought libraries would be in 20 years and what we’d be doing. My answer stayed pretty close to my current passions – we will be conduits to the cloud, providing tools and information and resources so that people can create, share, mashup and consume the data that that the cloud will hold. We’ll still be checking out books and providing reference services and gassing up the bookmobile for remote visits and all of that as well – it’ll take longer than 20 years to completely stamp out the paper book, certainly, but a large part of our mission will be to connect our patrons/users/customers to the wealth of data and creative possibilities that will live in the cloud.

presentations

Updates and pointers

First, I’ll start off with a pointer to my “Raves & Reviews” page, where I’m keeping track of the reviews of my Library Technology Report that was recently published. The book to which I contributed a chapter (about using the LibraryThing API), Library Mashups is available for pre-order. I don’t yet have my author’s copy, but I’m eagerly awaiting it!!! Finally, I will be at ALA in Chicago for the majority of the conference (9th-14th) and will be hanging out there, wishing I was with somebody cool from the library world (since I’m the only one from my library going) – so get in touch with me (I’m robin.hastings on the gmail service – which includes GTalk, of course) if you will also be in ALA and want to meet up!

presentations

A Palm Pre Review

I’ve had my new Palm Pre for about 5 days now and I finally feel comfortable in giving it a thorough going-over. First, I have to say that this was a HUGELY anticipated product for me. I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while!! I’ve read the reviews that others have posted and I’m ready – now that I’ve got it – here are some of my thoughts:

ConsPros

It’s freakin’ beautiful. It fits perfectly in even my tiny little hands and is comfy. I’ve heard that some have issues with the keyboard being a bit difficult to slide out, but I’ve had no problems – the mechanism works beautifully and the keyboard itself is plenty big, easy to use and backlit (another drain on battery life, to be sure, but very handy in the dark!).
The OS is REALLY well thought out, being both beautiful & usable. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of navigation (though I wish someone had told me that swiping things to the right deletes them – that one took a day or two for me to “get” – so I was opening each email to delete it…).
The applications are a *current* weakness, just because there isn’t much there, but the ones that are work nicely (mostly – my shortcovers ebook reader has been crashy today) and are universally useful.
I have:

Pandora
New York Times
Where
Tweed (Twitter client #1)
Fandango
Sudoku
LinkedIn
AccuWeather
Spaz (Twitter client #2 adn the one I’ll probably stick with)
SplashID
Shortcovers
Speedbrain

Besides the apps that are currently available, you get a few pre-set bookmarks for the web application, including a link to Facebook that is pretty easy to set up. I can’t quite figure out how to get all of the FB info through the interface they provide, but given time, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out… Speaking of the web, the browser is nice and fast – and does a great job of rendering standard web pages. I’ve yet to hit a site that gives me problems – and today is the first time I’ve fired up my computer since I got the phone – I’ve been able to keep up using just my phone!

Summary
In summary, the phone has it’s issues – there are some hardware concerns that may cause some to give up on it. The interface and the features, though, are more than enough for me to deal with any glitches that show up in this first few weeks of use.

Tags Palm Pre, phone, review, WebOS

cluetrain manifesto Web 2.0

Cluetrain Plus 10 – Thesis 94

Post author By Robin
Post date April 28, 2009
2 Comments on Cluetrain Plus 10 – Thesis 94

The thesis I picked from the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s 10th Anniversary Project reflects my recent work on collaboration with “cloud” tools – #94 says that:

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

Part of what I’ve been spending all of my free time writing about these days is the fact that we can easily circumvent the corporate pecking order and create our own conversations with anyone at all – just by using the tools that are freely available on the ‘net today. It may be considered by some to be subversive, true, but if you are active on Facebook and your boss’s boss is on there too, why not consider Facebook a valid way to communicate with him? If you have co-workers that are on Facebook, why not use the tools provided to work together in a way that the corporate hierarchy may not be ready for? We can do so much more as employees of a corporation (or as freelancers, self-employed business owners or members of a charitable or non-profit organization) if we cut through the traditional chains of communication in an institution and use the somewhat more freewheeling communication methods made available by Facebook, Twitter and blogging.
Of course, this assumes that your boss’s boss is on Facebook – if he or she considers networked conversations confusing and chaotic, however, Facebook probably isn’t one of his or her daily visits…
Corporate rules about how to contact people and who to contact for a particular project don’t have to be adhered to in this Web 2.0 environment. You can directly contact anyone who has a social networking account much more directly than in the past – and get an answer back to a question or feedback on an idea much more quickly!
The general rules against “facebooking” at work show that the folks in charge of traditional corporations don’t understand how much more productive being able to contact the right person, at the right time, about a potential problem can make us. (1) Until the people at the top of the corporate food chain understand this, the people in the trenches who are tasked with doing the work of the business will be forced to come up with ways of getting around these social site bans so that they can do their work more effectively than they could in a traditional, hierarchically structured organization.

1:http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/5750/

Tags Cloud Computing, cluetrain manifesto, collaboration

presentations

Quick note

Post author By Robin
Post date March 5, 2009
No Comments on Quick note

Just wanted to fire off a quick note pointing folks to the utterly hysterical goings on via Twitter today. Do a Twitter search, or a hashtag follow, on #queryfail and get “from the horse’s mouth” examples writers’ queries to editors and agents that failed. Some seem to have failed in epic ways…

presentations

Updated Letterhead Theme

Hey folks – I just spent an hour or so of my Sunday morning (cause that’s how big a nerd I am) updating my Letterhead theme to be widget-ready. You can download it and give it a whirl in Zip format only now – I didn’t have the time to tar.gz it, so it’s just a zip file. I’ll put it back on the sidebar for downloads eventually. Updates to the theme are found in the readme file in the zipped archive, but it’s pretty basic and very easy to use!

Tags letterhead, theme, wordpress

Cloud Computing Web 2.0

Google’s & Zotero’s newest “Cloud” offerings

Post author By Robin
Post date February 24, 2009
No Comments on Google’s & Zotero’s newest “Cloud” offerings

Google is going to be releasing, sometime this year, their GDrive application. TG Daily says:

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google’s execution could set it apart.

Plus a whole lot more, of course. The question is, for me, will it work as seamlessly and as beautifully as my Dropbox account? I LOVE Dropbox – I have a Dropbox folder on my laptop, my home desktop and my work desktop machines and it does an absolutely effortless job of keeping the files in that folder perfectly synched up and perfectly usable. If GDrive does that for my entire computer… I may be even more in love.
Now, this is all speculation for now – there are no official announcements from Google to back this up, and there are issues (privacy, of course, but cost and reliability guarantees and various other niggling little details) that have to be considered before folks will willingly upload the entire contents of their computer’s hard drive to a corporation’s care. If, however, the service works as well as currently existing services do *and* if Google gives some thought to privacy and practicality concerns of users, this could be an AMAZING addition to Google’s services!
Finally – before I forget – as a Public Computer Center manager, I am always looking for ways for patrons to be able to use our computers as their “home away from home” without *actually* letting them save their work, install their programs or otherwise screw with my computers. This could be a good solution – something that many of them will already have a user/pass login for (their Gmail accounts) and something that they are familiar with. Hmmm, I’m already getting ideas and making plans and the silly thing hasn’t been announced yet.
The other big announcement this week was the release of the new Zotero plugin for FireFox. This new version now includes synchronization between multiple computers – so if you find a great resource and add it to Zotero on one computer, it will sync up and be available on any other computer you have Zotero’s plugin installed to. Finally, Zotero has made it so that I can happily use it! With my reliance on 3 or 4 different computers and my heavy use of Dropbox-like applications, I just couldn’t get into a single-computer use Zotero application. Making it available on multiple computers, however, means that I’m there!

presentations

Foodie Blogs!!

The London Times has released its picks for the 50 Top Food Blogs in the World. A friend of mine tweeted about it, bemoaning the fact that there was no OPML file to go with it… Never one to pass up an opportunity to screw around with my Google Reader, I added in all 50 blogs (some of which I already subscribed to, but some of which were new to me) and exported the list for you all to do the same – only much more easily! The OPML file is here – download it, import it into your feed reader and you should see a new folder with 50 of the best food blogs in the world populating it. Easy as pie, one might say!!