A quote from an email interview I gave on using Twitter in my writing career is up at The Adventurous Writer. It’s a quick quote about how I got my book deal, but I thought I’d point you all to it anyway since there are lots of quotes from other writers in there too with interesting stories and ideas for using Twitter for writing.
The website for “Library Mashups” has been created and is available to peruse, just to whet your appetite for the actual book itself – due out sometime this year. I contributed a chapter to it – the LibraryThing Mashups chapter – and it looks like a lot of other folks contributed a lot of other really interesting chapters to the book as well. Check it out and send it on to your library’s collection development folks for inclusion in your professional collection. That’s what I’m about to do!
I haven’t listened to the audio portion of the interview yet – I’ve just read the text part. I’m a little scared to listen to the audio – I always think I sound like an idiot… Anyway, MaintainIT has chosen little ol’ me as the Library Spotlight for this month. Very exciting stuff!!
Update: I just listened to the audio and I actually don’t sound like as much of an idiot as I thought. You all have my permission to listen to it now…
For Christmas this year, I got inspired to do some cooking! My BF’s mother gave me How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (who also does the Minimalist TivoCast, which is great fun) and I’ve been reading it cover-to-cover. So far, I’m through “everything you ever wanted to know about noodles” and getting ready to find out everything about bread. I’ve already been through the veggies, fruits and seafood chapters. It truly is a bible for folks who want a cookbook that gives them more than just static directions on how to make a single food item – there are almost no recipes in the book (so far) that don’t have multiple variations so that you can take the basic recipe (of which there are 2000) and make up to 20 different foods using that one recipe, with just a few variations. My friend Tab also got me the Better Homes & Gardens “pink plaid” edition of the kitchen essential cookbook. My mom has one of these (though I think it’s the original edition – it’s really old and “well-loved”…) and it was the go-to cookbook when I cooked at home with her. Now I have one of my own!! Yeah!
My boyfriend got, also from Doug and Tab, the Alton Brown salt cellar and a set of Alton Brown Plunger measuring cups. Since I got Tab the Gear For Your Kitchen book by Alton Brown, we’re thinking that Alton did pretty well this year…
So far, from the “How to cook everything” cookbook, I’ve made an asparagus and parmesan risotto, a lentils and potatoes with curry dinner and fried zucchinis. Yum! I also noticed a recipe for truffles in the BH&G cookbook last night that I might have to try out…
Also – and you thought I was done – my BF’s mom got me a year’s subscription to the Taste of Home magazine, something that I regularly “borrow” from my Mom. Mom is happy to know that her issues will be staying put from now on!
It wasn’t a *completely* foodie Christmas, though – my family got a Wii (which has inspired me to get a Wii Fit for it – I’m going to have to make up for all the cooking I’ll be doing somehow) as well as a bunch of Wii games. I got some clothes and some cash, which was nice. Alex got mostly cash, so we spent a lovely afternoon at the Columbia Mall last weekend, spending $241 on new clothes for my little clotheshorse… He left the mall with $9 in cash and a beatific grin on his face, so I think he was happy with his Christmas as well.
I hope all of my readers had a wonderful holiday season – while it is fun to play with all the new stuff that the holiday season brings, I hope that everyone also got some rest, some time with their loved ones and a new outlook for the new year!
Reading through Bill’s comment on my previous post, I was reminded that I meant to tell you all about a very cool, and very related, compendium of information that the folks at the MuniGov 2.0 organization have compiled. The Web 2.0 Security page is basically an annotated collection of reports and “thought pieces” from all over the web, put together and given to us for free! There are positive and negative pieces included – you can read through them and make up your own mind, but as Bill so nicely stated in his comment – our job as IT people is to *support* business use, not stand in the way of our internal customers as they try to do their jobs. If we can do that and maintain security, we’re golden!
Update to the update – I just found a link (via the privacyala Twitter account to an article on Facebook & privacy. The sentence that makes it relevant to this post is:
Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.
I’m headed off to read the article now, but thought I’d post a quick update here first, to let others know about it!
For those who haven’t heard about it, Rachel Singer Gordon has started a new review service for libraries that focuses on Computer books & topics. The Tech Static is a resource for anyone who buys computer or technology books for libraries. I am one of the reviewers, and my first review, for The Productive Programmer is now up! Enjoy!!
Read/Write/Web today has a story on the dangers of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. They are profiling a company called FaceTime that gives IT departments a way to add web application scanning to their network. Most IT departments do some scanning, at least at the firewall, for malicious applications and sites, but few do any kind of searching for web applications (think Facebook apps, Google’s Team Sites, unsupported IM capabilities, etc.). This company is offering a way to do that. RWW’s take on the matter, in the post Your Web 2.0 App is a Security Threat – ReadWriteWeb is:
Of course, when users become their own I.T. department, they’re unknowingly introducing inherent risks into the previously hardened network infrastructure. Just because a web app is easy to operate, that doesn’t make it safe and secure for enterprise use. As users upload and share sensitive files through these unapproved backchannels or have business-related conversations through web-based IM chatrooms, they might not only be putting their company’s data at risk, they could also be breaking various compliance laws as well.
And this is completely true. The problem isn’t really with the apps, though, it’s with IT departments that refuse to allow *safe* networking practices in their networks. User education, coupled with some monitoring of public sites for confidential information, along with sanctions for misuse of Web 2.0 tools (after the users are educated on proper use, of course) can make Web 2.0 apps part of the IT infrastructure and, consequently, much safer than if the users are off in the “wild west” of web applications, doing things themselves.
I’ve been working on a Tech Report for ALA discussing just how to use these Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with others – and one of the issues that I discuss is the fact that these are publicly facing tools with risks for unintentional leaks of data or confidential information. If your IT department is on the ball and willing to work with you, however, those leaks can be stopped and all of your data can be kept safe – even while you are using these tools to their best effect.
Want more about this? You’ll have to buy the Tech Report next year… until then, however, educating your IT department about the benefits of Web 2.0 applications in the organization will really help to make these things available – in a sanctioned way – for you!
Gmail now has a native task manager, if you go to the “labs” area of Gmail and turn it on. Once you click on that little green bottle at the top of your regular Gmail account (this is not something that is available to us as “enterprise Gmail customers” yet – BOO!!), you can see the tasks option on top. Enable it, refresh Gmail and find the Tasks link under the Contacts link on the left side of your screen. Click it and a handy little box pops up that allows for entry of tasks – with indenting – and basic task management capabilities. You can also automatically add an email as a task, with a link to that email included under the task’s title as “related email”. That is pretty cool!!
Check out this slide deck from Razorfish on “What if Amazon & iTunes were to use Facebook Connect” (explanation of FB Connect on slides 1-10, imagination starts on slide 11).
Ok – that’s interesting enough – but what if libraries hooked into FB Connect? What sort of things could we do with the information in people’s profiles to “personalize” their experience on our websites? I imagine a lot of the suggestions for Amazon would be applicable to libraries, but surely we could think of other ways to use that Facebook data, too!
Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed are probably already aware of this, but for the rest of you…. I’ve just signed a contract to write a book! I’ll be banging out lots and lots and lots of words on the phenomenon of microblogging (think Twitter and Tumblr) and lifestreaming (think FriendFeed) and how libraries can use such phenomena to reach out to their patrons. This book will be part of a series of books all on various aspects of social media/phenomenon and their uses in libraries. I’ll let the other authors announce their own titles, but from what I know so far, the series is going to seriously kick some ass. Emphasis via profanity totally intentional there, by the way….
Anyway – this gives me a bit of pause as to the future of this blog (at least in the short term). Now that the blog has helped me on my way to lots of writing assignments (don’t forget to check out my Library Tech Report from ALA that will be out about the time this book is due in to the publisher next year…), I’m so busy writing other things that I may not have time to write here. Hopefully I’ll be able to do *some* posting, but I will definitely be keeping up with my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, so posting will continue to happen – albeit in a shorter format – there.
