I should be writing, working on a presentation or editing something, but I’m not. Instead, I’m playing with my two latest toys in an attempt to feel like I’ve accomplished something today (the Envisionware install was trying, to say the least… though it wasn’t really Envisionware’s fault, we piled too much onto the “to-do” list along with it). First, I got an account with Updating.me (http://www.updating.me) using the beta code BetaToUpdateMe (that will work until they shut the doors on it – no guarantees for the length of time that will be!) and then, thinking that a Ubiquity command would be just the thing to make Updating.me really, really useful, started hacking at some Javascript.
34 minutes (according to my FriendFeed posts) after I started whining about wanting to see a command for Ubiquity that would update my Updating.me account, I had it written, posted and tested. It worked! Except for the small fact that the Updating.me folks haven’t actually released their API yet, so it doesn’t actually update anything. They posted on their blog, however, on the 28th of August that an API would be coming soon, so all I have to do is change a single line in the script to point to their API “hook” and the script will be actually useful.
In case you are as impatient as I am, you can get the command (after you install Ubiquity, of course) at http://www.intertecdesigns.com/updatingme.html. If Ubiquity is installed, a drop-down bar will pop out of the top of your browser and ask you if you want to subscribe. Do be sure to subscribe to updates so that as soon as I make that little API hook change, you will get the full benefit of a working command to update multiple social sites with one single command.
Sweet!!
Category: Web 2.0
I don’t think I’ve completely updated my Presentations & Publications page with all of this yet, but if I do it here, I can just copy & paste later, right? This is my schedule for the next couple of months – if you are going to be around any of these places, look me up and say hi!
Sept 8-12 –National Association of Government Webmasters Conference – speaking on Sept. 11th on Web 3.0, but will be there for the whole conference.
Sept 17th – MaintainIT Webinar on making Public Computers 2.0-ready
October 1-3 – Missouri Library Association Conference – speaking on the 1st on Collaboration 2.0 (2:45-3:30) and Library Learning 2.1 (3:45-4:30) – but will be there for the whole conference, introducing speakers and going to business meetings….
October 19-22nd – Internet Librarian – since I somehow forgot to send in a speaking proposal, I won’t be speaking here – just attending!
Nov/Dec – Computers In Libraries – Article on how to use social media/2.0 tools to collaborate.
That’s it – so far! Hope to see you around at one of these places!!
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Becoming 2.0
Bobbi and I finished up our 4-day workshop on all things Web 2.0 on Friday. I was surprised at how tired I got after each day of teaching, but it was also strangely invigorating, too. The students in the class were really engaged and willing to learn, although there was a lot of complaints about too-full-heads, I think they got some good information out of it and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do when they get back to their home libraries and get some time to put this stuff into practice!
Now that everything is officially official, I can let my loyal readers know what my next big project will be (besides 4 presentations in 3 months and a changeover from Exchange to Google hosted email)! While I was in Anaheim for ALA, I was approached at my table at the Social Software Showcase by an editor for the ALA Tech Source Tech Reports and asked if I’d like to write one for them. After some discussion of topic and timing, I can now say that the May/June 2009 issue of the Tech Report will be on Collaboration 2.0 (working title – it’ll probably change…) and will deal with using Web 2.0 tools (Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) to provide a platform for collaboration in libraries. I’m pretty excited about the project and am champing at the bit to get started! I’ll be doing some serious tapping into my social network to get examples of collaboration from my librarian buddies on Twitter, Facebook, Ning (starting to sound familiar?) and the like. Don’t feel like you have to wait to be asked, though, if you are doing some collaborative project and using these tools – feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you are doing any time!
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Intermission
As a break from the tedium that is my description of my workweek, I’d like to answer a question/comment left on Monday’s post by the lovely Lori Reed (who I met at ALA, but didn’t get any time to chat with, really). She asked me to elaborate on my use of Remember The Milk and, specifically, if I was using the Gmail/Firefox extension. To answer her last question first, I’m using the extension and LOVE IT. Not only do I have my task list right there in my most-used inbox, Gmail, but I can tag an email with Action (per my GTD setup) and it automagically adds the tagged email to my RTM tasks. How freakin’ cool is that? If I want to add a task, but not tag it as Action, I can also create a task from an email via the “More Actions” menu in Gmail. That makes RTM the obvious choice of social task lists for me! Speaking of – I just blogged, for our Library Learning 2.1 program, about just this topic this week. Monday’s post was on social task lists and discusses my use of RTM in the post. I also link to a really excellent blog post from RTM on setting up your system to work with GTD (along with an explanation of GTD for those unfamiliar with it). Links to the Firefox extension and a couple of alternative list programs are included in that post as well.
Hey – I just learned about a new “contest” being sponsored by the UK Government in which they are looking for creative and useful mashups using public data (crime, health, education data that is released by the government, but not in particularly useful ways). This is a fabulous idea!! What a great way to get people thinking about using the REAMS of data produced by the government! For a list of ideas that have been submitted so far, check out their Ideas page.
The winner of the contest will get their idea funded by the government and the chance for Internet fame and fortune – such as that might be… Wonder if this (in a stripped down fashion) would work for a library – we put out massive amounts of data about our collections, ILL information and more – or we could add pointers to public data ourselves and get civic-minded folks to do something with it!
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8. Blogs
Hmmm, you are reading this, so do I really have to go into what Blogs are? Well, here’s a textbook definition:
Weblog (blog) – a web page that consists of separate, diary-like entries that are arranged in a reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry at the top.
That’s it. That’s a blog. Of course, we expect certain other things from blogs these days, don’t we? At the least, they should provide an RSS feed so that we can subscribe to their content and read it through our feed readers. Oh, and most of ’em have archives and other ways to access past content as well as some sort of method for commenting on individual entries. Good ones are updated regularly with information that is timely, relevant to the audience and well-written.
Now that we’ve established what a blog is, let’s talk about what it can do for your library and your patrons. First off, it can be an amazingly efficient vehicle for communication for your library. And not one-way communication, either! Blogs generally allow readers to post comments – giving the reader some voice in the communication so that it becomes conversational as opposed to one-way announcements. For libraries that allow their patrons to post comments in an unmoderated (radical trust right there!) way, they give their patrons the feeling of openness and concern for what the patrons want and need – they tell ’em that the library is listening. Of course, if you don’t want to destroy that impression, you’ll need to post fairly regularly.
This brings us to the topic of time investment. All that writing, editing, finding the perfect picture and just plain old thinking up topics takes time. You can have one person responsible for it all, with a significant investment in time for that person, or you can split the work up and have multiple authors doing the work. Whichever way you decide to do it, there needs to be at least one person who is responsible for making sure that content reaches the blog on a regular basis. For some blogs, that will be daily – for others it may be weekly or even monthly, depending on the topic and the frequency of news about that topic. Irregular posting can cause some folks to assume the blog has died during your quiet times and unsubscribe to it – this means that they’ll miss the next big news or interesting take on a subject that is posted! At the last Internet Librarian conference, the folks behind the Hennepin County Library’s Bookspace site said that contributing to the Bookspace’s blogs was a job duty for several people – no contributions means that they aren’t doing their jobs and it will reflect on their job evaluations. That makes for some serious staff buy-in there!
Why go to all the trouble to create a blog for your library? As I said before, it opens a 2-way communication channel that is invaluable for getting patron responses to your programs, events, library news or whatever you choose to blog about. It’s also a great way to put information up onto your website that is completely reusable – and not just by you. We take our blog feed and post it on the home page of our site, just with a bit of teaser content, so that everyone who comes by our home page will see what the last 5 blog posts are. We also have a WordPress plugin that takes the blog posts and reposts them to the library’s MySpace page blog. This means that every time we post to our blog it is republished automatically to our home page and to our MySpace blog (as well as our Facebook news feed and our Twitter feed, but you get the picture…). We aren’t the only ones who could use this information, however. Since we publish our RSS feed, others can take that feed, run it through something like the new Google Feed Control Wizard and provide our blog posts as part of their website. Since we are a public library, this would be an excellent addition to a Chamber of Commerce tourism site (we have LOTS of programs going on all the time) or to a city-wide information network or to any site that wants to give their users a complete picture of what’s going on in our area. Just a bit of copy-n-paste from Google and you have an automatically updated source of information on your public library.
Blogs are even helpful if you don’t feel up to publishing one externally. An internal blog can disseminate information, provide staff with another communication tool and help teach your staff about tools that your patrons are using (feed readers, web pages, web forms, etc.). While using a free blogging service such as Blogger, WordPress.com, Vox or any of the thousands of others out there might be a bit more difficult for an internal-only blog, setting up a WordPress installation shouldn’t be too difficult for an IT department to handle. If it is, or if your IT department is reluctant to install it, give one of the blogging services that offer passwords a try. Blogger and WordPress.com do offer password protected blogs – but that’s just another password that your staff has to remember…
I could probably talkwrite for hours about how great blogs are and all of the fun things you can do with them to improve your patron/library relations, your staff/staff communications and your community/library information needs, but I’ve gotta quit sometime and this seems like a good stopping point. Anyone else want to write a book about what I’ve forgotten? OH! They have! Check out Jason Griffey and Karen Coombs new (and I do mean new – it’s not yet actually available) book about Library Blogging. Knowing those two, it’s bound to be incredibly useful and chock-full of great ideas/tips/tricks/things to remember about blogging at your library!
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6. SlideShare
I like SlideShare. I’ll admit to that little bias right off the bat. SlideShare doesn’t provide tools to create slide decks or to edit them, but it does provide tools that make a vibrant and interesting community space out of presentations! The real purpose behind SlideShare is to share information – what’s more Web 2.0 than that? By uploading a slide deck to SlideShare, you can control who sees it via privacy options, what they can do with it via embedded Creative Commons licensing and where on the Internet it goes via an easy bit of copy’n’paste embed code.
Once you’ve created your slide deck in either PowerPoint, OpenOffice or Keynote (or any presentation software that outputs in those file formats or PDF), you can upload it to your Slidespace. There is a 50MB limit to the size of the presentation, but I’ve found that just about any presentation will work with a bit of tweaking (I’ve seen presentations on there that run more than 225 slides long, with some graphics thrown in, so 50MB is pretty generous) or with an export to compressed PDF, if necessary.
Once your slide deck has been uploaded, you can link to it, embed it just about anywhere, and get great statistics on it. You can share it with your contacts that you have in the SlideShare community or you can share it with the whole world using the site’s privacy options. 
You can even create an audio track to go with your slide deck and synchronize it to your slides for a narrated presentation or a slide show with musical accompaniment. To create the slidecast that I’ve linked to above, I downloaded the free Audacity audio recorder and used it to speak while I was viewing my slideshow on my home computer. After I was finished (which took about 10 tries… I hate the sound of myself speaking!), I uploaded the MP3 file that Audacity created to my personal web space and “linked” the two in SlideShare (by entering the URI of my MP3 file and letting SlideShare get it from my web server – there is no uploading of audio files to the SlideShare service. Not sure why…) and then proceeded to use a very simple, drag-and-drop interface to sync up the voice and visual parts of my presentation.
Why would a library want to use SlideShare? Individual librarians are already using it to post presentation slide decks made for various conferences all around the world. If you can’t make it to a conference, chances are you can find at least some of the slides used during sessions uploaded to SlideShare. You can also share your presentations with patrons who might not have been able to make it to a computer class, author event or other program that used a presentation slide deck. Others use it as a sort of self-guided learning tool. If you have a topic you would like to find more about, do a quick search for it on SlideShare. You will certainly find at least one presentation on that topic that you can view and get information from. Still others use it as a basis for inspiration (or theft) for their own presentations. Be sure to check the Creative Commons licensing, though, before you steal slides or slide shows from other users – some are perfectly willing to let you do it, as long as you credit them, others have reserved all rights and would frown on you grabbing a couple of their slides to use in your presentation! (Just FYI – all my slides are always CC licensed to allow anyone to use them with just a quick credit to me somewhere in the presentation)
Like most of the Web 2.0 tools I gush on about, this one has a pretty solid sense of community. You can create a profile for yourself, “friend” others so that you can see what they have been uploading, favoriting and commenting upon and you can join groups that give you a way to get your slides seen as a part of a larger body of work on a particular subject. Again, as with most Web 2.0 tools, tagging is a big part of making your presentations findable and usable! When you start uploading your slide decks and slidecasts, be sure to tag them liberally!
Again, the statistics that SlideShare offers is a big draw to the service. Not only can you keep excellent records of how many people are viewing your library’s presentations (and whether they are viewing them at SlideShare.com or as an embed in your site – or even which embed is getting all the views!), you can also see what is popular – what slide decks people are marking as their “favorites” (marking a presentation as a favorite is a great way to bookmark slide decks for later viewing, too), what presentations people are downloading, embedding into their sites and commenting upon. All these stats are available to you for free!!
If you create any sort of presentation for your library – consider uploading it to SlideShare. Let other librarians, your patrons and the whole world know about the cool things you are doing. Even if you don’t create your own presentations – take a look at other folks’ stuff. Learn what is going on and what neat things people are doing at their institutions!
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Social networking is educational!
According to a recent study by the University of Minnesota, the use of social networking sites is narrowing the technological divide between low- and high-income kids in that they are all learning vital computer, communication and socialization skills while using these networks.
What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study.
While using just about any site – not just social networking sites – would give kids the same sort of “21st century skills”, the question is, would they want to use them like they do MySpace and Facebook? Plus, you have the possibility for creative expression with these sites that encourage user-created content – something that doing research on the computer or learning typing skills on the computer will do. And schools still block these sites…
A better response would be to reinforce the lessons these kids are learning on these sites.
“Now that we know what skills students are learning and what experiences they’re being exposed to, we can help foster and extend those skills,” said Greenhow.
and finally…
Greenhow suggests that educators can help students realize even more benefits from their social network site use by working to deepen students’ still emerging ideas about what it means to be a good digital citizen and leader online.
So – let’s stop blocking and start teaching!!
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Twitter Debate!
McCain and Obama will be debating via Twitter over the next few days – and it should be fairly interesting. McCain says that he doesn’t know how to use a computer at all, and Obama has 40,000 followers on his Twitter account already – so the technical advantage is definitely for the Obama camp. (and really, do we want a president who will probably ultimately decide the Net Neutrality issue to be one who admits to computer illiteracy?)
You can follow the debate either through the Summize search for the #pdfdebate hashtag (PDF – Personal Democracy Forum, the sponsor of the debate) or through the Tweetboards arrangement of the debate moderator (Anna Marie Cox), McCain’s representative (LizMair) and Obama’s representative (Mike Nelson).
This is an interesting experiment and a great way to get the candidate’s positions out to a new audience. It’s also an interesting use of Twitter, which I love to see! What I’m hoping we won’t see is the infamous “fail whale” that Twitter posts on it’s site whenever it gets overloaded and unable to respond to all of its traffic!
Enjoy the debate!
