#13 web 2.0, library 2.0 etc.

I am very immersed in this area at the moment so I think for this post I'll just talk about our new web site, which will have a number of library 2.0 features. From the earliest planning it was designed around users from the usability testing & focus group work we did to the survey of features users wanted. The site allows for patrons to review items and for teens to submit local events, and there are more dynamic forms of content from the planned blog entries in the resource guides to the Yahoo Pipes based aggregated topical RSS feeds providing up to date news on various topics.

One of the Yahoo Pipes - this one combines arts news feeds:



In the near future, it's looking like mobile devices will become an increasingly important means of accessing the Internet. For some examples of library web site mobile access screens, see this slideshow:

#12 social networking

I get a bit of déja vu doing some of these 23 things - the original Charlotte Mecklenburg program was in 2006 I think, so some of the things that were newer then are as familiar as wallpaper now, like Facebook and the rest of the social networking phenomenon. But still a good place for libraries to have a presence.

For myself, I have a pretty minimal Facebook profile - in fact I think I still have a Christmas tree up on my site but from December 2007. I'm not crazy about the privacy and ownership aspects - privacy in particular is something it seems people are all to eager to exchange for fairly trivial benefits, so I wouldn't want to put up a whole lot of personal information. I've tried looking up people I've lost touch with but without much luck - I guess baby boomers aren't really a major force there. It's kind of too bad since that seems to be one of Facebook's nicer features.

technorati #11

I have to say Technorati doesn't do a lot for me. As a way of searching for blogs or blog posts, it seems like there is a lot of noise to wade through. The results I got on Technorati from looking up particular topics or looking at the most popular blogs were pretty uninspiring. However, I read somewhere that one of the main ways blog searches differ from regular search engine searches is that with blog searches people often want search results only from today or the last hour or even the last five minutes, so having a specialized tool for that seems like a good option for those who are interested in it.

Not that I'm against blogs - I have come across different blogs over time that seem interesting, so I guess the way I would use blogs is more to follow a few on and off, or sometimes just spend a one-time visit to a blog that is of brief transient interest.

#10 del.icio.us

I've known about this for a while, but the thing is that I rarely bookmark anything anymore - if I use a site all the time, I'll put it on my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox, but usually I just type the name or the start of the name into Firefox's address bar and that just seems easier.

In terms of its use as a research tool, I found the Askaway del.icio.us account bookmarks useful for things like good math sites for kids. Also, I went to a session at BCLA last spring given by Paul Joseph, a librarian at Emily Carr, explaining how he uses del.icio.us to list web resources for students on the their library web site. You can see how it looks here - http://www.ecuad.ca/library/research - and it seems like an effective way to manage a large number of links, but probably better suited to the academic environment.

libraryThing widget (more #9)

libraryThing #9

I've had an account here for awhile, from back when we were looking at LibraryThing for Libraries and whether we should join that, but I hadn't added any books so I did that now - I can't say I'd have the patience to put in all my books, though. As a sidebar, I heard LibraryThing's inventor, Tim Spalding, speak at last year's CODI conference - he did a very entertaining presentation.

image generators #8

I got stuck on this one for awhile because of the hypnotic effect of putting all kinds of different pictures through FD toys' Warholizer & Hockneyizer. I tried people & objects & people work better but for the Warholizer it helps to have an image with contrasting tones. I finally ended up running a picture of Olympic diver Alexandre Despatie through both -

the Warholizer version:



And the Hockneyizer:

rss and readers #6 and 7

Okay, so being from Saturn, it would make sense that I've had a Bloglines account for a long time now, (and a Google Reader one more recently just to check it out that I use more for non-work-related feeds). I don't keep up with the readers all that often, and there are a lot of feeds I should probably delete because I don't keep up with them at all. On Bloglines, I have some library feeds, mostly related to web sites & technology and some feeds about books.

From some library blog or other today via Stephen Abrams' blog feed - tests you can run on your blog:

Typealyzer – provides a Myers-Briggs type analysis of your blog and shows you the area of the brain that your writing style reflects most.

Genderanalyzer – determines what sex you write like.

Readability Test - Determine what grade level your blog is written at.

slinkachu - (thing #4)

igotwood from slinkachu
Originally uploaded by my dog sighs

I saw an article about the street artist Slinkachu and I love his stuff. He makes incredibly intricate tiny figures & leaves them out in large cities, mainly London, to "fend for themselves". Find more Slinkachu at http://little-people.blogspot.com/

posting to the intranet (thing #3)

I would post something to the blog but I have already done this a lot so I think that that counts. (especially because I'm the person who helps people make this work).

palette generator (thing #2 and 5)

The palette generator (at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php) is listed in the fd flickr toys collection of image manipulation tools. It's a tool I really like because you can play around with the colours in a picture and get a palette of colours you can then use for anything else you might want to do with it. Often photographs from nature especially will have interesting colour combinations - I used this with a series of photographs of different coloured pebbles on a beach and found some quite lovely colour combinations.

If you start with this photo of Vancouver I found for example:

















You get this palette:














So there you have it.