Bingo, Blyberg!

I read these words of John Blyburg on the blog librarian.net, and wanted to applaud:

Some people also just don’t like to step out of their comfort zone. They don’t want to absorb new things. I was on a top technology trends panel at OLA last January when someone asked, “what if we don’t want to learn about all these new technologies?” (paraphrase). I don’t think I was in the mood for hand-holding because my answer was, “it’s your job.” Really. I don’t believe libraries are life support systems for staff. We need to work for our bread. That means that we have so stop bunting and try to knock it out of the park every single time. That takes passion, and too many people in every industry, including libraries, lack it.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Happy Mappy!

I browsed through some of the Web 2.0 Awards sites. My favorite is Wayfinder because it lets you create personalized maps and explore others' creations. MacroMaven wrote about a Google maps mashup that listed local Starbucks locations.

This could be used personally for when I host visitors, and they'd like to know of interesting places to visit and good restaurants to try. It'd be nice to have it all on one map, and to be able to color-code by category (museums, sports, food, etc.) and add notes (e.g. which menu items to try at an eatery).

For the library, it might be useful for having a map of our libraries. Although we have one under the Find Your Library link (along with general directions), this could eliminate a step of inputting addresses for more specific driving directions.

We could also make a special map for local booklovers, with not only libraries, but bookstores and local sites mentioned in stories.

G infinity

Remember the Animaniacs cartoon duo "Pinky and the Brain"? Brain, the genius rodent, constantly plotted to take over the world...maybe he would like to work for Google, because they seem to be aiming to take over the world [of information]! (Although according to The Invisible Web by Chris Sherman and Gary Price, there are plenty of websites that go "uncrawled" by Google for various reasons.)

Here are other online articles about the "invisible web" (sorta ironic that I found these via Google, eh?):

• "Those Dark Hiding Places" by Robert Lackie
• "Invisible or Deep Web" from the UC-Berkeley library
• Wikipedia's entry on Deep Web.

Anyway, back to the point of this post, which is to describe my explorations of Google Labs products. It's neat that they have so many experimental projects going on...maybe when I'm more tech-savvy, I'd be interested in participating...whoa, that would be even more ironic. ;D

I tried Google Sets (since it was the last one listed, and I have sympathy for Last Things Listed, having a surname toward the end of the alphabet), Google Ride Finder, and Google Page Creator. Even though the last two names are clunky-sounding, I have to say that G--gle is doing a good job of branding these services to make sure everyone knows these innovations are associated with them....

• Google Sets is neat...it tries to detect a pattern out of items you input. I first entered "apple," "mango," "persimmon," "pineapple," and "guava", and then it generated a whole list of fruits! I also did a sorta-library related set of "cataloging," "web," "service," "books," and "maps," which generated mostly appropriate terms, except for "heraldry"--where did that come from?
• Google Ride Finder could be useful for seeing whether a private transit vehicle is nearby to pick you up. However, when I tried to refresh the position of the taxi cars, they didn't budge on the map. This would be more useful if I could see where the King County Metro buses are...I wonder if Google Transit shows this.
• Google Page Creator is just what it says. I'm not so interested in this, although I like the idea of having a website hosted for free.
  

Google and Zoho

Thoughts on...

Google Docs:

• I've used this before, primarily to back up Microsoft Word files for assignments.
• I discovered that you can not only collaborate with others on a document--you can also sign up for an RSS feed that notifies you of any changes...cool! I will definitely keep this in mind for group projects.
• At this point of available functions, how do these collaborative documents differ from wikis? Is the wiki's additional value the ability to organize pages? All of these tools are starting to blend together, sort of like how TV and internet and PDAs and cell phones and DVD players are starting to blend together on single comprehensive devices....
• I mentioned before my wariness of Google knowing so much about me...I use Gmail personally, and share my calendar with close friends. I don't care to use Google for my documents as well because I'd rather limit the information that a single company knows about me. Which is why I appreciate...

Zoho:

• This is the first non-Google service that I prefer to Google! Yippee!
  
• The interface is just prettier.
• The downsides? No RSS feeds for the word processing doc, as far as I can tell. Also, I had to scroll sideways to see the whole editing space. Maybe that wouldn't be a problem with a larger monitor, but still...
• I also appreciated the version number that appears on the bottom bar. I updated the document twice, so it went from version 1.0 to 1.1 and then 1.2. I wonder if I made a major change, if it would jump all the way to 2.0 or it would continue to graduate in tenth increments.

Both services seem interoperable with lots of other things, including blogs and commercial office software. Very nice! I wonder if this makes Microsoft or other companies nervous....

And also, I wonder how long these beta services will be offered free. Will they start charging, or will there be advertising? Is their plan to get us "hooked" and start paying for more? I just might sign up!

Library 2.0 articles in OCLC's report

I am most excited about Wendy Schultz's future-projecting article. Library 4.0?!! I appreciated her point that Library 4.0 would incorporate Library 1.0-3.0, not be something completely different. I think that's where people start to panic, when they fear that everything's changing. But the principles and products and services should still be there, just enhanced.

The OCLC report was presented nicely, in brief paragraphs with subtitles and generously sized photos of the authors in silly poses. There's great content in these OCLC reports, and the attractiveness factor means that more people are likely to read it.

I was also happy to explore North Carolina State's Endeca-based catalog, which seems to be a much more useful way to explore the library's resources--to enter a keyword, and see which categories the results fall under, and continue to narrow the results until you get something you want. It obviously needs some refining, but there's so much promise there.

Let's play!

I compared Rollyo and Google Search Engine. I was really trying to like Rollyo because I don't want Google to dominate my internet life, but I do prefer Google because of speed and the results, which were more even.

Rollyo seemed to favor Sno-Isle-related results, while Google seemed to slightly prefer KCLS (is it because they detected that the 27 Things search engine was created by KCLS staff?), but generally came up with Sno-Isle and SPL results as well.

keyword/search engine	Rollyo	Google Search Engine
storytime	Sno-Isle, Tacoma	KCLS, Sno-Isle, Seattle
gaming	gambling (homework help), SPL, Sno-Isle, KCLS	KCLS, SPL, Sno-Isle

PS Don't know why there's so much space between the text above and the table. I wrote the html code myself...if you have an idea of how to decrease the margin, let me know.

PPS Here's the link to my Google search engine (also embedded within my blog). The theme is board and video game reviews...the first five sites included are Uncle's Games (local game store with great customer service and weekly game nights where you can play and eat pretzels), Board Game Geek, FunAgain Games (online retailer), Board Games With Scott (a videoblog where Scott, a LIS professor, orients people to interesting board games), and Games Magazine, which does monthly reviews of both board and electronic games.

RSS Feeds 2

I read Talking Story's post about RSS feeds, and have to agree that I wish aggregators were more visually appealing. As much as I value Bloglines, I miss appreciating the graphic design of individual websites. Library 2.0 tools are often presented in aqua, hot pink, and black, and white; this color scheme get monotonous. However, I have hope because I'm sure people will start to make things more beautiful once they master the basic tools.

Another issue that Bloglines brings up is that since I subscribe to so many feeds using my personal account, I have a hard time recalling which blogger said what, since everything is presented in a similar format.

The South Park Me

I have to say, David's South Park avatar looked a lot like him. I don't know how well mine reflects me (especially because that gynormous book covers my fabulous outfit), but here it is:

PS I just realized that I have no nose! Yikes...how can I breathe in South Park without a cartoon nose?

I'm Blogging!

I am blogging for LISNews.org! It was exciting to see my first three posts appear in my Bloglines feeds today. I would link to them, but I want to retain some semblance of anonymity...and make people work to figure out who I am.

In other news, I checked out my tags for this blog...each one is unique, making my tags utterly worthless except for purposes of amusement! Exactly what I desired...heh heh.

Online weeding

Information overload disturbs me. As much as I adore books, magazines, and basically anything interesting to read and learn, I sense that I need to establish some boundaries for allowing all this stuff into my mind.

It might be helpful to write some sort of script that prompts people to delete blog feeds from their RSS reader...though the reader probably can't tell which feeds I peruse, skim, or just click on so it'll be eliminated from the to-read queue. It could also be helpful to prompt people to delete tags from their del.icio.us account if they haven't been clicked on for a certain period of time.

Libraries care about weeding physical materials, but what about online materials?

I recently learned that Google acquired a whole bunch of land in Oregon in order to store their server farms. It hadn't dawned on me that all my e-mails and other online whatnots have to be processed and stored via these huge machines which require electricity...thus, energy is spent (squandered, I should say!) on preserving much information that is useless.

Wacky Wikis

The tempation to commit an act of alliteration was too great for me, folks. Hence, the title of today's post.

I think that wikis could be very useful....An engineer I interviewed for an iSchool class on information behavior expressed excitement about using a wiki to clarify what was the most recent development on his team's project. But he said that he suspected that the majority of his colleagues would be reluctant to adopt this way of communicating.

(Note: these engineers are definitely confident with technology, and yet there's still resistance to learning new things, an attitude that doing so is a burden--in spite of this being potentially hugely beneficial in the long run.)

Anyway, the wikis that were highlighted were of varying quality. I believe that a wiki done well can be super convenient and gather much timely and helpful information from a variety of contributors. However, many that I've viewed seem to be lacking content. Plus they just look plain, not very sexy, and look uniform in presentation. And if those are the first examples that one sees, their imagination may be limited by these sparse representations.

My favorite wiki was the one about best practices and services in the library, founded by Meredith Farkas.

I wonder if it's possible to merge wikis...having multiple related wikis combine could resolve the problem of duplicating info and automatically beef up content. Win-win!