Library Stuff

I downloaded the trial version of The Easy Bee this evening and played with it for a few minutes. It is basically a web site watching tool (similar to Web Site Watcher – WSW). The one feature that sets Easy Bee apart from WSW is that it allows the user to extract the portion of the page that one wants to keep up with. For example, many pages include ads, linkrolls, javascript enabled dates, etc that users could care less about if they change. With Easy Bee, the user can easy rule out any of these portions of a page. WSW does this with ads but the user needs to use the advanced features to deal with other types of unnecessary content (which takes a bit of maneuvering – not truly difficult, but time consuming). Easy Bee makes it a bit easier.

Thinking about the concept behind Easy Bee, I couldn’t help but parallel it to what RSS is all about. It takes the content (and only the content) from pages and displays it in its pure format.

Amanda blogged her experience at OLA. What’s that I see as her last entry (for the Jan 30th post)? Does she have a book coming out? Oooooh!

Kristina and Jessamyn have started bookmarks over at Del.icio.us.

Kristinas (RSS)
Jessamyn (RSS)

When LIS Blogsource comes back to life (Hey Blake!!!!), we should start a new category for del.icio.us bookmarks done by librarians. Also, maybe we should start adding these to LISFeeds. Maybe we can start a folder for all the feeds from del.icio.us. What do you think?

Did you know all of the neat things that you can do at LISNews?. I didn’t.

Probably one of the most important aspects of LISNews is to become an author. If you want to write professionally for librarians, this would make for a great start. You are not pinned down to how often you post, so you do have a lot of freedom. Plus, it helps to get your name “out there”. Last, it takes some of the burden off Blake, who works like a dog to keep it current.

What an exciting few days it has been here in Toronto at the Ontario Library Association Conference. First, it’s cold. I don’t mean chilly cold, I mean I can’t feel my ears or feet cold. I mean tears running down my face from just walking out the the door cold. Here’s a recap in semi-congrunting mode.

Spoke Canadian and US politics with a traveler from Toronto on the plane.
Free broadband in the hotel (signed up to be a Marriott Rewards member)
Ate dinner while looking at the field inside the sky-dome.
Had dinner with James, saw Stephen Abrams for a quick second, finally met Rita Vine and am having dinner with her tonight, met (blushingly) Amanda Etches-Johnson and spoke with her for a few minutes.
Both of my presentations went well. Had the fortune to meet a fellow blogger who blogged one session (well, put links up) and then fascinated me with a neat little tool that he uses to find wireless points without having to take out a computer
Spoke about Refgrunting and congrunting.
A $33 dollar (US) cab ride from the airport to the hotel. Yikes!!
Can’t use my cell phone up here at all (unless I want to pay 49 cents per minute!!).
Saw Nancy Pearl speak.

One last note: I was talking with the convener for my session on RSS and mentioned crossposting among weblogs and how it wastes time. He mentioned that there should be a built in section of an aggregator to weed out the crosspostings. A great idea. That said, may be it would be better to put all of those posts that mention the same topics into a separate folder, so the user can read them if he/she so chooses. Maybe use similar code as Blogpulse. Which reminds me…

Blake: – check out blogpulse for that new tool you have been working on for LISFeeds…