Library Stuff

I am deeply engaged tonight in numerous projects, so here is a quick round-up on some neat stuff I found in my aggregator today. Gary Price must be having an effect on me, as I have produced more lists in the past month on LS than I have over the past 4 years. Here we go:

1) Law Professor’s Web Log Is Jurists’ Must-Read – “As the creator of a Web log, or blog, called Sentencing Law and Policy (http://sentencing.typepad.com), Mr. Berman has established himself as the go-to guy for all things Blakely for federal and state judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors and prisoners’ relatives.”

Yet another article about the power (and, unfortunately, peril) of using weblogs to market oneself and ones abilities. Once that niche is created and situated in the minds of others, it can only get better as a career is launched.

2) Windows and .Net Magazine now has RSS Feeds (12 of them). They have also started blogging. (link via Topix)

3) Teri mentions:“CNET at Work has just put up their own “RSS 101″ page, which includes a glossary and reviews of 5 newsreaders (Pluck is their choice). There’s also a nifty little video (3:30 min.) of one of the CNET.com editors giving a brief overview of RSS and how to use it.”

4) Mediathink has put up a very readable white paper [PDF] entitled, “RSS: The Next Big Thing Online”, filled with diagrams, charts, benefits of RSS, and much more. Definitely worth a look and a bookmark. (link via Topix)

5) Gary mentions that the Wall Street Journal has implemented 5 RSS Feeds for their specialty publications? Does this mean that the WSJ will offer RSS feeds for their main content soon? That will be hard to do since they charge for most of it. Will they be the first to charge for access to RSS Feeds? Yikes.

Jessamyn IM’d me this afternoon (I’m always thrilled to hear from friends) and mentioned a post that she just made on her DNC Blog. Apparently, Patrick Leahy, from Vermont, has an RSS Feed for his “More From the Floor” page, which looks like a Userland/Manilla run weblog. Thanks Jessamyn.

Will Richardson displays a chart of why U.S. Bloggers read blogs. “News I can’t find elsewhere” is in the top slot. Note the title of the chart: Why U.S. Bloggers read blogs. I would be more interested in why non-bloggers read blogs. Especially in the library world. If we are using weblogs to attract patrons and get them to read our content (and -GASP – subscribe to our RSS Feeds), I would want to know the reasons. Do they do it to keep up with what the library has to offer? Are there other reasons? BTW, this would make for an interesting study…

Bibliophile – “Bibliophile is an initiative to align the development of bibliographic databases for the web. It aims to promote standards, discussion among users on necessary features and a variety of specific solutions for different fields of research.”. (link via del.icio.us)

The one thing that I don’t like about del.icio.us is that they don’t display the tags that I had created (I post directly from my browser rather than logging into the site). If I was one letter off in the tags when posting a link, it wouldn’t go into the right “folder”.

Enter Nutr.itio.us. Just enter your del.icio.us user name, and a bookmarklet is created. Put the bookmarklet in your favorites and when you want to post to del.isio.us, click the bookmarklet. Not only does the usual form come up, but your tags are there as well. Choose the one(s) you want and save.

What a great tool. Many of you that have written in with great resources and tools have mentioned del.icio.us. This is another one to add to the list.

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tools/resources over the past few days that I haven’t posted nor have had much time to play with. Nevertheless, here they are:

1) WB Editor – “WB Editor is the weblog or blog editing and posting tool that provides word style interface, RSS aggregator integration, offline local blog storage and etc. for bloggers. Unlike other existing blog tool, the WB Editor has WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing capabilities and full internalization support.” (via Darlene Fichter Furl Archive)

2) Pivot – “Pivot is a web-based tool to help you maintain dynamic sites, like weblogs or online journals. Pivot is released under the GPL so it is completely free to use. It is written in PHP, and does not require additional libraries or databases to function.”

3) Library Techtonics – A new weblog by my dear friend and colleague Andrea Mercado. (RSS Feed) – Also posted on LISBlogsource.

4) Waypath Topic Streams – “For the past few months, we’ve been experimenting in the Waypath Labs with ways to automatically build feeds on specific topics, gathering posts from the nearly three million weblogs we monitor. The result is our new Topic Streams tool. Though not quite ready for prime time, we’re releasing a “preview” of Topic Streams at Waypath. We’ll be working to make it better over the coming weeks, with the goal of reaching “official” beta status.”

5) Gibeo – “The Gibeo Network is a new online service built by Gibeo. It’s a rapidly growing community, a web annotation service, a open content-enhancing platform, an amazingly simple and useful tool for browsing and sharing the web. The Internet is still a fundamentally changing environment and this is the latest evolution in powerful online services. Simply browse the web by adding .gibeo.net to the end of any site, and it will be transparently enhanced by adding any community annotations and highlights to the page as well as enable the menu of personal tools available.” (via The RSS Weblog)

Last week, I mentioned that Bill French had created (read scraped) numerous RSS Feeds for EContent Magazine. Well, I just got off the phone with Bill Spence at InfoToday and he told me that Econtent now has put up their own RSS Feeds. Hip Hip Hooray! As I have mentioned, third party feeds (aka scrapes) are not the best way to do provide content. It’s better to convince the content provider of the powers of RSS (which Jenny and I have done consistently with InfoToday) and to get them to do it themselves, and InfoToday has done so. Great job Bill (and his staff).

Here is the rundown: They provide 21 feeds from their Econtent Research Centers, a feed of the ten most popular recent articles, which can be customized. Also (and this blows my mind because they “get it”), users can get a personalized feed using the following URL: http://www.econtentmag.com/rss/default.aspx?Criteria=search&query=. Just place your keyword or key phrase after the “query=” and you have a personalized feed.

Bill also mentioned that they are going to be doing this for some of their other products in the future. This is great news for the information professional community as it shows that we are (and need to be) constantly ahead of the curve when it comes to content delivery. I’m a very happy librarian today.

Thanks again Bill.

Not only did the new Feedster go live today (see Scott’s post and my post over at ResourceShelf for more information), but they made LS the Feed of the Day. Thanks Scott(s).

They also have a neat calendar feature, which looks sweet!

I saw this last night, but couldn’t blog it until today because Blogger was doing some maintenance.

Anyway, Bloogz, which specializes in indexing and searching weblogs (and has a neat language feature) has just released a (web-based aggregator. It’s still in beta testing, but I signed up and gave it a run last night. Not too bad. It has a pre-update Bloglines interface look (which I was more partial to), plus an “Inbox” feature which shows all of the feeds that one has subscribed to, with any new posts. This is one of the features on Feed on Feeds that I love (actually, it’s the main interface). There are, of course, folders, and a feed management section on the Bloogz reader. Not bad for a beta. (link via del.icio.us)

For the last Internet Spotlight column of the year (Nov/Dec issue), I always like to do some sort of wrap-up or “best of” piece. Last year, I concentrated on search engines. This year, I want to touch upon the favorite/most useful new web tools that came out during the past year. I think that my columns are better with reader input.

What were your favorite/useful web tools that you have utilized in the past year or so (Say from June 2003 to the present)? I’m not just talking about web resources (although those certainly count) but tools, software, etc. For example, I’m definitely going to mention Bug Me Not, which I immediately started using when I came across it. Think of those online tools that you use everyday and that, if taken away, would make you sad. Those are the ones that I am looking for.

So, if you have a resource that you think should be mentioned, send me a note at stevenmcohen [at] gmail.com or use the contact form. Please make sure to include the following: Name, library, position, the resource, and why you think it is useful.

Fellow library bloggers, I could use your linkage here to get this out to as many people as possible. Also, if someone wouldn’t mind posting this on a few listservs, that would be appreciated.

Note: Your submitting information to me does not necessarily mean that it will be mentioned in the column. Also, if you don’t want me to mention anything that you submit, please let me know and I won’t quote you.