Archive for November, 2004
2 New(ish) Online Bookmarking Tools
November 30th, 2004The first wave of social bookmarking tools have been implemented and are now part of daily use (well, they are in my world). The leaders IMO are del.icious, Furl, and Flickr. They all have 2 commonalities that make sense for todays online world: Open tagging systems and RSS feeds for those tagging systems. [...]
Delivering the News with Blogs: The Georgia State University Library Experience
November 30th, 2004Teri Vogel has put a pre-print online of an article [PDF] on the Georgia State Libraries experience with weblogs and RSS which will appear in Internet Reference Services Quarterly next year. I’m going to print it out tomorrow and delve right in. Whenever I show off what libraries are doing with weblogs [...]
Greg Hill Apologizes for His Mistakes
November 30th, 2004In his column this week, Greg Hill writes::
“How I wish I, like Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, could say, ‘There is no mistake, there has been no mistake, there will be no mistake.’
That’s impossible where the column I recently wrote on Weblogs is concerned, for I claimed that blogs usually don’t invite their readers’ [...]
InfoToday Blog Rises Again
November 30th, 2004They are blogging again at Infotoday. This time, they are covering the Online Information conference in London, which they did last year. I’m glad that they are actively persuing blogging as a medium for content distribution. Pus, Dick Kaser is posting some great pictures. One problem guys. You need permalinks [...]
And….We’re Back
November 29th, 2004I hope that you had a restful and thankful holiday. For those of you that read LS in your aggregator, you will notice that the feeds are no longer provided in full-text. There is an explanation, but unfortunately, I can’t write about it until the new year. Let’s just say that big [...]
How to Make Google Scholar Work for Distance Students
November 29th, 2004I’m not sure how I missed this last week, but Paul over at The Distant Librarian has come up with a brilliant idea to market library databases via Google Scholar. While this might correlate with the “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach that I have seen lately in our field, it’s one [...]
Presenting with Confidence: 10 Tips for Librarians
November 29th, 2004In the latest round of articles from LISCareer.com, Robin Ewing tackles presentations with Presenting with Confidence: 10 Tips for Librarians. A well written piece that I highly recommend. 2 pointers that stick out include:
“4. Find - Find your own style. Your style will develop as you give more presentations. Whatever style you adopt, you want [...]
RSS Compendium Blog
November 29th, 2004Yet another reason to love Peter Scott. He’s started an RSS Compendium Blog filled with new/useful RSS feeds. Incredible. A few resources from the past week include:
+ ESL Teachers Boards RSS Feeds
+ Startster - “free web-based feed aggregator combined with a custom start page builder. it features a preloaded list of the [...]
Hiatus
November 23rd, 2004I will not be publishing to Library Stuff until next Monday. I need a rest and the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is slow anyway. BTW, look for some exciting happenings in early 2005…
Preliminary Programs for CIL 2005
November 23rd, 2004The Preliminary program for Computers in Libraries 2005 is now available. I will presenting in the following sessions:
Preconference:
Advanced Weblogs: Applications, Technology, Cases - With Jenny Levine
“This workshop focuses on the more advanced features of Weblogs and RSS. Topics include how to get the most out of Weblogs and RSS (marketing, creating a user community), [...]
Speical Issue of Communications of the ACM on Weblogs
November 23rd, 2004Unmediated points to a special section of the latest issue of Communications of the ACM about weblogs. Neat. Here are the titles and authors. You need to be a member to obtain the articles, but maybe your library subscribes to the journal and you can get them there. I’ll bet they aren’t on [...]
FeedFire.com
November 23rd, 2004From the site:
“Would you like to create RSS feeds without ANY programming at all? FeedFire will take virtually any web site and convert it into a RSS feed, suitable for use in web pages or RSS news readers.”
“FeedFire is a sophisticated solution that is simple to use, yet powerful, completely automated and customisable. No [...]
Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Includes RSS?
November 22nd, 2004Who would have thunk it? When I think about RSS, the furthest thing from my mind is PDF. It looks like 7.0 will have a built-in aggregator that will convert RSS Feeds in PDF. Very odd, but interesting. Why would I want to convert RSS Feeds into PDF? Anyone?
From Planet [...]
A Hero @ His Library
November 22nd, 2004Congrats to Aaron on his mention in Library Journal. Aaron is one of a kind and a true hero in our profession. Way to go!
Retrospective Search, Prospective Search, and Your Library
November 22nd, 2004Bob Wyman (of PubSub) writes:
“Ideally, users would have both retrospective and prospective search built into a single user interface — instead of having to use two different tools each of which only addresses half the user’s needs. Thus, at PubSub.com, we’ve been looking for retrospective search partners that we can team up with to [...]
In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries.
November 21st, 2004Yet another paper (not in its final form) on weblogs and virtual communities. I’m going to read this during lunch tomorrow and hopefully find time to comment on it later in the evening. From the abstract:
“Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public, there is a growing [...]
Digest tool for del.icio.us
November 21st, 2004It’s about time someone came up with this. A WYSIWYG tool for del.icio.us, called We Taste. Complete with a bookmarklet for IE. Nothing for Firefox yet, so if you can whip one up, send it in to isaac.mao [at] gmail [dot] com. (link via del.icio.us)
European Union Use Of RSS
November 21st, 2004After reading about RSS use in U.S. Government, Fredrik of Corporate Blogging decided to look for feeds from the European Union. He was semi-impressed with what he found.
“Most interesting, I think, is the feeds of the European Environment Agency’s State of the Environment Reporting Information System (SERIS). It is a bit difficult to find [...]
Blow Up a Library Today
November 21st, 20042 quotes from a sad story about the public libraries in Salinas, California, where the public libraries may close for good.
“My feeling is that this city is dying,” said Greg Meyer, a 25-year city maintenance worker who was given a layoff notice in September and will be unemployed in January. “We are opening the gates [...]
Librarian, Heal Thyself - Dan Gillmor on Greg Hill
November 21st, 2004Ouch!
A colleague of Dan Gillmor sent him the article that Greg Hill wrote about last week on weblogs and wikis. Dan points out a few errors in the story:
“Normally I wouldn’t bother to link to his piece, given its predictable nature. But as the e-mail correspondent who alerted me to its existence [...]
Conference Wiki and a Better Way to Aggregate
November 20th, 2004So, Richard Ackerman (not THE Rich Ackerman, of the famous WFAN sports radio here in NY) suggests that a conference wiki should have been created for Internet Librarian and Jane thinks that it is a great idea and (POOF!), he creates one. Yet another reason why I love our profession. We get stuff [...]
Legal Blog Watch
November 19th, 2004Law.com has started a Legal Blog Watch, which will showcase posts from the 6 blawgs that have been carefully chosen to participate. Very interesting…
IngentaConnect Power Tools
November 19th, 2004Ingenta has released 4 bookmarklets as part of a page they are calling Power Tools. The bookmarklets are as follows:
Search IngentaConnect - Add the link above to your toolbar and you can highlight text on any web page, click on the link in your browser and a search will be executed across titles, keywords [...]
Why Do I Love Weblogs?
November 19th, 2004Because after a long and tiring conference, I come home, open my aggregator and read posts that provide positive reviews and immediate feedback of tools that I showed off. Thanks “Half Baked” and Heather. I just wish I had more time to meet everyone. 4 days go by very quickly.
Happy Birthday Hallie Elizabeth
November 19th, 2004I can’t believe that you turn 2 today. It feels like you were born yesterday and I immediately fell in love with you. You are my world.
Ray Matthews…
November 18th, 2004I finally met Ray Matthews this past week. Great guy. Very humble (when Jenny introduced him to me, I tried to get on my knees and scream “I’m not worthy” right by the registration booth, but he wouldn’t let me). Ray has a lot to offer and hopefully he’ll be back next [...]
Quote of the Month
November 18th, 2004I know that I don’t have an official “Quote of the Month” thing on LS, and I know that this article came out in September but I wanted to highlight a great quote from the article entitled, American Demographics: This Way App:
“‘Content is king again,’ says Robert Mendez, CEO of NetHawk Interactive, Inc., a [...]
A Bit on RSS and Advertising
November 18th, 20042 interesting articles were published today on advertisements in RSS Feeds. I saw them both on The RSS Weblog. First, a story from CNET entitled, “Overture tests RSS ads” and the other from Wired headlined “Advertisers Muscle Into RSS“. In addition to this, I finally got my hands on that article in [...]
New Look to PubSub
November 18th, 2004PubSub has gotten a facelift. Great job. Very user friendly. The search boxes are right on the front page, rather than having to click twice to get to them. Also, they have a bunch of sample searches, and if you look closely, you’ll see one for Internet Librarian. Librarians continue [...]
Feed Envy - A New Term is Born
November 18th, 2004I promised Jane that I woudn’t steal this from her, so I was a good boy and waited until she posted about it:
“Over cocktails last night with Jenny and Steve and lots of other bloggers, it became apparent that the new challenge is how many feeds you can subscribe to in order to keep up [...]