Archive for December, 2004
The Six Degrees World of Inventors
December 16th, 2004David Teten links to and article titled, “Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors”, which appeared on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge page. A quote:
“Six degrees of separation seems to work well for B-list actors—but does it have anything to say about innovation and business?
HBS associate professor Lee Fleming [...]
RSS Committee at ALA?
December 16th, 2004Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not what you think. I had both hands raised in the air doing a “Hip Hip Hooray” before I read more about it on Beyond the Job (this link may be a bit off - they need to change their permalinks):
“During 2004, RUSA reorganized some of its [...]
Does Your Employer Know That You Blog? Why Not?
December 16th, 2004There is long running debate in the blogging realm about whether bloggers should be up front with their employers about their blog. The answer to the question shouldn’t be that hard. If you want your employers to know about your blog, then just put your name on it. They will find you. [...]
No Blogging at Conferences?
December 15th, 2004A short, but interesting post (considering that the PLA blog will be launching soon) from Andy Beal about the restrictions of blogging at the SES conference. Apparently, they are not allowed to check e-mail or blog in the press room.
I’m not at SES so I don’t know how it is set up. I’ll [...]
Popularity of Librarian Blogs
December 13th, 2004Blake takes a stab at the popularity of librarian blogs, and comes to a few conclusions:
“So, to summarize what I’ve learned so far, The Shifted Librarian is the most poular librarian blog, according to my interpretation of browsing a bunch of sites that attempt to measure popularity. (Since I host The Shifted Librarian I can [...]
Ethics, Blogging, and ALA Midwinter
December 13th, 2004Karen Schneider blogs:
“I’m hoping that those of us blogging PLA’s meetings at the ALA Midwinter 2005 conference are willing to talk about, and agree to, guidelines for our own blogging, and are willing to commit to standards of blogging that won’t make us cringe when we look back at our activities ten or thirty [...]
Libraries with columns
December 13th, 2004I bookmarked this article in my drafts folder on Friday, and on perusal today saw a great quote. The article is titled, “Library columnists share love of words“.
“After reading their columns and looking at their libraries’ Web sites, I have a strong urge to go visit each person. And I realize that is probably [...]
More on Customized Yahoo Feeds
December 10th, 2004The other day, I mentioned that you can get an RSS Feed for ALA by using the “inurl” search at Yahoo News. I played on Yahoo News again this morning (querying different organizations and associations) and found 2 more that may be useful.
+ White House press releases (RSS Feed)
+ American Medical Association Press [...]
Karen Schneider Talks About Blog Ethics
December 10th, 2004Karen talks about librarian weblogs and ethical considerations:
“For some time I’ve grumbled and groused about the practices of librarian bloggers. Too many of us want to be considered serious citizen-journalists, when it suits us, but fall back on ‘hey, it’s only a blog’ when we’d rather post first and fact-check later, present commentary as ‘news,’ [...]
Great New from Feedster and Moreover…and a Question
December 10th, 2004Two press releases were issued today which should have a significant impact on weblogs and RSS. First, Feedster has gotten more venture capital money, which is always nice to read. Congrats Scotts.
Second, Moreover has come out with a Pinging service today, which is great news if you happen to get content from them [...]
RSS: Tooling Up the Information Brokers
December 9th, 2004Charlie Wood, over at Moonwatcher has a few thoughts about RSS and Information Brokers:
“There is a fundamental problem facing people whose job it is to gather and analyze data and communicate their findings: the volume of data available electronically is increasing exponentially, making the filtering function more difficult. On the other hand, increasing volumes of [...]
Some Press for the “Engine that Could”
December 9th, 2004I’m not into Podcasting (yet) so I have nothing to add to an article from Wired titled ‘Video Feeds Follow Podcasting’. My only reason for linking it here is to give a “shout out” to my colleague Greg Gershman who runs Blogdigger, the tool I like to call, “the little engine that could”. [...]
Blogging at ALA Midwinter - Be a Part of it
December 8th, 2004I can finally let one cat out of the bag. There is one left in there, which will have to wait until January 2005 to be set free (sorry Fluffy).
I will be working with the Public Library Association on an official weblog (you heard that right - official). We will be [...]
RSS Feeds from ALA?!
December 8th, 2004I just had another one of my “DUH!” moments. I was writing an article on advanced RSS capabilities and was playing around with some advanced Yahoo news searches. While futzing with the “inurl” parameter I threw in ala.org for the heck of it, to see if any of the ALA web site content was [...]
Blogging - Where Do You Find the Time?
December 7th, 2004Anne Davis has a wonderful post on that often asked question: When does one find time to Blog? She quotes Ton Zijlstra and Lilia Efimova and then answers the question herself by talking about how important blogging is to her work. She says:
“At first, it does seem like an add-on and it [...]
And the Planets Have Alligned…
December 7th, 2004Odd. I was going to blog about Morgan’s comments on Live Journal and how well the LJ is the best blog service for building communities. Then, I saw an article titled, “Pulling sense out of today’s informational chaos: LiveJournal as a site of knowledge creation and sharing” that came out today from First [...]
QuackTrack
December 7th, 2004QuackTrack touts itself as the “The world’s largest browseable blog index - 330,000 links to 85,000 blogs in a thousand categories”. (I’m not exatly sure what that means). The text on the left hand side seems to indicate that the people from Blogshares are running this index. The cetagories are well attended [...]
ALA Midwinter Meeting
December 7th, 2004I will most likely be attending ALA Midwinter in Boston next month. More on the reasons for my attendance will be made public this week (I hope). So, was a bloggers dinner discussed? If not, shall we discuss?
Attention World - Librarians Get RSS!!
December 6th, 2004Even though this appeared on a TV movie that seems to be getting mixed reviews from librarians (I didn’t watch it), the news of the year is that RSS was mentioned in last nights broadcast of “The Librarian”. You heard that right folks. RSS on national TV from a character playing a librarian. [...]
More on Weblogs and Marketing
December 6th, 2004In an article from Newsday (no they don’t have an RSS capabilities yet - I read this in the - GASP - print edition this morning) titled “Blogging Bluepoint:
“For Stephen Harris, a marketing technology director in Whippany, N.J., writing blogs is a form of forced continuing education. His newest blog at www.think-ebiz.com focuses on his [...]
A Del.icio.us Interview
December 6th, 2004Rands In Repose has an interview with the J.D. Salinger-like Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us. Well worth the read if you are at all interested in this useful tool. A few interesting quotes:
“RANDS: At whatever level of detail you prefer, what have you been up to since you graduated from Carnegie Mellon?
JOSHUA: I [...]
Best Librarian Blog Poll
December 6th, 2004It looks like Incsub is running yet another “Best Blog” poll. There are several categories, related to teaching and education, with one geared towards librarian blogs. Only 3 librarian blogs are in the running (Jessamyn, Jenny, and me), which doesn’t seem like enough. Where is Resourceshelf, Tame the Web, Walking Paper, LISNews, [...]
RSS Feeds from the National University of Ireland, Galway Library
December 6th, 2004I’ve been cleaning out my drafts folder (posting some of it to LS and Furling the rest) and came across the RSS Feeds that are available from the National University of Ireland, Galway Library. There are 14 feeds available, which come directly from their catalog. They are probably using these feeds to update [...]
LISFeeds Help Need - Geeks Wanted
December 4th, 2004So, we (well Blake, since he does all of the backend stuff) are in need of some help with LISFeeds (Remember that place?). We need a script that will be able to grab any feed (RSS, Atom, whatever), parse it, and throw in into a MySQL database. It can be written in php, [...]
A Wiki About a Blog About Social Software….at a Library Conference.
December 3rd, 2004John Anderies writes in:
“A group of music librarians will be blogging in real time during the upcoming Music Library Association annual meeting in Vancouver, BC, in February. I’ve started a Wiki to gather ideas from the Library Blogging community on what nifty tricks we might include.”
Jenny had some ideas about what she would like [...]
RSScache.com
December 3rd, 2004For those that think that their RSS Feed is getting hit way too often (I should be so lucky) or whose libraries complain that their RSS feed is over-extending the bandwidth on the server (again, they should be so lucky), RSScache may be a viable solution. What is RSSCache?
“Instead of accessing the feed directly [...]
Why Blogging Works - A Case Study
December 2nd, 2004Well, not a real case study, but a story that could be turned into a case study.
On Tuesday, I blogged about CiteULike. Big whoop, right? Everyone is blogging about CiteULike. It’s hot right now. Big deal.
Here’s the big deal. The day after I blogged about it, I received [...]
How to be a NewsMaster Parts 1-3
December 2nd, 2004Roland Tanglao has written a few blog posts on how to use Feedster and PubSub as well as “How to be a Newsmsater”, which I will delve into later tonight.
1) How to use PubSub
2) How to use Feedster
3) How to be a Newsmater
Take a look. And grab his RSS Feed when you get a [...]
Mandatory Blogging?
December 2nd, 2004In a post about a collaborative communication tool used in some corporations, Charlene Li quotes from one of her reports:
“Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, email address and a URL for their blog. The company would give all of [...]
2 more customized RSS Feed tools using Amazon API
December 2nd, 2004Both of these ideas have already been created by other programmers, but they may be useful.
+ Amazon Wishlist via RSS - Just as it says. No explanation necessary (via del.icio.us)
+ Amazon RSS Feed Generator - I currently use OnFocus for this service, but this one from Oxus seems a bit more [...]