Library Stuff

Zniff:

“What you see is the very first version of a new breed of search engines. A search engine that uses human information from normal internet users to find and rank web pages. The results you see here are from a collection of roughly 1.5 million bookmarks gathered by the users of the Spurl.net bookmarking service.”

Add the tags from delicious and Furl (just two among many) and an advanced search page with lots of boolean syntax and this may be a neat tool. Not that it’s new. Both Furl and Delicious are searchable now. Combine them all and I’d be interested in trying this out again. (link via Michael Fagan’s Bookmarks)

Neville Hobson writes:

“If I were organizing a conference right now, at the very top of the list of communication channels that I’d be thinking about in my communication planning would be blogs and RSS. Yes, I’d also be thinking of all the traditional ways to communicate – the website, the press releases, the flyers, etc – but top of my list are the new media channels.”

“There can’t be any doubt that this new way to get people talking and buzzing about your event – not only the formal stuff but also the informal, chit-chat type things that happen: see Renee’s blog for examples – has no parallel. It is the most effective way to rapidly spread the word.”

Another “Duh!” moment for me. Of course weblogs and RSS can help get the word out about conferences! Come to think of it, we (the Blog People) have been doing that for Computers in Libraries for the past 4 months now. Wow. Talk about your cheap advertising. Note to library conference organizers. Send out press releases or links to bloggers and ask them to hype up your event. We just might do it.

Pete from PC4Media (from where I found the above post), chimes in:

“Greg IMd me during the conference, and said: “It is like you are right here.”. Why? Because I happened to be reading and reblogging two of Marc Canter’s and Lee LeFever’s posts, that they were blogging while sitting next to Greg (I presume.)

1. Letting the rest of us who don’t go to these events feel like we are almost there (from an educational perspective… and to a degree: from a participatory perspective)
2. Evangelizing these events to the rest of us, so that we really want to go to them.”

That was our goal for the PLA Blog. We wanted to get people excited about attending the event and excited about blogs in general as well as having librarians who couldn’t attend the meeting but would like to play along at home.

Hello. My name is Steven and I’m a blog person.

Oh, and for those that don’t think that there will be any negative fallout from Gorman’s comments, take a look at what is being said. This is harmful stuff. And according to Gorman, it probably will not be worth reading until it appears in a print publication 4 months from now. By then, however, it may be too late.

(thanks Greg, Karen, and Michael)

Some press out of Network World Fusion that librarian bloggers can do without:

“If you think about it, it probably makes sense that the head of the American Library Association wouldn’t love bloggers.”

I think that Gorman should think about retracting his statement before this gets out of hand (not that it hasn’t already). Mr. Gorman: Feel free to use my weblog as a pulpit for your retraction. Do it for the good of librarianship, a profession that you purport to love so much.

There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post this week on the future of the newspaper business:

“The venerable newspaper is in trouble. Under sustained assault from cable television, the Internet, all-news radio and lifestyles so cram-packed they leave little time for the daily paper, the industry is struggling to remake itself.”

And then later on…

“Print is dead,” Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? “Get over it,” meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.”

My wife and I just cancelled our newspaper subscription this week. I had wanted to do that for a long time, but she persisted that it was worth the $25 per month. I’ve been reading news in my aggregator for a long time but occasionally picked up the paper if it was laying around. For the past year, I knew more and more of the stories that were printed AND had more information about those stories that I could relay to my wife. I think she got the point and made the unsubscribe call.

The next step in my master plan? Get her set up with an aggregator…