Steve Matthews, proprietor of the the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, has put together a list of Canadian law blogs. A nice narrow listing (we need a lot more of these for reosurce discovery – humans creating lists, not machines!), which I would love to see grow. (link via LexBlog)
A while back, I was watching a local public television channel late at night while writing an article and a band called Sirsy was profiled. Great sound, with a flute playing female vocalist, and well worth taking a listen.
This got me thinking (as smoke started to spew out of both ears) that if SirsiDynix were to throw a big party at ALA or other big conference, they should get Sirsy to come play a set or two. Actually, taking a look at future shows, I see that Sirsy will be playing at Kinsale in Boston on March 24th, smack dab in the middle of the PLA Conference. I’m there.
Scott Johnson, the co-founder of Feedster (for those into search trivia, Feedster was originally called Roogle – just for a few days), has left the company to pursue other ventures. Best wishes Scott. (link via j’s scratchpad)
One of the hardest pieces of the blogging community to measure is context. How many bloggers like something as opposed to those that don’t? This is not an easy task to accomplish (I’ve had many discussions at the office about context and intent in blog posts) and one that I have not seen done successfully.
Opinmind comes incredibly close. Claiming to track “15,000,000+ opinions of 1,700,000+ bloggers”, it will break down topics into positive and negative opinions. I ran a few searches and was semi-pleased with the results.
As an example, take the search for librarians. As of this writing (see the screenshot), there was only one false result (on the negative opinions side, there is a post that says, “sorry librarians are gay..” – it was a comment on a negative blog statement on librarians).
I also like the Sentimeter, which provides a quick percentage of positive to negative opinions (31% positive, 61% negative for librarians).
Opinmind is not without flaws. I ran a search for librarian and the sentimeter almost absolutely reversed itself, giving librarian 68% of the positive opinions (does that mean that bloggers don’t like groups of librarians, but only solo?)
I learned from the blog (subscribed) that you can put terms against one another (like Googlefight) and them compare the negative and positive opinions.
I ran a bunch of odd searches (some that I won’t link to here do to their graphic nature) to see what would happen and the results weren’t as thrilling. Using programming language to measure context, intent, feelings, personality, behavior, and the like is not easy. Opinmind comes close. I’ll keep an eye out on this one for you.
Organization, organization, organization. We all are trying to accomplish more tasks with less time and the key (we think) is in proper organization. Despite all of the Web tools out there to use, I am convinced that success will have nothing to do with them. Organization and prioritization is inbred and, I believe, cannot be taught. I’ve tried so many tools, tricks, hypnotics, self help books, and cults to know that I will always be disorganized. It’s in my genes.
That doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to try new things (it’s fun trying to be organized, even though I always fail miserably). I came across Voo2do today, yet another online tool that promises to get you organized and rapidly on your way to accomplishing tasks that are important to you.
Aesthetically, Voo2do is nice on the eyes. Using a very clean interface, one can easily set up lists, projects, add notes, prioritize with time spent on certain projects, and more. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles as Airset (no RSS, calendar, etc), but it is cleaner, which makes me wonder if it will keep me more organized due to its simplicity. I doubt it. Thus, many tools that I review are not meant for me, but for some readers who may be looking for the best to-do-list application. Maybe I should try Voodoo instead.
BTW, Voo2do comes form the same guy who brought us Frassle
Well, this was a necessary entrance into the podcasting movement.
Nativetext is an open community where humans will translate your podacsts into any language, for free. It’s not live yet, but you can be notified when it is. Great idea. (link via Howard Rheingold’s Links)
From my friend over at Critter’s Mom
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of” – Burt Bacharach
Sad and true. I do that all the time.
Here’s a few shots from the conference. A few thrilling moments.
1) Michael Arrington coming up to the PubSub booth and introducing himself.
2) Meeting Ross Mayfield and telling how much I love his del.icio.us tags.
3) Meeting the guys from Wondir (and having them tell the “Who is Steven M. Cohen” story to my bosses).
4) A session on Searching the Syndiphere, with lots of talk about librarianship. (Liz Lawley was on the panel)
5) Realizing that I was NOT at a library conference.
6) Drinking two “Yahootinis” (downed the first one – they tasted like Kool-aid!).
7) The Gritwire party (which was after the Pluck party which was after the Yahoo party…)
Structured Blogging was released to the wild.
What an enriching and exciting show. I haven’t met more new people since my first national library conference.
I used to play with the online version of Post-It Notes. In fact, the were always sitting on my desktop, where chose to constantly ignore them. Useful? Nope. They weren’t interactive enough. I could only just put my notes and nothing else. No weather reports, no RSS, no search engines. Useless.
Netvibes has lead the way in the new “my pages” phenomenon. Built with Ajax, they allow users to play with more than just notes. More customized pages can be created that fit the users needs.
Today, I came across a similar product to Netbives. It’s called Protopage, and has the some of the same bells and whistles as Netvibes, with other nifty features.
+ Users can create more than one page (you’ll see that on the bottom right of the screenshot), which is a bit different than Netvibes in that it’s all built in a non-scrolling atmosphere. Instead of putting less important content on the bottom of Netvibes, just put it on the second page.
+ One can customize the look and feel of Protopage. Change the colors, background, brightness, contrast, and more.
+ Date and Time – a no-brainer, right?
+ All of the feeds that you read are in one panel, and you can mark the entire feed as read and unread, not individual posts. Click on the feed panel and you can read the full text of the feeds (similar to Netvibes)
+ Docked panels – I’m not exactly sure why this is available, but if you want, you can “dock” any panel, which, to me, means that you can put anything in a holding cell for when you need it. I’d just put it on the second available page.
Overall, not as user-friendly as it’s competition, but a few good features had me intrigued. Enough to subscribe to the blog. I also just noticed that Michael Arrington reviewed this tool twice (note to self- check “The Crunch” first), but I’m going to publish this post anyway. Two reviews of a product isn’t a terrible thing.
I’m about to get on the red-eye back to New York after a tiring show at Syndicate. More on the show within the next few days (there was lots of library-related discussion which blew my mind!). A few pieces of housekeeping:
1) If you’ve sent me an e-mail during the past week, I’m not ignoring you. I didn’t have time to check e-mail, let alone respond to it. Please be patient.
2) I have two pieces of news, one of which I can share now because I’ve just sent in the contract. Starting February 2006, I will be writing a column in Information Today, ITI’s monthly publication. I will be writing on various technology issues, most of the ame type of stuff that you read here, just fleshed out more in a 900 word column.
3) The next piece of good news will be delivered next week, after I have two important phone meetings.
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