Ballad in Plain E

A few months ago I borrowed an O’Reilly book called Ambient Findability from VPL. It was written by Peter Morville, who is a librarian and an accomplished information architect. I had only made my way through a few chapters when I had to return it because there were other holds on it, but I would really like to pick up a copy or borrow it again some time. At any rate, what I did read what really interesting and full of vivid examples of wayfinding.

Speaking of VPL, those black, recycled material VPL bags are everywhere: the Lululemon of the literati. Every time I turn around, I see one–on transit, on the Drive, in the mall…. I have four or five myself*, and when my mum saw them, she demanded I ship a few out to her. At $3, they’re a steal and a very practical way to support the library. You can get them at any branch or at Book’mark, the library store at the central branch.

Heh. Looking to see if anyone had uploaded a picture of a VPL bag to Flickr, I discovered that photos tagged “VPL” often don’t have ANYthing to do with the library. This discovery led to another: that Flickr has “clustering” that tries to separate disparate content that has been tagged with the same term. Neat-o!

*not that I’m calling myself a member of the literati–I just liked the alliterative effect!

Well, Steve beat me to blogging about the new Google Co-Op Custom Search Engine, but I couldn’t let that stop me. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked. I’m not sure if anything will compare to the day that I discovered Rollyo, but this was pretty exciting.

Rollyo had been out for about five months when I heard about it - five months too many, if you ask me! The first time I visited the site, I quickly rolled my own vertical search comprised of the websites of big BC law firms and some of the major ones from across the country. (When I say quickly, I really mean it. All you do is paste in a bunch of URLs and you’re more or less good to go.)

This particular “roll” is invaluable for searching only these sources for a couple reasons, the biggest ones being:

• Simplifies searching for an “expert” in a particular practice
• Cuts through irrelevant sources to find very current (and usually authoritative) commentary on new legislation, caselaw, etc., especially when only results from our jurisdiction(s) are desired
• (I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but…) finding out what topics other law firms/lawyers are writing about is a breeze

I use Rollyo probably once a week to do one of those searches. Eager to see how it stands up to Rollyo, I created an identical engine in Google Co-Op CSE and ran a few test searches. The results? Not surprisingly, they were comparable.

When I ran a search for “Apology Act”, Google beat Rollyo by one hit. On a search for “tax on legal services”, Rollyo beat Google by one hit. Tests of more complex searches yielded different results, though neither set was clearly better or worse than the other. Since Rollyo is powered by Yahoo and Feedster, and Google Co-Op CSE is powered by, well, Google, it’s only natural that that results will differ.

Just as it’s a good habit to use more than one search engine, I think applying the same logic to a vertical searches powered by different engines is probably a good idea, too.

By the way, if you’re not scanning headlines at the Official Google Blog, I recommend checking it out. There’s a certain amount of fluff on there, but there’s a lot of good stuff too. The posts are made by the people who work there, so even if it is a little Kool Aid-y, it’s cool to read the description of a project written by someone who actually worked on it.

Some interesting things I saw this weekend:

Spam: The Documentary aired on the Ceeb’s “The Lens”, a program that features Canadian independent filmmakers’ documentaries. I missed the first few minutes of the film, but what I saw opened my eyes. I mean, obviously, spam is a problem: they’re always on about enacting laws to combat it, so it’s got to be a bigger deal than just how annoyed I get by it magically multiplying inside the fertile breeding ground of my Gmail spam folder. (Although you’ve got to love the spam recipes that appear as sponsored links - who could resist savory spam crescents or vineyard spam salad?)

I learned about Spamhaus, an international non-profit team of spamfighters. They track down spammers and publish information on them, and maintain a list of spam rings that have been terminated by at least three ISPs (Register of Known Spam Operations). This information, along with their database of spam IP addresses, helps ISPs to identify and get rid of spammers who are already on their networks and keep more from getting on. According to the Spamhaus website, 80% of spam comes from 200 known operations. Yuck.

Investigatory journalism high jinks ensue as the documentarian tries out products he’s bought from spam, and buys a “Father of Spam” trophy for Gary Thurek. The documentary was both entertaining and informative - watch it if you get the chance!

Douglas Coupland’s Blackberry Pearl ad
I noticed it in Maclean’s - the issue with the cover story that proclaims “THE INTERNET SUCKS”. A quick visit to the Blackberry Pearl website (www.blackberrypearl.com>Life>Douglas Coupland) reveals more on Doug’s use of the smartphone. At first, I was disgusted. And then I thought to myself that it’s actually perfect. Reviewers love to say that Coupland “has his finger on the pulse of a generation” and to some extent, they’re right, so the fact that he’s hawking one of the hottest toys around is completely fitting. Good on him.

Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival
Aaron surprised me with tickets to Memory Lane, a program that featured readings and discussion with four authors who’ve recently published memoirs. All the authors were great, but I especially enjoyed Ryan Knighton’s reading, which was actually a memorization. Knighton is blind, teaches writing at Cap College, and is really funny. His new memoir, Cockeyed, is about going blind. His other books look pretty good too, and the pulp page has props from Don McKellar and Christian Bok. Sweet.

I’ve been using Google Docs (formerly Writely) & Spreadsheets over the past week or so, and I love it! I’ve been using the Docs side to compose blog posts (mainly because I haven’t figured out how to add a spell-check plug-in to Wordpress yet) and do my writing class assignments, and I used Spreadsheets the other day to help a friend make a master list of slides for his art history class. And I haven’t even tried out the collaboration features yet! Here’s why I’m digging it:

• I can log in from anywhere via my Google account–as long as I have internet access, there’s no need to cart around that clunky flash drive! ;)
• It doesn’t insert as much annoying hidden formatting as say, Word, does
• The familiar interface made it a breeze to pick up
• There are plentiful “save as” format options (HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, PDF - yes, PDF!)
• Like Gmail, it autosaves, and also (this is so slick!) saves revision history. It’s like point-in-time, only for word processing!!

I’ll be honest. I only started using it because when I reinstalled my completely legitimate copy of Office XP on my computer, it didn’t want to accept the registration key, so every time I use Word, it prompts me to register and tells me only have a few uses left. Since I can’t be bothered to call Microsoft and complain, this is an awfully nice substitute. Obviously, Google Docs is nowhere near as sophisticated as Word, but outside of work, my word processing needs are few–I don’t use 90% of Word’s “features”, so I’m not missing much.

I was a WordPerfect fan anyway. I may never get my all-time favourite keyboard shortcut (the glorious “Shift-F6 to centre”) back, but it’s nice to know that I’m not completely stuck with Word.

With all the books, newspapers, blogs, journals, and magazines out there, it’s seriously hard for me to find time to read everything I want to. I’m someone who will anything for the sake of reading something (yes, I have been known to read the coffeemaker manual or fine print on a box of Kraft Dinner), so it’s in my nature to hoard things to read. The problem is twofold: even if I have time to read it all, do I actually absorb any of it? It’s hard to say. I’ve been thinking about what can be done to ease information overload and improve retention, and came up with this list.

5. Trust your real-life colleagues. They know you: what you’re interested in, what makes you laugh, and what gets you riled up. And they’re already sending you things they know you’ll want to read. So go ahead, trust them. Give their suggestions priority, especially if they work in environments similar to yours. Don’t forget to return the favour. (I’m working on giving people a little more to go on than just “thought you might be interested” and adding something concrete and specific about why they should read it.)

4. Don’t over- or underestimate the heavyweights. The blogosphere is so ridiculously self-referential that anything really good (news, commentary, or otherwise) is going to get picked up by lots of bloggers, especially the really prominent ones. Find a few you consider to be “star” bloggers and get to know their posting styles. Reevaluate periodically…are they still living up to your expectations?

3. Be ruthless. For RSS, I try to review and weed my feeds every few months, to get rid of stuff that I subscribed to on a whim but haven’t looked at regularly since. As for paper, I usually have a pile of magazines and journals stacked up on my desk, both at home and at work, in which I will often find articles that are months old and pretty much out of date. It can be painful, but I try to remember Jack Handey’s advice: “If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let’em go, because, man, they’re gone”, and apply it to my accumulation of periodicals. Just let those articles go. They’re gone.

2. Think smaller and narrower. Until recently, I had the Wired RSS feed in my aggregator, but that baby spit up way too much content for me - sometimes a dozen or more new items in a day (which is obviously a fine volume of headlines or news, but not articles). I noticed that I was consistently keeping Lore Sjöberg’s AltText and Tony Long’s The Luddite columns new. So, I got rid of the “Everything from Wired” feed and subscribed only to those two. My IRL friend Laurel is a devout Wired reader, so I know she’ll pass along anything cool that she thinks I’ll enjoy.

(OR)

If you’re feeling extra ambitious, filter your feeds so that they capture only what you’re interested in. Steve Matthews has a good post on Feedrinse. I’m trying this out and so far it seems to work pretty well.

1. Do something with your newfound knowledge . That’s assuming you’ve found something that sounds useful or like fun to experiment with. Submit it to a newsletter, ask a colleague’s opinion of it, blog about it, etc. Whatever you do, do something with it! I find that the likelihood of me putting some new idea to use is much greater if I revisit it.

So there you have it. What works for you? Leave a comment if you’ve got any tips!

*Of course, I did a little research before writing this list. It seems they’ve already found the cure!

I’m a week late on this one, but how exciting is this?

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to Speak at 2007 SLA Annual Conference in Denver
Between Gore’s opening keynote and Scott Adams’ closing keynote, I’m very much looking forward to SLA. Those speakers alone make it very appealing. I just hope neither of them have to cancel, as Bill Clinton did for the 2005 conference.

It’s a tough choice though: my boss will be going to CALL in Ottawa, and I guess I could go to that one instead. For the cities themselves, I’d rather go to Ottawa than Denver, but I’m sorry… AL GORE! Aieeeee!

You see this phrase almost every day…every time you turn around, some company or other wants your feedback. This post deals with organizations that really need your feedback, but not so that they can make more money.

As Courtney mentioned over at Reading is Sexy, we had an LTAIG committee meeting yesterday. We made plans for a lot of exciting projects, including the 2007 salary survey (see Court’s post for more deets) and our session proposals for the 2007 BCLA conference. Our meetings are always a lot of fun, not only because I really enjoy working with my fellow committee members, but because I always come away with renewed enthusiasm, excitement, and pride in the library community I’m a part of.

We also talked about how to generate more feedback from the members of the organization. See, LTAIG operates mainly as a virtual group: the closest thing we have to “members” is our e-mail list’s subscriber base, which is about 400. The list is open to anyone, but we gear our events and activities to library support staff (technicians and assistants). The downside of not having a formal membership is that it’s hard for us to gage whether our work is successful. As volunteers, we can only hope that our efforts are useful to others: no formal membership means no formal feedback. It can be disheartening to work at something you really believe in, not knowing whether it really makes a difference. In our next newsletter, we’ll be asking some specific questions in an attempt to get a more concrete idea of how our members think we are doing.

Within the library community, there are so many people whose volunteer work benefits us all. In every organization I’m a part of, people graciously give their time and hard work because they believe in the organization’s goals, and yet so often, these efforts go unrecognized. This is not limited to the library world - every field has peer associations that depend on volunteers to run. The more work I do in a volunteer capacity, the more I realise that it’s essential to tell people when they’re doing something right. Specifics are nice, too! I’m not saying this because I want the glory, and I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. Just as we want to hear what we’re doing right, we also want to hear what we could be doing better.

So, here’s my challenge (yes, I mean you!): if you enjoy or appreciate something that a volunteer/non-profit organization does for you (a conference or seminar it hosted, an article you read in its newsletter, etc.) - let someone know! When I attend a talk that is particularly useful, I try to send a quick e-mail to the speaker to say thanks and let him/her know that I enjoyed it. You’ve heard it before, and I’ll say it again…it only takes a second, but it can make a world of difference.

Conference-wide themes…

Big concerns: security of digital documents, awareness of “invisible” document metadata

Hot technologies: online collaboration, portable aps & devices, Adobe PDF

Best Swag:

• LexisNexis lipbalm
• Dye & Durham light-up yo-yos
• Datawitness wine stoppers

Best made-up and “Buzzword Bingo”-worthy words:

• Articlette (a small article?)
• Disgruntlement (Roget’s 3rd ed. 1995 says this one is real, but I don’t buy it)
• Paradigm (heard this one about 10 times - shoot the puppy and get rid of this one, already!)

Best way to avoid jumping on the new software bandwagon:

• “Just say no to X.0”

60 Marketing Tips in 60 Minutes

• Remember that “no” doesn’t mean “no, not ever”, it just means “not today” or “not this week”, etc.
• When developing material for a seminar, an article, etc., try to “touch one, use many times” to get more value out of it: turn an article into a seminar, a blog post into an article, etc.
• In the US, and presumably elsewhere, marketers have been known to purchase Adwords based on the specifics of a disaster within hours of the event so that law firm/lawyer websites will appear in sponsored links when people search for that news – may be in poor taste, but kind of smart thinking

Doing the Research: slaw.com and Other Legal Research Sites

• The dangers of relying on Google for statutes – Simon Chester (of Slaw fame) told a real-life example of a colleague who gave a client advice based on a statute from a page he found in Google: the act turned out to be several years old and had substantially changed, making his advice completely wrong. Lesson: Use QP Legaleze, eLaws, QP Source, etc.
• Altavista is vastly superior to Google for searching the contents of PDFs on the web.
• The dark web isn’t going away: 80% of Fortune 500 companies’ websites are unindexed

I spent the day at the Westin Bayshore attending the Pacific Legal Technology Conference. I’ve divided my notes into three sections: the techie stuff, the semi-techie stuff, and the real stuff. I took lots of notes, but reduced them down to the points that were either really cool or new to me.

60 Tech Tips in 60 Minutes
This session gave a whirlwind tour of new aps, gadgets, tips, and points to ponder.

• Infrared Projector Keyboard – you just have to see it to believe it
• Computrace Lojack for Laptops – here’s how it works: load the software onto your laptop, where it silently monitors and maintains contact with Computrace. If the laptop gets stolen, notify the Computrace Recovery Team and your local police. As soon as the stolen laptop gets connected to the internet, the software starts regularly calling the Recovery Team, allowing them to track the location of the laptop. The police use this tracking info to locate the laptop, and voila – thief gets busted and you get your laptop back. (If they can’t locate it, you get the cost of the software refunded.)
• Belarc Advisor – I’ve used this before, but never realized that you can use it to keep a record of software registration keys. Nice!

Powerpoint for Powerful Settlements
While the session focused mainly on creating presentations for settlement conferences, the speakers also talked about general best practices. The tips on the acual software were most useful, and I learned some nifty commands you can use during a slideshow:

• Hit “B” to go to a black screen, “W” for a white screen. Toggle on and off.
• Hit Ctrl-S to get a numbered list of slides

I also learned that spell-check in Powerpoint is horrible – you really need to check it manually!

I often get asked where to find photos for Powerpoint presentations, and though it’s hard to believe, I often recommend the Microsoft Office Clip Art and Media Gallery. Naturally, I was pleased that the presenters mentioned it as a good source (Good! I’m not crazy!) All you have to do to get at the photos is limit the type of media to “photos” and throw in a search term or two; there are lots of good ones, and they can make excellent backgrounds for slides.

PDF: The Latest Tricks & Techniques
People are seriously fired up about how cool the new version of Adobe Acrobot 8 Professional is. It has a wealth of features that are particularly useful for the law office, including:

• Bates numbering and redaction tools
• PDF “Packaging” – create a sealed package comprised of several PDFs
• Save an entire website in Adobe, internal links intact. This is VERY slick and I anticipate that it will be a huge time saver, especially for internet defamation matters. External links can be converted and brought into the PDF as well.