Steve posted to law.librarians about maybe ditching Bloglines.
I’m with him on that. I can’t get Manitoba “new cases” feeds from CanLII, and my Slaw feed hasn’t worked in weeks.
So what’ll it be? Google Reader? Anyone got suggestions?
Rex Turgano, one of the good folks at Andornot, has developed a neat site called LibraryDevCamp.ca, dubbed “a web playground for the library community”. It’s a place where people can try out open source software that might be of use to them in their jobs. Lately they’ve been adding links to libraries and other websites that are using particular software so that you can see it in action. Some recent posts have been on PBWiki, Scriblio, and Blogger.
A great idea, Rex. Keep up the good work!
One blog I’ve been reading a lot lately is Meredith Farkas’s “Information Wants to be Free“. She does a great job of bringing to light what other library bloggers are talking about, which is great for me, since I discovered long ago that I can’t possibly read all the blogs I’d like to read. What got me hooked on her blog was a very thoughtful response to a Library Revolution post on overachievers, underachievers, and motivation – which had me thinking about the debate all day. That’s the sign of a great blog! Meredith seems to be level-headed with a good sense of humour, and her writing is a pleasure to read.
In today’s post, she describes a “Library 2.0 idea adoption spectrum” that she and a colleague devised, which ranges from “Twopointopians” (awesome term apparently coined by Annoyed Librarian) to “Alienated”. It was an interesting exercise to determine where I fit into the spectrum. According to Meredith,
“I think most people who are into this stuff, me included, fall into the “Pragmatists” category. We are big technology fans, but we understand that these tools should only be used in libraries to fill needs. We realize that not all of our patrons are tech-savvy and that many of them have needs that can’t be filled by 2.0 technologies. We know that any time we focus on a 2.0 technology, we take time and resources away from something else, so we must carefully prioritize our technology use at work. Pragmatists manage to be both excited and skeptical.”
[my emphasis]
I guess I must be a pragmatist, but I suspect I may be headed towards becoming a grazer, because my excitement is wearing thin. Some days, I think I’ll scream if I read about one more new 2.0 application – library-related or not. I think it’s silly that it even needs a name anymore, which I guess it why I find the term “Library 2.0″ so ridiculous. For me, it comes down to one main thing. Either an application is useful, or it is not. I like Meredith’s assessment of why some uses of new technologies work, and others don’t:
“And a lot of the initial things I tried to implement failed. Why? Because I put the tool before the need, I didn’t consider the fact that my colleagues may not want to use these tools, and I didn’t really consider the maintenance burden these tools have.
…
[W]e’ve been successfully providing IM reference now since January 2006. But it’s mainly because it was done right, putting the need before the tool.”
[my emphasis]
Another aspect that comes into play here, I think, must be a generational divide. Had these new sorts of user-generated, AJAXy applications not been given a name and given the cool factor, I don’t think anyone my age (26) would have batted an eye. For my generation, “the next thing” has always been an inherent feature of the internet. I think when it comes to the internet, “progress” is a neutral descriptor – it’s just time marching on. The internet isn’t necessarily improving with all these allegedly 2.0 applications.
It just occurred to me, right now, that for me, keeping up with changes in web technologies has never really been “keeping up”–it’s just been the way it’s always been: finding out about new things, trying them out, using them if they’re good, and not if they’re bad. Maybe I’m biased because I’m the kind of person who enjoys reading about this sort of stuff — I know that not everyone does. Maybe for them, keeping up is an active effort.
It’s like this: when I was in high school, I had a couple of Tripod and Geocities homepages dedicated to assorted musicians and actors (and okay, yes, some bad teen poetry). In college, I had a Livejournal. Now in my working life, I have this blog. It’s just one thing replacing the other. But did people 20 years older than me have this experience? Or are they now looking at the internet with all these crazy things you can do and feeling totally overwhelmed – and either thinking “I have to master every single thing out there” or conversely, “I got along fine for ages without these, so why should I bother?”. I don’t know – I’m just speculating. Maybe what I’m wondering is whether you would find these types of “Library 2.0 – boon or bane?” discussions at all in a strictly under-30 set? It’s just interesting to ponder.
I know I’m all over the place here. I’m just trying to figure out where I stand in all of this. I guess I’m also a little worried that my growing wariness of this hype is going to turn me off of the internet–and that would probably not be good for my career. I’m already a curmudgeon in many other aspects of my life–and work is one area where I can’t afford to be!
Anyway, thanks, Meredith, for giving me a lot to think about and the fodder to break out of my blogging rut!
There are some new features in two of my favourite “people” tools.
I’m a little late on this one, but in January, LinkedIn debuted its “Answers” feature (I think you have to be signed in to see this section) . Don’t start mucking around with this unless you’ve got some time to kill. Nearing Wikipedian levels of time-suckage…it’s like pearl citation technique gone delightfully awry, in the best possible way. There are so many interesting questions posted, for example: “What’s the best question you’ve ever asked or been asked that helped you get to know someone better?” and “What’s the worst thing you ever heard on a job interview?” You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular category (for instance,”Law and Legal” or “Career Development“), which always scores points with me.
And Zoominfo, which has long been one of my favourite websites for looking up biographical information, has a new feature called “BeFound”, which allows you to take control of your Zoominfo profile, consolidate summaries, and add information (such as whether you are male or female), if you wish. Nifty! I’m not a man anymore!
I just had an excellent WebEx session and conversation with Kathy Bryce at Andornot Information Management Solutions. Andornot is offering free 30 minute consultations for clients until January 31, 2007 and I wanted to take advantage of it to learn a little about how to set up subject browsing for a new project I’m working on.
It never ceases to amaze me how much cool stuff you can do with Inmagic’s WebpublisherPRO, and Andornot is always finding innovative ways to make the software even better than it already is.
Kathy showed me two really nifty things:
1) Index pop-ups with dynamic query modification (find matches as you type) — check out Imagine Canada’s opac and click on the A-Z buttons for Author and Subjects — so slick!
2) Andornot Search Cannery (canned search generator) — this is going to save me hours of headache and confusion! Using this tool, it’s a lot easier to see how a canned query is assembled.
Kathy tells me we can tentatively look forward to a February Inmagic Users meeting, where they hope to demonstrate some new ways of generating and incorporating RSS into your catalogues/webpages. Can’t wait!
I’m moving in February, and hopefully to the West End, so yesterday, I took advantage of the beautiful, atypically rain-free fall weather and took a stroll down Robson then up (er, down – my sense of direction in Vancouver has never been skewed) Denman. Man, am I ever excited to be moving there – what a gorgeous little part of town. SO MANY SHOE STORES on Robson, Cupcakes on Denman, millions of Greek restaurants…but I digress.
As I strolled, I marked up a Google Map I’d printed out with annotations for amenities like banks, libraries, green grocers, liquor stores, etc. Doing this survey of the neighbourhood got me to thinking, “I wonder when A9 will get around to doing street-level photo-mapping in Vancouver?”
It’d been a while since I used the A9 maps–I think I last used it to check out the convention centre before heading out to Baltimore, which was back in June–but when I tried to go to the site, I discovered it’s gone. The service, which had only been available since January 2005, was discontinued on September 29th, 2006, as part of a series of service cut-backs. The service was fabulous: you could take a virtual tour of a city at street level, as if you were walking around, instead of being limited to an aerial view.
It was reported several places, all of which I managed to miss. According to the folks at ResourceShelf, Windows Live Local is working on the same type of service, but so far only SF and Seattle are mapped. A9 Maps had quite a selection of major cities’ downtown areas, which makes me wonder what they did with all that data–has it been sold or will it be reused at some point? Is there anyone else providing a similar service?
Just stumbled across a nifty new site called Confabb, which launched a few days ago.
From the About page:
Confabb (confabb.com) combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience.
There are more than 16,000 conference loaded and ready to go. Intrigued, I looked up the SLA 2007 conference, and sure enough, there it was! (Lucky me got to be the first to sign up as “attending”.) I looked at the page for a conference called Web Directions North that my friend Laurel’s going to in February, and there were three people already watching that one. BCLA 2007 isn’t up yet, nor is CALL 2007. The categorisation tool is wonky, which they admit and claim they are working on.
Basically, each conference has a homepage with various tabs including details, sessions, speakers, reviews, discussion, photos, news, and events. You can sign up as “attending” or “watching” or “speaking at” a conference, and from there grab RSS feeds for each conference. In the press release, they suggest people will be able to use it to research past conferences – check out attendee ratings on food, swag (STUFF WE ALL GET!), etc. What’s really neat is that where available, the conference tag is listed, and users are reminded to use the tag in their blog posts and photos for ease of aggregating.
So far as I can tell, Confabb has huge potential to be a one-stop-shop for conference-goers and conference-would-goers. I love the idea of “watching” a conference that you can’t go to but are interested in.
It’s early days, so it doesn’t look like there are many users yet. I’m curious to see how well Confabb will do, and a little skeptical, in light of many conferences having their own sites and officials blogs, but still, it’s a very, very cool idea!
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:
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.
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’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.
