Techgnos

Thing #23: The Survey

2009-04-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

TELL ME WHEN IT'S OVER

I took the survey. I told it like it was and tried to be nice about it. I worked hard to be succinct. Is it over now?

I'm wondering if I should go back and spiff up a few things. Proofread. Add some images. Do some of the challenges. Read more of others' blogs.

There wasn't time to do everything I wanted to the first time around. Hmm. . . .

THING #1 CHALLENGE: BLOGGER GADGET

I returned to Thing #1 and decided to add a gadget to the layout of my blog. I saw were lots of cool possibilities (originally from Feedburner) from which to choose.

I was torn between Cat Quote of the Day, The Zip Zap Game (a game about grabbing books), and Google Book Search.

I finally settled on Google Book Search because it required no lateral scrolling. The four searches I tried were--can you guess?--unicorns, bengal cats, harps, and perfume. All yielded interesting results. Try it!

NOTE: It's a little glitchy, but still cool. If, when you first arrive at Techgnos, the windoid for Google Book Search seems to expand and expand all the way down the left side of the window, just click on the Refresh button. That seems to stop it.

THING #5 CHALLENGE: PIKNIK

This looked interesting, so I clicked on the link to learn more about the Piknik / Flickr partnership. I took a look at the Piknik FAQs and took the tour.

Creating a collage looked fun, so I put together a (slightly kooky) collage of some of the photos I shot for this year's Summer Reading Program Training.

Here it is!

Notice how I've learned to insert pictures where I want them in the text?

They still paste in at the top of the blogpost, but I've learned how to click on the Edit HTML tab so I can cut-and-paste the code to appear where I want it.

I feel such a sense of accomplishment!

THING #8 CHALLENGE: TWITTER

Twitter looked intriguing when I flashed by it while doing Thing #8 a few weeks ago. Because I was so far behind, I couldn't take time to do any of the challenges.

I reluctantly had to give Twitter a pass. I'm delighted to have finished up early (just barely!) and had time to go back and check it out.

The Common Craft Show video was succinct and informative, as always.

I signed up and decided to stalk--sorry, follow--four celebrities: NPR's Scott Simon, Weird Al Yankovic, actor LeVar Burton (may Reading Rainbow and Star Trek--The Next Generation live forever) and fantasist Neil Gaiman.

I didn't think it would be a good idea to hand over my email password to let Twitter search for tweating friends, so I didn't.

I posted my first tweat. In plain English, no abbreviations. I'll have to learn those.

I wandered around the Twitter site looking for people I know. I decided to follow five people who have names that are the same as those of people in my department.

I'm not sure if these are actual colleagues or just namesakes. Perhaps their tweats will reveal this to me.

I uploaded an image to my profile and added three Twitter related gadgets to my iGoogle page: TwitterGadget, TwitterLit, and KidderLit.

Twitter Gagdet lets me access Twitter from iGoogle, and TwitterLit posts the first lines of fiction books with a link to the book on Amazon.com.

TwitterLit was mentioned in Thing #20, but I didn't look into it at the time. KidderLit is the kiddy lit version of TwitterLit. Intriguing idea!

THING #9 CHALLENGE: FLICKS & BLIST (INSTEAD OF LAZYBASE)

I went back to PictureTrail to sign up for a free account. I then created a rotating cube flick of six of my favorite small pedal harp models: the Salvi Arion, the Camac Clio, the Lyon & Healy Style 85 Grand Petite, the Salvi Daphne 40, the Venus Penti Chamber, and the Venus Prodigy Chamber. Take a look.

Next stop, Lazybase. I'd been able to look at it, but it just didn't work properly the first time around, which is why I didn't explore it further. I gave it another try.

Alas, it was still no go. So I googled around to see if I could find something similar. I found a website for blist, which presents itself as an easy, sharable online database.

I signed up for a free account and created a database called Small Pedal Harps which lists make, model, features, and retail price of various 40- and 44-string pedal harps currently available in the U.S.

Check it out.

Small Pedal Harps

Get your own blist widget

THING #10 CHALLENGE: FURL MORPHS INTO DIIGO

I clicked on the link to Furl, only to discover it has been absorbed by Diigo.com and is being phased out. While all the information about Furl remained on their site, I decided it wouldn't do me much good to learn about Furl if it would soon be subsumed into Diigo.

So I darted over to Diigo and discovered that it, like Del.icio.us, is a social bookmarking site--but with the attractive feature of allowing you to highlight text of interest in the websites you bookmark.

By highlight, I mean you can click and drag to choose the text, then click on a setting to cause that text to be overlaid with a broad swatch of transparent color--just as though you had taken a highlighter and used it on a text book you were reading.

You can also write a comment and attach that to your own private view of the webpage--just like glossing the text, adding a stickynote, or writing in the margin of your college textbook. You can tag, too.

The service seems to be aimed not so much at people casually surfing the Web, but at those who are information-gathering or conducting research of some sort.

A social networking aspect is also available, in that you can make your bookmark collections and commentary available for others to view. Users can join forums based on their common interests as well as chat with friends online.

I confess to finding this three-fold combination of bookmarks, highlighting, and commentary a pretty compelling idea. I am infinitely more interested in discovering what other people are reading and researching than I am in listening to them talk about themselves.

I am impressed by doers, not talkers. Talk is cheap. I'm afraid that over the years I have found most self-description to be neither interesting nor scrupulously truthful. I'd rather watch what people do than listen to them yak any day.

For this reason, the unique brand of social networking offered by Diigo (revolving as it does around the social bookmarking of informational sites) holds a certain amount of intrigue for me. Far more so than Gather's vapid chatter.

Having been unpleasantly surprised by an earlier social networking experience, I did not screw up the courage to join Diigo--yet. But I am actually thinking about it. I think I would like to return when I have greater leisure and check out the site more thoroughly.

THING #11 CHALLENGE: DIGG TOOLS

I'd already registered for Digg when I did Thing #11, so my challenge was to return and explore the tools in greater depth.

I took a look at the site before logging in: oodles of newsfeeds on all sorts of topics. Logging in didn't appear to change the view.

I clicked on Customize as perhaps the best bet for finding tools. I wandered around through the usual profile settings, uploaded my image, rejoiced in my lack of friends.

I wasn't able to successfully crop my image in Safari, so I logged off and logged in again using Firefox. The cropping function worked properly this time.

I saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the profile section, finally stumbled across a link entitled Digg Tools. This page featured various widgets. I added a Digg 2.0 gadget to my iGoogle page and dugg three articles (one about personality, one about IQ, and one about neurology).

I tried other links: How Digg Works, Take a Tour, Diggbar Tools, Digg Dialogg. All pretty standard stuff.

Diggbar Tools lets you view Digg from any webpage you're on while websurfing. Digg Dialogg chooses celebrities as guests, of whom Digg members can ask questions. Current guests are 3 politicians and a popular musician. Yawn.

The Partnership Opportunities link mentioned a few more possibilities: add a Digg This button to a website so visitors can submit stories to Digg about their visit to the site. An RSS feed, an API (Application Programming Interface) to request information about Digg stories, other ways to feature Digg stories and videos on a website.

I just didn't see anything that groundbreaking. I have this eerie feeling that there must have been some neat feature I was supposed to find but didn't. Hope I didn't miss anything, but I gave the site a pretty thorough once-over.

THING #12 CHALLENGE: CREATE A WIKI

Already done. See my Thing #12 blogpost.

THING #13 CHALLENGE: LIBRARY THING WIDGET & GOODREADS

I tried to add a Library Thing widget to my blog once before and failed. I will try again.

When I logged into LibraryThing, I immediately saw a link entitled Widgets Get a Whole Lot Better. That looked promising, so I started there.

I didn't have enough books (only 7 so far) in my Library to choose the basic animation setting, so I opted for a basic list, showing three random books, expandable to fill the space it occupies.

I chose a book with its pages turning as my preloader image and customized the link setting to link to Library rather than to my profile.

Let's see what happens.

Alas, nothing. I experimented with different types of widget, different settings, different browsers, different points of insertion into the blog's HTML, but unfortunately, the widget still was not showing up.

I searched Blogger's gadgets to see if anybody had designed a different way to embed my LibraryThing Library into the blog, but only found a gadget to allow me to embed somebody else's Library. No thanks.

However, while searching, I did come across two other gadgets that looked neat. The first was Librarian's Book Revoogle, a search engine for finding online book reviews written by library staff and users.

The second was Children's Book of the Day, which features a new book each day from the Interational Children's Digital Library's free collection. (This was mentioned as a possibility under Thing #20, but I didn't investigate it at the time.)

Nifty! I installed both on my blog.

As for the second half of this challenge, I signed up for GoodReads as documented in my Thing #19 blogpost. I still have no friends. I looked once more for a dozen or so people I know, but nobody yet belongs to GoodReads. If I can chip loose a little spare time, I'll invite some to join.

Puttering about, I added another book to my shelf. When I saved the review, I saw an option to "blog this review" so I copied the code.

I'll paste it below and see what happens.

Adventures Of Cow by Lori Korchek

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Thoroughly clever and charming. Miraculously obtuse, Cow misinterprets everything that happens, yet still manages to come out right in the end. As funny for adults to read as it is for kids. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews.

Why look--there it is! I only had to clean up the code a little bit (insert a missing angle-bracket) to get it to display properly. A miracle.

I feel I have fulfilled the spirit of this challenge. Only three more to go. (I'm not doing the one listed under Thing #18.) Forward.

THING #14 CHALLENGE: BASECAMP VERSUS ZOHO PROJECTS

BaseCamp by 37 Signals, the outfit that also offers Backpack, is a project management software used by many major companies.

Its focus is on facilitating communication between collaborators online. Business Week praises it as being "so simple" and "addictively easy-to-use." Testimonials speak of the software being intuitive enough that staff and clients require no training.

The software enables companies to keep track of multiple concurrent projects and communicate with their clients online. Project managers assign tasks and deadlines, while staff and clients share files and keep track of time spent.

Dozens of add-ons such as mobile phone and desktop widgets, software development and time tracking tools, as well as billing and accounting apps broaden the software's functionality.

Basecamp offers a 30-day free trial and various pricing plans from $25 - $150 per month.

Zoho Projects is obviously gunning for the same market, advertising itself as software for "Online Project Managemtent and Collaboration. Plan, Track, Collaborate and Manage Your Projects Online."

Rather than dropping names of well-known clients, Zoho Projects pushes its functionality, quoting enthusiasts who praise its "feature-rich" setup which offers "TONS more features than other platforms out there" and is "by far my favourite."

Major features of the software include facilitating collaboration and file-sharing, time management, deadlines, and reports. It, too, represents itself as easy to use.

On the other hand, Zoho Projects is much less expensive. Zoho offers one project per month free, 10 projects for $12 per month, and an unlimited number of projects for $80 per month, about half what BaseCamp charges.

Both products seems to have a loyal following of satisfied customers. If I had a single project that I wanted to use as a test case for either software, I'd most likely try Zoho Projects first--unless the project were compressed enough to require no more than 30 days.

In that case, I might sign up for BaseCamp, then cancel before the first month's bill. However, I think that might be a risky proposition, since even short-term projects often run longer than initially anticipated.

Zoho Projects would definitely be the lower-cost option.

THING #15 CHALLENGE: SEARCHBOX FOR MY ROLLYO SEARCHROLL

I didn't understand this challenge at first. I wasn't sure if it was telling me to create aRollyo searchroll that includes my blog, or to create a Rollyo searchbox to include on my blog. The instructions seemed to be telling me to complete two separate operations.

I took my best guess and proceeded accordingly. Here is the result:

It looks like it might have worked. Appears to be a Rollyo searchbox, appearing in my blog, that will enable me to search my Rollyo Harps for Sale searchroll.

Simple enough. I wonder why the Rollyo Tools directions were so ambiguous?

THING #18 CHALLENGE: FACEBOOK VERSUS MYSPACE

Flashback to the trauma of joining Facebook. Am I foolish enough to take on MySpace as well?

Negative! One must draw the line somewhere.

Eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, my unicorn skin all aquiver, I wheel and plunge away, leaving this particular optional assignment unassayed.

"Hey, come back here," Princess Spanky Pants calls after me. "It's okay. Trust me. You'll like it. It's fun!"

"Eat my dust, social networking siren!" I neigh over my shoulder as I gallop toward the final challenge.

THING #20 CHALLENGE: BOOKS 2.0 IN DEPTH

In fulfilling this challenge, I took a closer look at some of the Books 2.0 sites mentioned in Thing #20: TwitterLit (and its juvenile version, KidderLit), BookLamp, What Should I Read Next?, Which Book, BookStumpers, Book Glutton and the Unbound Reader, Podiobooks, Open Culture, Facebook's Visual Bookshelf, Lookybook, Storyline, and Sillybooks, to be precise.

TwitterLit and KidderLit are such a great idea. I added a TwitterLit feed to my BlogLines feed sometime back and just recently put a TwitterLit gadget on my iGoogle page. I just added a KidderLit one as well to iGoogle--but I can't find a feed for BlogLines.

Both services are a ton of fun. I always click. I can't stand not knowing the book that first line is from.

My only thought on these two feeds is I wish there were a library version which would link subscribers to a nearby library's catalog rather than to Amazon.com.

If there isn't one (and TwitterLit and KidderLit aren't interested in starting one), perhaps someone in the library world should look into creating one. Just a suggestion!

BookLamp appeared absolutely fascinating to me. What an innovative concept in reader's advisory! By tracking six or eight key factors (pacing, plot density, level of action, etc.), the BookLamp team is--apparently quite successfully--creating graphs for works of fiction that a computer can interpret and upon which it can make recommendations.

More exciting still, because a computer can store information on far more books than any single reader or advisor (your friendly neighborhood librarian, for example) could ever have in his or her own personal mental database, BookLamp holds the potential to be able to fulfill one of the toughest tasks librarians ever get asked to do: help a patron find the next good read.

There wasn't an iGoogle gadget for BookLamp, alas, but I don't want to lose track of this site. It's undergoing development, still in beta, so I added an RSS feed to the BookLamp blog to my Bloglines account so I can keep up with the site as it matures. BookLamp was my cool find of the day.

What Should I Read Next? malfunctioned after just one try, although the results for that try were in the ballpark. I asked it to recommend readalikes for The Darkangel by Meredith Ann Pierce. I love reader's advisory sites.

Which Book is a site that I discovered years ago (I think it had a different name then) and I use whenever I'm trying to help someone with a tough reader's advisory question. The patron has to be reasonably articulate and self aware about his or her reading tastes and preferences for the results to be useful.

The way it works is you adjust a sliding scale for your choice of four from among a dozen possible characteristics of a book in order to tell Which Book how happy or sad, funny or serious, predictable or unpredictable, sexy or unsexy (and so on) a book you are looking for.

For example, do you want a book that is very happy, medium happy, halfway between happy and sad, a little bit sad, pretty sad--or what? Just adjust the slider in between the two extremes of each scale to define how much of a certain quality you want the book you seek to have.

Alternatively, you could choose various characteristics of the main character, setting, or plot that you want to read a book about and choose them instead.

Once you've made your choices, just click on Go to generate reading recommendations. This is a wonderful, useful site!

I regret to say that Loganberry Books' BookStumpers costs money. It's a great idea, however, and if you're really stuck, $2 isn't too much to pay for help solving the riddle of that imperfectly remembered book haunting you from way back when.

From time to time I get questions like this on the public service desk. Not too long ago, a querent asked after a children's book about a strange animal--part lion, part elephant--that protects children from nightmares by devouring their bad dreams.

I was able to track down what the mythological beast was that the story is about (the Japanese baku or dream-eater) and suggest several possibilities, but none of those books were the one for which the patron was searching.

Had I known about BookStumpers, I could have mentioned it to the patron as alternative avenue for finding help. I'll be sure to let people I'm helping know about it in the future.

Book Glutton and the Unbound Reader looked wonderful. I'm assuming it carries only titles in the public domain. Still, what a great resource for students assigned to read a classic. Students can chat with others online while reading, leave comments on what they read, and later check back for responses. It's like a literature study group online. Keen.

Podiobooks looked like a great idea to me: audiobooks serialized and syndicated as RSS feeds. The site has lots of interesting (to me) and less mainstream categories (Alternative History, Fantasy, Magical Realism, and Science Fiction, for example).

The reading is not of the stellar, professional quality one would find on a commercial audiobook by, say, Recorded Books or Books on Tape, but it's eminently listenable to. It's more like hearing a teacher or an author read aloud than a professional performance.

And of course, you can't beat the price. It's free (although donations are welcome, with 75% going to the work's author). I like this site.

Open Culture has been described (in Web / Tech, April 8th, 2009) as "a free, online collection of human knowledge," and indeed the site is full of useful categories of learning, including free audiobooks and university classes and foreign language lessons.

Formats vary. Some are MP3 downloads, others iTunes, RSS feeds, streaming audio, or website links. And it's all free. What a great idea!

Living Social's Visual Bookshelf for Facebook was something I'd considered adding on my first pass through Thing #20, but I'd decided against it for lack of time. I'm glad to have had the chance to go back and pick it up.

Signing up was easy. Four of my Facebook friends already use it. By way of getting started, I browsed through popular titles and added three I remembered reading, all titles I enjoyed. During the registration confirmation process, I added 10 more without reviews.

I expected to be able to see my Visual Bookshelf in Facebook, but apparently not so. I have to go to the Living Social homepage, but from there I can see my Facebook friends who belong to Living Social.

Not as cool or as visually exciting as I'd hoped, but good enough. Oh, well.

Lookybook proved to have gone out of business! When I clicked on the link from the 23 Things at NEFLIN blog, I was saddened to see that Lookybook has shut down "due to lack of resources."

Building a library of children's picturebooks online sounded like such a worthy idea.

I was hoping this was going to be a link I could recommend for ACLD's Summer Reading Program. Too bad!

The Storyline link on the NEFLIN blog was broken, but I was able to find www.storylineonline.net by Googling. The site is nicely put together, obviously intended to be appealing to and easily usable by young children.

I listened to the first few minutes of A Bad Case of Stripes, read by Sean Astin and found the production values to be first class. The site also includes suggested activities for each work. A thoughtful offering. This may well be a link we can use for the Summer Reading Program.

Sillybooks looks like another promising bet as a Summer Reader link. Kids can click on (untitled) pictures to see an animated rendering of a picturebook which a narrator reads aloud. There are also puzzles, contests, games, and music.

Some of the books are written by children and are winners of the "Books by Children" contest. The prize for winning the contest appears to be having your book published, narrated and animated online. I think kids will find this idea very appealing!

CHALLENGES MET

Okay. So now I've done all the challenges I'm going to do. (I only skipped the Thing #18 challenge, and that was on moral grounds.) I can hardly see straight. My hooves are tired from typing, and my son is demanding the computer.

So I will stop now and post. It's Monday, April 13th. If I find some time between now and Wednesday, April 15th (the original deadline for completing 23 Things), I'll go back and proofread, double check links and add more images.

If not, so be it. I feel like I put a lot of effort into this learning experience and gotten a tremendous amount out of it. I'm just sorry it had to be under such an unrealistic time pressure. That was sort of like creating an emergency that didn't have to be.

By all means I think we should do more Library and Web 2.0 explorations in the future, but it should be in smaller bursts, with more tightly focussed parameters.

Someone really needs to cut 23 Things into baby bites so that those of us who are still of tender years as far as our technological savvy is concerned won't find ourselves choking to death from biting off more than we can chew.

Enough. I expire. Virtual Unicorn signing off.

Thing #22: Staying Current

2009-04-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

AND WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

This penultimate Thing begins, "We hope you have learned many new things during 23 Things."

Yes, I certainly have. I am now much, much more familiar with many of the websites and web tools I have been hearing about, and I have learned of the existence of quite a few I'd never even heard of before.

I feel that I am much more current with lots of the online technology that library patrons are using. I've learned quite a bit that is interesting and several things that promise to be of real value to me personally and professionally in the near future.

BEGGING TO DIFFER

All this is very much to the good. However, I must disagree in the strongest possible terms with the assertion, found at the beginning of the second opening paragraph of this Thing:

"Here are some of the other things we hope you have learned: It really doesn't take that much time."

This statement is misleading. Blatantly so. There. I have said it. The participants in 23 Things were deliberately misled. Our participation was solicited on the repeated assertion that it would not be a time-consuming endeavor.

Helene Blowers spoke at the Annual NEFLIN Conference of taking 15 minutes a day to acquaint oneself with new tools online. The NEFLIN blogpost on Thing #22 echoes that sentiment: "Make a resolution to maintain your blog, use the tools you now know. . . . Give yourself the gift of time--15 minutes a day. . . ."

THE GIFT OF TIME

Management strongly encouraged staff to participate. In many instances, staff were granted two hours of work time per week to participate. It wasn't enough.

I have heard many, many colleagues expressing great anxiety over the amount of time they were finding they needed to put into 23 Things. It was far, far more than they had been led to expect.

A huge percentage of participants fell behind. Some were afraid to admit it or ask for more time. Many staff worked on 23 Things covertly over an above their two-hours-per week limit. Others of us worked on 23 Things almost exclusively on our own time, at home.

I heard some of the most conscientious employees I know admit to "cheating." When I asked for a definition, a couple said they were blogging that they had completed Things they'd really only glanced at.

Most said they were "doing the bare minimum," which they felt was far less than what they wanted to be doing as well as less than was expected. They wanted to do better. They just didn't have time.

And they weren't necessarily owning up to any of this in their blogs. They felt that if they did not maintain a front, they would be penalized.

I FEEL A GREAT DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE

Why do people tell me this stuff? I'm practically management. You'd think they'd be more careful what they said around me. I found all these confessions profoundly disturbing.

I helped everybody I could, troubleshooting technical problems, for example. I tried to reassure people who were freaking out that we're all in the same boat. A lot of this is new to most of us. We're not being required to master the material, just shake hands with it and say hi. We'll all just do the best we can. And so on.

I also pointed out that NEFLIN was building in extra catch-up weeks and ACLD had decided to extend our in-house deadline for completion. (NEFLIN and ACLD management are to be commended for these decisions. They helped.)

WHAT WE COULD HAVE DONE BETTER

One of the reasons I'm so deeply introverted is because I'm reasonably observant about and fairly responsive to the moods of others.

I have to tell you these last couple of months it's been pretty hard being in such close proximity to so many people who were feeling this pressured, unhappy, and frantic.

While I think anxiety levels have dropped somewhat over the last few weeks as more people have become comfortable owning up to how hard they have been struggling, we could have headed a lot of this off at the start by being honest about the time commitment participating in 23 Things would entail.

23 Things is the equivalent of an intensive college level survey course, but it was presented to us as though it were going to be a fun little community ed outing.

We agreed to participate, but we didn't know what we were getting into. There is such a thing as informed consent.

I don't think anybody enjoys being misled.

Reading "We hope you have learned[ i]t really doesn't take that much time" in the 23 Things @ NEFLIN blog just makes me want to gore somebody through the vitals and then trample them with all four cloven hooves.

AND ANOTHER THING

Here's something else we could have done better: craft each Thing to take about the same amount of time to complete.

I've said this before. It's difficult to plan when ostensibly like units (the Things) require wildly varying time-chunks to finish.

There's no excuse for such unpredictability.

Here's how I would have divided the first eight Things:

Thing #1: Set up Blog and Register. Leave it as is. There's no way to pare it down, really. It's all of a piece. However, I'd allow participants two weeks to complete it.

Thing #2: What Is Web 2.0. Cut down the many articles to, say, two. They contain a lot of useful information and compelling opinions, but reading them and then blogging about them took a long time.

If it's really that important that we read them all, divide this Thing into three or four. Give participants one week to complete each.

Thing #3: Blog Search Engines. Choose one. List others as possibilities to explore on one's own, but don't require exploration of a second blog search engine. Keep the focus tight. Give participants one week to complete.

Thing #4: RSS and Newsreaders. Choose one aggregator and present it only. Tighten the scope of this Thing. Ask participants to sign up for two feeds and give them a choice of about 8 library-related feeds. End of story.

Mention the other aggregator and other possible feeds as extracurricular, on-your-own-time possibilities.

The idea here is to allow participants to complete the assignment swiftly and efficiently, then tempt them back to add more feeds to their aggregator on their own time.

Thing #5: Flickr. This assignment had the right idea, giving participants options. We only had to complete one option, not both. Still the assignment took quite a while to complete. Participants should be allowed at least a week.

Thing #6: Flickr Mashups. Too many choices. I found this one of the most enjoyable Things, but the 23 Things organizers need to choose a handful of mashups and instruct participants to explore those, choose one, and create a mashup.

The wealth of other mashup types should be presented as possibilities for playing with off the clock.

Key points: clearly defined assignment, tight scope, quick completion, opportunities for further exploration.

Thing #7: Online Image Generators. Choose one websites. (I suggest Big Huge Labs.) Select half a dozen from which participants can choose. The many others should be put forward as fun stuff to do if and when time permits--after the assignment is completed.

Better yet, divide this Thing up into lots of different Things. I saw so many possibilities for generating Library-related publicity and P.R.

One could do an entire survey course on online image generators alone. Because these are so quick and fun, participants could probably complete two or even three per week.

Thing #8: Communication--Web 2.0 Style. This was three Things plain and simple. Disguised as one, but still three separate things. Come clean. Break it into three. One week to complete each.

I trust one catches my drift.

BACK ON TASK

Okay, where was I? Now that I have returned from my tangent--and I'm not sorry I went off--I see that Thing #22 asks us to look back on our first Thing and reflect on how far we've come.

Yes, I can see I have come a long way. I have discovered tools that I will continue to use. Bubblr and some of the other Flickr mashup and online image generators were a blast. I really like my cute little customized iGoogle page. Rollyo was just too cool.

Slideshare, Zoho Show, Flicks, podcasting and YouTube hold immediate possibilities for library work. I'll keep using PBwiki, of course. Del.icio.us and Lazybase look interesting, too.

Bloglines, Technorati, and Google Blog Search may be something I can use. Ditto with Digg. I'm sure Webjunction and web conferencing will be in my future. I might even join Bengal Cats Place on Ning.

Google Calendar and the Ta Da List could be useful. I think I'll probably be checking in with LibraryThing, GoodReads, BookTrails, Overbooked, Librivox and BookBrowse from time to time.

I'll probably bail out of Facebook as soon as I decently can. Days after joining, I log on and all I see is a chaotic mess of commentary.

Is it directed at me personally (like a note left on my desk) or a more general announcement to the world at large (like a graffito on a wall)? Am I supposed to respond to it? It's cacophanous and confusing. Are people just talking to themselves? I don't get it!

And I can only say I find both text messaging and IM about as exciting as eating a piece of chalk.

ADDING A FEW MORE FEEDS

On NEFLIN's recommendation, I added Librarian In Black and Dangerously Irrelevant to my Bloglines account. They both look pretty dense and intensive. I'll try them for a while and see if I can keep up.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

I plan to keep up with Web 2.0 by trying to hang on to what I've learned and use it every chance I can. Work it into my personal life. Find ways to incorporate it into projects at work.

I'd also like to make time to go back and explore further some of the tools I discovered along my techgnostic journey through 23 Things.

I also plan to be bolder about trying out new things. Web 2.0 is trying very hard to be easy and intuititve. (You know, the old Apple model that was pooh-poohed by Microsoft for years until they finally got it and started imitating Apple.)

Because they are more efficient, ergonomically designed things get used more. This goes for web tools as well as hand tools.

I'll try to put some time in each week trying out new tools--although it will almost certainly have to be in chunks longer than the prescribed 15 minutes.

I do feel motivated. Having come this far, I want to keep going--although not at the breakneck, artificially accelerated pace of 23 Things. Once I complete the final Thing, I look forward to setting my own pace and proceeding with all deliberate speed.

Thing #21: Student 2.0 Tools

2009-04-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

ASSIGNMENT CALCULATOR

To use the Assignment Calculator, I pretended that I had a Library Science project due in 3 weeks. I found the 12 steps generated to be logical and the timetable realistic. The support materials (such as "Suggestions for Understanding Assignment Sheets" and "Sample Thesis Statements") was thorough and informative.

I especially liked that the calculator did not attempt to oversimplify the complex (but orderly) process of fulfilling a college assignment. In attempting to quell students' anxiety, I have frequently heard concerned advisors assure students that their assignments are easy and won't take long.

Such well-meant but inaccurate advice does students a grave disservice. Writing a college paper is an involved undertaking that will be closely scrutinized, measured and judged by one's professor. One's grade depends on how well one fulfills professorial expectations. It's a good idea to pay close attention, do the research, and devote sufficient time to do a decent job.

I heartily approve of the obvious care and thought that University of Minnesota Libraries personnel put into designing the Assignment Calculator. Nicely done.

RESEARCH PROJECT CALCULATOR

For the Research Project Calculator, I stated that I had a slide show presentation due in three weeks. Again, I admit to being delighted at the serious and practical advice dispensed.

The process and philosophy of creating a slide show presentation were covered in a succinct, linear progression that does not skimp on the often-slighted portions of such an assignment.

By this, I mean students were urged to storyboard their presentations, choose images and assemble their slides with care, rehearse their presentations and evaluate their performances after the fact.

This is all to the good. So many oral presentations I have witnessed had clearly been conscientiously researched, but the actual performance part of the project had received little attention and therefore fell flat.

The Research Project Calculator urges students to consider themselves the star of their oral presentation and choose slides that will grab their audience's attention. What excellent advice.

TEACHER GUIDE TO THE RESEARCH PROJECT CALCULATOR

The handouts found here looked useful. Under Step 1: Question, I particularly liked the "Student Research Planning Guide," "Narrowing a Topic. . . ," and "What's My Angle?"

Step 2: Gather had a similar array of eminently utilitarian guides, such as "Interview Tip Sheet," "Boolean Basics," and "10 Questions for Evaluating Websites."

The "Sample Idea Sketch" and "Outline Organizer" found under Step 3: Conclude looked equally practical, as did the advice for essays, videos, and slide presentations under the last step, Step 4: Conclude.

The discussion sections "About the Research Calculator" and the "No Time? Suggestions for Condensing" for each of the 5 steps in the process were equally well crafted and useful.

WHAT WE COULD MAKE OF ALL THIS

I can certainly see making use of the Assignment and Research Project Calculators as well as the Teacher Guide in the public library. Three ways spring immediately to mind.

First, we should include links to these sites on ACLD's brand new website, launched yesterday. The Homework Help portion of the Kids pages would be the logical spot.

Secondly, staff should make and keep at the ready paper copies to hand out to students who seem to be in need of them. The sheets should list the URLs where the Calculators and other handouts (part of the Teacher Guide site) can be found.

Finally, staff should mention these tools to both students and teachers, demonstrating the sites to them whenever possible. Explanations should be kept very short to minimize panicked resistance.

For example, "Oh, let me show you this cool website. It's got just what you need. See right here? It tells you exactly how to narrow your topic down."

Or, "Take a look at this. It's so simple. Just type in when your assignment's due, and it shows you step by step exactly what to do. It even tells you how much time to spend on each step! Is that neat or what?"

PERSONAL USE

These Student 2.0 tools impressed me. I hadn't realized tools like this available on the Web. Clearly 23 Things has come along at just the right time.

I actually have a library-related slideshow presentation due about six weeks from now. I haven't started formally working on it yet--it's still in the mulling stages--but when the time comes, I'll take another peak at the two Calculators.

I have no doubts about how to put the project together, although I've never had any formal training on how to construct a PowerPoint presentation. Just one of those things I've had to pick up along the way.

Still, it's nice to finally have a guide. The Librarians of the University of Minnesota Libraries should be commended for having so thoughtfully written out the entire process from start to finish.

Thanks, colleagues! Virtual Unicorn very much appreciates your efforts.

A REMARK ON THE SCOPE OF THING #21

Compared to some of the other sections in 23 Things, Thing #21 took almost no time at all. Its scope was just right. I think I spent a little over an hour on it.

Every single exercise in 23 Things needs to take just about as long. As an extremely busy unicorn, I need to be able to predict the investment of time that will be needed to complete a Thing before I dive blindly into it.

The organizers of 23 Things have it in their power to so arrange the workload in this training. Just divide the exercises up in to uniformly sized bites.

It will come out to more Things--quite a lot more, in fact. But participants' time commitments will be respected, their stress levels lowered, and their participation made that much more productive.

Only two more Things to go. I'm beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel!

Thing #20: Books 2.0

2009-04-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY

Thing #20 begins "With all the emphasis for online tools for learning and socializing in the library, what has happened to the book?" After the shock and trauma of Thing #19, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Before coming to work for the Library District, I worked in a bookstore for seven years. Prior to that, I was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. I'm a novelist.

Books are the whole reason I work at the Library. They are the sun around which my world revolves.

I recognize on a professional level the tremendous importance of the public library as a citizens' forum and community center, where people meet to socialize, discuss, and learn.

However, neither individual nor group interaction are appetites that libraries satisfy for me on a personal level. For me, libraries are all about books.

FUTURE OF THE BOOK

I found the FotB blog extremely interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone was seriously advocating doing away with print media--for all the many reasons mentioned in FotB's blogposts.

I added the RSS feed for FotB to my Bloglines account and feel inordinately proud of myself. See? Library 2.0 is already sinking in. I am learning.

LITERACY DEBATE: ONLINE R U REALLY READING?

Interesting article. As a kid, I can remember reading cereal boxes, toothpaste tubes, magazines, comic books, and numerous instruction manuals for appliances my parents couldn't seem to wrap their minds around. I also watched quite a bit of television.

Adults sagely informed me that all these activities would rot my brain, lower my self-esteem, and result in physical ailments of every kind. Hairy knuckles and spinal degeneration were favorite predictions.

Unicorns do not have knuckles. My brain, spine, and self-esteem all appeared in good enough shape to me.

So I just ignored my elders, who didn't seem to be doing nearly enough reading themselves. Unicorns hunger for knowledge. Any kind of reading is fun to us.

I'm therefore not sure I can get all that alarmed over self-motivated kids reading six hours a day on the Internet.

I found the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus webpage hysterically funny, and the one on sasquatch even funnier. I wonder how many adults would have been similarly taken in had they encountered the same spurious information in print?

Perhaps a similar percentage of the population to that which read Midnight, The National Enquirer, and The Star--or checks out from the public library nonfiction works on UFOs, Bigfoot, and . . . um . . . unicorns.

I hadn't previously considered the keyword searchability of the Internet to be a research aid for the dyslexic, but I see now how that could be. Most keyword searches bold the word searched as it appears in the found text, which doubtless also helps.

FICTION READING INCREASES FOR ADULTS

I guess I'm supposed to feel encouraged that more adults reported reading something--anything--in the last 12 months, but I find the statistics depressing.

The slight upturn isn't much, and only about half the adults surveyed admit to having read any sort of traditional work of literature (novel, short story, poem, or play) over the last year.

It saddens me to think how many people don't seem to share my love of reading. Reading's so enjoyable to me, I can't imagine going a whole year--much less even a day--between reads.

NEA REPORT READING ON THE RISE

This article was basically a reiteration of the information contained in the New York Times article above. I was quite interested in the statistics on the more dramatic increase in teen reading than that among adults.

To hear NEA tell it, their Big Read, Poetry Out Loud, and other initiatives were key factors in the turnaround. Supportive as I am of the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm a bit skeptical.

The Harry Potter and Twilight phenomena were much more widespread, touching many more teens. I tend to think that it was these and other popular fiction works that made a more significant contribution to the upturn.

HOW LIBRARIES CAN SURVIVE IN THE NEW MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

Overall, I like the points this PowerPoint presentation made. For example, that in the Information Age, information has become abundant, cheap, personally oriented, and designed for participation.

Also, the 10 fundamental ways in which the information ecosystem has changed:

1) The volume of information has grown.

2) The variety of information has changed.

3) The velocity of information has increased.

4) Venues and availability of information have expanded.

5) People's attention spans have both truncated and elongated.

6) Media environments have become compelling places to hang out and interact.

7) Better searching and customization have improved the relevance of information.

8) Information has democratized, enhancing the visibility of its new creators.

9) Voting and venting about information has proliferated with tagging, rating, etc.

10) Social networks have changed the structure of friendship.

I especially like Lee Rainie's recommendations for how libraries can leverage these changes to reach their patron base and remain relevant:

1) Be findable and available.

2) Become a news node and information hub.

3) Emulate social networks.

4) Build social capital using links.

5) Use Web 2.0 applications.

6) Solicit feedback.

7) Demonstrate how well we are paying attention.

8) Help patrons master the new literacies:

a) Graphic

b) Navigation

c) Context

d) Focus

e) Skepticism

f) Ethics

g) Personal

KINDLE 2

I have to say that when the original version of Kindle hit the market a year or two ago, I took a look at it, but concluded that it was too bulky, heavy, and that the text resolution was not sharp enough.

The new Kindle looks better. Sleaker, slimmer, more streamlined, lighter weight. The text resolution on the grayscale screen looks sharper. Text size is adjustable.

I wonder if you can turn the screen sideways to enable it to be enlarged a little further? That would be a nice feature.

The attribute that appeals the most to me is text-to-speech, enabling the reader to switch from visual text to audiobook format. This is something I've been interested in for years.

The $359 price tag is awfully steep. Reading matter is limited, especially for those of us on the long tail who are not always interested in the latest bestsellers.

It's also expensive. I'd have to see the cost of downloads cut in half before I could seriously consider a Kindle for myself. It's an interesting concept, though.

I wonder if Kindle has any plans to come out with a color screen and the ability to play video for its Kindle 3? Multimedia capability would definitely up my interest and make me willing to reconsider the steep pricetag.

KINDLE IN LIBRARIES

I think if Amazon will allow libraries to lend Kindles to the public, the practice will give their product a great boost in popularity.

I know that I myself might be much more interested in a Kindle if I had the opportunity to check it out myself before having to make a purchasing decision.

Being highly tactile, I prefer a test drive if at all possible. Does the item feel right? That's an important question for me that cannot be answered except by a hooves-on demonstration.

If the Kindle feels better than expected, that might go a long way toward ameliorating my hesitation to drop $359 on a Kindle.

A MOMENTARY COMPLAINT

I notice that Thing #20 consists of 6 articles to read and 8 categories of book-related online tools to sample. It has taken me several hours to finish reading and blogging about the 6 articles. I wonder how long it will take me to do the 8 mandatory categories? (There are two optional ones as well.)

If I were in charge of designing 23 Things, I would divide Thing #20 into half a dozen or more individual Things, each of which would take about 45 minutes to an hour to complete.

Designing a Thing that takes hours and hours to get through is setting participants up for failure. Staff in my own Departments have been asked to schedule no more than two hours of work time per week on 23 Things.

I have heard of similar time limits being observed by other Departments.

Making Things too time-consuming invites cheating. Not everyone is willing to devote their days off to this venture.

Nor is everyone willing to put in the time necessary to form even a nodding acquaintance with the material.

In this unicorn's humble opinion, 23 Things should not be encouraging its participants to give this ostensibly vital training only a quick skim. Cursory participation is unlikely to produce deep or lasting results.

BOOKS ON YOUR PHONE: TWITTERLIT

TwitterLit looked like fun. I love reading the first lines of novels. I added the RSS feed to my Bloglines account.

READERS ADVISORY: BOOKTRAILS

BookTrails looked interesting. The trails I followed were "Great Readalouds for Kids 5 - 6," "Fantasy Wonderland," "Great Fantasy Series," "Books I Have Read and Would Read Again," and "Fantasy / SciFi."

ONLINE BOOK COMMUNITIES: OVERBOOKED

I took a turn through Overbooked's 2008 and 2009 Speculative Fiction lists. This website has possibilities. I'll be back.

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES: LIT LOVERS

I chose to explore LitLovers for my book group resource. The sections of the site most interesting to me were the LitLoversBlog (I visited LibrarianInBlack.net) and the LitCourse Catalogue.

AUDIOBOOKS: LIBRIVOX

Librivox's ambition to record all public domain books as audiobooks using volunteers strikes me as innovative and admirable.

I wish their site contained an audio sample that didn't involve downloading. I don't have time at the moment to download one of their books in order to check out the quality.

Whether or not this free service catches on will almost certainly depend on the quality of its volunteer narrators.

Audiobook listeners--myself included--are very picky about narrators. We want to hear the book read well. Mediocre is not good enough. Reading aloud skillfully is an art.

BOOK REVIEWS: BOOKBROWSE

A quick foray through BookBrowse's "SciFi / Fantasy / Alternate History" list (found under "Book Themes" on the "Find a Book" tab) showed me that this is a site I'll be back to visit.

The titles listed on this list were definitely my type of reading. I think this will be a good place to get suggestions on what to read next.

BOOK RENTAL: BOOKSFREE

I was disappointed that BooksFree wasn't actually a free service. Only the shipping is free. Still, that's something. The selection looked good, especially in the fantasy / scifi audiobooks--but the pricepoint is still too high.

The basic plans (one item at a time) were restrictive, the more liberal plans (multiple items) expensive. The audiobook rentals were costly even at the basic level.

However, because for most of its plans BooksFree has no time limit for borrowers (in other words, no due date: just return items when finished), it occurs to me that a family, book club, or group of friends with similar reading tastes might be able to pool their resources, all chip in to purchase a high-end plan, then pass the books or disks around among members of the group before returning them.

Such a plan would drop the price far below the basic rate of one-at-a-time audiobooks for $22.95 per month. Six people could share six audiobooks and, by splitting the six-at-a-time cost (of $62.9 per month) only pay $10.42 per month individually.

That works out to six times the number of audiobooks as the basic service for less than half the cost. Not bad, provided you and your group could agree on what to order.

FACEBOOK: GOODREADS

Since I'm already a member of GoodReads, I decided to add my GoodReads bookshelf to my Facebook account. I did so and invited 5 friends to exchange book reviews with me.

FORGING AHEAD

I'm embarrassed how many hours I spent on this Thing. I reiterate my protest about better Thing design being needed. These Things are taking much, much too long.

Thing #19: Other Social Networks

2009-03-31T06:12:00.000-07:00

WEBJUNCTION

I took a look at WebJunction. I was familiar with the name, so I'm sure I've seen their course offerings before. It looks like a broad range of interesting topics, reasonably priced.

NING

Then I went to Ning. I didn't join, I just searched the list of groups.

I typed in harps and found a few small harp networks that looked promising. (Nothing in my area, alas!)

The search term perfume revealed that a lot of folks from outside the U.S. are interested in perfumery. This makes sense, since most of the finest perfumery ingredients originate overseas.

Then I typed in bengal cats. Lots of cat groups popped up--and the very first one was Bengal Cats Place. Their tagline is "Show us your bengals. We'll show you ours."

It's a group that exchanges photos of their bengal cats! I'll have to check this out further. I sat mesmerized by the slideshow for several minutes. I saw a cat that look just like Fudge Swirl!

Cooooooool.

THE LEMMINGS GATHER

Onward to Gather. I have to say, my first impression was not impressive.

Gather bills itself as "the leading social networking and media site for adults, with some of the highest quality user-generated content on the internet." How modest.

Apparently Gather is the place where all the NPR listeners hang out.

So I click on the link and wind up at Gather. I click on the "People" tab so that I can catch a glimpse of these intellectual giants in whose company I've been subtly nudged to feel awed.

Guess who's the first person I see?

Princess Spanky Pants. She wants me to "ping" her.

Wow. Great crowd. This is a party I really want to be at.

CAUTIONARY TALE

I call my son over to to the computer screen to instruct him on the dangers of attending parties, frequenting bars, and joining social networks.

Princess Spanky Pants and her creepy ilk are legion. My son's eyes widen as my message of parental toughlove sinks in: go to these places and this is who you are going to meet.

He gallops screaming from the room.

ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH

Okay. So now my mood is really crashed. I can't believe I'm being made to do this for work.

I return to Gather on the off-chance that my experience there so far has been an unfortunate anomaly. No such luck.

I click on the Groups tab, revealing that Gather has groups on money, pets, food, friends, love, life, republicans [sic], freebies, children, games, and I'm not yet seeing the difference between Gather and any other social network.

It's mass inanity as far as the eye can see.

NOT GETTING THE SPIN

Gather's homepage proclaims "Real people, real lives, and real conversation make Gather special" and "Keep up with the people, conversations, and moments that matter" and "Avoid the noise of other sites."

I confess I do not see this. The subject matter and participants all look terribly mundane, ho-hum, and unexceptional. A lot of slick ads for SAM-e and Neutrogena.

What am I missing here? Could it be that the emperor actually has no clothes?

WHAT OWNING CATS TEACHES US

I'm tempted to dig deeper, thinking Gather can't possibly be what it appears to be: an average, run-of-the-mill social networking site that wants to appeal to average, run-of-the-mill people who would simply prefer to think of themselves as somehow out of the ordinary.

Tempted--but then I think of what always happens when I'm cleaning out the cats' litter box and decide to dig deeper because I have this vague feeling that I haven't found it all.

The horror is, I'm usually right. There's almost always more to it than I originally thought.

I'M OUT OF HERE

I've had enough of Gather. Every hair on my hide is standing on end.

I return to the NEFLIN's 23 Things blog determined to proceed with my phaser set to stun.

I feel like I'm trapped in one of those original Star Trek episodes where a gelatinous blob that smells like honey could ooze from behind an alien rock formation at any moment and suck the electrolytes from an unsuspecting crewmember with its hideous tentacles.

The name of this Star Trek episode is "Thing #19."

Social networks are for extroverts with time on their hands. I swear to the god of unicorns, I have never been that lonely, desperate, and / or bored.

THE HORROR BUILDS

Now I'm supposed to read some articles. Grumpily, I proceed.

Reading the three-year-old Publisher's Weekly article on Gather depresses me even further. So gather isn't a spontaneous creation at all, the serendipitous brainchild of lonely extroverts.

It's a cynical construct of National Public Radio and the U.S. publishing industry, in bed together and looking for "traction." I'm gagging.

I actually listen to NPR fairly regularly, work in a library, read books and have on occasion been known to write them. Call me naive, but I never until this moment quite realized I was actually part of an evil Borg conspiracy to manipulate the hearts and minds of innocent literati.

Thanks for shattering my illusions, Thing #19. Now I've got little round sucker-marks all over my body and feel like I could drink about a case of Pedialyte.

GOING TO MY HAPPY PLACE

The article entitled Building a Social Networking Environment at the Library seemed right on target. I agree. Providing library patrons with multiple social networking opportunities is the way to reach out to patrons who have drifted away, gather new patrons into the fold, and retain our loyal core.

I checked out Pierce County Library's site and found it fully featured, with lots of great content--if a bit rectangular and compartmentalized. Perhaps our eBranch manager could tactfully refer them to Big Media, the outfit that just redesigned ACLD's website? We're curvier.

See? I drank my Pedialyte and I calmed down.

WHAT NEXT?

Wait--now I have to join a social network? It's the next assignment??? Augh! Make it stop!! Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Mind spinning. World reeling. . . . Blacking . . . out. . . .

AFTER I DECLINED TRANSPORTATION TO THE HOSPITAL FOR OBSERVATION

I joined GoodReads. Nobody in my Department or on my Facebook friends list belongs, so I haven't added any friends yet, but will keep trying.

I did add to my bookshelf three books I highly recommend: all three volumes in Ursula K. LeGuin's Annals of the Western Shore series. Their titles are Gifts, Voices, and Powers.

I joined several groups: Fantasy Book Group, Folklore & Fairytales, SciFi and Fantasy Book Club, I Love Young Adult Books, Children's Books, and Kid / Teen Literature to Film.

I asked for the group discussions to come to me in a weekly digest. This is similar to the way in which I used to subscribe to a harp discussion group through the now-defunct, text-only Alachua Freenet.

I am calm. I am breathing into a paper bag. It will be okay.

Thing #18: Facebook and MySpace

2009-03-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

COMMON CRAFT

Kudos once more to Lee and Sachi Lefever for a succinct and informative Common Craft Show presentation on social networking.

The more of these I see, the more I want to start communicating with others using stick figures on little scraps of paper and dry erase markers.

I very much appreciate the care and planning that has gone into these deceptively simple-seeming, ostensibly low-tech productions.

Communicating effectively is, in my book, the height of praiseworthy high tech.

EXPERT VILLAGE

The Expert Village tutorial on how to register for FaceBook was nicely done, clear, and short. I also watched the Expert Village walkthrough of the FaceBook guided tour, which was the next video in the series.

Unfortunately, I didn't see how to proceed to the next video in the series, which was mentioned at the end of the guided tour video. The video I wanted to watch next was on building a FaceBook profile--but I couldn't find it.

I found this lack of continuity frustrating. Did I miss something?

These videos were obviously intended to be viewed in a logical sequence, but I couldn't locate a listing of all the videos. Nor could I figure out how to proceed from one video to whichever one followed it. Alas!

FACEBOOK REGISTRATION & PROFILE

Disappointed but undaunted, I just went ahead and registered for Facebook, using my work email on the advice of the first Expert Village video.

Filling out my profile wasn't much fun, since I truly don't want people I don't know to be able to learn much about me without my knowledge. I can't imagine who would--and yet, clearly, many people don't mind. I sure do.

I'm downright averse to getting that friendly that quickly with people I don't even know. It's one of the reasons I don't frequent bars.

Not interested in shallow. Not interested in short-term. Quality in relationships is important to me.

FACEBOOK WALL

Okay, enough tortured self-disclosure. Moving right along, I go in quest of finding out what a Facebook wall is.

Since I couldn't locate the Expert Village video on Facebook walls, I went to Ask.com and typed in "What is a Facebook wall?"

The explanation I came across on Webopedia was the clearest. It stated that in Facebook, the wall is a section of your profile where others can write (graffiti-like?) messages to you or leave you gifts in the form of small, icon-like images.

Okay. Interesting. I returned to Facebook and clicked on the Wall tab, then added a couple of messages with links to two of my favorite websites: Adventure Beach Bengals and Thormahlen Harps.

I didn't really have any photos or video that seemed suitable to share. Hm. I'll have to ponder that. Maybe I should create some, like when I took photos of the cats. . . .

NEXT TASKS

Next tasks: joining groups and adding friends. I'll try to work on this tomorrow. Right now, it's 9:30 p.m., and I need to brush my teeth so I can read a chapter of Fire and Ice (book 2 in the Warriors saga by Erin Hunter) to Garrulous Unicorn.

This talkative colt is on spring break at the moment and will--as soon as I chase him there--be in bed productively regenerating lost brain cells. An activity I intend to emulate. I'll add more to this blogpost tomorrow.

MULTIPLE DETOURS

I sat down at the computer twice today hoping that I had perhaps 45 minutes to an hour to work on 23 Things. Unfortunately, I spent most of both sessions helping others with their 23 Things questions.

No complaints. These folks have generously helped me when I was stuck, so returning the favor is only just. It seems people are having trouble with wikis and podcasts today.

One person I was able to help. The other I made arrangements to work with tomorrow because neither of us could figure out over the phone what's going on with his podcast. It was working earlier today. I listened to it around noon and then posted a comment on his blog.

I don't know what happened between then and now. We'll work on it tomorrow when we're both in the same room looking at the same computer.

ADDING FRIENDS & JOINING GROUPS

All I was able to accomplish this evening was asking several people if I could add them to my list of Facebook friends and joining two groups: the ALA Members Group and the Library 2.0 Interest Group.

Both procedures were simple and straightforward, but I'm afraid I was so distracted I wasn't able to absorb much. I'll have to come back to this tomorrow and try to finish up.

FACEBOOK, DAY 3

Okay, I'm back after a night of rest and regeneration. I successfully uploaded a picture to my profile. Overnight, four generous people have consented to befriend me.

One of them recounted a story I had completely forgotten, about how I had saved him from raging rapids in 1986 using only my two floor harps and a length of rope.

He must have been about 12 years old at the time.

While reading his vivid narrative, it all came flooding back to me. (I used to tote those floor harps everywhere, especially while hiking in the woods.)

Well, it's a small world. I'd always thought this fellow looked familiar somehow, but had chalked it up (absurdly) to the passing resemblance he bears to a historic American president.

Of course I confirmed all the details.

ALERTING NEFLIN

The instructions for this Thing say to "Be sure to let [NEFLIN] know when you join [Facebook] so we can 'friend' you." I wasn't exactly sure how to do this.

I wasn't clear if logging it on the blog would sufficient, or if I'm supposed to use another method.

So, I searched Facebook for NEFLIN and saw Stephanie Race's Facebook account. But she recently left NEFLIN for a job with the State Library and Archives of Florida, so I didn't think I should trouble her.

I also saw "Brad Neflin," but haven't seen Brad's name attached to any of the NEFLIN's 23 Things blogposts, so I held off approaching him.

There were several Jennifer O'Neills, so I thought I'd better try something else. (There's probably some obvious method I'm overlooking here--but I'm new to Facebook. I'm sure I'll learn more the more I use it.)

My next strategy was leaving a message via the Meebo widget located on the NEFLIN's 23 Things blog. I was able to type a short message and edit my name, but I didn't see a control to allow me to "send" the message. I'm not sure if it has reached NEFLIN or not.

Finally, I opted for email. I'll check my email and Facebook account over the next week and see if I get a response. Keeping my fingers crossed.

WHAT NEXT?

Well, I think I've exhausted Facebook for now. I'm not quite sure how the groups work--perhaps by joining groups, I open up a wider circle of possible friends? That's kind of a scary thought.

I think Facebook would be much more appealing to me if I were a lot more bored than I actually am (which is not very) and had a whole lot more unscripted time on my hands.

To call me fully engaged with my life and work would be an understatement.

I think there must others like me out there somewhere in the world. Perhaps I should start an anti-social network called Camouflage for all us quiet, inwardly directed people who just want to be left alone.

What I need a whole lot more of at this busy juncture in my life is not friends but time to myself.

Onward!

Thing #17: Podcasts

2009-03-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

MILLER ANALOGIES FOR DUMMIES

Remember the Miller Analogies Test? Were you ever kidnapped, held at gunpoint and forced to take it? You know the test I mean. It's full of weird fill-in-the-blank comparison questions like:

1. A toaster is to a PopTart as a certain character from the Harry Potter series named __________ is to an owl pellet.

Or, in case your belief-system forbids you to read Harry Potter, here is an alternative Miller-style analogy for you:

2. A toaster is to a PopTart as a __________ is to a certain unfortunate Biblical character named Jonah.

Did you ever get any of those analogies? I always just found them amazingly irrelevant and stupid.

FLASHBACK

And yet, here I am, many years later with the following analogy popping into my head:

3. A podcast is to a radio broadcast as a __________ is to a movie playing at the local Cineplex.

I guess what this means is that podcasts let the listener control when to listen (and allows him or her to listen in private) in the same way a certain other media format that's been around longer than podcasting allows a viewer to choose when to view a movie (and to view it in private).

Okay, fair enough.

(Answers to the above three analogies, by the way, can be found at the end of this blogpost.)

THE COMMON CRAFT SHOW

Lee and Sachi LeFever's Common Craft Show episode, "Podcasting in Plain English" this time, was a model of brevity and clarity. As always.

BOOK-RELATED PODCASTS

I went to Podcast.com and listened to several podcasts. The March 19th, 2009, podcast of All About Books had a very polished, NPR quality to it. Charles Stephen and Otis Young discuss several new books, leading with War as They Knew It by Michael Rosenberg, about the rivalry between two legendary football coaches: Woody Hayes of Ohio State and the University of Michigan's Bo Schembechler.

Denver Public Library's had podcasts (audio only) of children's books. I listened to It's Quacking Time by Martin Waddell, read by a narrator identified only as Jeff, and "Frog," a fractured fairy tale from Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Sisters Weird by Vivian Vande Velde, read by Emily. These reminded me inescapably of library storytime readalouds.

I also listened to Episode 12 of a publisher podcast series entitled Sweet and Sassy Summer of Girls Fiction from HarperCollins. Laura Kasischke reads a spooky passage from her young adult novel entitled Boy Heaven. This was a slicker, more commercial production, with music and an announcer introducing the author.

ACLD COULD DO SOMETHING SIMILAR

I can see the Library making use of all three formats (expert review, readaloud, and author-read excerpt). A few others spring to mind as well: What about kids reviewing their favorite books? Or kids doing the reading aloud? What about a contest where kids submit their own original stories?

ADDING AN RSS FEED

The RSS feed I added to my Bloglines account was BigStoryTime.com, which is a series of 75 charming readalouds by five-year-olds. The kids' voices are delightfully expressive. The works being read are published picturebooks.

Although the podcast is not still in production (last episode was created in July of 2007), it is still available via RSS feed, and I'm sure it will take me a while to get through all 75 episodes. (Wolf's Chicken Stew was wonderful!)

PODCASTING VIA Gcast

I use this song in my storytimes for preschoolers, Kindergarteners, and even early elementary aged kids if they're well-behaved and / or sleepy. As a lullaby, it makes a great lead-in to naptime.

I sang this into GarageBand on my Mac while sitting in the kitchen. If you listen closely, you can hear the cats sneezing and walking on the stove.

Subscribe Free for future posts Add this player to my Page

ALL FOR NOW

Pretty cool. Podcasts are fun.

Okay, well, I guess that's it for now. I'm looking forward to Thing #18.

Don't forget to look for the answers to the Miller-style analogies below.

ANSWERS TO MILLER-STYLE ANALOGIES

1. Hedwig 2. whale (okay, big fish, if you want to be literal) 3. DVD

If you didn't get any of these, I recommend reading more British fantasy and / or Bible stories in conjunction with vacationing at the beach once a year so you can fry your brain on cable.

Thing #16: YouTube

2009-03-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

FUNNIEST VIDEOS

I already had a passing familiarity with YouTube, having been introduced to it by friends and colleagues.

It's one of those great-idea sites I haven't had a chance to explore as fully as I'd like to, yet. It reminds me a lot of those Funniest Video shows available on cable television.

THE PROBLEM WITH CABLE

We don't have cable at my house. It's not available in our area (yes, that's how far out in the woods we live) and if it were, I still wouldn't have it.

Why should I pay huge amounts of money for way too many channels I'd never have time to watch anyway? Not doing it.

I satisfy my pitifully weak cable-urge by vacationing at the beach once a year. The cabin has cable. We all sit around watching Animal Planet until our brains explode.

Here's a very silly YouTube video about cats. My opinion is that most of them are possessed by demons. Nothing a good exorcism wouldn't cure.

HSI FOR CHEAPSKATES

One thing we do have at my house, however, is high-speed Internet. It's cheaper than paying a mental-health counselor to help us work our frustrations with dial-up.

With HSI, YouTube is easily accessible, loads quickly, and runs without seizing up. High-speed Internet also costs less than cable.

In some ways, YouTube satisfies an unmet need I have with regard to cable. If I could pick the cable channels I want and only pay for those channels, I might be tempted to explore cable further.

But the cable service providers would never stand for that.

POWER AND CONTROL

However, with YouTube, I can search for the type of videos I want to watch. Most are home-movie-style amateur productions--many of them surprisingly well done, actually. Some are informational or instructional. A lot are humorous, and a few are basically commercials with professional production values.

It's actually quite a nice mix, and viewing is entirely voluntary, so the viewer is in control. I like that.

WHAT DOES THE SUPERBOWL HAVE IN COMMON WITH FRANCE?

I read somewhere, many years ago, that in France, instead of being spread out throughout the day, all the TV commercials aired during a half-hour period from 7 - 7:30 p.m.

Supposedly, it was (or is) lots of people's favorite show. Highest ratings share of any TV show in the country. Advertisers pulled out all the stops and paid huge sums for a minute or two of time. As far as on-air advertising went, it was the only game in town.

I have no idea if that was, or is, really true, but it's a nice concept. Sort of like TV commercials in the U.S. during our annual broadcast of the Superbowl. Advertisers go all out, design great, unique commercials that people anticipate with pleasure and actually tune in voluntarily to watch.

Hm. YouTube seems to have tapped into the concept of voluntary viewing as well.

COMMERCIALS & MUSIC VIDEOS

I took a look at the links to be found under the instructions for completing Thing #16. Google Video looks to be a functional clone of YouTube. That there are now over 60 similar Internet video providers just goes to show that this is a concept whose time has come.

It was fun watching some of the old TV commercials I remember from my childhood. Kind of embarassing, too. I can't believe we were that unsophisticated.

The video of the man caterpillar-breakdancing across the intersection was amusing, but it was followed by something even funnier--I don't know if I accidentally clicked on a link or if it just started playing spontaneously--a commercial for TripAdvisor which bills itself as a way to avoid infested hotel rooms with lamentable housekeeping and severe plumbing problems.

Nadine Velasquez in her femme fatale persona writhing around on satin sheets and warning us to beware of "dirty, dirty, dirty hotel rooms" was a stitch.

LIBRARY RELATED VIDEOS

Library Dominoes was interesting, but they should have had a much longer and more complex domino trail. I've seen a similar video done with VHS videocases that went on and on. It was amazing.

The WSU Library Tour was a great example of how a good soundtrack and rapid-cut editing can make even the most pedestrian subject (welcome to the library--yawn) engaging.

The OCPL Library Commercial was nicely conceived but didn't go quite far enough. After the buff young history student leaped over the furniture into an imaginary trench to avoid enemy fire, he should have found somebody else crouching there, perhaps an attractive

literature major hiding from zombies or musketeers.

LIBRARY JOKES

I had heard about the video in which the clueless young woman attempts to order fast food in the library, but had never seen it.

The Bible verses following the actors seem tacked on, not well integrated with the first part of the video. Perhaps the video was shot by a faith-based outfit promoting education? I couldn't tell.

If only the video had come back to the actors at the very end for a brief, live-action zinger. Perhaps library staff could have handed the patron a religious tract promoting wisdom and told her, "Here's the menu." We needed something to tie together the two halves of the piece.

Conan the Librarian was another YouTube I'd had recounted to me on several occasions but never before seen. It was a hoot.

MUSICALS AND COMEDY

Prankstgrup's High School Musical spoof entitled "Reading on a Dream" was pretty funny.

The actors' hyper-earnest portrayals of two sad and lonely people who find personal fulfillment and one another through singing and dancing hammily in front of dozens of other (rule-abiding) library goers was spot-on.

Even better was the spontaneous, embarrassed snickering of the nonmusical after the two protagonists clasp hands and run joyously from the premises.

IT versus Librarian was elegantly simple and wittily low-key.

I had seen Introducing the Book before and found it as funny the second time around as I did the first time.

The fact that the actors are speaking a language I don't (Dutch?) and I have to decipher it by the subtitles just makes it funnier somehow.

The main character is clearly a monk. I'm wondering if the man who arrives from the helpdesk is supposed to be Gutenberg. I love it how they play it absolutely straight.

It reminded me eerily of an old Saturday Night Live sketch with Steve Martin and Bill Murray entitled Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber.

I couldn't find it on YouTube, so I had to go to Fancast.

I hope you enjoy these three videos. I had fun with them. Now on to Thing #17!

Thing #15: Rollyo

2009-03-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

A FASCINATING CONCEPT

I found the idea of limiting a search to a select list of websites a wonderful one, since I am often frustrated by the deluge of results returned by search engines such as Google or HotBot that search the entire web.

On the Public Domain e-Books Search serachroll, I was able to bring up eBooks for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan without difficulty.

The Rare Book Library Search serachroll was a bit more problematical. I couldn't find any listings for either William the Dragon by Polly Donnison or The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The first is quite rare, the second not rare at all, although I assume there are rare editions. Perhaps the book dealers whose sites compose the list just don't have any copies of these items available right now.

The Quick Quotes serachroll easily brought up Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on."

Again, a good idea to search multiple quotation indexes in aggregate, while excluding those same quotes scattered across random websites.

JOINING UP

I routinely run searches for obscure items (such as 44-string pedal harps) with only limited success.

I can usually increase my odds of a relevant hit by searching promising sites individually rather than googling the Web as a whole. But it's tedious having to search each site individually.

So I was eager to sign up for a Rollyo account and try my hand at creating a custom Rollyo list.

I registered for an account and created a list entitled Harps for Sale. On it I placed 24 sites I regularly search for listings of folk harps and pedal harps (either new or used).

I entered 24 harp sites I search either regularly or occasionally for harps or related items (strings, sheet music, CDs, etc.).

My category was Arts & Humanities. My tags were: harps, musical instruments, pedal harps, and folk harps. I chose to make this list public.

HARPS FOR SALE

Now when I log into Rollyo, I see Harps for Sale as one of my searchrolls. How cool!

I typed in Lyon Healy Style 85 GP (a type of 44-string pedal harp manufactured by Lyon & Healy) and clicked on Search. The results were highly relevant. Much more so than when I search the Web at large using Google. Neat!

Here's the link: Virtual Unicorn's Harps for Sale searchroll on Rollyo.

I suggest you try the following search term: Camac Clio, Salvi Daphne, Dusty Strings FH36B, and Thormahlen Swan. These are all popular harp models. The first two are pedal harps, the second two, folk harps.

Searching these will give you an idea of who on my list is currently carrying which models of harp. Now you know the sort of things I look at on the Web for fun. Happy searching!

Thing #14: Online Productivity Tools

2009-03-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

FOUR FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

I have to say, I'm really getting tired of multiple Things masquerading under the aegis of a single numeral.

Is 23 Things You Should Know about Web 2.0 really still 43 Things that have just been consolidated so as to appear to be fewer in number?

I'd have found the 23 Things experience a lot more straightforward if each Thing had represented a single Web 2.0 tool and participants had been asked to do just one a week for however many weeks it took.

Artificially compressing the experience has only created stress for me and many of my fellow participants.

23 Things was billed--over-optimistically, in my opinion--as compact and time-efficient. It simply isn't.

It takes quite a bit of time to absorb even a surface understanding of these brave new tools. If we're serious about taking all this in in a meaningful way, we should allow ourselves sufficient time to process the experience. Speed-dating really isn't my thing.

Not much time left till deadline. I am determined to finish 23 Things. It was, after all, one of my New Year's resolutions.

I am also very, very tired.

Perhaps this handy countdown widget will spur me on. I intend to refer to it often, in ever rising panic as the deadline nears.

Created by OnePlusYou

iGOOGLE

I took a look at iGoogle and chose Gainesville, News, Humor, Business, Technology, and Entertainment as my selected interests.

My background theme is called Sweet Dreams (an evening sky with a crescent moon). My Country / Region are, of course, the U.S., with my zipcode as 32667.

It really didn't take much longer than the 30 seconds claimed, and created a very nice, compartmentalized, personalized start page.

Features included the weather forecast for Micanopy, Gmail, NYTimes top stories, Google Finance Portfolios, ETonline Breaking News, Date & Time, CNN.com, Joke of the Day, The Wall Street Journal, Movies, YouTube, UF News, Go Comics, CNET News, and TV Guide.

It seems to have lifted all my personal information directly from my Google Account without me having to do anything.

Now every time I log into Google, I should be able to reach my personalized iGoogle startpage just by clicking the iGoogle link in the upper righthand corner of the screen.

Pretty cool.

I decided to add a few gadgets just to spiff things up. The gadgets I chose were Google Calendar, Hangman (word game), Current Moon Phase, ToDo, Free iTumes Downloads, Google Translate, Dictionary, Spanish Word a Day, Funny Cat Photos, Movies Trailer of the Day. . . .

By this time, I'd gone through 20 pages of gadgets, and there seemed to be no end in sight, so I stopped there.

GOOGLE CALENDAR

After reading the recommended article entitled "The Web's Best Calendars," I chose Google Calendar for its drag-and-drop editing and color-coded layout.

Scrybe looked interesting because of its to-do list and ability to sync changes made offline, but I decided Google Calendar would work well enough for a start.

I filled in some projects and appointments for the next few days. It was pretty painless.

TA DA LIST

I chose Ta Da List to be my online to-do list. Signup was quick and easy.

I then created a list of various Cat Tasks: buy more bacon-flavored ferret treats, investigate kitty exercise wheels online, etc.

Not difficult at all.

I thought it was interesting that signup for a Ta Da List account issued me a private webpage rather than a login from a centralized page.

BACKPACK

Backpack bills itself as "An Intranet in 30 Seconds," and includes a lot of interesting features like info-sharing pages, messageboards, and to-do lists.

The feature that intrigued me most, however, was the group calendar. I'm in charge of my department's shared calendar, comprising daily work schedules, meetings, training sessions, and presentations.

The calendar we use now is a clunky Excel document on a shared server. It's not very elegant, easy to read, or easy to use. I'd love to find something better with which to replace it!

Having taken video tours of both how to compose a Backpack page and how to use the Backpack Calendar, I'm not sure the calendar can handle the complexity of my department's schedule--but the basic Backpack page looks intriguing.

I decided to sign up for a free account so that I could check out the features, and that's when I realized Backpack costs between $7 and $100 per month, depending on the number of users, pages, and storage space needed.

Oh, well! I will have to give it a pass.

CHECKING OUT THE SITES

I scanned the recommended resources, all lists of online productivity tools. Some of the same tools pop up over and over again.

Remember the Milk (to-do lists), Bloglines (RSS feed manager), My Stickies (sticky notes webpage markup), Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Meebo (IM aggregator), Google Calendar (online scheduling), iGoogle (personalized startpage), and PBwiki are the ones I noted.

That these sites are listed by multiple recommenders likely indicates that they are both well-designed and popular. Those I don't already use, I'll keep in mind for the future.

Despite my fatigue, I am definitely finding 23 Things an eye-opening experience. I had no idea all this stuff was available on the web--and much of it for free.

Thing #13: Library Thing

2009-03-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

NIGHT OF THE LIVING LIBRARIANS

All right. I confess. When I first read about LibraryThing in the 23 Things at NEFLIN blog, I found the concept intriguing--followed quickly by pangs of conscience.

Thoughts flitted through my mind about handing the asylum keys over to the inmates.

Allow actual readers / patrons / laypeople to catalog their own libraries? What about Library of Congress subject headings? Uniform titles? Authority control?

My old cataloguing professor, may she rest in peace, returned briefly from the grave to haunt me.

COMING AROUND TO THE CONCEPT

But then I actually went to the site and read a little more, took the tour (exquisitely done), read the FAQs (informative, clear), and I abandoned all loyalty to the past. I like LibraryThing.

There. I've said it. I have only myself to blame.

The death warrant will be issued within moments of my publishing this blogpost. Hit squads from the Cataloguing Department will now ambush me in the back hallway. My only hope lies in anonymity / disguise.

Maybe I could put on Groucho Marx glasses and pass myself off as narwhale. One with really long flippers that terminate in cloven hooves. But Virtual Unicorn digresses.

SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR BOOK LOVERS

"Reframing" is a favorite phrase of one of my library system's Division Directors. It means looking at things in a new way in order to free oneself from knee-jerk (usually negative) responses.

I find that if I look on LibraryThing as a social networking site for book lovers, not a torch-bearing, pitchfork-wielding mob of iconoclasts out to burn down the sacred temple of Cataloguing and put all the holy people out of a job, I'm much more comfortable with the concept.

It's more like a book lovers' club or a book discussion group, rather than a traditional library. (But, of course, who says libraries have any intention of remaining "traditional"?)

And it's certainly not a books-by-mail service or bookstore. I love the quote in the FAQs: "LibraryThing cares about books, not about SELLING books."

MY NEFARIOUS PAST

I love books. I love talking about books and reading about books and hanging out with other people who appreciate books.

That's why I've worked at my library for 22 years, worked in bookstores for 7 years before that, have been known to write a book from time to time and once, many years ago when I first went to college, was a card-carrying English major.

These days, I think they call it language arts. But what it really means is books.

Yes, I admit it. I'm a book lover. I've been a book lover all my life. I know it's habit-forming, but I don't care. Long live the printed word! I intend to depart this life with book in hand.

A LITTLE FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Just because I don't hold hooves on the first date--I'm not that kind of unicorn--I decided to do a tad more investigation before making a commitment to join.

BROWARD COUNTY YA LIBRARIAN

I really liked what the Broward County YA Librarian was doing with her LibraryThing account: keeping up with her library school classwork (reading lists of YA books) and providing a forum for her teen volunteers.

I can see immediate application for my department's newly created position of YA librarian. This sounds like a great way to keep a core of interested teen library supporters in touch with one another, even when they don't have transportation to come to the library for, say, book club discussions.

FLASH-MOBS: NO TORCHES, NO PITCHFORKS

I also checked out the LibraryThing Blog, where each month's Early Reviewer books are posted. That feature holds a lot of interest for me. Reading prepublication review copies and writing reviews looks like tons of fun!

I also read with fascination about flash-mob cataloguing parties, where a group of volunteer descend upon an organization's small, unorganized library. Using wireless laptops and CueCat barcode scanners, they catalog the collection using LibraryThing.

This reminds me of the inventory companies that used to come once a year to the bookstore where I worked to inventory the stock after hours between the time we closed the doors in the evening and opened them on the morning of the following day.

The difference here, of course, is that the flash-mob cataloguers are paid only in free pizza and good fellowship. Sounds like another dynamite project for teen volunteers!

SIGNING UP

By this time, I was sold, so I decided to sign up for a free account. I found the price-break (first 200 books free, $15 per year thereafter or $25 for a lifetime membership) entirely reasonable.

Signing up was quick and easy. I edited my profile to include an image and geographic location.

Next step was to enter some books. I decided to go with some recent reads. The process was simple. LibraryThing takes care of the grunt work of supplying the bibliographic info so I was able to concentrate on short, punchy reviews.

WIDGETS THAT WEREN'T

I decided to add two widgets to my blog: a standard blog widget, which shows random books from my LibraryThing library and a search widget, which enables readers to search my library directly from the blog.

Alas, nothing I did could get them to show up. The code pasted in fine, but Preview never revealed the widgets.

I scared myself silly at least twice when, having pasted in the code, all the other text of my blogpost seemingly disappeared.

Luckily, the first time Blogger had autosaved just before I did the paste. After that, I saved manually before every paste attempt--but still to no avail.

Alas, I must content myself with pasting in a link to VirtualUnicorn's LibraryThing profile and VirtualUnicorn's LibraryThing library page.

Sigh. This is not as fancy as I would have liked it to have been, but I need to get on to Thing #14.

FEATURES OF INTEREST

Just as a last word, I thought I'd quickly run over those features I found of greatest interest about LibraryThing.

I was not terribly interested in any of the group features right at the moment. I think I'd like to watch (old-style listserves used to call it "lurking") for a while before joining.

The Early Reviewer program did look interesting to me, although I see there is a lot of competition for the review copies: 5 to 30 times more requests that there are books to go around.

I did, however, put my name down for The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato, The New 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth by Sophie Javna Earthworks Group, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire b C.M. Mayo, The Survival Handbook by Collin Towell, The Moon & the Sun by Vonda McIntyre, Mom's Guide to Growing Your Family Green by Terra Wellington, and The Manual of Deception by Jedediah Berry.

I'll just have to wait and see.

The Members Book Giveaway Program also looks interesting. I intend to investigate further at a later time.

I also took a look at LibraryThing local, listing my area as the 50-mile radius around Gainesville, Florida. I was astonished to find nothing listed. So I added Comics for Everyone, a featured ACLD event to take place on March 19th.

ENOUGH

Good heavens, look at the time. It's 2:30 in the afternoon. All for now. I haven't even had breakfast.

Thing #12: Wikis

2009-03-07T17:16:00.000-08:00

WIKIS I ALREADY USE

I feel more confident about wikis than I have about any of the other Web 2.0 tools we've studied so far in 23 Things because I've recently created a wiki and I belong to two more.

The wiki I administer (take care of housekeeping for) is The ACLD Storytime Wiki, created for use by our library district's Youth Services Planning Group. It's all about programming for children and teens.

The other two wikis I belong to are the Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute's Alumni Wiki (a closed wiki for SSLLI participants and their mentors, alumni, and instructors) and The Youth Services @ ACLD Wiki (created for the YS Department to keep track of group projects).

All three are PBwikis.

WHY I CHOSE PBwiki

Before I set up the ACLD Storytime Wiki, I used WikiMatrix to compare features of the various wiki engines available. It was quite comprehensive and easy to use.

I ultimately chose PBwiki because the basic service is free and has plenty of room. It can also be upgraded for a modest cost, is entirely WYSIWYG and requires no knowledge of coding. Best of all, it supports multimedia content such as clipart, photos, and videoclips with sound.

These features struck me as perfect for creating a powerful but very user-friendly wiki dedicated to youth programming.

SAINT JOSEPH COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM WIKI

The Subject Guides portion of the SJCPL website looked quite straightforward. It reminded me of ACLD's staff bookmarks and Great Links public bookmarks. The layout resembles Wikipedia's.

I took a peek at the homepage, which isn't part of the wiki, and noticed a few points of interest: Encore catalog searcing, IM reference service, audiobooks on iPod, a GameBlog, and a dedicated teen page. ACLD doesn't offer any of these services--yet.

The entire website is very, very spare. A little too spare for my taste. A purely white background just isn't engaging to my eye. I'd recommend some sort of (subtle) background image to offset the plain-and-simple text, thus lending interest to the page.

BOOK LOVERS WIKI

Princeton Public Library's Book Lovers Wiki was created for their 2007 summer reading program and apparently featured prizes for those who contributed content in the form of book reviews.

The wiki comprises about 200 reviews in all, and the wiki notes that the wiki has been discontinued (it remains accessible solely as an archive) because library patrons are now able to enter their reviews directly into PPL's online catalog.

The wiki is pleasingly crafted in pale shades of green, and each review contains both an image of the book's jacket and rating in the form of stars. Reviewers may be identified by name or choose to remain anonymous.

I like the design flair that went into this functional / minimalist yet aesthetic wiki.

LIBRARY SUCCESS

Meredith Farkas's "Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki" is another that resembles the look and feel of Wikipedia. It looks well organized and comprehensive, a sort of central clearinghouse for all sorts of useful information about running a library.

In my opinion, the Alachua County Library District could learn a thing or two from this wiki about how to organize information employees need to access easily and often in order to do their jobs.

Right now, our forms, policies and procedures are chaotically scattered over several servers. Employees often spend more time searching for a form than they do filling it out. It's remarkably inefficient.

It's rumored that all these forms, etc., are about to be moved from their disparate servers to our staff-only intranet. If that's the case, I hope whoever is in charge of the move will organize the information as thoughtfully as Ms. Farkas has her best practices wiki.

LIBRARY STAFF WIKI

The Albany County Public Library's staff wiki is obviously a PBwiki. It has that distinctive look.

Having a centralized, easily accessible place to store communal information (such as library procedures) has long been a dream of mine. Apparently others consider such a place a worthy enterprise as well.

I feel mildly cheered. At least I'm not the only one on the planet who thinks a half-way decently organized procedures manual a goal worth prioritizing.

Now if only such a thing could become a reality at ACLD.

BLOGGING LIBRARIES WIKI

Blogging Libraries Wiki, like The Library Success Wiki, is powered by MediaWiki. It looks a lot like the SJCPL Subject Guides Wiki, which is to say, it follows the Wikipedia model of being bare-bones, spare, and texty rather than visually arresting.

Though it contains no images other than a very simple logo, it's a nice idea: create a wiki to collect links to library blogs. Librarians will find this a useful tool, even if the workmanlike design fails to excite much emotional response. (Fun to look at this wiki is not.)

Though the lack of images is most likely a constraint of the wiki's service level--probably basic and therefore free--I hope the wiki's creators will eventually opt to upgrade to a level of service that allows greater use of images, preferably photos.

ADDING TO MY WIKIS

During the last couple of weeks, I've added pages to all three of the wikis to which I belong.

As a class assignment, I uploaded my class project's "Charge" (formal statement of purpose and delineation of roles and responsibilities for those involved) and Gantt chart (timeline for the project) to the SSLLI Alumni Wiki.

(I wish I could show them to you, but it's a closed wiki.)

I created a quick-and-dirty booklist entitled "Some Good Teen Reads" to the booklists area of the YS @ ACLD Wiki. Because it's an open wiki, this page is available for all to see.

Finally, I created a couple of new folders (Information and Notes), added 60 new users to the wiki, performed various edits to existing pages, and fashioned 27 new pages for the wiki.

Here are a couple of my favorites: "FAQ: Reasons to Contribute" and "Fingerplay: Ten Little Candles."

BUSY BUSY

Virtual Unicorn has been a busy beast. Just one of many reasons I am so far behind in doing my 23 Things!

But that is why the Powers that Be created weekends, and I am busily using this one to get caught up.

Thing #11: Social Media

2009-03-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

SOCIAL MEDIA IN PLAIN ENGLISH

Another excellent explanatory video on a Web 2.0 topic by the LeFevers at The Common Craft Show. I want to rush right out and copy them!

The simplicity of their (ostesibly) low-tech approach is just what I need to understand the subject matter. The length is just right, and the props (mostly hand-drawn paper cutouts) never get in the way of the message.

Next time I need to do an instructional video or training session, I intend to channel The Common Craft Show.

DIGG

I couldn't help myself. The first thing I did when I got to the Digg homepage was watch the new Star Trek movie teaser trailer. They've certainly pulled out all the stops on the special effects. Intriguing.

I also viewed Dmitry Orlov's 5-minute videotaped remarks on "Superpower Soup": the ingredients he believes are necessary to cause a superpower--such as the U.S.S.R. or the U.S.--to collapse socially and economically. Scary.

I then read a short article entitled "Ecstasy Treatment Draws Rave Reviews for Vet Treatment" by Mark Rutherford dealing with a new use for the rave drug ecstasy: treating military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The drug apparentl "inhibit[s] the subjective fear response to an emotional threat" which is the cause of PTSD. Interesting.

The tour was succinct and clear. I wanted to join right away but restrained myself so that I could go on to Reddit.

Here I read "Obama to Lift Ban on Embryonic Stem Cell Research" and "How to Sccessfully Compete with Open Source Software."

The first was terse and informational (with a complaint against The Wall Street Journal's assertion that embryonic stem cell research is "opposed by religious groups" (as though all religious groups oppose it).

The second was too long to read in its entirety, but I skimmed it. It made some valid points about how commercial software can compete with open-source software through better marketing, design, and user support.

The Reddit Intro was super simple, cute, and non-threatening. (By threatening, I mean "makes me wonder if I click this link, will I be sucked into an inescapable vortex of endless frustration and wasted time?" Reddit'd intro didn't.)

NEWSVINE

Newsvine looked much more like a mainstream news site than either Digg or Reddit, although the introduction makes it clear that there are no editors and that content is controlled by those users who vote.

The idea of creating a Newsvine column entirely out of "seeded" (linked from elsewhere) articles was an interesting thought. Sort of like a scrapbook, into which one pasts "clippings" (links) of interesting news articles one has come across.

After looking at the intro, I went to the homepage and selected "Democrats Blast Limbaugh for Comment on Kennedy" to read because I figured it would contain a lot of reader comments, which it did. Many vilified Limbaugh for his recent remarks. Others insulted the commenters.

I did not find reading the exchange particularly useful. Sadly, others' commentary only rarely interests me. Most of it's so ephemeral / inarticulate / forgettable. Who cares?

Just about the only time I pay attention to commentary is when consumers are rating their experience with a product or a company.

Was the item as described? Did it arrive on time? Was it of good quality? Worth the cost? Did the company resolve any problems? Would the reviewer buy from this seller again? Answers to questions like these interest me.

I don't know that I'll start paying any more attention to commentary on news articles as a result of looking into Social Networking, but obviously loads of people love it, choosing to spend their time composing it and reading it.

Clearly I must be antisocial.

MIXX

Mixx more closely resembled Digg and Reddit, being less slick and polished-looking than Newsvine. The tour was simple enough.

On the homepage, I read an article entitled "Does Daylight Saving Time Conserve Energy?" I didn't feel strongly enough to vote or leave a comment.

The article entitled "School Lunch Nutrition Standards Haven't Been Updated in 30 Years" moved me to want to do both--but of course, one has to register for a Mixx account in order to do so.

I therefore held off, determined to get through each Thing as expeditiously as possible. Picking up the pace is what I'll have to do, if I'm ever to get caught up on 23 Things!

CHOOSING AN ARTICLE

For my article to recommend, I went to the New York Times website and navigated to the section on technology. The article I chose was "When Everyone's a Friend, Is Anything Private?" by Randall Stross.

It discussed how Facebook's liberal default privacy settings encourage the indiscriminate sharing of personal information to any stranger who asks for it.

If you respond in the affirmative--as many Facebook users do--anyone who asks to be your Facebook friend can gain access to all sorts of information about you.

This is the exact same information you'd feel creepy about disclosing to someone you didn't know who just walked up to you out of nowhere and started quizzing you about yourself.

MY PERSONAL REACTION

I don't get it. Why would anyone make private information available to strangers?

Being deeply private--any surprise to learn that I'm an introvert?--I don't really want to know that much about strangers, and I certainly don't want to share much of anything personal with anyone I haven't known for quite a while.

Whatever happened to the idea of building trust over time?

Perhaps this is why the thought of establishing a Facebook account fills me with all the pleasant anticipation of juggling loaded firearms.

SHARING THE ARTICLE

When I clicked on the share link, I saw that I needed to register for one of the social networking accounts, so I chose Digg.

Registration took mere moments. The article had already been recommended by a couple of other people, but I was able to "Digg" it and leave a comment.

The process was actually quite pain-free.

ONWARD

Good enough. Now on to Thing #12!

Thing #10: Tagging and Delicious

2009-03-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

BEHOLD MY DELICIOUS NETWORK BADGE

I am now officially delicious!

AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE

I very much enjoyed Thing #10. Tagging's fun, and I think Delicious is going to be very, very useful.

I'd done a little bit of tagging before now. It's a great idea and no big deal.

I do get frustrated when the total length of tags for an item is constrained to a certain length (such as 200 characters). I ran into that when retro-tagging all my blogposts.

And of course I'd heard about Delicious. (Actually, I'm used to seeing it referred to by its pre-Yahoo spelling: "del.icio.us") but hadn't gotten around to checking it out till now. I'm so glad I did!

WHY I NEVER USED BOOKMARKS

Before now, I've never used the bookmark / favorites feature of any of my browsers. There are three I use all the time and several others I use occasionally. The reason for my reluctance to use bookmarks was simple: they weren't portable.

Since I move from computer to computer all day long--at work, I have the computer at my desk and five different computers on the public service desks; I also have a computer at home--it didn't help me at all that I couldn't take my bookmarks with me.

So I just memorized the URLs of the sites I visited frequently (or Googled them if I couldn't remember) and ignored bookmarks / favorites.

Now it looks like Delicious has fixed my problem. I should be able to access my bookmarks list from any Internet-connected computer anywhere.

BACKGROUND READING

Once again, I found Lee Lefever's instructional video crystal clear, charming, and laudably succinct.

Brandon Connelly's "Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users" was informative.

So, too, was "7 Things You Should Know about . . . Social Bookmarking."

I also enjoyed skimming through the list of libraries in the melange blog on libraries that bookmark using Delicious.

SIGNING UP FOR DELICIOUS

Signing up for a Delicious account was a breeze. The instructions for adding the bookmarklets were ultrasimple. I added bookmarklets to five of my browsers.

Afterwards, I flitted around to 8 or 10 of my favorite harp sites and bookmarked them. You can see them at http://delicious.com/virtualunicorn if you like.

Now I don't have to remember the URLs for those sites anymore or hunt for them, I can just find them via my Delicious account. I like that!

My last delicious act for the day will be to add a Delicious network badge to my blog. If this works, I'll insert it at the top of my blog just to give the beginning of the blogpost some visual interest. Here goes.

Thing #9: Sharing Slides, Photos & Databases

2009-03-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

| Get your Presentation Pack

SUCCESS!

I'm happy to report successfully uploading a PowerPoint presentation to Slideshare, then pasting it into my blog above.

I went about creating this blogpost a little differently than I have with past posts, though. So I feel a word of explanation is in order here.

A WORD OR EXPLANATION

I decided to create this blog entry while exploring the slideshow, photo montage, and online database tools described in Thing #9, rather than waiting until I had finished the exploration.

I wanted to see if this would streamline the process. (I'm not entirely sure it did.) Anyway, it was an experiment.

Accordingly, I first blogged about the "Web 2.0 Tools in Your Classroom" slideshow, Zoho Show and Slideshare software, Flicks by Picture Trail, NEFLIN's Flickr photostream, and Lazybase below.

After I completed my exploration, I signed up for a Slideshare account and uploaded one of the PowerPoint presentations my department created a couple of months back for training colleagues outside of the Alachua County Library District for this year's upcoming Summer Reading Program.

I ultimately chose to upload the shorter, simpler PowerPoint of the two I was involved in. This presentation that didn't use any of PowerPoint's fancy animation. I chose this one because I thought it would probably display more clearly on the blog and be a better bet for a neophyte like me.

How did all of this come about? Let's step back a little in time. To discover what I was thinking as I explored the slideshow, photo montage, and database tools (prior to the successful upload of the above PowerPoint), please read on.

FLASHBACK: WEB 2.0 TOOLS IN YOUR CLASSROOM

I enjoyed this little (59-slide) slide show, although the default advance speed was too quick to allow me to adequately scan and / or read all the content on some of the more complex slides. I went through a second time using manual, slide by slide advance.

I love the idea of social networking as an educational tool. The quote, "Everybody and Anybody can collaborate, influence, connect, create, publish, share" holds a great deal of appeal for me.

The slide entitled "But Why?" on the benefits to connecting people via Web 2.0 (tapping into collective intelligence via collaboration, transparent delivery and instant gratification, a non-hierarchical / democratic information feed, etc.) was another one that resonated for me.

Blogging as a way for students both to better imprint what they have learned as well as pool what they have learned in a communal repository of knowledge struck another chord.

The slide picturing a scale weighing the main features of actively searching the Web for information on websites (older method) versus the newer, passive method of online information gathering via RSS feeds aptly summarized the contrast between methods.

I thought the point that by allowing users to subscribe to others' bookmarks, del.icio.us "Allows us to connect with the web resources of the very best minds in our field" was well taken.

Because I'm smack in the middle of a wiki project myself, I viewed the slides on wikis with particular attention.

I found myself longing for music and / or narration as I advanced through the slideshow. Surely Slideshare and Zoho Show must enable an audio track to be added? Let's take a look.

ZOHO SHOW

The link to Zoho Show in the Neflin's 23 Things blog didn't quite work, so I had to go to the Zoho homepage, but that worked well enough. I took the tour, checked out the demo video, and viewed one of the public presentations (an inspirational, poster-moment style slideshow entitled "Finding Joy.")

Zoho Show appears to be gunning hard to rival PowerPoint. All the controls look very similar. I like the fact that Zoho Show can be embedded in one's website or blog and is entirely free.

Here's what occurred to me while I was checking out Zoho Show: I had fun throwing together a couple of PowerPoint training presentations several months back, but was stymied when I tried to email the presentations to a colleague from another library system who requested them.

I finally had to snail-mail her the PowerPoints on a thumb drive. Had I known about Zoho Show, I could have used that instead and let her access the presentations via the web.

As far as I can tell, Zoho Show doesn't have an audio component yet, although I see that support for animations is in the works. That would be wonderful.

Also, one of my PowerPoint training presentations used a lot of zippy animations to liven it up. Without the animated transitions, the presentation would have been a lot flatter and less fun.

Okay. Time to check out Zoho Show's rival Slideshare.

SLIDESHARE

Aha! Slideshare says right up front that you can "Add audio to make a webinar." Cool.

And the slideshow "tour" indicates that you can upload PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or PDF presentations to Slideshare in order to share them with others over the Web. Perhaps I'll be able to upload my PowerPoints to my blog???

"Create SlideCasts . . . Sync audio with your slides. . . ." Virtual Unicorn is starting to salivate.

I see Slideshare's potential to publicize events and allow participation / voting in contests as immediately useful to the Library District and to my department (which hosts and presents a lot of programs) in particular.

These features could be especially useful in our push to offer more and better programs for teens.

Like Zoho Show, Slideshare, too, is free.

FLICKS & LAZYBASE

I have to say, Flicks by Picture Trail looked intriguing! I see a great deal of potential there for commemorating Library events via an animated photo montage instead of just a bunch of separate, lifeless stills.

I checked out Big Huge Labs a couple of Things back when I used its Motivator tool to create a poster. The Mosaic Maker tool doesn't excite me much.

I did take a moment to flit to NEFLIN's Flickr account to take a look at a couple of short photo sets: the igloo built out of plastic milk jugs (right here in our very own Alachua County Library District!) and the New River Staff Development photos.

I recommend rotating all the photos into an upright position before making them part of a slideshow or photo montage. Seeing images that are sideways is a little jarring.

Lazybase looks interesting, if painfully simplistic. Still, it's a way to get a simple database embedded in a website, accessible to anyone with web access, no database software required.

I might look into that one for future reference, since building databases is something of a hobby of mine. I find them appealing because they put a large volume on information at one's fingertips, uniformly formatted, comparable, and searchable.

Thing #8: Web 2.0 Communication

2009-02-25T04:39:00.000-08:00

BAIT AND SWITCH

I spoke too soon. Here I was, on a roll, thinking I was finally past the quicksand when bam! Thing #8 reared its grisled head. Actually a troika of heads.

Because Thing #8 isn't one thing, it's three: instant messaging, text (short) messaging, and web conferencing. This is hardly fair.

WAITING FOR RENKOO

The "How Instant Messaging Works" article by Jeff Tyson and Alison Cooper proved informative enough, although in my naivte, I made the mistake of clicking on the link in the Video Gallery: Instant-Messaging box that was touted as "Watch this video about event planning on How Stuff Works. Renkoo is a fun way to negotiate the when and where of social events. . . ."

I will never do that again.

Instead of taking me to a video about instant messaging, it took me to a video about a natural unicorn (a deer with one horn growing out of the middle of its head) that lives in a Tuscan deer park.

Not exactly on target, but I watched it anyway out of serendipity and a sense of loyalty to my totem animal (the virtual unicorn). It was blessedly brief.

Afterwards, I rummaged around and found the event planning video, which lasted 22 excruciating minutes. The presentation was amazingly informal. Poor lighting, uneven sound. It was like watching somebody's home movies.

Eavesdropping on three people casually chatting about "peach-pea" (I finally figured out they were talking about PHP) is certainly one way to absorb information, but not a very efficient one.

My time is a premium, and I would have appreciated some condensation, editing, scripting, and a minimum threshold of production values.

(It did, however, conclude that perhaps Renkoo or a similar IM tool could have proven useful in setting up our recent Valentine's Day Cookie Exchange.. Certainly better than an endless email thread. Something to think about.)

HOW INSTANT MESSAGING WORKS

Badly traumatized, I returned to the "How Instant Messaging Works" article and vowed not to be lured again from the True Path so easily while traipsing through Faerie.

The 2-minute video of the University of Buffalo librarian IM chat session with the panicked student was entertaining--and compact! Compact is good!--although I wish some of the IM acronyms could have been decoded for me. (Maybe via subtitles.)

COMPARING IM SERVICES

I then took a look at the three major IM services.

Google Talk appears to be for Windows users only. Gnash of teeth. But it's okay. That's why I own an Intel Mac: I can impersonate a PC any time I want. (Although it still feels like knuckling under to the Borg.)

I see that Gmail offers video chat for both Mac and PC users. That's nice.

Yahoo Messenger is web-based, so no download required.

AIM 6.8 seems to work with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

ALL GOOGLED UP AND NO ONE TO TALK TO

Most of my co-workers in my department favor Google Talk for their IM, so that's what I'll sign up for, as soon as Parallels (my Windows emulator) finishes installing Internet Explorer 7 and Java.

Downloads are complete, so I've just signed up for a Google Talk account and entered four of my coworkers into my contacts. I've invited them all to chat, but nobody seems to be available right now. The NEFLIN Meebo Widget says they're offline as well, so I'll check back later.

Back to blogging.

INSTANT MESSAGING

The LJ article "IM Me" by Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens was an interesting read. The article asserts that IM is "less formal" than chat. All I have to say to that is it's hard for me to imagine how anything could be less formal than chat.

The article also mentions system crashes with chat, which I assume resemble the constant glitching and freezing I experienced while staffing the Ask-a-Librarian virtual reference desk back during the days of the old interface. I haven't run into nearly so many problems with the new portal.

I do see the utility of library staff using IM to communicate with one another rather than making long distance calls. My own library system, the Alachua County Library District, has branches in multiple area codes.

I was puzzled by the remark that IM leaves no "trail," so that users feel freer to say controversial / political / unpopular things via IM than they would using email.

I am skeptical. I don't think any electronic communication method leaves no trail. I'll bet that if someone wanted to, even an "off the record" IM session could be captured and saved.

I think it's also the wiser course to exercise a modicum of decorum when expressing oneself at work--even using a supposedly ephemeral, trail-free medium--than to put one's foot in one's mouth and regret it at leisure.

My final observation on the SJ article: 24/7 IM service wouldn't be practical at ACLD simply because we wouldn't be able to afford to pay staff to do it--not unless we're willing to cut other services and assign somebody to staff a graveyard shift.

I just don't see that happening. Maybe in an academic library that keeps very late hours, but not at the public library--or at least, not at our public library.

TEXT MESSAGING

As for text (short) messaging, I read through both the How Stuff Works article "How SMS Works" by Jennifer Horde and the Smart Libraries Newsletter article "SMS Offers Libraries New Talk Tool" by Marshall Breeding.

They were okay. Informative. I felt pretty jaded at this point. Thank heavens I wasn't required to do anything, sign up for anything, create another username and password. Exhaustion was setting in.

WEB CONFERENCING

Finally, I accessed the OPAL archive and watched a 1-hour dual session on "The Wonderful World of Wikis" by Chad Boeninger, creator of The Biz Wiki, and "The How of Wikis" by Starr Hoffman, discussing how to set up a PBwiki.

Even though PBwiki has a newer version out now, with a slightly different look, it was still interesting. I'm in the middle of creating a wiki as a combined class / work project and wasn't able to take the SLA webinar on best practices for creating a wiki, so I thought I'd fill in the gap.

I was glad I did. Watching the OPAL archive for free was better than paying SLA $89 to take their webinar.

SUCCESS: IM AT LAST

Okay. We're getting to the end of the post at last. A compassionate coworker consented to IM chat with me via Google Talk a couple of evenings ago. I've been working on my wiki and preparing for class, so I didn't get a chance to finish this post until now.

My coworker and I exchanged instant messages with one another while sitting side-by-side on the public service desk. It was hilarious in a way--but not actually that different from what I see patrons doing.

By that, I mean, I've seen two people sitting in adjacent chairs, both mesmerized by their hand-held devices (PDAs or cell phones or some such thing) simultaneously texting one another and conversing verbally. They don't look at one another, just stare at their screens.

Their thumbs are punching little buttons and manipulating controls so fast they're practically a blur. I wonder if they're going to develop some sort of new physical disorder similar to Tennis Elbow but entitled "Texter's Thumb."

Are they wearing down their joints? Developing arthritis? It seems rude to ask. I always just keep my mouth shut and walk on. At least they're not yelling or yakking obliviously at a deafening volume. The texters I've seen are always muttering softly out of the sides of their mouths.

My coworker and I did the same, talking to one another even as we instant messaged back and forth. I'm not sure if this qualifies as multitasking, or just pointless overkill. I found the whole experience just too weird.

Thing #7: Online Image Generators

2009-02-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

Hooray! NEFLIN's 23 Things is finally getting past the reams of (important but ever so time-consuming) background reading.

Our last few Things have proven much faster, funner, and better.

Thing#7 was a breeze. I went to Big Huge Labs and chose Motivator, a tool that lets you create inspirational posters. Here's mine. You like?

This image used is called unicorn800x600120. The artist is drlight3. It's available for downloaded from Flickr.

But getting back to Big Huge Labs and its array of tools:

In addition to Motivator, Jigsaw, Movie Poster, Magazine Cover, and Trading Card also looked cool. Ditto with Slideshow and Captioner (similar concept to Bubblr). I'm eager to go back and check those tools out, too.

Already I can see the possibilities for using these to do programs and contests for kids and teens. They're really fun! Also very easy to use.

Why not have an afternoon program once a week where we show the kids how to access and use these fun tools? They'll pick it up in a snap.

Then hold a contest to see who can design the coolest poster, bookmark, trading card, or whatever--all of which promote the Library, of course!

Feature the winners on a big bulletin board and on the website. Have a party at the end of the series of contests. Invite the press! This could be big!

Whoa, Virtual Unicorn. Must reign self in. Getting too excited. Having too much fun!

Must be true to vow to blog economically, so will sign off for now.

I can't wait to see what Thing #8 will be.

Thing #6: Yet Another Flickr Mashup

2009-02-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

Who says nothing ever works out?

For the benefit of those with teensy screen resolution:

Panel #1 Caption: Virtual Unicorn sets out on a desperate quest to find and reason with the crazed Kiki, whose territory has been invaded by the newcomer, Fudge. . . .

Panel #2 Caption: . . . only to discover an astonishing sight.
Virtual Unicorn (thought balloon): ???

Panel #3 Kiki: Purr.
Fudge: Purr.
Caption: A festival of peaceful coexistence.

Panel #4 Virtual Unicorn (thought balloon): In my absence, it seems a miracle has occurred.

The events portrayed in this Bubblr cartoon are true. The cats really are getting along a lot better now. Everybody seems to be calming down. Not a moment too soon.

Thing #6: Another Flickr Mashup

2009-02-13T10:36:00.000-08:00

Cartoon #2 in our tragic series.

Just in case it's too small to easily read:

Panel #1 Caption: The council of unicorns meets to discuss Kiki's death threats against the new cat, Fudge.

Panel #2 Caption: Incredulous Unicorn speaks.
Incredulous Unicorn, transparently: I can't believe this is happening. That Kiki is a maniac. Some of the things I've heard her say just make me want to disappear. I'm allergic to cats.

Panel #3 Caption: Young Garrulous Unicorn voices his opinion.
Garrulous Unicorn, cutely: I just want our kitties to love each other.

Panel #4 (Virtual Unicorn in captivity) Caption: Will the hissing and yowling never end? Virtual Unicorn feels trapped.

Soon, the awful conclusion.

Thing #6: More Flickr Mashups

2009-02-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Virtual Unicorn household implodes:

This is Bubblr, a tool that enables you to search for Flickr images, add speech bubbles or thought balloons, then assemble them into a comic strip.

For some reason, the speech balloons show up really teeny in the blog.

They're much larger and easier to read on the actual Bubblr site, which is located at www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/ Just click on the archive and search for Kiki and Fudge #1 by Virtual Unicorn.

In case you can't read the microscopic speech balloons here on the blog, this is what they say:

Panel #1. Kiki, eyes glowing: Death to the interloper.

Panel #2. Kiki, eyes glowing: Remove him, or I will gaze upon his with my laser beam eyes.

Panel #3. Fudge, forlornly: Don't hate me. I am nonviolent. I desire only peace and harmony.

Panel #4. Kiki, eyes narrowed: Clearly he is a menace that must be destroyed.

More comics on the way as the tragic saga of The New Cat at Our House unfolds.

Thing 6: Flickr Mashups (a.k.a. The Ultimatum)

2009-02-10T05:19:00.000-08:00

I awoke this morning to find this lying on my pillow, covered in cat hair:

"Remove the interloper and no one will get hurt."

This sordid little ultimatum obviously comes from Kiki, our resident cat, whose turf has been invaded by the newcomer. Clearly she is having a mental breakdown. That, or it's just her regular, run-of-the-mill demonic possession flaring up again. It's hard to say.

Here's how I think she did it:

After I went to bed last night, Kiki snuck into the front room, set up the laptop, and accessed the Internet. She went to the neflins23things blog and read about Flickr mashups.

Then she went to Erik Kastner's Spell with Flickr site and created her doom-filled message. In the old days she would have used scissors, magazine clippings, and paste instead of just resizing the window, taking a screenshot, and printing it out on the all-in-one machine.

I know she used our laptop to do it because I found her telltale screenshot floating ominously on the desktop when I logged on this morning.

I've uploaded it to my blog so that others can view the evidence for themselves. Things have gotten ugly around here. Pray for me. Pray for us all.

Thing 5 All Over Again: Flickr Redux

2009-02-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

Okay, I now have a Flickr account. I took some photos of the cats. Here they are. Kiki is the glamorous green-eyed goddess. Fudge Swirl is the beauteous blue-eyed boy. Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264794084/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264833738/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264017065/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264009591/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264010889/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualunicorn/3264838712/

photographer: Virtual Unicorn

Thing 5: Flickr

2009-02-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

What do bengal cats look like? I went to Flickr to look for some photos to show you. I searched through "Everybody's uploads" using the search term bengal cats.

Given the popularity of this new breed, it was no surprise that lots of results popped up. Constraining the search to "tags only" helped narrow the results.

Some photos were for bengal tigers rather than for domestic housecats, but for the most part, I found just what I was looking for.

Not every shot I came across would allow me to download it. Clearly some photographers wanted only to display their work without allowing viewers to have copies.

However, quite a few photographers were willing to allow downloads. Here are a few of the images I came across:

Okay. So what are we looking at? Quick course: Bengals 101.

Some bengals have small, round, solid spots like cheetahs. Just look at the gorgeous kitty below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24079740@N05/2730200138/sizes/m/

photographer: Watchcaddy

Many bengals, however, have actual rosettas that resemble those of jaguars. Look down.

See how this cat's markings are made up of groupings of spots with an open area in the middle that is lighter in color than the spots, but darker than the surrounding field? Pretty cool.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24079740@N05/2472035365/sizes/m/

photographer: Watchcaddy

And there's another spotting pattern that's quite a bit rarer.

The spots are larger with less space between them. They more closely resemble the broad, patch-like spotting of the clouded leopard.

The coat of the kitty below is tending more toward the clouded pattern than that of the jaguar.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knein/2632215244/sizes/m/

photographer: Knein

Then there are the marbled bengals. Their coat pattern is not spotted at all, but swirled, almost like that of an ocelot. They can be quite stunning, like the young cat pictured below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/junglelure/443779031/sizes/m/in/photostream/

photographer: Junglelure

I have just described the possible patterns of the bengal coat. But don't forget to think about color in addition to pattern.

Most bengals, like the one pictured here, have brown coloration. Their coats consist of various shades of black, dark brown, rust brown, and buff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexanderino/306059656/

photographer: alexanderino

Less common, but much in demand, are silver bengals. Their color range includes mostly black, charcoal, medium gray, and silvery gray. Below is a lovely silver marbled bengal.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10758478@N06/1809540366/sizes/m/

photographer: p.smithson

Finally, there are the snow bengals. This is the newest color variation. These bengals are being bred to resemble snow leopards.

They are very pale in color. Like Siamese cats, they are born pure white. Their color develops as they mature.

Another point of similarity between snow bengals and their Siamese cousins is that many snow bengals have beautiful blue eyes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkerja/2208013003/sizes/m/in/set-72157603436031212/

photographer: barkerja

So what do the two cats at my house look like?

One is a classic brown tabby, beautiful enough to be a bengal--she even has ear tufts!--although she almost certainly is not. (She is a rescue kitty, obtained from a shelter.)

She does a great bengal impersonation, however, and looks almost exactly like the marbled brown bengal below whose photo I found on Flickr. It's hard to imagine how someone could have abandoned this gorgeous cat.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61855486@N00/3178985266/

photographer: ramsescity2003

As for our newest addition, he is an eight-month-old snow bengal, specifically a chocolate lynx-point marble. He looks like some sort of delicious ice cream treat made with fudge ripple.

He, too, is a rescue kitty, whose breeder was unable to keep her bengal cattery going in the face of sudden overwhelming medical bills.

He had a couple of health problems as a kitten and could not immediately be sold. A friend of the breeder nursed him back to health and then adopted him out for a song. We can't believe how lucky we are to have him!

Here's a marbled snow bengal from Flickr with a similar look.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gribb0/2934248503/sizes/m/

photographer: gribb0

I am now officially exhausted. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to do this blogpost!

Finding the photos was easy enough. However, I was unable to download them directly to Blogger. I had to download them to my computer first, then upload them to the blog.

Nor could I cut-and-paste the URL to the Flickr image! I had to create every backlink by hand. Twice.

Type it into the blog, then type it into the link field. Double-check the spelling both places by referring back to the Flickr window. Major pain.

Plus, once I got the photos uploaded to the blog, I could not move them around. They stayed put at the top of the blogpost. No way to insert them where I wanted them in the text.

This meant I had to find the photos, write the blog, figure out the order in which the photos needed to appear, upload them in reverse order, then rewrite the text around the photos.

Do you know how crazed I am at this point?

I will now post and check the links. They'd better work, or I swear I will gnaw through the restraints and rampage through Tokyo devouring skyscrapers.

If--and this is a big if--I'm not required to do any major bad-link triage, I'll consider breaking out my digital camera and photographing my actual cats so you can see them.

If I succeed, I'll sign up for a Flickr account and upload the photos. Stay tuned!

Thing 4: RSS Feeds and NewsReaders

2009-02-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

My readers' indulgence is requested. I had to get my previous (ranting / whining) post off my chest before I could turn my thoughts back to addressing Thing 4.

The good news is I had a lot of fun with RSS feeds and think that they are a wonderful idea--basically an updating of the magazine subscription concept for print media.

You know how you can go out to look for the magazines you want and buy them at the store? That's like visiting your favorite blogsites periodically, checking for new posts. Your other option is to subscribe to magazines and have them snail-mailed to you. That's like an RSS feed.

It makes good sense. It's also addicting. If I had infinite amounts of leisure time, I'd subscribe to a lot of magazines. Unfortunately, my leisure time is extremely limited, so I confine myself to reading magazines while waiting for my appointment at the doctor's office.

So I told myself going into this exploration of RSS feeds that I should only sign up for a handful of feeds, and they had to be ones I really, really wanted. I also vowed to keep my selections weighted more toward the professional (library-related) end of the spectrum than toward the pop-culture or purely personal-interest ends.

(You realize, of course, that this means my spectrum must be triangular rather than linear. This is intentional, I assure you. No, really.)

So, after doing the background reading / viewing, I signed up for a Bloglines account.

Bloglines, by the way, has in addition to its primary site, a new beta site which had some interesting features. Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the difference between the two sites at first and got very confused.

I'd log on. Things would look different. I wouldn't be able to find a feature I'd previously used. . . . Once I finally got that figured out, I regrouped and chose 7 feeds in addition to the default Bloglines / News feed.

They are:

Dilbert Daily Strip and Get Fuzzy, two cartoons I enjoy but have read only sporadically since I don't subscribe to a newspaper at home. (Newsflash: RSS feeds replace print as Virtual Unicorn's syndicated comic strip delivery medium of choice. Western civilization falls. Film at 11 p.m.)

Get Fuzzy is about your average guy, Rob, and his two pets: an easy-going dog and a hyper-intense cat. Pets are personal, and so is my Get Fuzzy feed. Dilbert, on the other hand, is about a motley crew of engineers struggling to realize poorly defined goals under ridiculous working conditions. I consider Dilbert extraordinarily work-related.

I also signed up for the Publishers Weekly--Children's Books News and Jacksonville Public's Library Storytime feeds. I guess that makes my area of interest within library service pretty obvious. (Can anyone guess which department of the Alachua County Library District I work in?) So these two feeds are work-related, too.

Also work-related--see how on-task I am?--are Helene Blowers's LibraryBytes and NEFLIN's Blah Blah Blah Blog. I want you to know right now that these two choices were not a suck-up to the 23 Things @ NEFLIN prize-awarding committee. I have been intending to subscribe to them all along. I just didn't know how.

See? 23 Things @ NEFLIN has addressed my needs and taught me useful skills already. Thank you, NEFLIN, and Ms. Blowers. I intend to follow both blogs religiously. (This paragraph is the suck-up. Do I get a prize now? If so, I want a subscription to Bengals Illustrated. In hardcopy. Snail-mailed to me.)

Okay, almost there. The last RSS feed I subscribed to was Rotten Tomatoes: Movies. It's a compendium of movie reviews with a rating assigned according to how many film critics found a particular movie "fresh" (that is, recommended it) versus how many found it "rotten" (advised against seeing it).

It's customizable so that you can look at an amalgam of all reviewers' opinions, just those of the "top" (nationally famous) reviewers, or just those of the reviewers of your choice. A thoroughly nifty idea, and I've used it for years, mostly by clicking on review links found at IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database).

As an added bonus, since I get asked fairly regularly at work about movie content--which films are suitable for children, which are too "adult" for teens, etc.--my subscription to this feed, too, is actually work related as well.

So that's the saga of my Bloglines RSS feeds. I'm still shocked that I can't find exactly the kind of blog I want dedicated to bengal cats. I felt sure somebody would be doing one just like what I've been envisioning by now. I guess not.

Why am I so desperate for such a blog? Guess who just adopted a young, rescued bengal? Yours truly. Yesterday. He's gorgeous but very disoriented and distressed. He's been crying piteously since we brought him home.

The cat we already have (the new bengal is supposed to become her playmate) is in a towering snit. She hopes a meteor will crash from the sky, obliterating him and if possible, me along with him. There is now a 100% chance that my existing cat is plotting to kill me.

So if no one is already blogging about bengals in the way I'd like to see, perhaps I should start such a blog myself. After I finish 23 Things @ NEFLIN. In my copious spare time. Provided I live that long.

Tortured by Doubts

2009-02-07T08:41:00.000-08:00

I can't believe how far behind I am already! Thing 9 has already been posted, and I'm only just now finishing up Thing 4.

I think a lot about how I can spend less time doing 23 Things @ NEFLIN and still get the benefit of learning the new technology--and the only thing I can come up with is cutting down on the blogging.

I can't really cut the exploration time. I try to keep it as concise, focussed, and task-oriented as possible: no tangents, no goofing around--but it still takes hours. I have to read enough of the background material to understand what I'm doing, and I have to explore enough to be able to see how things works and have something to report.

I feel if I pare it down any further, I'll just be pretending. And I seem to remember reading in the rules somewhere that perfunctory participation would not be counted.

So it looks like its the blogtime that's got to be reduced. I'm going to have to try to make my blogposts shorter. Again, the problem is, I don't know how to do that. I want to report on what I've learned. I'm already crystalizing to the very essence.

I guess my dilemma is that I'm afraid I'll actually expend more time by trying to shorten things even further. When writing a report of any kind, I rarely find myself intentionally padding. Just the opposite in fact. I usually trim my rough drafts so that the finished product winds up shorter than the original draft.

I think this is probably a different writing pattern from the one others use. I'm guessing here, but I think most writers start short and go long; that is, they start from an outline and then fill it in. I, on the other hand, start long and go short: amassing a huge wealth of disorganized details, grouping them, then throwing away whatever's redundant or unnecessary.

Sometimes, if I'm really pressed for space, I'll have to throw out important stuff, too. But I never know which details fall into which category (essential, sacrificial, or unimportant) until I do the sorting. Sorting is the way I process.

Perhaps others process in a different way. (Mulling this, I find myself toying with despair.)

One last observation before I abandon this angst-riddled and totally off-topic post: I looked through some of my fellow 23 Things participants' blogposts--as we have all been urged to do--and found some of them almost unimaginably brief.

Did people really have so little reaction to their explorations? Might they already be so familiar with the Things that it's so old hat that there's nothing much left to say? (Egad, does that make me feel like a dinosaur!)

Or are posts that compressed exactly what the 23 Things organizers want? A few parameters would help me to better know what's expected of me. Perhaps I should impose my own parameters. I could set myself a goal of spending no more than 2 hours per Thing and confine my blogposts to 500 words or less.

The difficulty is that I think such restrictions--self-imposed or otherwise--would be deeply, deeply unsatisfying to me. Like buying a 500-page book and finding that it contains only one word per page. That's all? I spent all that money for a book, and 500 words is all I get?

Translate that as: I participated in 23 Things and that's all I got out of it?

I guess my real problem is that I want to truly get something out of this experience. Something meaningful. Something real. I want to actually learn something. (More accurately, a lot of things.) And that is just going to take some time.

So I guess my best plan is to carry on, avail myself of every time-saving practice that I can, sample rather than savor, blog fast, and hope that after a while, I'll get familiar enough with the process to get into a rhythm and become a little more efficient. We live in hope.

Thing 3: Blog Search Engines

2009-01-27T07:21:00.000-08:00

Hello, world. After spending the weekend totally out of commission due to illness, I find myself returning to 23 Things @ NEFLIN feeling very behind. All my good intentions to do Things 3 and 4 over the weekend in flames!

Oh, well. No time like the present. So back to business.

I spent a couple of lunch breaks last week exploring Technorati and some time this morning on Google Blog Search, comparing features, ease of use, relevance of search results, etc.

My search term was bengal cats. This is a fairly new breed of domestic housecat that is becoming very popular because of the beauty of their exotic markings, which may resemble those of a cheetah, a jaguar, a snow leopard, or an ocelot.

Due to their growing popularity and inherently photogenic nature, I thought there would be a million blogs from which to choose. But not so. I did find some good ones (NOTE: define good as interesting to me) but not nearly as many as I'd have thought.

I have to say I found Google Blog Search infinitely easier to use than Technorati. Technorati seems to be universally praised as among the most used and useful blog search tools, and I'm sure it is, but I found it not as transparent as I would have liked.

It appears to have been thoughtfully put together, with a plethora of features, the value of many of which I'm sure will become apparent to me in time. I will definitely be back to explore Technorati further. It just wasn't giving me the number of useful search hits I was expecting.

With a general search, the search term bengal cats returned nearly 800 hits, mostly blogposts that mentioned a bengal cat somewhere in the text rather than a blog devoted to the subject of bengal cats. I sampled a few of them, but this was too large a pool.

I did a bit better with Technorati's advanced search when I entered my search phase into the find posts tagged field. I got less than 70 hits--few enough to actually browse through.

I liked the videos that popped up. There are a couple of hilarious ones featuring bengals vying for an exercise wheel: "Bengal Cats Fighting for the Exercise Wheel" and "3 Bengal Cats on Exercise Wheel." I could watch those all day. (I could also have found those simply by going to YouTube.)

I did come across one useful blog which also publishes a magazine called Bengals Illustrated. (They claim to have a swimsuit issue.) Basically eye candy for bengal buffs.

My cavil is that I came across this one indirectly, in a link on one of the not-so-useful blog sites I visited. The Bengals Illustrated blog did not come up on Technorati on its own. Disappointing, as this was the most relevant site I found using this search engine.

Actually, besides the magazine and the exercise wheel videos, the two most worthwhile posts I encountered on Technorati were one entitled "Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths," where a bengal cat is mentioned as the hapless victim of a neighbor's hyper-aggressive nonbengal cat) and another in which the blogger (Michael M) concludes that there is a 78% chance that his cats are plotting to kill him.

While funny, everything except the Bengals Illustrated blog were not exactly on topic. Worse, they took a lot of digging to find.

Thank heavens I tried Google Blog Search next. It was reassuringly simple to use and, for the bengal cats search at least, yielded more useful results more quickly. Four relevant blogs popped up on the first page of search results. Subsequent pages of search results were not as helpful as the first, but at least I got usable results fast. For a beginner like me, that's important.

I think for now I'll probably turn to Google Blog Search for quick-and-dirty results and try Technorati when I need something more highly refined. Quick forays into Blogpulse, Bloglines, and Ice Rocket yielded no useful results. I look forward to exploring these further and trying out some of the other Blog Search Engines, but I feel I've spent enough time on Thing #3 and must forge ahead to Thing #4.

Enough said!

Thing 2: Figuring Out Just What Is Web 2.0?

2009-01-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Thing 2 in 23 Things @ NEFLIN consisted of a viewing a YouTube video, a blogpost, and an online journal article, plus several extras (a series of five journal articles, another video, and a Wikipedia article).

It took me about five hours to complete: 3.5 for the reading / viewing and 1.5 for the blogpost.

I can see that if the time commitment is similar for future elements in 23 Things, I'm going to have to do them all at home on my own time. There just isn't going to be time at work. I find this troubling.

Now for my reactions:

The Stephen Abrams Kicks Off 23 Things at Murdoch University Library Video

I was interested to hear about all the new technologies Mr. Abrams is already incorporating into his life. He must be rich and have oodles of free available time.

When the interviewer asked Mr. Abrams how a 23 Things participant might find time to explore the various technologies, he mentioned having previously smoked three packs of cigarettes a day before quitting.

A pack of cigarettes contains 20 cigarettes. Three packs contain 60 cigarettes total. If Mr. Abrams did indeed, as he stated, find 7 - 15 minutes per cigarette, that totals 7 - 15 hours per day spent smoking.

Mr. Abrams implied that all of us have hours and hours of time in our daily lives similarly devoted to unproductive pursuits that, if redirected to 23 Things, could enable us to participate without too much inconvenience.

I must protest. I don't doubt Mr. Abrams' statement that he smoked three packs a day. I'm sure he did. But smoking is an activity that can be conducted while doing something else. One can smoke while one works, while one drives, while one eats, etc.

If one gives up smoking, one still has to work, drive, eat, etc. So the question becomes, if one gives up smoking, can one participate in 23 Things while still working, driving, eating, etc.?

I venture to say no. 23 Things is something to which one must give one's full attention. So what exactly am I supposed to give up to make time for 23 Things?

My private life contains almost no discretionary time as it is. If there's no time at work, I may not be able to finish the course. This realization bothers me.

John Blyberg's BlogPost about the Library 2.0 Debate

The main questions seem to be: Is Library 2.0 real? Is it a big deal? Is it inevitable?

I confess I don't quite see what the debate's about. Web 2.0 is happening all around us. If libraries don't adopt current trends in technology and adapt themselves to social expectations, we'll become irrelevant. Nobody will use us. What's to debate?

What I found even more interesting than the blogpost itself was reading through all the commentary at the end. Interesting, but time-consuming. Again, I find my thoughts turning to whether or not I'm going to have time to devote to 23 Things.

"The Ongoing Web Revolution" an unattributed article from Library Technology Report 43.5 (Sep - Oct 2007 issue)

I thought this article stated the case for Library 2.0 pretty clearly.

The two most interesting aspects for me were:

(1) The video entitled "Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us" by Michael Wesch, which I thought demonstrated the new accessibility and link-ability of information via the Web wonderfully well in contrast with the constraints of traditional print technology; and

(2) The mention of Gene Smith's "Social Software Building Blocks" (identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation, and sharing) along with the fundamental question, "How can library systems and library Web sites include these building blocks?"

These seven factors are just exactly what our users want, need, and expect. It seems to me that our job is to figure out how to revamp library services to deliver them.

"Web 2.0: Where Will the Next Generation of the Web Take Libraries?" in Next Space: The OCLC Newsletter, No. 2, 2006 issue.

A. "Away from Icebergs" by Rick Anderson

I like the three icebergs Mr. Anderson mentions:

(1) Traditional print collections at the expense of other, newer types of collections. I agree that libraries don't need as many books as they once did. Other collections need funding, too.

(2) Librarians as teachers. Again, I agree that library staff don't have time to give the public in-depth, one-on-one tutoring on how to use library resources. We need to choose resources that are self-explanatory and very easy to use so as to maximize both our own and our patrons' time.

(3) The traditional "Come to Us" model of library service. Again, I'm in complete agreement here. Libraries no longer exercise the information monopoly they once did. Our customers don't have to use us. It would behoove libraries to make our services as inviting as possible and position them where potential patrons are most likely to encounter them and use us. (Remember the old adage, "Location, location, location"? Right now, that location is online.)

B. "Into the New World of Librarianship" by Michael Stephens

Mr. Michaels's new world of librarianship sounds like a utopian ideal in an Obama-esque, "Yes, We Can" watershed era of dramatic change. I'd love to work in a library such as the one he describes!

Empowered staff. Progressive change. Fiscal responsibility (as opposed to the unbridled consumerism of "technolust"). Transparency. Accountability. Sounds good!

Unfortunately, I wonder if the higher-ups at most libraries trust staff enough or give them sufficient credit to allow this to happen.

My unhappy impression of many other libraries, garnered from a few conversations and limited reading, is that most managers and administrators instruct their (often very bright, energetic and motivated) staff to shut up, do as they're told, and stop making suggestions.

Strangling feedback has, in my observation, been the first act of many new managers and administrators. I think that's a pity.

C. "To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate" by Chip Nilges.

This article advocates boldly for "Harnessing collective intelligence" for collaborative revision of libraries' missions and services. I'm all for it.

I've heard this sentiment expressed elsewhere as, "None of us is smarter than all of us." I have a little bit of trouble parsing that, so I like to reword it as, "No one among us is smarter than all of us working together."

I also love the idea of networking all libraries into a searchable WorldCat with no authorization required. Resource sharing is so much more efficient than separate collections.

Ditto the idea of allowing users (not just library professionals) to collaborate in the library community cooperative. Yes!

Mr. Nilges's third and fourth points ("release lightweight services" and "build better data") didn't resonate with me as immediately as did his earlier points. But maybe I was just getting tired.

D. "To Better Bibliographic Services" by John J. Riemer

This article was all about the need for federated searching to access all the many sorts of databases (a.k.a. information storage systems or "silos") in order to:

(1) Make their data more efficiently available;

(2) Make it available in nontraditional (nonlibrary) settings;

(3) Incorporate Amazon.com and Google features (e.g., reviews, tagging, etc.) that users want / need / expect;

(4) Simplify the creation of metadata; and

(5) Eliminate reduplication of effort.

To all these points, I say, "Rock on!"

E. "To a Temporary Place in Time" by Dr. Wendy Schultz

Dr. Schultz asserts that Library 2.0, like all trends, is transitory.

According to her, Library 1.0 offered books as commodity.

Library 2.0 seeks to package the commodity (meaning information / books) into product with librarians cast into the role of "experienced tour guides."

Library 3.0, she predicts, will offer service via Web 3D (virtual world technology) with librarians as VR information coaches. These avatars will have the potential to become celebrity "superstars" based on the quality of their service. That's a neat thought.

Another key point Dr. Schultz made is that despite the rise of virtual reality, bricks-and-mortar storefronts will continue to exist "if they offer a compelling experience." (I.e., one that is authentic, humane, experiential, impassioned, relevant, and participatory.)

I found this point fascinating, because the litany of the seven attributes of a compelling library experience echoed eerily a list of personal core values I came up with in a recent library-related workshop I attended. These are just the things a job needs to have in order for me to find it satisfying!

Finally, Dr. Schultz postulates that Library 4.0 will offer experience, becoming a sort of art salon, aesthetic environment, dream society, gymnasium of the mind, idea lab, and / or knowledge spa that will absorb and incorporate all previous library incarnations.

I loved all those descriptions and found her vision extremely exciting. It's along the lines (though much more complete and better articulated) of something I--and I'm sure many others--have been thinking over for some time now.

Why does the library have to change (become something wholly other than what it already is)? Why can't it simply grow?

As a child matures, does he metamorphose into an entirely new and alien being? No, he's still recognizably who he always was, there's just more to him now than there used to be.

When the electric light bulb was invented, did candles suddenly (or even eventually) cease to be? No, they're still around. They work fine. They're still good, and we still use them.

I like the idea of the library growing, becoming more complex, more varied, more user friendly. I think that's a lot more accurate description than the more abstract and rather sweeping descriptor change.

Change can mean a lot of things, not all of them good. I think growth has a much more positive connotation.

"Library 2.0" in Wikipedia

This article speaks of Library 2.0 as featuring user-centered and participatory library services, where information flows back from users to the library instead of using the old uni-directional information flow of previous models of library service. (I.e., Library 1.0.)

I agree that this is one of the hallmarks of Library 2.0 and also one of its most positive characteristics.

However, I'd also like to see more information flowing from staff and increased participation by staff as well as by users. By virtue of their unique experience, staff are ideally positioned to give very valuable input into the transformation process libraries are currently undergoing.

In order to be able to do this, however, staff will have to be enabled to participate: not only encouraged to do so, but given time to do so. Inviting staff to participate in 23 Things or Library 2.0 is exciting, but even more important is allotting them time to participate.

Right now it looks like I'll be doing 23 Things entirely on my days off from work. Oh, well. Who needs family interaction, personal hygiene, or sleep? The Internet calls.

Thing 1: Setting Up and Registering My Blog

2009-01-17T12:13:00.000-08:00

Getting started with 23 Things @ NEFLIN by setting up and registering my blog was a little bit traumatic in that it took much longer and did not go as smoothly as I had expected.

Despite good intentions to dive in on Day 1 (Monday, 1/12), I could not find a moment to even log into the NEFLINs23Things blog until Friday (1/16).

Even then, the two-hour lunch break during which I had planned to accomplish Thing 1 evaporated in the face of multiple interruptions and contingencies requiring my urgent attention. Alas.

I left work at 6:30 p.m. having barely managed to read through the instructions!

Undaunted, I raced home and bolted dinner while conscientiously rereading the directions. My first pass had been so fragmentary, I was afraid maybe I'd missed something important. Luckily, I hadn't, but this took a while to establish--and I was champing at the bit!

After logging onto Blogger, establishing a Google account went fine. I also enjoyed the Common Craft Show video on what a blog is. I found it concise, informative, and charmingly low tech.

So far so good. Things seemed to be getting back on track.

Then I encountered difficulty with the blog creation process. Augh!

Thinking up an interesting, original name was time-consuming. (The first several I tried were taken. Rats!) My family were interested in what I was doing and kept up a constant barrage of questions and suggestions which were alternately helpful and distracting.

At a couple of points during the process, I found I needed to back up and correct an earlier entry. This seemed at first to be going okay. I was allowed to proceed forward again after typing in a new squiggly word.

However, at one point, the system just seemed to seize up. It wouldn't let me go any further forward, insisting that the name I'd finally chosen (after dutifully checking availability) was unusable. It was about 9:30 p.m. I was tired, frustrated, and fried.

"I'm starting over," I announced brokenly.

"We're going to bed," my family said, their electric toothbrushes buzzing.

"Fine. Be that way," I muttered, closing my window and logging back into Blogger in despair, expecting to have to do it all over from scratch.

But I didn't have to!

By some miracle, my blog existed, named the name I had chosen. My display name was wrong--the last change I'd made hadn't taken--but by stumbling around through the Profile settings, I was able to correct it.

I'd been assigned some sort of default template, having never made it that far in the process, but I was able to select a new one easily in Layout.

That done, I quit while I was ahead. It was 10 p.m. I was a basket case. But I had a blog.

The rest is all denouement. I logged back in the following day. Tinkered a little with profile and settings, uploaded a picture. (Fetching likeness, no?) Then I registered and started posting.

So here I am. It's done. As with childbirth, you forget the bad parts. It was worth it. I'm looking forward to Thing 2.

The Meaning of My Blog's Name

2009-01-17T11:42:00.001-08:00

Welcome to Techgnos, a new blog by an employee of the Alachua County Library District to report on my exploration of Web 2.0 technology through 23 Things @NEFLIN.

So what's up with the funny blog name? (Say it TEK-nohss. Ch to be pronounced like k. G silent. O long. Hiss the s.) Okay, so now it's pronounceable--but what's it supposed to mean?

Well, tech is the first syllable of technology, and gnos derives from gnosis, which means arcane knowledge. A techno is someone with lots of technical knowledge. A gnostic is an earnest seeker after hidden truths.

So I guess I hope the name suggests a quest for as-yet-undiscovered technological information, which is what 23 Things at NEFLIN embodies for me.