johnofjack doing 23 Things

I rolled one. It didn’t work. It was intended to be an image searching roll, and at first it had four sites defined: flickr, altavista images, google images, and yahoo images.

The first time I tried it, it pulled results only from Flickr. I deleted Flickr from the URL list and tried again. Then it pulled results only from Altavista, but they weren’t photos. The text alongside the box for URL entry said that you should use only top level domains, which would be why the Altavista part didn’t pull photos (the URL was www.altavista.com/image/default rather than images.altavista.com ). So I deleted that URL and tried again (supposedly searching Yahoo Images and Google Images), and it told me there were no results.

The search term in each case was “Watchmen.” I am certain that both Google Images and Yahoo Images have results for that term, and indeed a quick trip to the sites confirms that they do (and quite a lot of them, for obvious reasons).

So then I decided the site was broken, and decided also that I should move on.

My roll (restored to three URLs, pulling results only from one, and therefore still broken) is here.

The site is a great idea, and it could be useful in a library setting–very useful, in fact–if only it worked.

I had an iGoogle home page already and stuck with it; it had a ToDo gadget on it already and I’m happy with it so I didn’t try any others. And I was already using Google Calendar and am happy with that too, so I didn’t try any new ones.

I was surprised that one of the Top Ten Productivity Websites was TinyURL; it’s useful in the short term but breaks links in the long term (new destination URLs are assigned to old TinyURL URLs) so it leaves people in worse shape than the original situation, since the links might still work but will take people to a different document than intended.

The only tools that really interested me on any of these pages were the free backup utilities. This Thing really didn’t impress me much at all.

I set up a new account at LibraryThing and added a dozen books. Two of them were incredibly popular (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell) but the rest weren’t nearly as popular (including The Complete Maus).

Some of the reviews on show were brilliant, very perceptive and on point. Some of the conversations were also very interesting, especially the ones I read on YA lit that really grabs teens and the ones on graphic novel recommendations (there were some there that I hadn’t read yet).

I also searched for local events but didn’t find any.

Here’s my blog widget, w/ link to my LibraryThing library.

I started contributing to Wikipedia way back in 2001, when it was on much older crufty software and took up hardly any disk space at all; the rules then were still in flux and one of the ones you could trot out in a disagreement was “ignore all rules.” Somewhere along the line I lost enthusiasm for it, and it hasn’t returned as various scandals have surfaced, though I do still contribute occasionally.

One of my most recent edits was, I thought, perfectly relevant to the article, but was unceremoniously reverted with a dismissive summary. It seems that bureaucracy has grown up around what was once a freewheeling community that still got things done. Oh well.

All this is by way of saying that I’m familiar with wikis and could, once again, skim the readings. Yippee.

Yesterday our department head suggested that we set up a wiki for things relevant to what Youth Services is and does. So I set one up, added a few pages to it, and invited others to join and contribute. So far the results are modest, but that’s how anything starts. (As Paul Kelly says, “from little things big things grow.”) ^__^

Wikis are a perfect medium for collaborative editing, and of course the edit histories are useful for the occasional vandals (and if you have an invitation-only wiki, there’s little reason to worry about vandalism in the first place).

Library for Life had some interesting pages, not least one on Finding living people, and their collection of links to local events and venues must be a great resource for people in the area (and an idea ripe for pilfering).

I liked the reviews on BookLoversWiki, which was set up as part of a summer reading program in 2006 (there are not many reviews–the community has abandoned the wiki in favor of adding reviews directly into their catalog). I’m not convinced, though, that a wiki is the best way to store reviews: there’s no way to limit edits to correction of typos (even a three character deletion–no –can substantially change a review’s meaning). And I’m not sure that anyone would feel so attached to the reviews that they’d watch them to make sure that the content isn’t substantially changed. I think that wikis, designed for collaborative editing, are probably not so good for things which people don’t want to collaborate on.

In short: I like the idea of the use of wikis in libraries, mostly for collection of formatted and organized data–booklists, lists of links.

My thoughts on the reliability of information on Wikipedia? How long do you want to read? How long would I want to talk? It’s not an easy question–tied to it are questions of assumption of authority and the problem of information sources and information assessment in general. I’m not interested in writing a dissertation. Wikipedia is probably not a bad place to start research. Of course it’s not completely reliable, but no information source is. And I’m skeptical of the assumption that information is more reliable simply because it comes inside two covers with a pretty binding.

Now this is how mashups should be done:
Purdue has taken Google Maps data and combined it with data on CO₂ production. You can check absolute values and per capita, by state and by county.

I don’t know much about maps but this is very interesting: a great way to visualize the data so that it’s both more understandable and more memorable.

Digg:
Went to digg. Clicked “most popular” then “last 30 days.” Top “story”: screengrabs of someone posting “IS THIS REAL LIFE?” then a response “Is this just fantasy?” followed by several posts giving the entirety of the lyrics (and some instrumentation) of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Huh. So what’s the second thing I most needed to know? A kid is drugged when he goes to the dentist and is filmed asking questions about the experience. (“Is this forever?”) Cute, funny, not newsworthy.

And the third? “Obama is kind of a dick.” Four photos: Obama leaves a building, Obama packs a snowball, throws it, orange tabby has snow on its face, Obama is grinning outside the building. Sure, it’s funny. Actually he threw it at his spokesman, but I don’t really care about that either.

Fourth top story: Google street view of two people in medieval costume having a sword fight. Cute but, again, not news.

Verdict: I don’t digg it.

Reddit:
1. Scrabble word of the day was a bit lewd.
2. “Who listens to NPR as primary radio source?”… I have no idea what this actually was–a certain story? a discussion? It just links to npr.org.
3. Link to an image of a popup phishing for credit card numbers, claiming to search to see if your number has been stolen.
Somewhere on the site I found a link to a story about a soldier in WWII who was a bear (no, not the subculture kind, the furry kind … ah, I mean the kind that goes for honey and salmon).

Verdict: This site will also not enrich my life.

Newsvine:
Holy hell, it’s a social media site about news which looks like it might be about news. I could spend some time here.

Mixx:
Mostly junk, though it seems to be less junky than Digg or Reddit.

I suppose these sites could be useful in the library for pulling popular news (or popular puff pieces that pose as news). If someone asked for any of these sites, I’d help them find the site. I wouldn’t volunteer most of these sites as a resource though.

Maybe if I were willing to spend time creating a profile on each of these sites and voting enough things up or down, they’d eventually start recommending articles I’m interested in. Frankly, though, there’s not enough time in the day for me to bother with it and I’m tired of creating accounts all over the place.

I love tagging in general and think it usually works well enough even without a controlled vocabulary. Folksonomies have disadvantages, of course, especially in their imprecision–users might get both horses and cars under “mustang”–but the advantage in comparison to cataloging with a controlled vocabulary is that people tend to use terms that most other people would find useful too. And of course it’s cheaper to let other people tag things, provided you have someone doing quality control to weed out nonsense and mischief.

Right offhand I can remember using tags (both adding them and following them) on Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, and Wikipedia.

Still, I didn’t yet have a del.icio.us account, mostly because I visit a handful of sites over and over on just a handful of computers. I set up a delicious account and bookmarked and tagged a handful of sites, then couldn’t include my badge here because WordPress doesn’t allow Javascript.

Obviously this and other social bookmarking sites could be useful for libraries–we’re all about cataloging and organizing information and making it available to others, so a site like this is a natural fit.

I’m not sure, though, how likely I am to keep going to delicious for personal use–I have a lot of bookmarks at home but don’t use them much. Having them available from anywhere would most likely not change that.

Erin found a site called Blist that lets you create and share databases, for free, online. I set up an account and tried it out (didn’t enter much data–just wanted some experience with it) and found it to have a very intuitive interface.

I won’t continue with that database (allconsuming.net already does the same thing, and easier) but I like this site a lot.  I can see how it could be very useful in future for a number of library-related things (one idea is to put up a database of stamps, including pictures, in the Youth Services department).  And it even lets you search on Booleans (if you marked something true or false)!

So, thanks, Erin.

Create and Share Slideshows
I imported a PowerPoint presentation I’d made earlier about graphic novels for teens and/or graphic novels that teens read. Importing the file was straightforward, certainly simpler than learning how to make a presentation using a new interface.

Sharing Photos
I might try this one later. I might not. I’m a tempeh & potatoes kind of guy and not much interested in photo montages or photo mosaics.

Databases
I tried Lazybase. Repeatedly. Day after day, that server just can not keep itself out of trouble. I like the idea, though, so went looking for other sites that do the same thing. All the ones I found had monthly or yearly fees. I don’t doubt that there are free ones around but I didn’t find any.

IM:
I’ve been using IM for over 10 years: I had experience with AIM in 1998 and over the years have used Yahoo’s and Google’s chats as well as ICQ. Because of the number of accounts on different services, I switched to Trillian early on (back when AOL kept changing things to break the unauthorized interaction with AIM servers. They eventually gave up on that).

For this assignment, various people in my library set up accounts and we spent some time chatting with each other through Google Talk. My department head mentioned IM as a possibility to allow us to staff the reference desk with fewer people: when it was quiet, one person could go and one stay, and we would simply IM the other person asking for help if there was a rush of patrons or a reference question that had us stumped. I think this is a great idea.

IM could also, as pointed out in one of the articles, be used for answering patrons’ reference questions. This is another great possibility but I think that because of the medium it might be tempting to skim the questions (if they’re coming in quickly) or to give them divided attention. Unfortunately I’ve been guilty of these tendencies in online chats myself, but in a library setting they could lead to very bad service.

Another thing to consider is whether people can type well: IM questions may come in slowly, haltingly, and it would not be a bad idea to train IM reference workers in typing so that they can answer quickly.

I tried Meebo for this Thing but couldn’t remember my AIM password. It seems that you also can’t sign onto several Yahoo IDs at once, which Trillian does allow.

SMS:
SMS has all the same potential benefits and would allow us to answer reference questions where our patrons already are, rather than forcing them to come to a different space. Challenges here would include the exorbitant cost of text messaging–it’s technologically very simple to send and doesn’t take much bandwidth at all, but messaging has a huge markup on its price and a tiny caps on message length, as well as additional charges on exceeding it. It’s not hard to imagine difficulty in understanding the reference question and getting the patron a good answer without pushing them into extra charges on messaging.

I have no experience with SMS, as I despise cell phones, but I can still see its usefulness in addressing simpler patron information needs.

Web conferencing:
I’m familiar with these, both as a viewer and as a presenter. I’ve attended web conferences on different web services the library was thinking of subscribing to; they’re generally interesting in the way they can walk the viewer through a process.

I’ve given my own webcast for the State Library of Florida; this one was on graphic novels for teens and graphic novels that teens read.

Again, I think that webcasts and web conferences have a lot of potential in terms of addressing patron information needs.

Slightly different from these would be podcasting and video uploading services such as YouTube, which would both allow libraries to document how to do certain things and allow the patrons to consult these documents on their own schedules.