Welcome to iLibrarian

Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, blogs for Mashable about How To: Use Wikis for Business Projects. If you’re thinking about using one of these collaborative tools in your workplace, you’ll want to check out his tips and recommendations:

• Seed the Wiki
• Capture Feedback
• Beware the Wiki-Wary
• Applying Wikis to User Communities
• Just the Facts
• Choosing the Right Wiki

Tom Walker at DesignMag puts together a list of 15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Portfolio Sites. These useful add-ons will enable WP users to create and add image galleries, albums, thumbnails, videos, and even embed music into their blogs. Anyone looking to create a more multimedia and interactive blog or website with their WP installation will want to check out this post.

A new Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen media trends reveals How Teens Use Media. Here are a few of the findings:

• Teens are NOT abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more
  TV than ever, up 6% over the past five years in the U.S.
• Teens love the Internet…but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours and 32 minutes per month online—far below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes.
• Teens watch less online video than most adults, but the ads are highly engaging to them: Teens spend 35% less time watching online video than adults 25–34, but recall ads better when watching TV shows online than they do on television.

nielsen_howteensusemedia_june09

Laura I. Gómez, online media executive and former college language instructor, writes for Mashable about How To: Learn and Practice Languages Using Social Media. This quick and useful guide provides the following types of website recommendations for people who wish to learn a new language through today’s new media sites:

• Community
• Video/Interactive
• Blogs
• Twitter

Establishing an engaging and effective online presence takes continual maintenance. Chris Brogan suggests 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day in order to do just that. Here are a few of his suggestions:

• Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.
• Visit your blog’s comments section and comment back on at least 5 replies.
• Enter any recent business cards to invite them to LinkedIn (if you’re growing your network).
• Check in on birthdays on the home page [of Facebook]. (Want a secret? Send the birthday wish via Twitter or email. Feels even more deliberate.)

The folks at the Common Craft Show have put together another of their amazing educational videos called Twitter Search in Plain English which uses a metaphor of the small town of “Twitterville to explain concepts such as hashtags and trending topics.

Mashable has created a one-stop hub for all things Twitter with its new Twitter Guide Book. This aggregated directory of news and resources will be continuously updated by the folks at Mashable.

A new report on mobile technology adoption and libraries was published by University of Cambridge, authored by Keren Mills of the Arcadia Programme.

“The majority of respondents primarily use their phones to make calls, send text messages and take photographs, although they like to know that the other functionality is potentially available. respondents’ use of different forms of media on their mobile phones was mostly limited to viewing photographs. Some used their phones to listen to music or watch videos, but very few used them to listen to podcasts or audio books and only a small number read ebooks or journal articles. Some respondents commented that they prefer to use their iPod or other media player to access these other forms of media.”

Daniel Hooker at Sociallibrarian writes about 10 ways library schools should be teaching social media. This interesting post discusses the benefits of incorporating social media instruction into library school curriculum. Here are the first five ways that LIS programs could be teaching new media, be sure to check out the full post for more.

1. Promoting Content
2. Interviewing
3. News Gathering and Research
4. Crowdsourcing
5. Publishing with Social Tools

Michael Brito, social media strategist and community builder at Intel, blogs for Mashable about 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands. The article discusses the art of using Twitter effectively for your brand. Here are his top 5 recommendations, be sure and check out the full post for more:

1. Do your research before engaging customers
2. Determine organizational goals
3. Utilize either a branded or personal profile
4. Build your Twitter equity and credibility
5. Track metrics and conversation trends

The Duke University Libraries is now offering the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone. Through DukeMobile 1.1, the University’s suite of iPhone applications, the libraries are sharing digital materials from 20 collections - nearly 32,000 images in all.

From their press release:

“It includes thousands of photos and other artifacts that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s. Although a growing number of scholarly institutions offer images and other material online, Duke is the first to offer collections that take advantage of the iPhone’s design, navigation and other features.”

The Teaching Degree.org blog posts about 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media. This useful guide offers tips and resources for educators for instructing students about new media sites. Here are just a few of the 100 articles listed:

• How Social Networking Affects the Student Life Cycle — From Applicant to Graduate.
• How to Manage Your Reputation Online.
• Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers.
• Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace.
• Personal Branding 101: How to Discover and Create Your Brand.

A recent post on the Netvibes blog titled Using public pages as virtual libraries! contains a list of 11 libraries that are using a Netvibes start page as a public portal or virtual resource center.

via Novus

Photo Credit: Brent Humphreys

Fred Vogelstein writes about the Facebook-Google rivalry in the July 2009 issue of Wired Magazine with Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

Laura Carscaddon & Colleen S. Harris write for Library Journal about Working the Social: Twitter and FriendFeed: Let these social networking services do the filtering for you.

“Information overload is so five years ago, but the problem it describes is all too real. Fortunately, there’s hope yet for the savvy librarian: Twitter and FriendFeed turn information dissemination on its head, using friends and subscribers as a filter for the best, most credible, and most engaging information out there. As Clay Shirky said at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote in January, the problem isn’t “information overload. It’s filter failure.””