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The presentations given at the Internet Librarian International 2007 conference in London, England are now available on the conference website including Stephen Abram’s keynote - Next Generation Libraries: The 2.0 Phenomenon, Phil Bradley’s closing keynote Facing the Challenge of Web 2.0 as a Disruptive Technology and others including:
The Sloan Consortium has issued its fifth annual state of online learning in U.S. higher education report based on responses from over 2,500 colleges and universities. Titled Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning, some of the study’s key findings include:
Almost 3.5 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2006 term
Nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2006.
Virtually all (83 percent) institutions with online offerings expect their online enrollments to increase over the coming year.
IM aggregator/client Meebo has announced the launch of its own developer platform, allowing third-parties to create applications for its service much the same as Facebook Applications. One important distinction however, is that Meebo reserves the right to approve all new programs before they are added. So far there are four Meebo partners creating apps:
The New York Times has launched an online Reading Room for Conversations About Great Books. In this new section, editors from the NYTimes Book Review lead discussions about the classics, such as this month’s featured ‘War and Peace’, with a panel of authors, scholars, journalists, and reviewers. Readers can add to the conversation by leaving comments, browse the tag cloud, or subscribe to the discussion via RSS feeds.
JupiterResearch has published a new report today titled User-Generated Content: Demographic and Behavioral Profile of Consumers and Creators. They define content creators as those online adults who have uploaded video, maintained a blog, or created a page on a social network within the last month. Consumers, on the other hand are those which have read a blog, visited a social network, or viewed a video, or listened to audio, podcasts, etc. within the past month. Some of their key findings are:
25% of adults online are creators
55% of online adults are consumers (46% of these people are also creators)
Both use social networks - 85% of creators and 59% of consumers are members of at least one.
Both are young - 63% of creators and 44% of consumers are aged 18-34.
The most common activity among both groups questioned was reading blogs followed by audio and video consumption.
The folks at Common Craft have whipped up this excellent training film on surviving a zombie attack. The only caveat I would add is that, although zombies do not swim as they pointed out, they have been known to walk underwater - See Land of the Dead below.
Zombies Board Game
This game is a lot of fun - you must make your way to the heliport, while destroying zombies and staying alive. I would also suggest splurging for the glow-in-the-dark zombies as an added accessory.
JupiterResearch has a new report out on the use of widgets, also known as gadgets, which are the small applications which display Web content from external sources, often through an RSS feed. They can be added to a blog, social network profile, start page, or other website.
Overall, people are twice as likely to get their widgets from friends as from the companies that made them, however, online users aged 18-24 are six times as likely to get their widgets from friends over companies
The most popular widgets are media players - those that display video, music, and/or photos
The 18-24 demographic also shows a preference for games and entertainment widgets such as favorite book lists or gift applications.
Seth Godin, marketing guru, has created a guide to over 100 resource lists created by the tech-savvy folks at Mashable who provide incredibly useful productivity lists to help you do anything better online. He has set up this list of lists as a Squidoo lens so that you can vote on which lists you like best, and also add a few yourself. Some of the lists which caught my eye include:
“But the list, compiled in strict secrecy to prevent cheating by publishers and authors, is not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying, and it has generated controversy from time to time, most recently last month, when “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s haunting memoir of survival in Nazi death camps, was summarily dropped because the editor of the best-seller list decided the book was an “evergreen” that The Times would no longer track.”
The MediaShift blog has compiled a resource guide to virtual worlds including a glossary, background and history, a section discussing Second Life, a summary of how media companies are using virtual worlds, and a list of resources. Worth a look if you’re a fan of these online environments.
Looking for some new and interesting blogs to subscribe to? Check out PC Magazine’s list of their top 100 blogs here and start reading. I saw a few of my favorites made the list including Cute Overload, Gawker, and Web Worker Daily, and I found a couple of new blogs I’ll be visiting such as Cupcakes Take The Cake and strange maps.
The librarians at the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia are blogging, and they’re bringing you a book or film review a day, everyday, M-F. The blog which started in April of this year launched as a part of their Looking for a Good Book readers’ service and is a veritable gold mine of quality reviews.
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