Archive for November 2007

New TagMaps from Yahoo! let you explore a world of Flickr geotagged images within an interactive map which you can display on your own website. The new mashup overlays user-created Flickr tags, on a Yahoo! world map. Tags can be clicked on to view photos taken in that geographic region. You can embed a TagMap onto your own website, or use the API they have available to create a customized TagMap of your own. This is a research prototype from Yahoo! Research Berkeley.

Via Micro Persuasion

Looking for a few new RSS feeds to subscribe to? Look no further, check out Bloglines’ lengthy list of the Top 1,000 Feeds in ranked order. If you’re interested in any of them, grab the RSS feed right there or click to subscribe via Bloglines. And make sure to check out the Shifted Librarian at number 7 and LibraryStuff at #152!!!

Lee Rainie’s keynote presentation 2.0 and the Internet World from Internet Librarian is available for download from the Pew Internet & American Life website. It’s chock full of Web 2.0 usage statistics as well as some very interesting profiles of different people who use technology.

There have been some great presentations put up on the Web over the past few days. Check out a few of these.

From the Hawaii Library Association Conference:

Sarah Houghton-Jan
HLA 2007: Building a Thriving eBranch

Sarah Houghton-Jan
HLA 2007: Technology Training Tips

Michael Stephens’ Keynote
Ten Technologies and Ideas to Improve Library Productivity

From Internet Librarian:

David Lee King
Setting up the New Stuff: Planning & Implementing Library 2.0

David Lee King
Topeka’s Second Life: Experiments in a Digital World

David Lee King
Introduction to Video Blogging

Darlene Fichter
Mashups & Data Visualizations: The New Breed of Web Applications

Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone
Cool Tools for Webmasters

For all of you Mac aficionados out there, here’s a phenomenal list of the top 100 Mac applications.

via Social Media

Add-ons from the Library

This is final installment of the 40 Useful Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians series, parts one and two are also available.

Libx Plugins

Libx plugins are add-ons which provide access to a library’s resources in some very unique ways including providing a toolbar and right-click menus for quick access to the library catalog and quick full-text access to journal articles via Google Scholar. The plugins also place library icons called “embedded cues” directly in webpages next to items the library has in its collection. For example you would see a tiny library icon next to books the library has on the Barnes & Noble and Amazon websites, or when reading a book review in the New York Times, etc. Click on these icons to check the availability of the item in the library catalog. So far hundreds of academic and public libraries have made LibX plugins for their collections. Install a Libx plugin for your library or get inspired to create your own!

	University of Michigan Libx Edition – The UM Libx Toolbar plugin enables you to search the Mirlyn catalog, SearchTools (for journals, journal articles, or databases), Google Scholar, and the library web site from your browser.
	MIT Libx Edition – This plugin, similar to other Libx editions enables you to search the MIT Barton and Vera catalogs, Google Scholar, the SFX FullText Finder and other search tools, as well as provides embedded links in webpages and a right-click menu.
	Duke University Libx Edition – The Duke Libx plugin allows users to search Duke’s online catalog, e-journals, articles, and databases, and Google Scholar as well as click on embedded links on webpages such as Amazon.

Library Search Plugins

	University of Pennsylvania Library Search Plugin – These handy add-ons from the Upenn Libraries will add Title, Author, Keyword, and Video catalog searches to your browser search bar located on the upper right corner of your browser.
	University of Pennsylvania Library Article Databases Search Plugins – These alternative search add-ons will provide your browser search bar with the search functionality from the following full-text journal article databases; Blackwell, Ebsco Megafile, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Proquest, ScienceDirect, and Wiley Interscience.
	Vanderbilt University’s Heard Library Search Plugin – This Firefox add-on will allow you to add a keyword search of the Heard Library’s Acorn catalog to your search bar located on the upper right corner of your browser.
	Brandeis University Library Research Plugins – The library at Brandeis University has search plugins for both their LOUIS catalog and their e-journal collection.

For many other library search plug-ins, this search of the Mycroft Project for library yielded over 240 results.

Library Toolbars

	University of Pennsylvania Penn Libraries Toolbar – This Firefox add-on for Penn students, faculty, and staff provides a toolbar with a persistant search box to search Penn collections, library website, and databases, as well as links to frequently used Penn Library websites such as Webmail, Ask a Librarian, Blackboard and PennTags.
	Access Sarah: Vanderbilt University Science & Engineering Library – This custom toolbar provides access to the resources at the Stevenson Science and Engineering Library. Search e-journals, databases, the Acorn catalog, as well as other catalogs such as WorldCat and MS Academic Live.

For thousands more add-ons, plug-ins, themes, and extensions, go directly to the source and browse the Mozilla’s Firefox Add-Ons page.

An article in the December 2007 issue of University Affairs spotlights a new breed of tech-savvy librarians such as Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian at McMaster University who are leading academic libraries in these times of change.

“Librarians need to be seen to be part of this revolution. And if you don’t want to stay in the profession because of it, there are lots of young, fresh, smart librarians who will take your place.”

This post is part two of a series of three installments featuring Firefox add-ons of particular interest to librarians. Make sure to check out part one here.

For the Librarian Customizer

	Firefox Themes – Believe it or not, there are over 250 themes which you can dowload to liven up your FF browser. Check them out by browsing categories such as nature, sports, animals, retro, etc. or just view them all.
	Colorful Tabs – This add-on colors every tab a different shade of the rainbow to make them easily distinguishable and, well, pretty.

For Librarians who Code

	Firebug – Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live on any webpage with this handy tool. Also, a useful add-on for this add-on is Yahoo!’s Yslow which will analyze any webpage and let you know why it’s slow.
	Fire Sizer – This add-on enables you to resize your browser window to see what webpages look like in different dimensions. Handy for Web development.
	Web Developer – This add-on provides a toolbar for Web developers with tools to validate code, work with images, CSS, and forms, as well as view source code, and display a variety of other information.
	CSS Viewer – This simple add-on enables Web developers to view CSS information.

For the Super-Organized Librarian

	Morning Coffee – Automatically open up a different set of webpages in tabs for every day of the week with this add-on. Great idea for the super-organized who have daily routines.
	Webmail Notifier – This add-on will check all of your email accounts and notify you about your number of unread emails. Currently supports – gmail, yahoo, hotmail, daum, naver, empas, nate and more.
	PermaTabs – This unique add-on enables you to turn your tabs into permanent fixtures, which will open up each time you launch Firefox.
	AutoFill Forms – This handy add-on will enable you to automatically fill in online forms.

For the Librarian Searcher

	Add to Search Bar – This incredibly useful add-on will add the search functionality from any webpage to your browser search bar.
	Search Engines – Firefox has quite a few search engines which you can add to your search bar in the upper right corner of your browser, they list a few of the most popular here, and then 13,000 others here. A few which I think are especially useful are the IMDB, ESPN, Wikipedia, Weather Channel searches.

For Librarians Who Bookmark

	Zotero – This is a citation management add-on which will capture citation information easily from webpages, stores files and links, allows notetaking, and exports citations in a variety of styles.
	del.icio.us Bookmarks – This Yahoo! Add-on integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks with your browser offering additional functionality such as tagging browser bookmarks and enabling you to import your FF bookmarks into del.icio.us.
	Stumble Upon – Browse the best reviewed websites online with this unique social bookmarking tool and add-on. StumbleUpon leads you to webpages based on your interest which you may never have “stumbled upon” otherwise.

Part three coming next.

Firefox has quickly become my number-one browser since I grudgingly tried it out a few months ago. It is very adaptable and customizable between all of its add-ons and themes, and is compatible with just about every application that I use regularly with the exception of my Settlers of Catan game from MSN. But by the same token, with over 1,900 add-ons, it’s difficult to wade through them all to find the ones which might be useful. Here are a few suggestions to get you started, but please feel free to leave your favorites in the comments!

General Interest Add-ons

	Twitterbar – This handy add-on lets you post to Twitter from your browser’s address bar, even allowing you to post URL tweets (puts “Currently Browsing:” in front of the url). For those Twitter-holics out there, you might also check out Twitbin which is a Twitter sidebar for your browser, also very nice.
	Screengrab – Similar to the SnagIt program, this add-on will save webpages as images. You can choose to save the entire page, regions of a page, or just what is visible in the window. Sweet!
	FoxSaver – This pleasant add-on turns your idle browser into a digital photo frame which displays the FoxSaver photos or your own.
	Facebook Toolbar – This toolbar add-on integrates the popular social network into your browser providing a search box, notifications, a friends interface, and a share button enabling you to quickly post pages to your profile.
	FoxyTunes – Recently released as part of the Firefox Campus Edition which bundled this along with Zotero and StumbleUpon add-ons for college students, FoxyTunes lets you manipulate just about any media player from within your browser. Listen to music while you surf, search for lyrics, videos, bios, etc. with a right click – works with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player, Pandora and many others.
	Map + – View a Yahoo! Map of any address you select without having to open a new browser or tab. For those of you who prefer Google maps, check out MapThis.
	Digg This! – For those who love to digg stories, this add-on will be most convenient – adding the digg option to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally to the toolbar.
	Snap Shots for Firefox – From the folks at Snap, this add-on provides you with a Snap preview of a website whenever you mouseover a link – see images and descriptions before clicking into any link.
	Fireshot – This amazing add-on takes screenshots of webpages and then give you the tools to annotate them, and enables you to save them in multiple file formats.
	PDF Download – This time-saver will offer you a choice for viewing .pdf files as .pdf documents or HTML, as well as whether you want to view it in your browser, in your .pdf reader, or download it.
	Meebo – This add-on sets up all your buddy lists in a persistant browser sidebar so you can IM while you surf, also allowing you to drag-and-drop images and webpage links onto your friends.
	Email This! – This time-saving add-on will send recipients the link, title, and highlighted text of any webpage you are viewing using any of these email programs: GMail, Google Apps GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Stand-Alone Mail Clients like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, & More. Works through a toolbar or right-click menu, or a browser menu.

Stay tuned for more…

Wetpaint wikis have added fully integrated discussion forums into their wikis so that collaborators can post messages to a central board within their wiki sites. The feature was released last night according to TechCrunch, and will allow forum posts to be tagged and searched, and will offer email notifications of new messages.

I have recently been using Wetpaint wikis and have been really impressed with their ease of use, especially with embedding and displaying RSS feeds within pages. Wetpaint has a clickable widget which lets you simply copy and paste the RSS feed address into it. This combined with Judy O’Connell‘s announcement that Wetpaint wikis used for educational purposes can disable ads, makes it more attractive than ever for new projects.

UX Magazine provides in-depth coverage of two popular Notebook applications in its comparison article: Google vs. Zoho Notebook. While both of these types of programs enable users to clip and collect snippets of webpages and then organize them, each has their advantages and is compared according to their strengths in the categories; installation, clipping, organization, and sharing.

Google Notebook Pros

* Simpler UI
* Automatically links notes to web sources

Zoho Notebook Pros

* 2-D workspace
* Allows storage of actual files

Click for full image.

A new interactive Twitter mashup provides a poster of influential users with profile pictures displayed in proportion to their users’ number of followers and total Tweets. The main poster is a global display although additional posters are available for countries including United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan.

via TechCrunch

An article in the Sunday New York Times titled Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly discusses Google’s vision — “Social Will Be Everywhere”, and its new open standards initiative OpenSocial.

Via Social Media

A recent report from eMarketer shows a trend toward Internet users spending less time reading offline printed materials, while television viewing has not declined. It seems that Web multi-taskers are adjusting their routines to make time for TV, but less so for print resources. This may be due to people shifting to online consumption of these same materials.

The Web Worker Daily blog has put together this power user guide to the popular social bookmarking application del.icio.us. Some of the tips they provide include:

• Tag, Tag, and Tag Some More.
• Bundle Your Tags.
• Use the Browser Add-on.
• Prune the Plant.
• Build Your Network.
• Use Subscriptions to Find More Links.