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Both Lifehacker and Micro Persuasion have compiled excellent lists recommending useful bookmarklets to make your browsing experience more effective. These handy little applications are a combo of the bookmark and the applet (a small computer program) and they set up one-click buttons which appear on your browser and perform a specific function. I have bookmarklets installed which let me save webpages as bookmarks in my del.icio.us account, and products to my wishlists in Kaboodle by simply clicking a button. Here are a few more:
Time Magazine’s Who Will Rule the Internet? takes a look at Apple, Google and Facebook and the battle for platform dominance between the Facebook platform, Google’s OpenSocial and Android platforms, and the iPhone platform.
“A platform, to computer people, is the software code on which third-party applications function. There are scores of big platforms out there—something like three dozen in the international mobile-phone business alone. But a truly successful one can extend far beyond its immediate group of users and effectively create and control an enormous market…..The winners of the platform wars stand to make billions selling devices, selling eyeballs to advertisers, selling services such as music, movies, even computer power on demand. Yet the outcome here is far more important than who makes the most money. The future of the Internet—how we get information, how we communicate with one another and, most important, who controls it—is at stake.”
Bloggers will want to take note that College Degrees.com has created a mega list of 100 Web Tools for Writers annotated with useful descriptions summarizing each resource. The list is compiled of resources divided into the following categories:
The CommonCraft team that is best known for its technology “In Plain English” videos has developed a new easy to understand video explaining Meetup.com, a website which facilitates face-to-face clubs and group meetings.
Educause has come out with another of their handy 7 Things guides, this time about the popular virtual world which many libraries and librarians have decided to join. In 7 Things You Should Know About Second Life, the folks at Educause answer the following questions:
What is it?
Who’s doing it?
How does it work?
Why is it significant?
What are the downsides?
Where is it going?
What are the implications for teaching and learning?
The June issue of the peer–reviewed First Monday journal features an article on the Key Differences Between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Authors Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy of AT&T Labs discuss the key attributes and challenges of Web 2.0 within the following sections:
1. Introduction
2. What is Web 2.0?
3. Analysis issues
4. Web 2.0 substrate and enabling technologies
5. Measurement issues
6. Technical and external issues
7. Summary of metrics of interest
8. Beyond Web 2.0
eMarketer reports on a recent BIGresearch study which has found that the average age of an adult blogger is 37.6, and nearly 70% are white. According to the study, they have an average of 14.3 years of education with an average income level of $55,819.
While you’re there, you may want to check in on the summary of the May 2008 report by eMarketer, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots, which forecasts future bloggers and blog readers.
Web Worker Daily has put together a list of tips for increasing our productivity using Microsoft Word. The article walks us through how to accomplish 6 productivity tasks such as:
Doing Table Calculations Directly in Word.
Compare Two Documents.
Deja Vu.
Save Multiple Documents Simultaneously.
Paste Your Formats.
Building Your Styles Skills.
I will build on his Paste Your Formats tip to briefly give you another way to accomplish this – If you use the format painter as much as I do to paste similar font styles, you’ll be happy to know that you can paste the same format into multiple places in your document by simply double-clicking the Format Painter button, the style will then be available to paste throughout the document until you hit the ESC key.
The folks at College@Home have put together a mega-list of 100+ Job Resources for Librarians. New librarians and seasoned pros alike will find something useful in this annotated list which is divided into these categories:
General Library Career Searches
Higher Education Career Searches
Specific Types of Library Positions
Searches Within Specific U.S. Geographic Locations
Agencies
International Opportunities
Listservs
Job Search and Professional Development Information
Laura Milligan at CollegeDegrees.com gives us an annotated list of 25 Twitter Tips for College Students. Current Twitter users as well as anyone who is interested in microblogging will want to check out these 25 new ideas which are divided into the following sections:
According to Yahoo! UK & Ireland and Tokyo Mango, the hot seller in Japan these days is the made-for-mobile picture book which can be clicked through page by page without scrolling. These cell phone children’s books are bringing in 100-200 yen each and one popular title has sold more than 1 million units over the past 14 months. One publisher plans to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads available by next September.
Lore Sjöberg at Wired Magazine asserts that there are 7 basic types of blog posts, and he fills us in on how we can go about making one of each of them on our blogs. Here are his basic premises:
NetworkWorld presents a slideshow of the Top 12 Tools for Twitter. The slideshow summarizes the functionality of each application, provides images of each in action, and links to each tool’s website. Here are their top picks:
The University College London (UCL), has launched an iTunes channel on which they will broadcast free lectures, seminars, interviews, and other news for download. According to The Guardian, UCL is the first mainstream UK university to make audio and video content available on iTunes U.
A UCL statement said: “UCL on iTunes U [will] enhance the university’s provision of information and extend its reach to new audiences around the world. It will also enhance learning and teaching, developing innovation through new technology and meeting the needs of today’s techno-literate students.”
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