Archive for October 2008

Educause has published a free e-book titled The Tower and The Cloud which looks at the impact of information technology on higher education in an age of cloud computing. The book is comprised of chapters written by well-known authors such as Clifford A. Lynch. The 295 page book is available for free online.

via Open Education News

Too much information and not enough filters? Check out Mashable’s latest article, Slow Feed Movement: 7 Tools to Filter the RSS Flood, which suggests choosing from seven tools to focus the flow of information. Two which caught my eye were the Best of Friendfeed feature and TweetDeck, an Adobe Air desktop application.

The professional social networking community LinkedIn has now added third-party applications which can be incorporated into profiles. If you’re a blogger, you can embed a widget for your blog in your profile along with your resume to show people what you’re capable of. You can also sync your Slideshare account with LinkedIn to display your slideshows, and more.

Jessica E Vascellaro writes for the Wall Street Journal Technology section about the mainstream appeal of the Twitter microblogging application.

“Doctors are using Twitter to update patients about office hours. Local groups such as the Los Angeles Fire Department are using it to share details about service calls with interested residents, occasionally with graphic descriptions of the victims’ conditions. And dozens of major companies, like computer maker Dell Inc., use Twitter to share deals and product news with people who sign up for the service.”

Is Twitter mainstream? According to a recent Nielsen report it’s the fastest growig social networking site on the Web today. It’s also an application that Army Intelligence is looking into as a potential terrorist tool.

Google Reader just rolled out a new feature in the form of a chart which provides RSS feed details about the number of subscribers, items posted, and time of day and day of the week each was post was published.

via Micro Persuasion

Chris Brogan provides a guide to How Not to Be a Jerk in Facebook. If you’re unsure of social networking etiquette, or just want some fast FB tips you may want to check out this post. Brogan suggests taking the following steps:

• Put up a HUMAN Picture
• Join a Few Groups- Not Just Your Company’s Group
• When Friending, Add a Line or Two
• Stop Spamming Me
• Email Etiquette
• Bonus: Power Move

The new Amazon Windowshop application features new books, new audiobooks, book editor’s picks, as well as bestselling movies and games with new content featured each Tuesday. Each new book featured includes a bookjacket image, a description, and an audio track discussing the book. New audiobooks provide an audiotrack sample from the book. New movie releases include trailers and new CDs sample songs. This multimedia showcase of new releases may provide inspiration for libraries to incorporate some of these ideas into their own websites.

Andrew Bullen, Information Technology Coordinator for the Illinois State Library, writes about The ‘Long Tale’: Using Web 2.0 Concepts to Enhance Digital Collections in the October issue of Computers in Libraries.

“I firmly believe that the next step for object repositories lies in a melding of wiki and digital repository concepts. This as-yet undeveloped software package would allow the creation of metadata pertinent to the described object and allow the descriptions about each object to be expanded and interlinked by registered users. Existing object repository software does not even begin to allow the development of long tale descriptions, while current wiki software allows too much freedom and provides too little structure. Perhaps the MediaWiki software, being open source, can be heavily modified to incorporate the structures and data protection elements necessary.”

According to a recent Nielsen report, Twitter.com, Tagged.com and Ning are the fastest growing U.S. social networking sites. The analysis ranks social networks by year-over-year unique audience growth. Between September 2007 and September 2008, Twitter showed a 343% growth rate, Tagged.com 330%, and Ning 251%.

Torley at the Mashable blog has put together a quick guide to How to Master Screencasts in Seven Steps. The author, who has created over 200 video tutorials, shares detailed tips and tricks organized into the following steps:

1. Understand audio engineering
2. Indulge in templates
3. Focus on using eye candy to enhance learning
4. Learn from the best screencasts in the world
5. Practice narrating and love your voice
6. Be codec-smart, context-aware
7. Continually explore delivery mediums

I have just added a new item to the sidebar navigation called “Mobile & Gadgets” which leads to information about the iLibrarian mobile site, how to text a link to the site to your phone, as well as widgets I’ve created for the blog. If you’re wondering about creating a mobile website for your blog or website, there are actually some very easy-to-use tools out there which will have you mobile within a few clicks. Here’s how:

Winksite - This website will create a mobile version of your website or blog from an RSS feed. It will also create a QR (quick-response) 2D barcode for your website which mobile users can scan to instantly access your site on their devices, and will create a website widget which wil send your mobile URL to site visitors who enter their phone numbers. You can also grab the WordPress Wii Edition Plugin here which will render an optimized version of your blog on the Nintendo Wii.

MoFuse - This website will also create a mobile version of your blog or website from your RSS feed, and will also create iPhone versions of your website. They offer similar widgets and functionality as Winksite, such as 2D barcodes and desktop Web widgets that can be embedded in your blog and will send readers who enter their phone numbers a text message with your mobile URL.

Zinadoo - If you’re looking for additional functionality and customization options, you may want to check out Zinadoo which provides a FrontPage-like development interface for creating mobile Websites from scratch.

dotMobi - The Site Builder here provides similar development tools as Zinadoo, offering fully customizable mobile Web site development from scratch.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff blogs about a recent report titled The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption which finds that 3 out of 4 US adults are using social tools to connect with each other, up from 56% in 2007. Not only does the study find social tools going mainstream, but that the growth in consumption is coming from older demographics such as the 35-44 year olds, and the 45-54 year olds - a group in which only 28% are inactives with social tech.

“Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.”

via ReadWriteWeb

Educause has another installment in its “7 Things” series, this time on UStream, an interactive web streaming platform that lets users broadcast their own channels on the Ustream network or on a third-party website such as MySpace or Facebook. The quick guide answers the following questions about the technology:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. what are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Well-known marketing guru Seth Godin has written a new book about leadership in marketing titled Tribes. According to Godin “The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.” For a limited time, an audiobook version is available for free on the Audible website, as well as for .95 cents via iTunes.

The University of Michigan Library has announced that it will license all of its creative works including bibliographies, research guides, technology tutorials, and lesson plans under a Creative Common Attribution-Non-Commercial license. This will allow everyone to use, remix, and redistribute the library’s content as long as they credit the library and use it for non-commercial purposes. The license will be completely integrated into the library’s website redesign expected this fall.

via Open Access News