Archive for December 2008

Photo: Phillip Spears

Wired magazine counts down the ten Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 in this article by Priya Ganapati. Here are breakthroughs ten through five, be sure to check out the full article to see the top five.

10. Flexible Displays
9. Edible Chips
8. Speedo LZR
7. Flash Memory
6. GPS
5. The Memristor

The Wall Street Journal interviews 30 business execs to find out the best ways to use 2.0 technologies for marketing an organization. These managers who are experimenting with social media tools have identified a set of principles for engaging consumers through these applications. The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World is a multimedia article chock full of relevant tips such as:

• Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.
• Give consumers a reason to participate.
• Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.
• Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
• Don’t control, let it go.

A recent article in the New York Times reports that e-books are steadily gaining popularity and according to publishers such as HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster, sales of these digital publications have tripled or quadrupled in the last year. In Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold, Brad Stone and Motoko Rich discuss the rise of the Amazon Kindle and other electronic book readers.

“Amazon’s Kindle version of “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski, a best seller recommended by Ms. Winfrey’s book club, now represents 20 percent of total Amazon sales of the book, according to Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide.”

via Micro Persuasion

Pete Cashmore puts together a mega-post aggregating Mashable’s best social media how-to articles of 2008. This handy guide includes the following sections:

• Google How-Tos
• Facebook How-Tos
• Twitter How-Tos
• Blogging How-Tos
• Online Video How-Tos
• Social Networking How-Tos
• Business How-Tos
• Productivity How-Tos
• Social Media How-Tos
• Best of the Rest
• Bonus: More of Social Media in 2008

via Micro Persuasion

The UK’s Guardian newspaper chooses 100 useful websites for the coming year in 100 top sites for the year ahead. The list covers the gamut from blogging to gaming to maps however their selections and commentary focus prominently on location-based services, video, and remote collaboration tools. These are a few of the top sites categories:

• Geek Squad
• News recommendation
• Offbeat
• Physical from virtual
• Reference
• Visualisation
• Virtual worlds/MMORPGs
• Twitter, and associated

Doriano “Paisano” Carta at Mashable compiles a giant list of Twitter tools for use on mobile devices in Tweets to Go: 35+ More Twitter Resources for Your Phone. The post covers resources for the iPhone, T-Mobile G1, Blackberry, Windows Mobile devices, Smartphones, and non-Smartphones.

Robin Broitman at IIG has put together a Superlist of What NOT To Do In Social Media, linking to eye-opening examples of blunders made by major corporations and individuals when launching social Web initiatives. Learn by (bad) example and avoid the social media mistakes listed in this handy guide including:

• The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History
• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media
• 10 Social Media Blunders that Can Destroy Your Brand

Educause has published another of its 7 Things guides, this time focusing on the tech which enables instructors to record their lessons for students to access digitally. In 7 Things You Should Know About Lecture Capture, 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?

Thinking about starting a wiki for your library? Read about the different ways that four companies are making the most out of wikis and reaping the rewards of these collaborative tools in Wikis That Work In The Real World. Here’s a bit about just one:

“Angel.com, a 70-employee subsidiary of Micro Strategies that provides interactive voice response software, has more than 10,000 internal- and external-facing SocialText wiki pages. That’s from about 100 employees, customers, and partners with access.

One customer-facing wiki acts as a knowledge base for Angel products, while others for employees include video tutorials, training quizzes, and space for collaboration efforts, from developing marketing ideas to planning company picnics.

New employees get an hour of wiki training and set up a personal space that’s like a social networking profile.”

If you’re new to the microblogging phenomena and you want to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, find some great tips in How to be a Twitter All-Star by Denise Zimmerman. This article passes on wisdom from Twitter stars who are effectively using the application for branding and audience engagement.

“For example, on Election Day, Flying Dog Brewery tweeted that if you buy something from the store and enter promo code “I Voted” you get 20 percent off. In exchange, Flying Dog saw a spike in store sales and directly traced those sales through the promo code. That success can be credited to a loyal and enthusiastic consumer base and promotions that reflect the spirit of the brand and trusted relationships.”

via Micro Persuasion

The folks at Information Today were nice enough to allow me to archive the article I wrote for the September issue of The CyberSkeptic’s Guide to Internet Research titled Drupal and Libraries. You can find it in the open access repository for the library science field E-LIS.

Anita Bruzzese, syndicated columnist for Gannett News Service, writes about What Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists in a guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog. Buzzese offers some solid advice in this post, here are her ten points, be sure and check out the article for full explanations of each:

1. It takes time to gain trust.
2. You are what you write.
3. Use attribution.
4. Step away from the computer.
5. Look for the news peg.
6. Be consistent.
7. Precision is key.
8. Just get on with it.
9. Rewrite.
10. Understand you’re creating history.

LifeHacker presents a list of 13 of the best free Windows apps of 2008 in Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2008. These tools all look good, although Quick Media Converter and Mojo have made the top of my to-try list. Here are a few of their recommendations:

• Firefox 3
• Mojo
• Free PDF to Word Doc Converter
• ourTunes
• CCleaner

And if that’s not enough for you, take a look at these top lists from ReadWriteWeb:

• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

The Library of Congress has issued both a full and a summary report of the pilot project it launched with Flickr in January 2008.

“Two collections of historical photographs were made public on a Library account on the Flickr photosharing site in January 2008. The response from Flickr members and observers of the pilot was overwhelmingly positive and beneficial. The following statistics attest to the popularity and impact of the pilot:

• As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
• 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
• Over 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
• For Bain images placed on Flickr, views/downloads rose approximately 60% for the period January-May 2008, compared to the same time period in 2007. Views/downloads of FSA/OWI image files placed on Flickr rose approximately 13%.
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
• More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
• Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.”

via Open Education News

Dale Askey writes a very interesting column in the fifth issue of the Code4Lib Journal which was published today. In We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code, Askey identifies several issues as driving forces which prevent libraries from sharing open source software code with the community:

• perfectionism – unless the code is perfect, we don’t want anyone to see it
• dependency – if we share this with you, you will never leave us alone
• quirkiness – we’d gladly share, but we can’t since we’re so weird
• redundancy – we think your project is neat, but we can do better
• competitiveness – we want to be the acknowledged leader
• misunderstanding – a fundamental inability to understand how an open source community works