Archive for May 2009

Leo Babauta, author of Top 25 blog Zen Habits and best-selling book, The Power of Less, blogs for Mashable with tips for How To Simplify Your Social Media Routine. The article provides a six-step guide to keeping up by doing less.

• Step 1. Use simple tools to make the most of social media
• Step 2. Focus on sending out high impact messages
• Step 3. Let go of the need to read everything. Learn to scan
• Step 4. Figure out which social media give you the most value, and simplify
• Step 5. Form close relationships with people who give you the most value, not everyone
• Step 6. Manage your time wisely

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb discusses a 3-part series of posts by Greg Boutin in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. The article tackles three big post-Web 2.0 buzzwords, providing explanations on what each of these trends are and where they’re going.

Jeremiah Owyang blogs about the talk given by Dr. Urs Gasser of Harvard’s Berkman Center at the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam earlier today. Dr. Gasser coined the term “Digital Natives”.

“Always online: By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online –the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing — Urs Gasser, paraphrased”

Ben Parr of Mashable creates a quick guide to How To Publish Your Blog on the Amazon Kindle. Amazon launched their Kindle Publishing for Blogs program yesterday, a self-publishing tool that allows users to upload their blogs for sale in the Kindle Store – and it’s open to everyone. Mashable’s guide contains the following sections:

• Signing up for Kindle Publishing for Blogs
• Receiving compensation
• Blog distribution on the Kindle: is it worth it?

Both Mashable and TechCrunch have coverage of Ning Apps, the suite of application tools which will soon be available to Ning network creators. Ning is a social networking platform which enables people to create their own social networks quickly and easily without having any particular technical knowledge (there are now 1 million Ning networks). Ning Apps is now in private beta but will soon deploy 90 new features which will add functionality such as wikis, the ability to sell merchandise, store files, host contests, buy tickets, etc. Different from Facebook and MySpace Apps, Ning Apps are geared toward network creators who can roll out the functionality to the entire network, vs. just for individuals. Here are just a few of the upcoming Ning Apps slated to be released at the end of May:

Collaboration
A Wiki (Wiki)
Huddle (Share documents and collaborate through whiteboards)
Box.net (Store files on your social network)
Google Docs
NewsShare by Slinkset (collaborative news sharing and discovery)
WordPress (Integrate a WordPress blog into the main page of your social network)
Reviews by Notches (Add review functionality to your network)
Classifieds by Adbhai (Add classifieds functionality to your network)
SearchMe (Searchme reviews) (visually search your network’s content or the web)
Flinkit by Sapplica (share interesting links)
Zoho Office Suite (six separate apps for Calendar, Docs, Mail, Planner, Contacts and Tasks Apps)
Clackpoint (Add voice conference functionality to your network)
VoxBox by Sapplica (Add polls and discussions to your network)

Communication
Ustream (Streaming of live events)
Twitter Tracker (Display a Twitter stream on the main page of your social network)
Tokbox (Video chat)
Mailchimp (Email campaigns)
Qik (Live streaming from mobile devices)
Zorap (Live multimedia chat and sharing)
YapLoud (lightweight browser-based chat)
Superchat by Sapplica (alternative chat environment)
Contact Us by LiveWired (add a simple contact form to your social network)
Internet Voicemail by Meternet (add voicemail to your network)

See more in the full Mashable post.

Online University Reviews aggregates the 100 Most Inspiring and Innovative Blogs for Educators. These blog resources include tips, tools, and lessons and are divided into the following categories:

• General Teaching Blogs
• Specialty Subject Blogs
• Best Podcasts for Teachers
• Best Video Blogs for Teachers

David Weinberger discusses the Pros and cons of the Google book deal in an article for KM World.

“The settlement is not what you would come up with if you began with a blank piece of paper and designed the optimal system for all the interested parties. But it is a big step forward … especially if we can get some changes to address the needs of the class of people we call “readers.”"

Kaite Stover of the Kansas City Public Library writes for Booklist about using the Book Clubs application in Facebook to extend the library’s face-to-face book club.

The Book Clubs application let’s users set up their own clubs – such as the Book Lovers club which has over 6,500 members – and provides a message board, Wall, and other tools to discuss spotlighted books. From the press release:

“In Book Clubs you can post comments about a book or author, rate or review books, build or search a library of titles, entirely at your convenience. If you choose, you can arrange meetings in person, too, and use book clubs as a place to chat or post club news between meetings.”

Barbara Fister, Librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, and the author of In the Wind writes about Publishers & Librarians for the latest issue of Library Journal.

“Libraries are far more than a market, however. Libraries create readers. They are the test bed, the petri dish for books, a place where people can discover a passion for reading as children and indulge it as adults and where passionate readers can sample new authors. Librarians are the ultimate handsellers of books (though they call it readers’ advisory), and increasingly they put their considerable technical skills into making library web sites rich interactive social networks for book lovers.”

Amazon announced the Kindle DX today, a large-screen edition of their e-paper device which is available for pre-order at a price point of $489. Due to be available this summer, the new Kindle DX sports 2.5 times the surface area of the latest-generation Kindle, has native PDF support, and an impressive auto-rotate feature which changes the display from portrait to landscape as the user adjusts the device. Here are some other differences between the new Kindle DX and the Kindle.

• Bigger screen – 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen (as opposed to the 6″ Kindle)
• Larger storage capacity – 4GB or room for 3,500 books, (double the 2GB of the Kindle which holds over 1,500 books)
• Native PDF support
• Auto-rotate display
• also…
  Heavier 18.9 ounces (vs. 10.2 ounces of the Kindle)

Higher ed textbook publishers will begin to offer their titles through the Kindle store, and several universities have partnered with Amazon to make the DX devices available to students this fall.

From the Business Wire press release:

“Kindle DX’s large display offers an enhanced reading experience with another category of graphic-rich content—textbooks. With complex images, tables, charts, graphs, and equations, textbooks look best on a large display. Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.

Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device. ”

Noura Yehia writes the first in a 4-part series titled The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress. The initial article Part One: 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress, provides code snippets, hacks, and tricks for how to fully utilize WordPress as a content management system. Some of the post’s how-to’s and tutorials include instructions for:

• Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress
• How to widgetize your theme
• Set Up Custom WordPress post Templates
• and more.

Stay tuned to the Noupe website for the next articles in the series:

• Part Two: 25+ Great Websites Using WordPress as CMS
• Part Three: 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• Part Four: The Big Contest – Winning 10 Premium WordPress Themes

Derek Powazek, author of Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places, writes about The Wisdom of Community for A List Apart.

“The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online.”

Several libraries have recently joined the Flickr Commons initiative started by the Library of Congress in early 2008. Among them are:

Swedish National Heritage Board – 201 images

Nantucket Historical Association – 208 images

Chicago’s Field Museum Library – 476 images

District of Columbia Public Library – 154 images

Sarah Milstein, co-author of “Twitter and the Micromessaging Revolution,” a research report from O’Reilly Media, writes about Twitter for Libraries (and Librarians) for the May issue of Computers in Libraries.

“The essence of Twitter is conversation. Libraries, however, tend to use it as a broadcast mechanism. Libraries on Twitter should encourage followers to interact with the library—ask questions, share links, re-Tweet interesting posts from others, and reply when people message you (those are prefaced with @ your account name). For professional development, look for conference coverage on Twitter.”

First Monday has published an article written by Alexis Wichowski titled Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization in its May 4th issue.

“Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival”— remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.”