Archive for June 2009

The Chronicle of Higher Ed talks with Adam Smith, director of product management at Google in this podcast discussion. The two talk about “Book Search, the proposed settlement in the authors-and-publishers lawsuit against it, what it means for academic authors and researchers and so-called orphan works, and fears of a Google monopoly”.

David Chartier writes for Wired Magazine’s Dual Perspectives about The Future of Social Media – one in which the social Web breaks up the silos and enables true data portability.

“The vision of a web where users are no longer locked up with their content away from others just because they picked a different social networking service, is a big one. “We’re essentially creating virtual reality, except that it’s more of an intellectual, informational reality,” Laporte muses. “It’s hard to imagine what this world will look like … but it’s really about breaking down barriers that, up ’till now, have been about the scarcity of resources and information. Now those are coming down.”"

Ryan Deschamps, e-Learning Services Manager at the Halifax Public Libraries, writes about Twitter as Platform – 5 Essential Peripherals for Librarians at The Other Librarian. The article discusses five useful tools to improve the way you use Twitter.

Onlinecolleges.net puts together a giant list of 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom. This guide provides Twitter tips and third party applications for the following categories:

• Communication
• Class Projects and Discovering Content
• Twitter Tools
• Finding People in Academia to Follow
• Get Ready for Life After Graduation

I’m very excited to tell everyone that I’ll be writing a regular column for Library Journal’s Academic Newswire, and that my first column was published today! My column is called Stacking the Tech and it will be covering technology topics as they pertain to academic libraries in particular. My first article for the column is Unconference Uncovers Latest Tech Trends which covers the recent LibCampNYC 2009 event.

Josh Catone at Mashable puts together a guide to 10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps. This quick list includes annotated resources which will help you:

• Find Out Who You’re Following
• Find Your Friends
• Get Rid of Inactives
• Manage it All

Beginning at 12:01 am on Saturday morning, Facebook users will be able to claim their usernames as part of their Facebook Web address to easily point people to their profile or FB Pages. To find out more check out the press release here.

via TechCrunch

Robin Hastings, Information Technology Manager for the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, Missouri, has written a Library Technology Report titled Collaboration 2.0 which looks like an excellent guide to 2.0 tools.

“Some information technology managers and administrators are blocking access to social networks like Facebook or MySpace or to social tools like blogs because of fears that their staff will spend too much time updating their profiles and commenting and not enough time working. The purpose of this report is to give library managers the tools they need to encourage collaborative work both within and outside of their organizations and to make the case that social networking tools, when used efficiently by a library, are more of a boon to productivity than a drain on it. In this report, readers will also find hard data and concrete proposals that will save money and time in just about any collaborative effort library staff might decide to undertake. Even if a given library is not presently engaged in collaborative work, the activities that staff members do on a day-to-day basis can be improved by using collaborative platforms like Google Docs, a wiki, or an internal blog to facilitate communication.”

via Tame the Web

Chris Brogan, social media guru, details 23 Essential Elements of Sharable Blog Posts. If you want to know how to create link-friendly blog posts which spur conversations, be sure to read the full article. Here’s his top 5 recommendations:

1. It starts with a picture that captures your eye.
2. No. It starts with a title that makes you pay attention.
3. The post is useful to others, and not just about you.
4. It’s easy to read, and not a big clump of text.
5. It’s written in a human voice, and not corporate-ese.

Vincenzo Cosenza has created a World Map of Social Networks, a color-coded map that displays which social network is the most popular in each country. The colorful results are based on Alexa and Google Trend data.

Jennifer Leggio writes for ZDNet’s Social Business blog about the Nine worst social media fails of 2009… thus far. Anyone interested in social media marketing will want to check out these summaries of marketing misses.

“What is to be learned here? Well, don’t lead with tools. Don’t think that your brand is above the risks and backlash of social media. When plotting a social media campaign, truly think about what you want your end result to be, and fully examine everything that could possibly go wrong. Word-of-mouth marketing is a fantastic thing when you know how to leverage it. But if you lose control of your brand, the disasters are almost endless. Let these brands’ failures be a lesson.”

Karen Klapperstuck at Library Garden addresses the question of whether libraries should start charging for their services in her recent post titled Freemium.

“How does the freemium model apply to libraries? I’m not entirely certain of the long-term implications but it does seem to me that libraries that are implementing additional fees for services that go beyond the normal scope are taking advantage of this freemium business model (free for some services, pay for value-added services). Libraries are facing tightening budgets and I understand the need to generate revenue other than fines and regular fees. People talk about the public library as being “free” and in a way, it is free because library users pay for those services through their tax dollars.But as Nancy Dowd of The ‘M’ Word – Marketing for Libraries blog stated back in February, why not create a line of premium services for which to charge?”

Rajesh Setty, entrepreneur, author and speaker from the Life Beyond Code blog writes about 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. The article discusses the influence your content may be having (or not having) on your audience, and the different ways they may be responding to it including:

1. Spam
2. Skip
3. Scan
4. Stop
5. Save
6. Shift
7. Send
8. Spread
9. Subscribe

Time Magazine has published a feature article on How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live written by Steven Johnson.

“The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

Trent at The Simple Dollar puts together a quick guide to free software alternatives to Amazon’s 25 bestsellers. I use many of these including WordPress, Audacity, and OpenOffice, but found some new ones I’d like to try out including:

• AVG Free (instead of Norton AntiVirus)
• LiveMocha (instead of Rosetta Stone)
• QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 (instead of QuickBooks Pro)