Archive for November 2009

Paul Burgess at nettuts provides an extremely detailed step-by-step tutorial for How to Create a Photo Gallery using the Flickr API. If you’ve been considering ways to set up a slick photo gallery for your library’s digital image collection you’ll want to give this a read. Each of these sections includes screenshots and code snippets.

• Step 1 – Get a Flickr API key
• Step 2 – Download phpFlickr
• Step 3 – Basic Setup and Simple Configuration
• Step 4 – Building the Thumbnails Page
• Step 5 – Build a Page to Display Single Photos

Did you know that the New York Public Library has Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slippers and Charles Dickens’s favorite letter-opener in its collection? Or that they have a special collection of 40,000 restaurant menus, dating from the 1850s to the present? Robin Finn at the New York Times has written an excellent article about some of the NYPL’s more interesting items in Secrets of the Stacks.

Michael at Income Diary has put together a list of 20 Websites That Will Make You A Better Blogger. This annotated guide discusses twenty blogs and websites to “learn, improve and get inspired”. His list is divided into the following topic areas:

• Websites Teaching Blogging
• Blog Design Websites
• Website Optimization
• Make Money Online
• Blogs To Aspire To Be Like

The folks at Common Craft have created another of their “in Plain English” videos, explaining complex technologies in easy to understand terminology. This time they’ve tackled cloud computing.

The folks at Twitter are beta testing a new retweet feature which will enable you to retweet a post with one click. There will also be a new retweet icon to quickly identify retweets.

Will Kelly at Web Worker Daily suggests 6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project. If you’ve been lucky enough to snag an invite you may want to check out these quick tips:

1. Set suitable expectations.
2. Do a dry run with a Wave.
3. Take control of your Waves.
4. Use folders and tags.
5. Consider whether to use live editing or attachments.
6. Have a Plan B.

Pete Cashmore at Mashable suggests Google Wave: Better than Twitter for Conference Chatter? This interesting post illustrates the effective use of Google’s new enhanced email app through screenshots of an audience attending a session at the Ecomm conference.

“Rather than a stream of disconnected Tweets, the result was a wiki-like page of annotations which evolved over the course of a presentation.”

Sarah Evans at Mashable writes about 10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists. If you’re looking for inspiration for how to make the most of this new Twitter feature, you may want to check out this post. Here are her top five:

1. Industry Peers and Professionals Lists
2. Experts Lists
3. Recognize and Reward Customers Lists
4. Niche Lists
5. Employee Directory Lists

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb discusses several reports which show that Twitter is attracting a younger demographic in As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter. There are several interesting statistics included in this post such as: “Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace’s is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.”

“Facebook is getting old. No, people aren’t getting tired of it, it’s actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it’s 33, a good seven years older. That’s an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today’s college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they’re still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they’re also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.”

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has put together a stellar list of 13 Tools for Building Your Own iPhone App. These are applications with the non-developer in mind so if you’ve been thinking about creating your own iPhone version of your website or blog but didn’t know how, you’ll want to check out this list.

Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0, writes for Mashable about How To: Build Your Personal Brand on YouTube. This helpful post details steps you can take in order to leverage the full power of YouTube in order to build your brand. This quick guide provides recommendations in the following areas:

1. Brand your profile
2. Create remarkable videos
3. Promote your videos

This week I have assigned students in my Open Movements course the task of self-archiving their final papers in either E-LIS or DList, both disciplinary repositories for the LIS field. So in the spirit of that assignment, I archived a recent article which I wrote for The CyberSkeptic’s Guide to Internet Research in May, 2009. It’s titled 6 Steps to Publishing a Scholarly Online Journal (for free!) and it details how to create your own open access scholarly journal online.

David Turnbull at DailyBlogTips lists out 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog. If you’ve recently started a blog and you’re brainstorming about ways to get the word out, you may want to check out this guide which is divided into the following sections:

• Content
• Facebook
• Fundamentals
• Online Video
• Other Blogs
• Paid
• People
• Podcasting
• Search engine optimization
• Social networks
• StumbleUpon
• Su.pr
• Twitter
• WordPress

Lifehacker authors Gina Trapani with Adam Pash have published The Complete Guide to Google Wave. This helpful e-book is a comprehensive user manual for all things Wave and is available for free in wiki format. Here’s the table of contents:

• Chapter 1: Meet Google Wave
• Chapter 2: Get Started with Wave
• Chapter 3: Manage Your Wave Contacts
• Chapter 4: Find and Organize Waves
• Chapter 5: Dive Deeper into Wave
• Chapter 6: Master Wave’s Interface
• Chapter 7: Wave Gadgets
• Chapter 8: Wave Bots
• Appendix A: What Wave Can’t Do
• Appendix B: Contribute to The Complete Guide to Google Wave

via WebWorkerDaily

Twitter Lists are a new feature which allows you to group people into sets – even people you aren’t following. This is a great way to organize your Twitterers into lists such as: librarians, family, friends, etc. and then click into those lists for a tweet stream of what those people are saying. Josh Catone at Mashable has put together a guide to How To: Use Twitter Lists, and Jennifer Van Grove provides instructions as to how to Embed Your Lists on Your Blog.