Archive for September 2010

BitTorrent, Explained. from BitTorrent, Inc. on Vimeo.

The folks at Common Craft have created a new video in which they explain a technology in easy-to-understand terminology. Check out BitTorrent, Explained on Vimeo, or the BitTorrent website.

Joseph Janes, the Internet Librarian, writes for American Libraries about Wired‘s September cover story “The Web Is Dead,”. In As the Web Fades Away Janes takes a look at how information services need to become mobile.

“It follows that successful information services must be mobile-friendly or native, focused, fast, reliable, seamless, and easy. Does this describe anything we currently do or represent? I think “reliable” suits us well, and some things are “easy” or “focused” if rarely both simultaneously, but I struggle to think of a library function that satisfies all of those.

Here’s your assignment for the week: Take a service you’re responsible for (readers’ advisory, information literacy, catalog searching, whatever) and spend 30 minutes imagining how you could get it to move closer toward that list.”

Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, talks about Social Media Metrics. This brief but useful post discusses which metrics are important to track for your organization.

“The social media metric that I think does matter and that is difficult to fully qualify is sentiment: the positive or negative mentions of a brand, product, service, whatever. Companies like SAS (a client), Radian6 (sometimes a client and I’m an advisor), and many more track sentiment as part of what they do. This metric is very useful when applied to customer service metrics. If you know the perception and sentiment behind a perception, then you can work to correct it. This becomes a value, and it’s something you can put effort behind.”

In Library Labs Turn to Their Patrons for Project Ideas, Travis Kaya at The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog writes about universities that are asking their patrons what types of projects and services they’d like to see the library pursuing.

“This fall, the new Harvard University Library Lab invited students and faculty and staff members to help enhance the facility’s offerings by proposing projects of their own. The lab will pool the proposals—submitted through an online portal—for review by a board of library officials. Once selections are made, the lab will develop the most promising projects with grant money from Arcadia, a London-based charitable fund to protect endangered natural and cultural resources, and with technical support from computer programmers and the library staff.”

The folks at the Best List of Lists round up the 50 Best And Astonishing WordPress Themes Of 2010 For Free Download. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, be sure to take a look, many of these professionally designed themes look good, including #17 the Cat Lady theme.

Are you looking for ways to get organized and increase your productivity? If so, you’ll want to check out Whitson Gordon’s Top 10 Ways to Organize and Streamline Your Workspace on Lifehacker. Here are his first four suggestions:

• Pick the Right Desk for Your Space and Workflow
• Re-Evaluate Your Office Gear and Get Rid of What You Don’t Need
• Use a Camera to Help Find the Worst Clutter Spots
• Reboot Your Workspace Each Evening

Mashable’s Christina Warren rounds up 5 Tools for Keeping Track of Your Passwords for My Life Scoop. This useful article reviews each of these robust apps including price and feature information and a screenshot.

Cindy King at the Social Media Examiner writes about How to Create Social Media Business Guidelines. This excellent article provides a quick primer for creating social media policies and guidelines as a framework for carrying out your organization’s social media strategy. The guide is divided into the following sections:

• Advantages of Social Media Guidelines
• Models to Follow
• Social Media Guidelines for Employees
• Guidelines for Your Social Media Team
• Guidelines for Crisis Management
• Editorial Guidelines for Specific Social Media Platforms
• Social Media Guidelines for Big Companies
• Social Media Guidelines Adapted to Small Companies
• Find the Right Social Media Guidelines for Your Business

The Blog Herald has issued The State of the Blogosphere 2010, with some interesting stats in the form of an infographic. They report that there are currently 146,628,598 blogs online today.

Kyle Prior at Six Revisions rounds up 10 Twitterific Twitter Tools. Each list entry includes a screenshot, brief review of features, and a list of alternative applications if relevant.

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study based on a telephone survey of 2,252 U.S. adults age 18 and older, conducted by Princeton Survey Research International, has found that 35% of U.S. adults have software applications or “apps” on their phones, yet only 24% of adults use those apps.

“An apps culture is clearly emerging among some cell phone users, particularly men and young adults,” said Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project. “Still, it is clear that this is the early stage of adoption when many cell owners do not know what their phone can do. The apps market seems somewhat ahead of a majority of adult cell phone users.”

The Usability.gov website has put together this incredibly useful Step-by-Step Usability Guide infographic.

via Michael Porter

Bridget McCrea at Campus Technology discusses Gartner’s recent publication of the Rights and Responsibilities for Consumers of Cloud Computing Services in How Solid Is Your Clouded Data? This new document is a “bill of rights” for cloud consumers addressing data ownership and security of hosted data.

“The right to retain ownership, use, and control of one’s own data is one area that Plummer cited as especially relevant for institutions using cloud computing. “Basically what we’re saying is that you should have the right to look at your own data, even when that data is placed on a cloud server,” said Gartner. “In the university setting, there’s intellectual property flying all over the place–from researchers sending files to one another to the e-mail system that’s running on a Google or Yahoo data center.”

Danielle Rosenthal and Mario Bernardo write about Creating a Library Database Search using Drupal in the most recent issue of the Code4Lib Journal. If your library is one of the many which have adopted the Drupal content management system, you’ll want to give this article a look.

“When Florida Gulf Coast University Library was faced with having to replace its database locator, they needed to find a low-cost, non-staff intensive replacement for their 350 plus databases search tool. This article details the development of a library database locator, based on the methods described in Leo Klein’s “Creating a Library Database Page using Drupal” online presentation. The article describes how the library used Drupal along with several modules, such as CCK, Views, and FCKeditor. It also discusses various Drupal search modules that were evaluated during the process.”

October 1st has been declared Follow a Library Day on Twitter. People are encouraged to tweet their favorite twittering library or libraries using the #followalibrary hashtag.