Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

If you’re at all interested in social media such as social networks, blogs, wikis, podcasts, microblogs, etc., you’ll want to check Mashable’s latest article linking to 15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks. Here are some of the titles:

What is Social Media?

Social Networking, the “Third Place”, and the Evolution of Communications

We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information

12 Essential tips for Success in Social Media

Social Networking: Brave New World or Revolution from Hell? A look at the phenomenon of Social Networking and the implications for Businesses

Mashable comes up with a list of seven tools for editing images online.

1. A.viary Phoenix
2. FlauntR.com
3. FotoFlexer.com
4. Lunapic.com
5. Phixr.com
6. Picnik.com
7. Splashup.com

Educause has created another of its 7 Things guides, this time on the photo-sharing website Flickr. If you’re looking for a nice overview of the popular website, be sure and check out this document which covers the following points:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Less than two weeks ago we saw the Library of Congress partner with the photo-sharing website Flickr in a pilot project called The Commons to display some 3,100 historical photos, (Read our earlier coverage here). Within days of the project launch, the LOC received an overwhelming response. According to their blog, here’s a summary of what happened within the first two days:

• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• Adding in set and collection page views, there were about 1.1 million total views on our account
• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited

And just look at all of those tags!

Common Craft has produced a new video, Online Photo Sharing in Plain English which explains new photo-sharing websites in simple, straightforward terms. For more explanatory videos from their “In Plain English” series, see the Common Craft Show.

The Sunday New York Times story What Did the Professor Say? Check Your iPod covers new software programs which are enabling colleges and universities to record classroom lectures and automatically sync them up with the PowerPoint slides and other digital images used during the lecture.

Students can download these files to play on their iPods on the commute home and they can search these digitized lectures by keywords to jump into the lecture at a point of interest. The University of Central Florida uses one of these programs from the Tegrity company to capture all the sessions of 300 of their classes per year. Fees for these programs range in cost from $10,000 up to $100,000.

via Social Media

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, half of Japan’s Top 10 bestselling fiction books were composed via mobile phones. Each sold an average of 400,000 copies. This new cultural phenomenon sweeping Japan is called keitai shousetsu or mobile phone novels and it is transforming minor publishing houses into forces to be reckoned with.

These works are oftentimes written by first-time authors using a single-name pseudonym and are delivered to their young female-dominated audience via cell phone, the same medium which was used to create them. One of the most popular of these next generation books, Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold over 1.2 million copies since last October.

via TechCrunch

I will be speaking today at the ACRL/NY Symposium about Social Software in Academic Libraries. My presentation is here on Slideshare.net. Thank you to all of the college and university libraries who gave me great quotes about their social software initiatives to use in my prez. Also, here is a quick guide to all of the websites I refer to in my presentation:

Wikis
Wikipedia
WikiHow
University of Minnesota Libraries Wiki
Antioch University New England Library Staff Training & Support Wiki
USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library Wiki Webpage
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki
Butler University Libraries WikiRef
ALA 2007 Annual Conference Wiki
Library Success Wiki
Library Instruction Wiki

Social Bookmarking
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Southern Connecticut State University Hilton C. Buley Library
MIT Libraries Virtual Reference Collection
University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ PennTags
Libmarks
LIS901-06
Maui Community College Library
University of South Florida Lakeland Library Services
library2.0 tag
ALA2007 tag in del.icio.us

Media Sharing
YouTube
Flickr
Colorado College Tutt & Coburn Libraries
Arizona State University Libraries
Williams College Library on YouTube
School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Michigan
GeorgiaTech Webcasts
LIS901-06 Webcasts
SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science
American Library Association on Flickr

Social Networks
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
University of Central Florida
StonyBrook University Health Sciences Library
Facebook Applications
JSTOR on Facebook
Library 2.0 network on Ning

Blogs
Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
Binghampton University Library
Mohawk College Library
Barnard College
University librarian at the McMaster University Library

IM
Ohio University Libraries
American University Library

Microblogging
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Lunar and Planetary Institute

Second Life
Nova Southeastern University Law Library & Technology Center
McMaster University Libraries
San Jose State University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ohio University

Answers
Answer Board Librarians

Subject Guides
Boston College University Libraries LibGuides
LIS753 on Squidoo

Presentation Zen, the go-to blog for professional presentation design advice, has put together a list of 10 links to cool, high-rez images. These websites provide mainly public domain photographs in very large sizes for use in photo projects or in presentations. And check out their comments section for a few more suggestions.

The latest top 100 list comes from Laura Milligan at VirtualHosting.com who puts together a stellar list of the best and most read blogs in the following categories:

• Social Media
• Social Networking
• Web 2.0
• Investor Analysis
• Developer Blogs
• Industry News
• Social Media and Marketing
• Social Media and Google
• Miscellaneous

I noticed a few of my faves on this list including Social Media, Groundswell, Mashable, Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, Read/Write Web, and TechCrunch.

I am a avid reader of Forrester research which provides keen insight into information technology trends and developments in their analysis reports such as: “Leveraging User-Generated Content”, “How Consumers Use Social Networks“, (free to registered guests) “Why You Should Care About Web Widgets”, ” A Second Life For Marketers?”, etc.

They have just made available a series of videos from their recent Consumer Forum 2007 which everyone can access for free when they either log-in or register as guests. (They have noted that you must use Internet Explorer to access the navigation and see the slides.) Two of the analysts that I watch out for because they cover emerging trends and interactive marketing topics, Brian Haven and Charlene Li, have both got videos listed. Here are some others you’ll find:

• Social Networking And User-Generated Content In Today’s Media Environment
  Brian Haven — Senior Analyst
  Christie Hefner — Chairman and CEO, Playboy Enterprises
• MTV — Defining The Next Generation
  Christina Norman — President, MTV Networks
• Corporate Image In The Age Of Social Technologies
  Richard Edelman — President and CEO, Edelman
• Three People Who Are Changing The Face Of Media
  Shar VanBoskirk — Principal Analyst
  Jeremy Allaire — Founder and CEO, Brightcove
  Ze Frank — Founder, ZeFrank.com
  Philip J. Kaplan — Founder and President, Products, AdBrite

…and check out the website for more.

Click for full size.

Want to catalog your DVD collections, as well as books, CDs, and video games? Check out applications such as delicious library, lib.rario.us, and shelfmates listed in Mashable’s latest list of 20+ Media Cataloging Sites.

Have an upcoming speaking engagement? Want to make that PowerPoint presentation a bit more interesting? Check out some of these ideas to liven up your presentations.

	1. Learn from the Popular See what works by watching some of the all-time most popular presentations on Slideshare.net. Pick up pointers for improving your presentations by viewing Meet Henry, Death by PowerPoint, and Shift Happens. Also, I picked up many great presentation tips while watching a couple stellar presentations by Kathryn Greenhill and Judy O’Connell.
	2. Get Expert Advice The Presentation Zen blog and the related website are chock full of presentation advice, guidelines, and examples for creating professional PowerPoint presentations. Other sources of advice include presentation tips articles by experts such as: Guy Kawasaki, How to Get a Standing Ovation, Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users, Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article…, and Common Craft’s 10 Lessons from My Speaking Coach
	3. Add Charts Bestselling author and marketing guru, Seth Godin provides professional tips and advice about creating effective charts in his blog post How to make a PowerPoint chart.
	4. Use Images Image Generators Add a bit of imagery to PowerPoint slides with image generators such as the Txt2Pic website which lets you easily create custom images with your own text and font specifications. Choose from chalkboard signs, post-it notes, theater marquees, Etch-A-Sketch toys, fortune cookies and more. Just enter your text into one of the hundreds of tools on this website.
	The Custom Sign Generator offers users the choice to create custom Monopoly cards, arcade games, For Dummies book covers, and more.
	Create custom comic strip images with stills from Shrek, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, and many others with The Comic Strip Generator which offers over 1,500 comics to choose from.
	Find out about new image generators as they are announced on the Generator Blog.
	Professional Images Add some flavor to your presentation by inserting a relevant comic, illustration, or photo. The folks over at Blaugh.com have made their tech-oriented comics available for use by the public, even issuing an API! Check out this list for places to find free stock photos, and also make use of the Creative Commons license search available on Flickr to find images which are available for reuse.
	Image Caption Tools Prepare your photos with speech captions, thought bubbles, text, or objects before adding them to your slides with tools such as Graphita which also allows doodling on images. There are many tools available which will let you add speech bubbles to photos such as Bubbleshare and Bubblr.

Two new tools will allow you to quickly and easily embed Flickr slideshows into your website or blog.

with flickrSLiDR

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

with PictoBrowser

The first Recording Studio in a public library “anywhere in the universe” is proudly promoted at Palmerston North City Library. For only $5 an hour, you are able to book the recording room and use the iMac

• which is loaded with ProTools and Garageband
• has a 4-way headphone amplifier
• and a very cool MIDI controller keyboard. This means you can mix tracks you’ve recorded elsewhere, or record your own tracks in The Library.

There are academic libraries around with similar facilities. For example, there is a great media centre at Earl Gregg Swemm Library. With a full-time staff, loanable production equipment, and the Media Studios’ array of industry-standard software, The Media Centre is capable of supporting a wide range of multimedia projects from production, post-production to digital/analog distribution.

These are nice models that can work for all sectors of library services. School libraries are great places to set up facilities like this, and integrate particularly well with media delivery systems such as Clickview for storing and distributing student media work developed in the library studio.