Thursday
August, 7th
More from the Cloud
Again, via ALA Direct! Check out all the choices, including http://posterous.com/
Thursday
August, 7th
Tuesday
May, 6th
Page2RSS
Now, this is very useful. For pages that don’t have an RSS Page2RSS will basically create one for you. Simply type in the URL of the page that you’re interested in, grab the feed, add it into your favourite reader and you’re done.
Tuesday
March, 11th
Rapidly disseminating information you find interesting?
Note: we also get the results from the social media survey. Open all the links at once: http://linkbun.ch/52i -thanks infodoodads.com
Sharing PDFs
At times, I want to share parts of an article (like with you.) So I tested an online tool to extract an abstract from the article I just read. Here’s that abstract:
“…The main hypothesis we examine is whether heavier users of IT are more productive, and if heavier users of IT are indeed more productive, how does this increase in productivity manifest itself? Our results suggest that, controlling for other factors, the size of an individual’s internal email network is more highly correlated with revenues generated by that individual than age, experience or education. … Additionally, even after accounting for the individual’s number of unique contacts within the firm, the social network measure of “betweenness” is also highly correlated with revenues. We attribute the strength of these results to the fine grain detail of the data on this form of task-based white collar work.”
–From http://spirit.tau.ac.il/public
and rather than force you to load Adobe Acrobat Reader I can re-direct you to another tool. pdfmenot.com allows me to quickly let you load a presentation on the paper above. If you ever sent anyone a large PDF they will thank you for using this. Here’s that presentation.
http://pdfmenot.com/view/http:
Another way I collect information is to save the slides or pages I specifically want. In a 78-page PDF it’s doubtful I want all 78-pages. Sometimes I actually like to hand colleagues a hard copy of a specific section. Trolling through the PDF to print only the pages I want is time consuming. Nor do I want my colleagues to have to find the pages I want them to see if I email it. I just hack the PDF down. Using this app you can modify your PDF for sharing. Takes seconds. Saves time.
The folks over at infodoodads turn you on to some pretty cool stuff too. Laurie did this presentation. Then put it online. Pretty slick. Here’s the link to Issuu and the presentation:
http://tinyurl.com/2mu9db
A lot of my tricks I’ve picked up from other bloggers but most recently I’m thankful to http://www.friedbeef.com/about/ (I would have called it friedveggies since I’m one of those veg-heads.)
Delicious
I also bookmark like mad. Do you get regular links via your delicious account? “What’s that!?! Not another thing to check,” you say. Settle down now; it’s just links. If you’re in my network I can add you every time I bookmark something I think you would like. You can practice reciprocity by sharing with me. Here’s how to do it:
|links for you| –look for this up near the top of your delicious page.
then add me formally to your delicious network by searching for iblee or simply typing the tag:
for:laurenpressley
(I chose Lauren as an example because she shared a cool article on Buddhism with me.)
Social Media
A few weeks back we looked at the question, “How many Social Media Sites do you use online?” Of course, right away I was asked to define it. I’m not big on giving definitive definitions for things I didn’t create. (Not that I’ve created anything worth talking about or defining!) So, yeah, I googled it. I liked Robert Scoble’s take: Social Media. A large part of this media revolves around participation. Yes, participation is in decline in some ways. Read Bowling Alone yet? Even if the author’s premise and research is sloppy (as some have called it) it’s still worth thinking about. When was the last time you got together for dinner with friends? How regularly is it? Do you schedule this time? How social are you offline?
“How many Social Media Sites do you use online?” results:
1-3 sites 40.0%
4-7 sites 51.0%
8+ sites 9.0%
Some responses:
Primary interplay revolves around my typepad blog (justcrim.typepad.com), facebook account, del.icio.us/brianrwuci sites, and google reader feeds/sharing
Although I’m an Early Adopter (MOOS since 1995, LiveJournal since 2000, my offline life is too full for too much time spent online
I have my own blog, I blog for the library, I have a facebook account, a flickr account, i occasional login to Askville.com, I belong to three wikis including the Peace Corps Wiki
LJ, diaryland, flickr, twitter, ravelry, librarything, facebook, myspace, last.fm
Don’t Forget
oh! and don’t forget to share your feeds 
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/00291156310638200102
Feel free to share where you go for info and how you share it with your friends (those online ones too.) You will most likely expose someone to a tool, trick or source they didn’t know about.
Hmm, maybe I should have titled this post: “Sharing is caring?”
TTW Contributor: Lee LeBlanc
Friday
February, 8th
Struggling with Feeds & “In Box Zero”
I drove back to Indiana Wednesday night (yes, in our awful weather) to work on my Australia talks and get caught up with some outstanding writing. I’ve found I am super-productive in my home workspace!
On the drive back, as I often do, I got caught up on my favorite podcasts, including one I’d been meaning to listen to for a while: Merlin Mann’s “In Box Zero” Talk at Goggle from last year. I’m a fan of Mann’s take on productivity, mac use and technology. In the talk he discusses how he manages his email with some practices based on “getting Things Done” by David Allen. It’s rather fascinating how he hones in on how some of us “live in our inboxes.”
I realized while listening that I wanted to blog about this, and then yesterday I catch a tweet from Cliff Landis that he was “struggling with too many RSS feeds.” In a bit of synchronicity, Merlin Mann also discusses RSS feeds toward the end of the talk. The tips for dealing with clutter also carries to feeds and other work technologies.
His summary tips:
- Do email less.
- Schedule email dashes - once per hour.
- Use filters to control email/RSS
His blog series on “In Box Zero” is here: http://www.43folders.com/izero
Checkout the video here: http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/25/merlins-inbox-zero-talk
How do TTW readers deal with email? With “too many feeds?”
Update: Are there too many social sites?
Thursday
January, 10th
More on NetVibes - From France!
Clotilde comments about using NetVibes to build a portal:
The French Lille Management School’s library had made “virtual communities” with NetVibes.
You can see for example the HR communtiy on http://www.netvibes.com/esc-lille_rh
You can also visit their website 2.0 : http://mediatheque.esc-lille.fr/index.php?id=362&L=1 (in english)
Friday
January, 4th
RSS Feed Parser at Moraine Valley
This is very cool. Our IT department has helped out the by putting up our own Feed Parser. Now, sure what a feed parser it? Basically, it’s a tool that lets you take display an RSS feed in a Web page (Blackboard page, blog, etc) as a bulleted list. It is an easy way for the less technically savvy faculty members to incorporate outside content into course sites. I’ve put together this Feed parser help page to explain how this works a bit more.
http://www2.morainevalley.edu/default.asp?SiteID=10&PageId=2066
Wednesday
December, 5th
Article: Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups
Great post at one of my favorite productivity blogs, 43 Folders:
http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/27/sink-or-swim-managing-rss-feeds-better-groups
So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas. Here’s what I came up with:
News - Self-explanatory, but specifically feeds from traditional news outlets like the New York Times, BBC, et al that pump out so much stuff I can’t possibly hope to keep up. I usually read this group starting with the newest items first, and stop and delete the rest when I get tired. I won’t miss anything; if I get behind, most of those items are either updates on breaking stories, or tidbits I’ve already heard elsewhere on TV or the radio.
Can’t Miss - Again, pretty obvious, but these are my favorite sites, ones where I want to at least scan every single item, like blogs of friends, publications where I write, etc. Not just anything can go in here—this group has a high barrier to entry to keep its volume manageable.
Skip ‘Em - The aforementioned feeds that I like to read when I have time, but don’t mind missing either. Grouping them together like this makes it easy to dump them en masse on one of those days where I just don’t have the time or energy. However, this shouldn’t be an excuse to subscribe to every bleeping feed you see; I still try to keep this bunch to a minimum.
Not News - This is a combination of the Can’t Miss and Skip ‘Em groups. I usually like to read the standard news over breakfast, then save this one for later. It also makes a nice subset to peruse later in the day when I’ve had my fill of the ticker tape feeds. This is another area where Google Reader helped out, because it uses a tagging model that makes it easy to group things in multiple folders.
Great advice for anyone dealing with a mountain of feeds and finite time.
Thursday
January, 4th
Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006
Dion Hinchcliffe posts an overview of the best of Web 2.0 for 2006:
http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2006.htm
Amongst the choices are some of my favorites as well: Netbvibes and YouTube.
Wednesday
November, 29th
RSS Smarts
This week I had my regular Monday night LIS701 class and have 2 guest lectures scheduled as well. I’m talking Web 2.0/L2 and one of my points, of course, is that LIS students need an aggregator and some feeds. Starting in school sets the stage for using tools such as RSS to stay in the know. This morning, into my Safari-flavored aggregator comes this ultra hot post from Library Clips:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/11/29/rss-smarts/
I’ve found RSS is addictive, sometimes you have to let go and drop feeds, you can’t be aware of everything.
I’ve found RSS content is overwhelming, sometimes you have to learn methods to overcome the overload.
Most of all I find RSS enlightening, as I can now be aware of so much that is happening like never before.
Recap of tools/methods to speed/reduce/spread feed content:
- Try to avoid general search feeds, social bookmark tag feeds (Find blogs that cover this stuff)
- Reduce feed subscriptions if another feed already covers the topic or posts from that feed
- River of News
- Personalised Reading Behaviour (Relevancy)
- Rank frequently read feeds
- Auto-delete feeds
- Auto memetracking/collating similar posts
- Test folder
- Smart feeds (search feed across your subscriptions/OPML)
- Machine tags (by machine topic)
- Splice/Filter/De-dupe
- Search feed within a blog, even a blog category
- Personalised Memetracker (read content from your OPML based on popularity/relevancy)
- Start page
- RSS to email, RSS to IM, RSS to SMS
- System tray, sidebar, browser, cursor trail, real desktop widget, etc…
- Phone (mobile device) email or RSS Reader
- RSS to audio file
- Audio RSS Reader
- RSS to mobile audio
- RSS audio streamed to mobile
- Choose your RSS Reader carefully, Google Reader is hot at the moment!
I’d point all the Dominican GSLIS students to these tips as well as anyone interested in harnessing RSS. Thanks Library Clips!
Saturday
November, 25th
Announcing LibWorm: Search the Biblioblogosphere
David Rothman announces LibWorm:
http://davidrothman.net/2006/11/25/libworm-search-and-current-awareness-for-libraryfolk/
With LibWorm, you can search over 1100 feeds, including more than 800 biblioblogs, many LIS journal TOCs, and many other information sources of interest to libraryfolk.
Any search in LibWorm can be outputted as an RSS feed, so LibWorm should be a very useful way to track mentions of your favorite subjects in the biblioblogosphere and beyond.
You can choose to use LibWorm’s built-in aggregator by registering for an account, and this will also facilitate the social aspects of the site that will be implemented in the future.
Check out the feed categories, including podcasts form various types of libraries and a feed labeled “Meta.”
Wednesday
October, 25th
RSS Identity Crisis - Brian Gray’s Web 2/Library 2.0 Presentation
RSS Identity Crisis - Brian Gray’s Web 2/Library 2.0 Presentation
Originally uploaded by mstephens7.
Take a look at Brian Gray’s presentation:
http://briangray.alablog.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/25/2446127.html
Good stuff…great examples!
Monday
August, 7th
How is Your Library Promoting RSS Feeds?
I really appreciate what Tacoma is doing. Thanks to David King and Jenny Levine for posting!
Friday
June, 30th
Tech Crunch on the Future of RSS
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/30/newsgator-posts-roadmap-for-the-future-of-rss/
There ’s so much here about the power and future of RSS, I’ll just quote the end:
RSS is the foundation of almost everything Web 2.0 - isn’t it? It’s what makes blog readership scalable, podcasts subscribable, wiki changes watchable and so much more. If Newsgatgor can succeed in offering the kind of innovative features this roadmap alludes to, without falling into the trap of crass commercialism, Reinacker’s vision could be deeply influential for the future of the medium.
Put this on your to read list!
Saturday
June, 24th
TTW Mailbox: Selling RSS to Medical Librarians (Updated)
This is great stuff! I asked David if I could post his e-mail to me. He said yes!
David Rothman writes to TTW:
On the theme of how to sell RSS, I’d like to share how I’m ’selling’ RSS to physicians in my small medical library in central New York state. A big challenge for physicians and other clinicians (especially those not in an academic setting) is staying on top of new developments in their field. This is usually referred to as “Current Awareness.”
Medical Librarians have done a number of things over the years to help clinicians with their current awareness needs. One older technique is to photocopy the table of contents of new issues of Medical Journals when they arrive at the library, and distribute them to the clinicians who want them. This is, of course, very labor-intensive and time-consuming, and many medical libraries had to stop doing it because they no longer had the resources.
A more recent method is for the library to subscribe to distribution lists that email the table of contents of a particular journal to the subscriber. The librarian can, of course, set up email filters to forward the right tables of contents to the right clinicians, but this method still has significant problems.
* Not all Journals offer this service
* The library must still maintain a complex list of which clinician wants which tables of contents
* This isn’t very customizable. A gastroenterologist could, for instance, only want to see updates on Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and might not want to have to slog through all the tables of contents to visually scan for those articles that address his/her specific interests. Some physicians subscribe to these emailed tables of contents themselves, and find that they are glutted with so many items they DON’T want that they don’t have time to filter through and find the ones they DO want. Frustrated, some give up trying to stay on top of their current awareness efforts. This isn’t good for them, and it isn’t good for their patients.
But current awareness is more important than ever with the emphasis in recent years on Evidence-Based Medicine. The physicians I’ve spoken with on this topic have a very clear idea of what the problem is: They need the best and latest information, but they don’t have the time to filter the information for what they need, and medical libraries frequently don’t have the resources to filter it for them. Here’s where the opportunity to “sell” RSS comes in.
“How would you like it,” I asked our hospital’s head of surgery, “if you had one list of items from news or medical publishing on exactly the information you want. Imagine you could flip through this list and check off items as ‘not interested’, ‘maybe later’, or ‘the library must get me the full text of this article’. And what if, when you wanted the full text, you could click a couple of times to order it from the library?”
His eyes widened. “That’s possible?”
I asked him what the most essential journals he wanted to keep up with were and where he looked for news on general surgery. I then created a Google Reader account for him and subscribed to these sources. I then sent him the following:
Hello, Dr. Xxxxxxxx-
I have set up for you RSS feeds of the tables of contents for the three journals you named as most important to you (plus “General Surgery” headlines from Medscape) in a free Google Reader account (this comes with a bunch of other free services from Google that you may be interested in- please let me know).
Go here: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
Login ID: XXXXX.XXXXX
Password: XXXXXXXX
This should let you browse through each item very quickly. If you don’t want to read further, just move to the next item.
If you want the full text of the article, go to “More Actions” and choose “Gmail this”. From there, you can send the citation directly to library@
If you just want to mark the article for review later, “star” it. Later, you can select “Your starred items” to see a list of just items you “starred.”
You can also add any labels you want to any item so you can find what you want later. (see attached image)
There’s lots more you can do with this, and I know this will be an easier way for you to manage your current awareness than email. For instance:
* You don’t have to use Google Reader for these feeds. You could install a reader on your computer like Abilon , use another web-based reader like Bloglines , or use Firefox browser extensions like Sage .
* You can add not only feed that others have created but CREATE custom feeds via PubMed or HubMed . For instance, you could create a feed that would give you an item every time the phrase “General Surgeon” appears in Medline’s indices, in ANY medical journal. You could also use a service like Google News to add an item to your Reader whenever the term “general surgeon” (or any other phrase or combination of phrases) appears in popular mainstream news.
Please do let me know if/when you’d like some one-on-one time in which we can maximize the benefit of this technology to you. I have begun the process of building a web site to help Physicians learn and do this sort of thing on their own, but that is, at best, months away from completion.
Any feedback you care to offer, in any format, would be extremely welcome and help to shape the way similar services are made useful to other physicians.
In a sort of “Tipping Point” move, I chose this physician to try out feeds first because he’s influential and respected (and enthusiastic about technology generally). Next, I showed this email to the Hospital’s Vice President of Medical Affairs, pointing out that he could use RSS feeds to stay on top of hospital management journals and news, too.
The VP of MA asked for an appointment to set up his aggregator the next day.
I am completely certain that ALL physicians will be making use of feeds or their descendent technologies within the next 5-10 years.
Just a bit more:
1. The next step for my library is to create a portal for medical RSS, striving to make it as easy as possible for clinicians to find and use feeds.
2. I have benefited greatly from rss4medics.com and MedWorm.com. These are easily the best place to start looking for medical RSS feeds, if one doesn’t already know what one needs.
Thanks David! I’m always happy to see how librarians are incorporating a bit of training, a bit of technological expertise and a nice healthy dose of RSS into their services.
Hit David up with comments at david.rothman (at) gmail.com
UPDATE: David responded after I posted and said he’d had some good feedback and had been emailing with another medical librarian. He forwarded a bit moere of his thoughts (I like the concept of radical personalization!):
A few thoughts:
I personally dislike email distribution of TOCs and encourage other medical librarians to abandon them ion favor of RSS. Here are reasons (off the top of my head) why:
I have met too many doctors that end up feeling overwhelmed by the flood of emails in their inbox and eventually give up.
One of the advantages of RSS is that you can be more specific (if needed) than TOCs. Example: A gastroenterologist specializing in IBD might not WANT every article from J. Gastroenterology. He/she might prefer just to get articles that contain the terms “crohns”, “colitis” or “inflammatory bowel disease” that appear in that journal.
It is much easier and quicker to manage thje contents of an aggregator’s reading list than an inbox- especially when the inbox is used for purposes beyond receiving TOCs.
It takes time for a physician to open a TOC email and visually scan it for the information that interests him/her. An aggregator’s reading list organizes each article but its title, so a physician can decide instantly whether to ask for the full text from the library, or whether just to move on to the next item
If a physician finds an article via an emailed TOC he/she wants the full-text of, it takes some time to email the details to the library. Many aggregators (like Google Reader) have an “email this item” button. I’m encouraging my first few users to forward the item directly to library@
If the physician forwards the TOC details to the medical library to request full text, the details often WON’T include the PubMed ID. Often, they won’t even include Volume, Issue, or page, either (depending on the whims of the person at the journal’s publisher who decides how TOC contents are formatted). If you set up an RSS feed for that same journal from PubMed, you can be sure to get ALL the information needed to quickly acquire the full text.
Some journals don’t have TOC email lists. But you can generate an RSS feed from PubMed for any Journal you want, whether or not they offer TOC emails or RSS feeds. That way it doesn’t even matter that Elsevier (dang them to heck) is so far behind on RSS.
RSS is also just XML, really. This means that if you NEED to, you can convert the content of an RSS feed to HTML (for a web page) or to email! That way, you can still have email subscriptions, but ones that are MUCH more specific to the needs of the physician than TOC emails.
I don’t think that RSS has to be beyond physicians, and that medical librarians can develop tools to put the use of RSS easily in their reach. I see two ways of doing this, a web-based directory and subscription service and pre-configuration of aggregators.
Web-based directory: What I’m working to build (still in planning, not a keystroke of code is written yet) is a site that will let physicians find the sites they want (not dissimilar from rss4medics.com or MedWorm.com), and then subscribe to the feeds with a SINGLE CLICK.
I plan to make this feasible by allowing physicians to search by discipline, then separate into Medical Professional News, Mainstream Medical News, and Medical Journal articles.
Also making it easy for physicians will be having three subscription buttons for each feed. RSS (generic), Subscribe via BlogLines, and Subscribe via Google. The Bloglines and Google readers are powerful, easy to use, and will work on any computer with a modern web browser. All the physician has to do is find the feed(s) he/she wants, and click the button. That’s it. The physician is subscribed.
Pre-configuration of aggregators: In the email that Michael Stephens posted, you’ll see that I did a brief interview with the physician to determine is current awareness needs and wants, then created a Google Reader account and configured it FOR him. All he now has to do is log in and start playing with it. It took me about 30 minutes to find/create the feeds he needed and set them up in his Google Reader account. That may seem like a lot of time spent of the less tech-savvy docs, but the value to the physician is high enough that I’d be okay with it taking an HOUR per physician. Also, once you get them started, most will figure it out and be able to manage their own feed subscriptions.
One of the tenets of Web 2.0 is radical personalization, right? I think that RSS allows for this in ways that email simply cannot touch. The problem used to be that Physicians couldn’t find information they needed. Now the problem is that they have far too much. RSS can help them get EXACTLY what they need- and no more.
Friday
June, 23rd
How to sell RSS
Via the Copyblogger: http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-sell-rss/
Recently released studies re-affirm that people love getting content by email, and don’t get why they should switch to RSS. Of course when you ask the question “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” and get a negative response, it’s as if you had asked “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?” in 1995 (good one, Scott!).
Regardless, people simply don’t like change. And when you tout RSS on the basis that it does the exact same thing as email when it comes to content delivery, you’ll get nothing more than a shrug and a blank look.
The way to sell RSS is to tell people why it’s better than email for them.
Or, as Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog correctly commented, RSS “beats email all to heck.” Now, we just need to tell people why.
And I agree that we’ve got to stop calling it RSS. It’s just not going to fly with the masses.
I’m warming up to “content feed” myself. What do you think?
Another good term. I think I need to update some slides in my presentations. And training librarians, maybe it’s time to revamp your presentations as well! Try “content feed” on for size and don’t forget “textcasting!”
Friday
May, 26th
That textcasting is so HOT right now
Love the term! “Textcasting”
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2006/05/textcasting_the.html
Heck yeah! I’m in. Great idea!
Thursday
April, 6th
More Useful Links for the OPAL Talk
UPDATE: What a great time that was! Thanks to all at OPAL!!
Here are some extra links as resources:
Open Source Software at TechEssence
ALA on DRM & DRM Guide for Librarians
The Internet is Entering its LEGO era
Libraries with MySpace accounts
Tennant and Pace on the Future of Catalogues from Panlibus
Rainie on Millennials from SELCO
iPods in Action at Georgia College and State University
Sunday
November, 27th
Mashing Up RSS
I posted about the recent report about RSS and content here, and now these notes for publishers appear at Matt McAllister’s blog, and it’s oh so HOT to think about some of them for libraries, especially:
1) Do your own mash ups. Pick up content from aggregators, tagging tools, and other sources to complement every item you post. Every news article, product review, column and blog entry should be a microportal to relevant things that help readers dive deeper into that subject. In most cases, the best links will not be related links on your own site.
I think libraries could create some great mash ups of content for users, say from local news feeds, world news, new materials/reviews, tech news, commentary, etc.
Viahttp://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/_archives/2005/11/26/1422765.html
Wednesday
November, 23rd
Changing the Way Content is Delivered
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001518.html
How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed The first in a series of market reports by your friends at FeedBurner. You can download this report in PDF format (300 KB) from our Web site. Stay tuned to this weblog for future installments.
