The rest of the site is currently under construction, but for now you’ll find:

Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software (2006) - http://thehyperlinkedlibrary.org/libtechreport1/

Web 2.0 [...]]]> I am happy to announce the full text of both of my ALA Library Technology Reports are available now at the new TTW companion site The Hyperlinked Library.

The rest of the site is currently under construction, but for now you’ll find:

Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software (2006) - http://thehyperlinkedlibrary.org/libtechreport1/

Web 2.0 & Libraries: Trends & Technologies (2007) - http://thehyperlinkedlibrary.org/libtechreport2/

Special thanks to my SJSU SLIS grad assistant Patrick Siebold who worked very hard the past few weeks inputting the content. I know the examples from ’06 and ’07 may seem out of date and quaint in some ways, but I’m very proud of the framework we used for the works back then. Conversations, Community, Connections, Collaborations – all those great C words Jenny Levine and I used throughout our early social software roadshows in 2005 & 2006 provide a useful context for looking at Web 2.0. I hope these works are still useful to some of you. Comments are open for adding more to the chapters and I plan on doing some types of updating as time permits.

The site will also serve my course Web sites and other items related to my teaching. 

http://www.cloudtrip.com

Again, via ALA Direct! Check out all the choices, including http://posterous.com/

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.

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 [...]]]>

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/gandal/Information.pdf

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://www.idei.fr/doc/conf/sic/papers_2005/gandal_slidesl.pdf

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

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 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? 

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)

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 [...]]]> Troy Swanson writes:

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 

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, [...]]]> 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:

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.

What an excellent teaching tool!

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.

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 [...]]]>

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.

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.”

http://briangray.alablog.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/25/2446127.html

Good stuff…great examples!

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 [...]]]> 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!