My Gadget Life

Another thing I demo’ed at the awards dinner last night was Audioblogger. What you can do is save their number in your cell phone, call it, say whatever you want, or interview someone with your phone, and it gets immediately posted to your blog as an MP3 file. Here’s the link to the audio post from last night’s dinner.

At the NEASIST awards dinner last night, I gave a talk about gadgets (my gadget life). One of the things I demo’ed was Blogger Mobile. With it you can take a photo with your cameraphone, then send the photo to this address: go@blogger.com. It gets posted to your blog immediately. Here is the temporary blog I set up for the event: http://booads3.blogspot.com/.

Some thoughts from Michael’s talk:
- Control your technolust - sexy technology
- beware “technomust”
- technodivorce - can we let go of dead tech?, cabinet of dead & dying technology, library garage sale
- article: “planning for wireless in kansas city”
- user-centered planning
- expose hidden costs: training, staff time, promotion
- technology landscape: bringing structure to unstructured data, open source software, security, authentication and DRM, distributed, component-based software
- best practices for instant messaging: make IM part of your technology plan (”the millienials”), promote your screen name, add your IM name to your business cards, sig files, web site, use a multi-client, use away messages well
- report and de-brief your staff, give them numbers
- blog/wiki your planning for new projects
- be discoverable: offer access via handhelds, check your search rankings, offer RSS feeds of important content
- Stephen Abram: The Google Opportunity
- new Mac OS (Tiger) has screensave with RSS feeds built in (he demo’ed this), also Safari browser has RSS button built in
- make your own downloadable toolbar for users
- jybe.com (co-browsing plugin)
- unplug - get away from the computer!

Some ideas from Jenny’s talk:
- use a wiki for OPAC documentation: let users ask questions
- password protect your wiki to hide from spammers (most people don’t have time to keep doing the rollbacks to kill spam)
- del.icio.us has 50,000 users & growing 20-30%/month
- ideas for del.icio.us for libraries: Thomas Ford Memorial Library:
Here is a list of things we’ve bookmarked recently - they show that with RSS feed for their tags. Cool.
- del.icio.us / popular/ reference: Google cheatsheet is number 1
- people use the tag: howto
- del.icio.us: inbox - subscribe to people you think are interesting
- Furl is not as social as del.icio.us - really cool but not as many people using it. They give you 5 Gb of space. When you bookmark, it saves the whole page.
- Furl tags are not public - you can only access your own stuff.
- How Joe Q. is using social bookmark managers:
Furl ideas from the public - gift ideas, xmas wish list, housing rental listings, streaming music stations, job listings, school work - save and retrieve online research, reading lists.
- Rubric and Unalog
- Citeulike.org (academic del.icio.us)
- Connotea
- U.Minnesota blogs: integrated SFX into blogs: link to SFX URL (I’ve seen this before, it’s great).
- Flickr could be a daylong session.
- Flickr great for current events.
- SeattlePublicLibrary on Flickr.
- Flickr calendar view - show when your books are due.
- make a tag for your library on Flickr
- photos of books, add comments with links to the OPAC
- more Flickr ideas: teaching 7th grade math, geography (Mappr - uses Flickr photos to do cool stuff), available for reference within Flickr - going where your users are!
- promote the Yahoo Worldcat toolbar to get direcctly to your holdings
- Technorati
- we should be making our own toolbars for libraries
- “books we like” - tagging recommendations
- libraries could add “tags” in addition to subject headings
- getting our information, expertise and resources in the mix (of social tools)
- we should examine tags and folksonomies
- use RSS to put your content somewhere else, you can appear in other people’s web sites and aggregators
- rss feeds for new books, etc.
- spurl.net (js button) - they give you the HTML to put their feed into your web site
- blogs + RSS = better ranking in Google, Bloglines, Feedster, PubSub, BlogPulse, puts you into the online conversation
- Yahoo360, 43 Things, Audioscrobbler, Last.FM, NetFlix, GPS, RFID
- http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/neasist.pdf

Megan Fox is giving an overview: Tools in Personal Environments: A Taste of New Technologies. Here are a few ideas that I’m interested in:
- there is a mobile edition of Bloglines (for phones)
- Personalized RSS: Library Elf (I’m using this one already)
- Podcast: Schoolhouse Rock
- use wikis for staff manuals (reference docs) (UWinnipeg Library)
- Wiki for the ALA Conference in Chicago, everyone can contribute, local restaurants, free wifi hotspots, etc.
- let your users create subject guides using Wikis, or book recommendations from users
- IM for reference (taking off)
- Dawgtel (Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale): text message service
- Google Toolbar (I just started using the A9 Toolbar myself).
- desktop search: she talked about Google Deskbar (for Windows), but now that the new Mac OS Tiger is out, I’ll be trying Spotlight as soon as I get my new Powerbook (coming soon!)
- Bloglines bookmarklet
- Yahoo MyWeb
- A9 toolbar: just got this myself yesterday
- idea: take a photo of the library’s new books, put it on Flickr, and link to the new book list on the library’s web site

There is a lot more, but I just wanted to capture a few thoughts for myself here.