New Home for the Blog

My blog is moving over to http://chocolatespoon.wordpress.com/. Eventually I'll redirect everything more seamlessly, but in the meantime, jump on over there! You can update your RSS feeds too: http://chocolatespoon.wordpress.com/feed>

New Home for the Blog

My blog is moving over to http://chocolatespoon.wordpress.com/. Eventually I'll redirect everything more seamlessly, but in the meantime, jump on over there! You can update your RSS feeds too: http://chocolatespoon.wordpress.com/feed>

It's back!!!

I got my blog back!!! I missed being able to blog and it is SO nice to have it back! I have lots of days to catch up on and will get right to work trying to post some of the things. Yay!!!

Mom and Bill were here for the weekend. Mom and I went shopping, I ducked out for a few hours to teach a blogging class at the Gilroy Library, and then Saturday night Margaret and Alan came up here and we all went out to dinner at Ragoots.

Sunday we went into SF and met up with Lisa and John who were visiting for a friend's 60th birthday party and the 6 of us went to see the Picasso exhibit at SFMOMA. It was super crowded but a really interesting exhibit where they really showed the amazing influence he had on American artists. Then we met up with Barbara and Richard at Samovar, my favorite SF tea restaurant (where I had just been the week before when a couple of us from work went up to the Web 2.0 Expo) and really one of my favorite spots anywhere.

I am getting my server migrated (hopefully soon!) and then will have more server space and bandwidth (it keeps crashing because I've overused my bandwidth -- probably because people keep linking to my pictures) and then I will finally upgrade my blogging software (fingers crossed) to something a bit more stable as well.

Why No Updates?

Sadly, I broke my blog and can't add any new items (plus all the search, comment and other features are broken). I'm trying to get it fixed, but that is why there haven't been any updates posted for quite a while. I'm alive and well, and will try to catch up when the files are all restored.

Wild World of Blogging

Here are my notes for today's presentation on blogging... to give it some structure, I decided to do an A-Z approach, but that leads to some odd entries. I also decided to use all my animal photos from the trip (and to fill in with random landscape ones with I hit letters that I didn't have animals for).

pdf version for downloading

Update: Back from the presentation, which was a lot of fun (a few technical glitches of course, but I managed to get through the slides and then show off some of the web sites afterwards). Here's a photo of the group from the end:

Zapped Comments

I ended up zapping all the site's comments since there were 32k+ spam ones (not here, but on some other sites that I host) and things were so corrupted I couldn't seem to delete them. I hate to lose all the nice comments, but that may be the price of the spam (and yes, one day I really will upgrade MT to filter them... sigh)

IL06, Day 3 Confgrunt

Notes from Day 3 of Internet Librarian 2006

More raw notes from the conference... to be filled in further later...

Morning Keynote: Shari Thurow
Search Friendly Web Design
an engaging speaker, but a topic too focused for a keynote

• user-friendly web site design that can be easily found on both the crawler-based and human-based search engines
  
• 5 Basic Rules of Web Design: Easy to Read, Easy to Navigate (provides 'sense of place' and 'scent of information'), Easy to Find (externally and internally), Consistent in Layout & Design, and Quick to Fownload
  people will click as long as they believe they're making progress
  search engines as 3rd browser
  
• Search Engines do 3 things: index text, follow links, measure popularity
  if you do not place text on your pages and create a site navigation scheme that crawlers can follow, your library site will not rank well in the search engines
  need high quality links from 3rd parties
  
• Primary Text: title tags, visible body copy, text at top of page, in and around hypertext links
  
• Secondary Text: meta-tag content, alternative text, domain and file name
  
• MPABS: "most people are basically stupid" - you have to tell people what you want them to do on your site
  
• site map should provide context, have an intro paragraph
  
• Yahoo + Wikipedia = good high-quality links to get
  
• glossaries and dictionaries - especially illustrated glossaries - are good for rankings
  
• Gerald Spool, usability expert
  
• cross-linking
  

Session One: Trends in Mobile Tools and Applications for Libraries (B301)
Megan Fox, Simmons
http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/pda

Session Two: Training Tutorial Tour and Tips (C302)
Greg Notess
http://www.notess.com/teaching/

Session Three: What's Hot & New with Social Software (D303)
Stephen M Cohen
A quick A-Z of some of the current hot sites -- most of which I use, but I will definitely by checking out the Muppet Wiki ASAP!
A - Ajax
B - Beta, Browster
C - CoComment
D - Digg
E - Econsultant
F - Flickr
G - Gmail
H - Hype
I - Image Editors (resizr.lord-lance.com, pxn8.com, snipshot.com)
J - Jenny Levine
K - ?
L - Library Thing
M - Moo, Meebo, Media Convert, Mojeek, Muppets Wiki
N - Netvibes
O - OCLC
P - Pandora, PureVideo
Q - ?
R - RSS
S - Snapper (two sessions mentioned snapper -- I don't understand the appeal -- I absolutely LOVE FastStone capture and was going to mention it in the comments section of the talk but their site is temporarily down -- its SO much better and more flexible!) , Slideshare
T - Typo of the Day
U - utube (oops - they apparently got hammered after the YouTube acquisition)
V - ?
W - Wikis
X - ?
Y - YouTube
Z - Zoho

Session Four: Blogging Update: Applications & Tips (D304)
Walter Nelson, Karen Coombs, and Aaron Schmidt

Closing Keynote: Social Computing and the Information Professional (renamed All the World's a Game...)
Elizabeth Lane Lawley

IL06, Day 2 Confgrunt

Day 2 of the Internet Librarian conference, more hits and misses, but generally a good day (ending with cookies, which can redeem most any conference)

S dropped my off (since Monterey isn't all that far from Salinas and since I was going to stay over so it was silly to have my car) and I was there nice and early to do my work remotely before the first sessions only to find that the wireless wasn't working and there was no staff there yet to deal with it. So I went up the street to Starbucks and camped out there for a while.

First up was the presentation of the Mashing Up the Library competition, won by my old SHS classmate John Blyberg (who I tracked down later at the exhibit hall and said hello -- see photo)

Keynote 2: Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and Choices for Librarians
Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information
My notes are pretty scattered for this since it wasn't really in my domain overall, but I was interested in some of his comments about the museum world, special collections collecting digital formats, and some other random things noted below
mostly about how science has been affected by the internet and high performance computers, etc. (aka eScience)
while accepted in the sciences, more controversial in the humanities -- though that will evolve (as he explained in a strange example, "physics progresses one funeral at a time")
He mentioned the National Virtual Observatory projects, the European Digital Library initiative
digitization in the museum world -- they monetize access to out-of-copyright material which they are holding as public trust -- Getty Museum and others are digitizing public domain materials and making them available as broadly as possible
special collections - see NYTime article on Salmon Rushdie's email
dealing with changes in the way people approach life/digital forms
can't deal with the scope of records -- like corporate litigation
new job rol e- "data scientist" (like bioinformatice)
library as labratory of the humanists
for science, the main role is to pay for journals
collabotroeis - cross institution, cross countries
access to this cyberinfrastructure for undergraduate and K-12 students

Session One: Determining and Communicating Value (B201)
Joe Matthews
I realized that the reason some of this talk (esp the public library part) was so familiar was that I had written one of my culminating papers on proving the value of the public library to the community/elected officials, but it gave me a few ideas on how we should be promoting and measuring our special lib
communicate the value of your library to the people who count
should have 3-4 elevator speeches (15 sec, 30 sec, 1 min, 3 min) (the moderator pointed out that those should be Springboard conversations (go S. denning!) and that you should have tiers including a 15minute Starbucks Latte version and a 20 minute get a hot dog from the cart and sit on a bench version)
adding value - ease of use, noise reduction, quality, adaptability, time savings, cost savings (Robert Taylor?)
how do we add value for our customers?
our customers have a choice to use us or not -- it costs them time and energy to use us
why demonstrate value? show library's contribution to meeting the organization's goals and objectives, show accountability, advocacy and marketing tool, be proactive
to show value: address priorities of the whole organization, demonstrate how the library furthers the goals of the organization, use their jargon (understand the decision makers and what is important to them)
outcomes measure if we're doing the right things, efficiency measures just measure if we are doing things right
Taxonomy of Results (Rutgers): cognitive results, affective results, accomplishments in relation to tasks, expectations met, tme aspects, money estimates
Academic Libraries - a considerable proportion of students borrow NO materials from the library, a small proportion is responsible for the majority of the borrowing (usually grad students doing dissertations), assigned readings and reserves make up the majority of circulation, amount of borrowing varies by discipline and field, correlation between library use and academic achievement is weak at best
School Libraries - 10-20% higher test scores for schools with stronger school library programs, to make the case for the library, talk about the impact on children's lives
Public Libraries -
Social benefits: use of leisure time, informed personal decisions, literacy, support of education, local history and geneology, access to technology, technology training, library as place, community awareness, support for democratic society
[formalized relationships between libraries and schools result in a 5pt increase in test scores!]
Economic Benefits: for individuals - savings from sharing rather than purchasing own copies, information for personal investors, tech access, health info. Local businesses - busines and career information, economic development. Local community - library as employer, purchaser of goods and services, library as destination (Seattle impact study), attracting commercial and industrial development
cost benefit analysis, continue valuation methodology
for every $ you invest...
calculate the services, local price in the community for that service from an equivalent supplier, amount of use (circ, etc.), and then multiply out the value and compare that to the budget
Special Libraries - transform perception of library into a recognized organizational asset that affects the bottom line
Hospitals (Quinn & Roger, Marshall)
Banking (Marshall)
Government (Marshall) - better decision making, reduced risk, saved time
Koenig - improved productivity
saving time - substitution of professionals time, time spent reading (Griffiths & King), current awareness bulleting (Harris & marshall, 9:1 ratio)
Outsell 2001 survey - reduced product development time, 14hrs/project
Cost aspects - Griffiths & King, relative value approach, consequential value approach
ROI - Griffths & King, Tenopir & king, Portugal
Action Plan: Know your audience, determine your value, communicate value by focusing on benefits, use their jargon
His books: The Bottom Line (2002), Measuring for Results (2004), Institutional and Library Assessment in Higher Ed (forthcoming)
ARL LibQual survey (modeled after retail one), gap analysis, ask users for min and desired scores
what difference does the library make?
* collect personal success stories (we could ask people to describe a time where the library has helped them...)
search for: Stephen Abram, value of libraries

Session Two: Information Skills and Enterprise Collaboration ("Sharing Library Skills in an Enterpirse Collaborative Effort")
Christopher Connell, Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA)
Sounded relavant in the description, but since it was very much centered on MS Sharepoint, there wasn't too much I took away from it unfortunately
librarian as e-collaborator
adapted their skills in information resouce evaluation, compilation, organization and user design in a successful e-collaborative effort
librarians "pointing the way"
offer e-journals, e-books, databases, federated search and print collection
Article: Fichter, D (2005), The Many Forms of E-Collaboration. Online 99 (4), 48-50
Lotus (1996), Meijer (2002), Teufel et all (1995)
Advertisement - never underestimate the importance of a librarian (with librarian as part of the team at a surgery)
skills: evaluation/selection of information resources, "bibliographic" compliation, current awareness strategies, classification/organization of information, effective search queries, attention to presentation style/UI
holistic organizational view -- unique content integration opportunities
provide open literature content in support of work, open-URL search query string
* link to "recent articles on xyz" and then lauch search query against EBSCO host

Lunch with Kelly (decent fallafel)

Session Three: Mashup Applications
John Blyberg and Chris Deweese
I wanted to go to this one to see John, who I haven't seen since high school, and because mashups are cool and I didn't go to any of the other sessions in the mashup track -- how cool that there was a whole mashup track?!!? Not directly helpful since the OPAC stuff would require getting our system to put out XML and I've already played some with the google maps API (link to my map here?), but I picked up a few things to think about
John:
2 kinds of mashups -- useful mashups and "statement" mashups
one of his catalog mashups takes: Bib# -> ISBN -> Check Google -> Cache Results -> Link to Google Books if there, right in catalog hit list
URI
XML + NS + xmlschema
RDF + rdfschema
web ontology language (OWL?)
REpresentational State Transfer (REST)
xml/rdf/schema
aadl.org/rest/top/books/10/2
Patron Rest (PatRest)
Ed Vielmetti (Superpatron), Wall of Books
gadgets John submitted to Talis competition - blyberg.net/files - click "add to google"
Why let the public mash up your stuff? sense of stewardship, unlock potential braintrust, encourage innovation, benefits other libraries, solicits high-quality feedback, promotable as service, puts library data into new contexts
output from catalog -> massage into XML form
screen scraping (ugly, but it works)
Chis: Mash It Up Google Style
get google API key - google.com/apis/maps
Get hello world program -- /apis/maps/documentation/#The_Hello_World_of_Google_Maps
add your key
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl())
GMapTypeControl
need long/lat coordinates (now will generate from address -- geocoding -- instead of having to copy from URL)
#using_XML_and_Asynchronous_RPC (ajax)
lcls.org/api/query/?method=lcls.members.getDeliveryRoute&RoutheID=1...
generates XMLS doc to plug into GoogleMaps
cdeweese.blogspot.com

Session Four: Web Lessons
Pamela Gore, HP Labs Research Library and Jenny Spadafora, Intuit
This one was fun because the speakers do very similar things to the types of things we're doing -- and are at similar types of companies. The third speaker, Pamea Clark from AIG had to cancel unfortunately
Pamela - A FAQ on FAQs for Libraries
FAQ Purpose - save time, help users find answers more quickly, reduce number of questions staff must answer
Tupes: general info (policies, procedures, location, etc.), research questions (how to use the research tools), combination
Can increase credibility and user confidence in the entire site and library
Good: clear, concise, well-organizaed, scannable, searchable, accurate, up-to-date
Bad: wordy, difficult to scan, too much detail, marketing material
Gather questions: actual user questions from users and staff, narrower questions within broader questions, related questions
Don't try to think of every possible question!
Writing Style - concise, eliminate unnecessary detail, answers stand alone (don't need the question to understand answer), broader questions broken into multiple questions, bullet points for longer answers, paragraphs = 2-4 lines (1 sentence paragraphs are fine for the web) -- not big blocks of text
conversational style without wordiness, avoid library jargon (if you must, define the term briefly), active voice (the library offers... rather than these are offered by the library), avoid marketese, questions should be in first person, answers in second person, bold important words and phrases (use judiciously)
provide complete answer in text (not just referral to another source)
repeating information between questions is ok
step-by-step instructions should be numbered, just one action per step
check grammar and spelling
have staff review
List all questions forist like an index
logicially organiza - most frequenly first or simpler to complex if just a few, categorize if more than 10 questions
adequate spacing between question links
include "top" links to get back to index
keep visited link color
they had categories along the top (General Services | Digital Services | Customized Services | Books | Jounrals, Magazines and Newspapers..._ and then each category with the list of questions underneath it linking to further down the page with each question with the answers below
Include FAQ in site-wide navigation and on home page
point to specific questions within context
include in search engine index and on site index/site map
FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions should be in title, url/filename and metadata
Review FAQ regularly to update, remove outdated, add new questions -- regularly scheduled reviews
Didn't find what you need? Have a comment or suggestion? let us know!
print the FAQ and see what it looks like printed
Jenny - Social Software to Work Smarter (not harder)
(she has a super cool title - community evangelist, innovation lab, intuit)
presentation is at 12frogs.com/12/work/il2006
Blogs, feeds (follow more in less time, control the info flow), wikis (we can post it, we can fix it = living documents), del.icio.us (social bookmarking: find + share + remember), and social software (tagged interests and abilities + search/browse = find my right people)
she very wistfully commented, "imagine if the corporate directory worked that way" (they're working on an internal project called "watercooler" which sounds like an inside-the-firewall Facebook)
The Future is MMOW: Blogs, wikis, feeds, Facebook, Myspace, Second Life, etc. will enable Massively Multiplayer Online Work
wikis @ work -- they're using media wiki, hooked into corporate directory for group permissions
federated identity management
book to find: Day in the Life

Session Five: Intranet Content: Surfacing Full-Text News
Barrett Jones, IMF and Elena Maslyukova, World Bank
From all reports, I should have gone to the "RSS & Javascript Cookbook" session instead...
Computers in Libraries article is part I of this presentation, 2 ways to set up Intranet News
link to individual articles, link to a source, search
Factiva select, all in xml, 90 days of news, download to their servers
benchmarked the news against Yahoo news, etc.
Article: Information management Best Practices: Next-Gen IM - Moving Beyond the Repository, Outsell?
people inthe field in Africa get access to their page and its news sources via satellite
on homepage, there's a box with "Resources for" and a list of roles (task managers, researchers, clients, etc)

Stopped by the SJSU SLIS reception and then had a nice fish and chips dinner at a pub around the corner with Trish and then we sat and talked and played with our Treos (I managed to beam my new favorite Google Map app to her!) and ate pretty darn good cookies.

Evening Session: Scholarship in Chaos! Flying High on the Web? or in Free Fall?
Rich Wiggins from Michigan State University moderated with an interesting style which included correcting the pronounciation of one of the speakers and asking really bizzarre questions and referring often to his wife, who is a librarian, including telling the Elsevier rep that she does use Scirus and when she got up he announced that his wife was leaving him... he also apparently is bitter that his post about his "radioactive cat" isn't a top hit in google while the one that is has incorrect information...
Panelists: Anurag Acharya from Google Scholar, Jay Girotto from Microsoft's Academic Live, and Joris van Rossum, Elsevier Scirus
someone in the audience asked a question about scholarly publishing on ephemeral blogs and how that can be captured and archived, etc. and things spiraled out of control for a while when the panelists misunderstood and didn't really answer and then the audience called them clueless... after a while Trish and I left...

Tomorrow my plan is to attend Web Presence for Internet Librarians (morning keynote), Trends in Mobile Tools & Applications for Libraries, Training Tutorial Tour & Tips, What's Hot & New with Social Software, and Blogging Update: Applications & Tips, and then Social Computing & The Info Pro (closing keynote)

I'm sharing a hotel room tonight with Nicole from What I Learned Today (pictured here working on her presentation)

Mobile blogging

This is a test of blogging from my Treo! I'm so excited about being able to blog now from pretty much anywhere. Typing on this is going to take a bunch more practice...

IL06, Day 1 Confgrunt

Here's my raw notes from day one of the internet librarian conference. Trish has a whole blog with her notes.

Apparently there are about 1415 people participating in the conference (1250 paid attendees for the sessions), 48 states and the District of Columbia are represented (not sure why there were no people from Deleware or Mississippi), and from 9 other countries. There are 130 speakers and moderators presenting.

Keynote: J.A. Jance was the keynote speaker. Apparently not only does she blog but the character in her book Edge of Evil blogs as well. It was a funny and interesting (if completely unrelated to the conference) talk, and she sang the Janice Ian song "At 17" and did The Last Blues Song (complete with the "Woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh") as an encore!

Session One: Increasing the Use of Online Products (C101)
with Peter Simon, Lesley Williams, Lare Mischo and Jeff Wisniewski
i was pleasantly surprised on how many points carried over from academic libraries to our corporate library needs... lots of things to think about in restructuring our online services page

Lesley Williams:

• Best Practices — Five Proven Ways to Increase Use of Paid Online Databases
  
• organizae the online database page -- language patrons understand and good descriptions of each ("click here to search news articles from 19XX to 2006, rather than name-of-vendor-providing-db)
  
• test the links!
  
• Lesley Williams article from library Jounral, Making “E” Visible
  
• Library Terms That Users Understand by John Kupersmith
  
• provide "multiple finding points" for online services
  
• title index to complete magazine and journal collection (print and online)
  
• put online resources into the catalog
  
• Portland, ME - good descriptions of their online services
  
• Get other sites to link to us -- right to the online services
  
• inspire.net IN state library page, promotes statewide db access
  
• iconn.org marketing survey results
  
• advertise the ones with the most general appeal, and also do targeted marketing
  
• "We have to stop doing marketing as if we were running for student council president!"
  
• people can use Reference USA to make mailing lists
  
• Thompson Gale, accessmylibrary.com, find out local libraries that subscribe
  
• Wall Street Journal article on Big Help for Small Business at the Library
  
• become the "bottled water" -- advertising created that huge market
  

• no better way to increase use of online services than federated searching
  
• metric - click throughs to full records/full text
  
• webfeat
  
• PowerUsers (and professors) appreciate the A-Z database lists
  
• add a message to the page you get if there are no search results with tips (did you mean to search for articles?)
  
• make it obvious, easy and ubiquitous
  

Session Two: 30 Search Tips in 45 Minues (A102)
Mary Ellen Bates
She's great and I learned a lot of great search tips! I'll go back through and add the links when I have more time

1. Use search engines' "Answers"
   
2. Squidoo
   
3. Use Rollyo.com, Yahoo Search Builder or Gigablast's Custom Topic Search to build customized search engine
   
4. Put that customized search engine on users' home page (and also links to online catalog and other resources)
   
5. Google's synonym-finder
   
6. Google Co-op
   
7. Google Trend Search
   
8. Google Notebook
   
9. Google's News Archive
   
10. Yahoo's Search Subscriptions
    
11. Yahoo's Mindset Feature
    
12. Yahoo's Site Explorer
    
13. Exalead
    
14. Gigablast.com
    
15. MSN's cool synonym-suggestion tool
    
16. MSN's misspelling-suggestion engine
    
17. Zibb.com
    
18. Kosmix.com
    
19. pathfinders and subject guides
    
20. Tara Calishain's Kebberfegg
    
21. Scandoo.com
    
22. NationMaster.com
    
23. AccessMyLibrar.com
    
24. Eurekster's Swicki
    
25. TaxonomyWarehouse.com
    
26. Mining podcast content, chunking of search results
    
27. Qwika.com to search wikis
    
28. Furl.net
    
29. Use LibraryThing to find related books ("People who own this book also own")
    
30. Data visualization on Factiva
    

Session Three: New Search Strategies (A103)
Greg Notess
Search Engine Showdown
Feature Chart

1. Search Transfer
   
   between search engines (try his bookmarklets), between databases on a site
   

   Refine and Explore Terms (expand/narrow, related terms, directory terms)
   

   Ask.com, Exalead, Clusty, NortherLight.com
   

   Search as You Type
   

   Google Suggest, All the Web (Yahoo)
   

   Definitions
   

   answers.com, wikipedia, Yahoo! Reference, Google define:
   

   Search Societies
   

   Del.ici.us, Furl, Connotea (scientific)
   

   Field Searching
   

   site: gov, site:harvard.edu, inurl:library
   

   Expanded Search
   

   Rollyo, Live Macros (under more, Find Macros)
   

   Filetype Searches
   

   filetype:pdf (Google, Live, Exalead), orignurlextension:pdf (yahoo)
   

   tips for pdf searches: leave off the first letter, add spaces between letters
   

   Exalead Analysis -- shows breakdown of results by file type -- that could actually come in handy at work!!
   

   Link searching
   

   link:http://xyz
   

   Google only shows a fraction, Yahoo and Live are much more detailed
   

   Live: linkfromdomain:loc.gov site:hr (where do they link to? Library of Congress -> Coatia)
   

   Phrase Searching, proxminity at Exalead
   

   Cache to the Past (most include the date of the crawl - exp Yahoo)
   

Session Four: Cool Tools and Mashups
Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone
From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottom of their slides with the URLs, so here's the titles from the tops of each, and I'll have to go look them all up later
Font Tester, Meta Tag Expert, URL Investigator, Link Popularity Check, eXactMapper Lite, Google Sitemap Builder, Wink, Powerbullet Presenter, PHP Editor, PH Expert & Debugger
aws.amazon.com, google.com/apis/maps, api.search.google
suprglu.com, communitywalk.com, Frappr, yourmap.com, mapbuilder.net, google.mapbuilder.com (sucks in data from a spreadsheet and maps it)
pull in covers and reviews from Amazon
book carousel, virtual carousel
developer.yahoo.com/yui
Flickr Fun - captioner, colr pickr, Flickr toys
gliffy.com
community toolbar from Conduit, conduit.com
Firefox extension: duplicate tab, tab x, tails export (microformats), goodle notebook, Measure It, IE Tab, Linkification, Zotero
retrievr, adblock, web developer toolbar, accessibility toolbar, html tidy
Google Code Search
northstar.net community in a box
Digref listserv
lifehacker.com
programmable web

Session Five: Library Redesign: Making the Data Work Harder
Steve McCann (this was supposed to alo be Amanda Hollister, who unfortunately called in sick)
I shouldn't have gone to this one... oh well, you can't win them all

Session Six: Keeping One Click Ahead
Gary Price and Steven M. Cohen
One Click Ahead -- Gary Price's presentation
Information Overload is a Myth! -- Steven M. Cohen's presentation

IL06

I'm at the Internet Librarian 2006 conference in Monterey (mon-wed). There's wireless in the lobby, so I'll probably be able to provide a few updates now and then. I'm really looking forward to seeing people I know (Hi Trish, Hi Kelley), people whose blogs I read regularly, and all sorts of new people!

If you're here too, let me know!

Happy Birthday Blog!

I almost forgot to wish my blog a happy 3rd birthday. A lot has changed in my life since Aug 29, 2003. Thank you for coming along on the ride!

~2070 entries and 756 comments later, I'm still loving being a blogger!

Save Your Space

This group is working to get 1million signatures in one month opposing DOPA. Take a second and sign on:

The U.S. House of Representatives has already approved the bill banning social networking sites. Now the bill goes to the Senate and eventually President Bush. Stop them. The HR5319 bill would even ban websites that are used for positive, professional and social experiences. SAVE YOUR SPACE. Go to http://www.saveyourspace.org and take action now.

Tagged! The Fives Meme

I've was tagged by cheeky attitude ages ago on this but never finished and posted it, so here ya go:

Five items in my freezer

1. bagels
   
2. pizza
   
3. the remains of the first frozen yogurt I tried to make in the ice cream maker that didn't really work enough to want to eat all of
   
4. Healthy Choice Fudge Bars
   
5. salmon
   

Five items in the closet: (front hall closet)

1. first aid kit
   
2. basketball
   
3. ice cream maker
   
4. umbrella
   
5. vacuum cleaner
   

Five items in the car:

1. earthquake kit they gave us at a job I had 5 years ago (hmm, I should check that its still ok)
   
2. empty diet coke cans
   
3. lots of used mapquest direction printouts
   
4. maps
   
5. national park guides
   

Five items in my backpack:
(err, laptop bag)

1. work laptop
   
2. ethernet cable (after how hard it was to stay connected to the wireless at BlogHer I've decided to pack one)
   
3. digital camera
   
4. checkbook
   
5. a letter I forgot to mail (ooh, better go mail that now)
   

Five people I tag:

1. Emy
   
2. Spinnity
   
3. Squinxx
   
4. surprise me
   
5. surprise me
   

A little more from BlogHer

Some photos and links from BlogHer...

Some of the people in the Community Building Birds-of-a-Feather group:
Purple Women
Catster
Erika's Outlook - a lovely young woman living with Lyme Disease
Shopwiki
Betsy Devine
The Provocateur
Silent I
it's not about your stuff
essuredecision
Redbook Magazine
nursing student hell
Sarah Mei

Some political and place-based blogs mentioned in the panel on political blogging

h20town - Watertown, MA
crossleft.org
wicked local
daily gotham
Fresno Famous
Modesto Famous
Ann Althouse
Dogged Blog
Now Texas

BlogHer, Day 2

I'm here at Day 2 of the BlogHer conference...

Got a chance to catch up with Amanda Lenhardt (thank you to Parker for tipping her off that I was here :)) Always fun to catch up with a college classmate and especially after having read many of her research reports (everyone's buzzing about the recent one on bloggers).

I re-introduced myself to Danah Boyd over at the vendor booths at lunch today (explaining that I had quoted her research quite a bit in my proposal to the local library to have a MySpace presence) and she asked me what we were doing about DOPA. Other than following her blog posts on the subject, I haven't done anything (except privately worry) and I don't think our library's doing anything about it. We'd better get involved before its too late.

Sessions I'm attending today: How are your blogs changing your world, Birds of a Feather session on Community Organizing, Is the Next Martha Stewart a Blogger, Business Blog Case Studies, Political Blogging, and Creating Your Platform.

BlogHer Takeaways, Day One

S emailed to complain I wasn't live blogging the blogging conference... but unfortunately there hasn't been much I felt like capturing so far (and the wireless has been awful so every 2 minutes I get kicked off) Here are a few little things:

1) I really need to make the time to upgrade my Movable Type installation so I can take advantage of some of the cool new plug-ins and things that people are using
2) Conferences in real life are rarely as interesting as I think they will be, mostly because I don't excel at those between conference conversations that really make the gathering great
3) I need a microphone (probably a headphone/michrophone combo so I can skype with it, but there were some very cool external mikes and digital recorders that people had)
4) I really have to use flickr a lot more than I do - and to take and post a lot more (and better) photos. Good session with Heather Champ and Caterina Fake was one of the lunchtime keynotes.
5) Librarians are everywhere -- the very first person I talked to turned out to be one. She has a cool crafty blog, Cheeky Attitude.
6) I really should use del.icio.us or furl.net more -- starting with importing my bookmarks from home into it (if I can get my computer to turn back on, which hasn't worked since Monday's power outage), and using tags a whole lot more in general. I think I'll replace the links on my blog with my delicious tags -- and I like the idea that delicious will automatically post a daily link roll to capture what you bookmarked that day. In the meantime, I got my tag cloud working on my front page finally.
Brian -- Susan Mernit says Hi. I'm still waiting for a chance to say hello to Nancy White.

Sessions I've attended: Primp Your Blog; Audio/Podcasting; Digital Photography; Tagging, tracking & structured blogging ... more to come ...

Fun blog T-Shirts
"I'm blogging this"
Front: <body> Back: </body> (made me wonder if there was a matching <head$gt; hat?)

At BlogHer

I'm at the BlogHer Conference today and tomorrow, so will probably have lots to post from here. I really enjoyed the conference last year and am looking forward to this year's!

Don't mind me

just claiming my bloglines feed

Tag Cloud

Playing with a new tag cloud that I'll probably add to the side later. Its from Zoom Clouds

Except that it doesn't seem to be working... it does here at least I think.

My site as a graph

A gorgeous applet will take any URL and draw a mapping of it. Here's my front page:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

but you really should see how it evolves and grows. So put in your own page here

And I admit I was sorely tempted to buy one of his one thousand paintings... if only to be part of the community of 1000 people who did. What a fantastic idea. (as of right now there are still 449 left, ranging from $183.60 to $579.60)

My First Google Map

LiB had linked to this article about online cool things for libraries which mentioned (in addition to blogs, myspace, etc.) making Google maps. So, at lunch, I thought I'd give it a try.

So here's my very first Google map.

(of course Google maps don't work on Safari or IE on my Mac, and Firefox keeps crashing on my home computer, but it looked nifty at work)

Here's a library that uses it really well.

We feel...

Saw this on LibTechBytes and fell into it... it is as spellbinding as promised.

We Feel Fine

The graphical representation is just stunning and its fascinating to dig in and see the quotes (I like the "murmers" mode where they scroll selected quotes) and you can filter by feeling (just see all the people who felt stupid in the last hour...), by the weather at the time when people wrote what they felt, by location (I have it open now showing how all the people blogging feelings in Morgan Hill are feeling)

Careful ... this definitely can suck you in!

Mistaken Identity

Strange experience today... all day people I didn't know kept IMing me. I thought at first it might be Betty or Liz or someone (since they often seem to change their screen names and can talk the proper IM lingo) but these people all seemed to know me and I had no clue who they were. One finally asked if I was Emily, i said yes, and if I had a profile on myspace. I quickly checked and no where on my new profile (which I made last week as part of my exploration of how the library could use the site) did I give my IM address and I have no friends linked over there so no one would have found me through there... then I did a search and realized that there's a highschool girl with my IM screenname as her myspace id... another emily of course... so it totally explained why they thought I was her... and their other disbelief that I didn't know who they were and what they were talking about. That Emily has a whole lot of IMing friends!

I know, I shouldn't have my IM client open at work, but we're using jabber internally now and I had the faint hope that one day someone would ask me a work question (plus I chat with Mom sometimes)

Eek

My last 2 weeks worth of mail seems to have zapped itself off my server today, probably since I haven't been able to pop it locally since we don't have net access at home (though S was able to get on through the neighbor's wifi last night) and I am probably over my server's quota. So if you wrote and haven't heard back from me, please drop me another line. Thanks.

How Geeky?

According to the Newsweek Quiz:

Your score is 44
30 to 60: Heading to Geekdom

hmmm... to be really geeky I think I need a camera phone, play more war craft and watch different movies...

Great T-Shirt

via Stephen's Lighthouse comes SnapShirts which will make a tshirt of the words found on your blog or in a favorite author's book! It creates a "word cloud", a visual depiction of content (words) used in a body of text. The word clouds they use at snapshirts.com are arranged alphabetically and depict more frequently used words in progressively larger fonts. I love that words like books and libraries and reading and refgrunt float to the top of my word cloud. I'm definitely going to order one (in the font color of chocolate of course!)

BlogHer '06

Registration is open for this year's BlogHer conference. Last year's was a lot of fun and this year sounds much bigger and more comprehensive. It's great fun to see all these amazing blogging women together. So if you're interested, sign up too! There will be stuff for newbies if you're not already a blogger and hopefully plenty of fun things for those of us already addicted... And its right here in San Jose, so there's no excuse for us locals not to sign up!

Weird spam

I don't understand why I'm getting all this blog spam that doesn't have a URL with it -- isn't the whole point of these people to get their URL picked up all over my site? At least I thought that's what they were aiming for. In the past few days I've been getting hundreds of comment spam messages without a URL at all though... so what's the point for them to be doing it? I'm not really complaining -- its better than hundreds of spams with sicko urls, but it's still a pain to clean them up (even with mt-blacklist) and seems extra idiotic somehow.

One day I'll make myself carve out the time to upgrade MT to the version where you have to approve comments. My stupid comments barely work, yet I still get zillions of spam ones...

Museum Blogging

How cool is it that the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a blog! Eye Level "refers to the physical experience of viewing art, but it also plays on the many roles and perspectives that make a museum a reality" (via Jack Nack)

I found a few other museum blogs in this post and in this one on a museum blogger on museum blogging. Museumpro has a post about Museum Wikis...

Just thought it was a cool idea (and since Betty was talking about her dream Smithsonain internship, I was thinking how being a blogger could be a possible way in to a place like that...)

Tracking

I'm all excited that I can track my UPS packages in Bloglines, but my brother's birthday present isn't actually outside my door, despite the fact that the latest update says:

12/21/2005 13:00 US Delivered

hmmm...

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is an awesome program! Of course I don't use it at home on this or my other sites (but probably will one day). I use it a bit in 2 of my jobs and had the opportunity to attend an all-day training course today to get more familiar with the tool. Nothing too new, but it's always good to see new ways for doing things and I definitely think I'll be using it a lot more in the future. Boy does it make a lot of things easier that I do the hard way in building my sites now. Oh well.

Plus I got a nice certificate for completing the course :)

More blogs to read

A cool list of Librarian blogs from Pub Sub to look through when I get a chance... conveniently there seems to be a feed of the whole list.

Caucus 5

Congrats to Charles! More at CaucusCare.

Nov 1, 2005: CAUCUS 5 COLLABORATION PLATFORM RELEASED AS "OPEN SOURCE"

We're pleased to announce that version 5 of the Caucus forum,
collaboration, and and eLearning platform was released last night.
(Just in time for Halloween!)

Version 5 has been extensively rewritten to make use of the MySQL
relational database. It has been released as "Open Source" -- which is
to say, free, to everyone -- but with our same high level of
commercial-grade support.

Map

Just testing this out, it's suppose to record where in the world people visit my site from, or something.

(via Girl Scientist)

Worth Something

Not sure how this was calculated (somethng to do with the number of links to me as tracked in Technorati, paid for at the rate that AOL paid per blog for Weblogs, Inc), but it was a cheery thought. So thank you to all of you who linked to me (and I bet the BlogHer blogroll helped a lot.)

via Lady Crumpet, who is clearly undervalued -- and has way more links to her site than I do so I don't really understand the calculations at all.

Comments Disaster

I just accidentally erased the last 250 comments, instead of just the last 250 spam comments, so all of my wonderful comments from all of you (and, even worse, all the comments on the other sites I host for friends and family) are gone. I managed to salvage a few (like the nice engagement wishes) that I'll paste into the entries themselves, but I could just cry. Serves me right for not backing things up, etc. [sniff]

Sigh

I think I'm officially spending more time cleaning the spam comments off my blogs than posting to them. Ugh. Don't they get that no one reads those messages? My comments don't even _work_ and they're flooded with spam (about 250 comments and 100 pings this morning) Upgrading my blogging software is definitely on the post-culminating todo list...

Still Young, but more bloggy

It's nice to see I still count as the Young Adult group ;)

A.P. Fashions a News Feed for the Young
By Katharine Q. Seelye

"Experts say the biggest problem in the newspaper industry is capturing readers between 18 and 34 years old, and now The Associated Press is looking to tackle that problem head on.

On Monday, the 157-year-old wire service is to start its "younger audience service," offering articles and "experiences" in multimedia formats, with audio, video, blogs and wireless text aimed at reaching readers between 18 and 34 years old. The service, one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by The A.P., is called asap, pronounced letter by letter, meant to evoke the wire service's legendary speed."

Though of course, according to Jupiter, us in the 25-34 year-old group are "usually more like the next older group (35-44) than it is like the young 'uns" in how we use media.

"Wwhile 11% of online adults say they regularly read blogs, that figure is 24% for 18-24 and 13% for 25-34." -- so I guess I'm rather bloggy for my age group.

Google Blog Search

I'm so proud. If you search for Emily in Google's New Blog Search Tool, I'm the first related blog listed. (Or maybe I should be scared?)

(The fifth entry is another Emily's Musing from Seattle!)

I should come with a warning label

Ask me a simple question and I'm likely to go off on a 45 minute lecture about how amazingly cool RSS and Bloglines are (those of you who have already heard it know exactly what I'm talking about and know just how scary I can get) Really, it is so wonderfully addictive!

(and special welcome today to Darren who has been sucked into the bloglines world... hehehe)

Really, I did come home early from work to do some paper writing started, but that was really much more fun.

5 Blogs

Ok, so I never got around to commemorating international blog day and finding new blogs to share with you - I'll have to play next year. Its been fun following other people's submissions though.

International Blog Day

Apparently, today is International Blog Day -- I'll have to give this a shot when I get home from work.

BlogDay posting instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2005
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2005 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

[ I love the logo and the explanation: "Have you ever noticed that the date 3108 (August 31st) looks like the word “Blog”?" ]

Happy Birthday Blog!

Happy 2nd birthday to my blog! woo hoo!

As of right now (including this one): 1493 entries, 664 comments

Now I just need to find some time to upgrade my version of movable type so I don't have to spend quite so much time deleting spam comments and hopefully fix the error messages people get when they try to comment.

Blogging from BlogHer

Yay! There's wireless here at the BlogHer conference (not surprising) so I'm back online from the TechMart lobby waiting for the registration line to thin out. Its so cool to see all these women bloggers (many of whom are probably also blogging right now as we speak). More later...

Also, you can join in the fun at blogher.org -- there are chats and webcasts and things so you can play without having to be down here.

Lisa -- Nancy White and Beth Kanter (from the ArtsWire days) are at my breakout group table!

Its so much fun to see people FTF that you've known for years online -- plus all the people whose blogs I've been reading lately.

Thank you to BobbiLynn for sending this link:
The feminine blogstique/Santa Clara forum focuses on closing journal gender gap

BlogHer BlogRoll

Here's who is listed for the BlogHer Conference, July 30 in Santa Clara, CA. Looks like they only have a few spots left, so if you want to go, sign up today!

Caucus Goes Open Source!

Congrats to Charles for taking this big step!

Caucus 5.00 will be released in July 2005, as Open Source, i.e. free.

For those of you who don't know, Caucus is the great software we use for our online collaborative spaces, online courses, online events and all sorts of other projects and discussions. It is a fabulous tool and very customizable to meet whatever your group's needs are.

Survey

I've been seeing links to this survey on lots of people's site, but after seeing it on Jenn's just now I finally went ahead and signed up to take it. I do love a good web survey.

Fun things to do with RSS

Via Librarian in Black comes this cool list of things you can do with rss from TimYang.com. There are some great ones in the comments to the post as well.

I'm enjoying getting the weather now, and of course I get my news, comics, updates on what all my friends are doing etc there already. Bloglines is definitely now the one web site I visit most.

Also -- have you been to Google News lately? You can customize the page with custom topics -- so now I have a "library" news category as my top stories which is so cool :)

There are some great flikr tools here -- I'm definitely going to have to play with those some more as well.

BlogHer Conference '05

Just signed up for the BlogHer Conference '05, Saturday, July 30 at TechMart in Santa Clara. Any of you want to come? It sounds like a good event -- I read the blogs of a couple of the women on the advisory board (and will have to go check the rest of their sites out when I have a sec).

This flagship event is open to all bloggers—including men and beginners—interested in enhancing their online exposure, learning the latest best practices in blogging, networking with other bloggers, and specifically cultivating the female blogging community.

BlogHer Conference '05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to:

1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide

Though I seem to have signed up without them asking for my blog address, which was a bit puzzling because it would be nice to see the blogs of the other attendees...

Oh well, off to phone bank...

Small world story of the day

So I'm looking through the blogs that are linking to our upcoming Online Social Networks Conference (gotta love Technorati for ego-surfing) and I see this one from jobster blog... and it turns out Brian used to work for the author. Best part was this:

And in the far reaches of the web archives, here is a photo from 1997 of Brian and me at Camden Yards when Brian was writing one of the very first blogs in history, reporting on his journey across the U.S. to visit every major league baseball stadium that summer.

Ok, I want one

Ipod Shuffle. Sweet.

1000

Woohoo! This is post #1000. Thank you to all of you who stop by once and a while and humor me and my ramblings. I just love blogging!

ok, off to work...

Conference Webcast

Cool, the conference Brian's speaking at this weekend is being webcast. (via Joi who is also speaking there)

Yes, I'm available to help

via Librarian in Black, a Newsweek article
on The Tech-Support Generation

Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and … Please. Let’s be frank. We are going home to fix our parents' computers.

Luckily I have a pretty tech-savvy Mom (and thankfully a little brother who has taken over the local tech support duties to some extent) but there are usually a few things waiting for me to take a look at when I come home for the holidays and I doubt that this year will be any different. But I guess I like feeling useful :)

Firefox Frustration

So, with all the buzz, I decided to go for it and try out Firefox but sadly none of my pages seem to actually work in it! Ugh! I haven't figured out quite yet what I need to do to make my stylesheets actually be read (so if anyone has some suggestions, feel free to jump in, I'm not proud.)

(Ok, so I actually missed 99% of the buzz by being clueless, but since Brett blogged so enthusiasticly about it and Bloglines was making such a big deal of it in the daily tips, I figured I should give it a shot.)

Comments

Comments here are working -- I'm trying to figure out why they give you an error message -- but just ignore it for now...

The comment feature is a bit slower than usual since we're scanning the blacklist to try to prevent spam -- so click post and be patient, it will send eventually.

And I do love and appreciate everyone's comments here! Sorry to make it so hard to do!

One Year!

Wow! I've officially been blogging for a whole year now! I've had a web site for much longer than that of course... I guess well over ten years now?

It hasn't turned out exactly as I had expected, but I do love blogging -- and I really appreciate those of you who come and read my ramblings and leave comments (except the spam comments of course).

Ugh, more spam

There were a bunch of new spam comments this morning, so I finally went ahead and installed MT-Blacklist which checks the URLs against a master spam list. This will now work on all the blogs I host (including Carrie's, Alan's, Brian & Karen's, etc.) Its a great little plugin, easy to install, and it even searches the existing comments (it found 18 on Alan's site and a bunch on my photoblog that I'll go in and delete). Sigh. It still depresses me that people would take the time to go in and post spam, but I guess its no worse than all the icky spam I get via email. I have to say it was quite satisfying to add all their urls to my blacklist though :)

OSN 2004: Call for Sessions

OSN2004 will be a summit meeting where you will have a chance to hear from and interact with many of the pioneers in the field of online social networks as well as some of the current trendsetters now exploring the latest technologies and applications.

Novice attendees will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with some of the latest OSN technologies and tools in a series of safe, supported, activities and virtual “field trips”.

Experienced users will have the opportunity to engage in direct exchanges with developers and providers to co-create an agenda for new features, developments, and enhancements for the next generation of OSN applications.

Those with leadership responsibilities in their organization for communication, stakeholder engagement, marketing, education & training, outreach, and collaboration will get up to speed on what’s new, what’s important, and what you can use NOW to leverage OSN tools.

OSN2004 attendees will receive a CD with all the material shared during the event as well as additional ‘director’s cut’ materials you can use to create and support your own OSN applications from Rheingold Associates and Group Jazz - the leaders in training and consulting in the field.

Interested in presenting? Group Jazz and Rheingold Associates invites you to submit a session idea for the second Online Social Networks conference. Your session proposal should fall into one of the following three focus areas:

1. Online social networks in organizations - Who is using them and why? What challenges and opportunities do they present? What are the practical applications of OSNs?
2. Online social networks for personal social and business use - How are individuals using OSNs?
3. Online social networks in the political arena - How have political parties and politicians used OSNs to raise money, explore issues, and mobilize at the grassroots level?

Submission of proposals: no later than 30 August 2004
Notification of acceptance: September 2004

Interested in participating? Register online today!

[Please pass this along to anyone you think would be interested in presenting or attending! Thanks!]

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet
(Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst
(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html

(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.chocolatespoon.com/

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 02/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 22:37:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Los Gatos, California, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Me

(8) My age is: 29

(9) My gender is: Female

(10) My occupation is: Web designer, grad student, library intern

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 29/08/03

(14) My web browser is: IE, Safari

(15) My operating system is: Mac OS X

New Front Page

Carrie convinced me to play around with getting a three-column layout for my blog, but it came out too busy when I tried to add a side column to the current layout. So instead, I've been playing with a new entry page to my whole site -- which previously just had a quote from The Phantom Tollbooth and links to my blog, resume and work stuff -- and then leaving the main page as is for now for people who want to read the text of the whole week and see all the pictures at once. I figure more and more of you will be viewing the blog through an RSS aggregator like bloglines (my current favorite) so the layout doesn't matter as much and the front page might as well convey a bit more information.

So if you came in through the main url, you probably already saw it, if not, the new entry page is at www.chocolatespoon.com and pulls in most of the information that's on the main blog plus the links and things from before. Let me know if it breaks your browser of if there are things you think I should add or move.

Feedster

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Blogothon

Speaking of blogging, check out this 24 hour blog-a-thon for charity!
project-blog 2004 :: because we care

If I didn't have to go work today, I would totally have signed up to blog every half hour all day long for a charity! So instead, everyone go and read Knitflix -- and help her raise some money for the American Cancer Society (I just went and pledged -- its easy, just goto the project blog site, create an account and they'll show you a list of all the bloggers and the charities they are blogging for) Way to go Janice!

Dan Gillmor made my day

Ok, so I've been blogging all day about Dan Gillmor from the SJ Merc who was one of the people I was most excited about seeing. I was sitting outside at break catching up on my bloglines feeds and saw that Mr. Gillmor had posted that they were selling his book in the exhibit hall area and that he had signed a few. Well I went and bought one and was complaining that he had already left and I had missed my chance. I went outside to blog about buying the book (to see if I left a comment on his site I'd get a "virtual signature" of some sort) and a guy who had overheard me complaining, Bill Paseman, came out and let me know that Mr. Gillmor was still inside. So I ran in, and he signed my book: "from one blogger to another." My day has definitely be made. Yay!

Now on to the closing panel.

Lunchtime at Blog On

Well now its lunch time here at the conference and its a LONG lunch to allow lots of the great hallway conferences that everyone loves at these things.

One of the panelists this morning told a story about how he had been at a dinner meeting recently with a bunch of people and realized that he felt oddly uncomfortable. He realized that he would rather have been on a conference call with them so that he could use his social networking tools while he spoke to them -- so he could find out what clients they had in common, what their goals for the quarter were, things like that. Meeting with them in real life was so much slower -- he had to tease out all that information bit by bit. We all acknowledged that that was really scary, but I totally know how he feels.

For someone who is so interested in social networking, I really wish I was better at the actual fact to face netwroking part of all of this.

But I did go and introduce myself just now to Craig of Craig's List (and, yes, I told him I was a fan, which is probably not the best way to start a real conversation). After all, I learned about our Sunday knitting group on Craig's List and through there met quite a few people who now I consider good friends (a couple of whom may even be reading this!)

Anyway, back to trying to meet new people I guess (though its nice to sit off on the side and blog... the sun's come out, lunch was good, and there's 15 minutes more until the next panels...)

Someone brought their dog, so I should have a cute picture to post later. He's even wearing a conference name tag, though I don't think you can tell in the picture since he's sitting at the table...

Blog On, Conf Grunt, AM

Here are my notes from the morning session of the BlogOn Conference. They're just meant as little reminders to me for people and things to look up. I'll edit it when I get home to include more links and things

GroupWire Group is putting on the conference
they call themselves a "social media company" and define social media as "media as a contact sport", talked about participatory publishing

Panel 1
Moderator: Ross Mayfield, Social Text
business has always been about relationships, and now we're "building a business about relationships"
enhancing social capital
"what they share is what makes us care"

Reid Hoffman, Linked In (he was formerly of PayPal), evolution of brands and trust, blogs as "democratization of voices", companies need to be scanning for what people are saying about them on blogs

Michael Sikillian, Lykos, camera phones/digital camerals + "need to share"

Dan Gillmore, camphones in Asia are old news (now they have 3 megapix ones!), OhMyNews Korean newspaper written by readers having tremendous impact there

Jim Spohrer, IBM, business value of using htese tools inside of the firm, tapping into firm's collective IQ

James Currier, Tickle, Inc. "making media out of people", taking the unstructured data of the web - figuring out best ways to structure it to be more useful to people

David Hornik, August Capital, blah blah blah quote?

will google combine orkut and blogger?

IBM webfountain - wwfql
emerging problems in business
emerging capabilities and technologies

Mary Hodder, Technorati

Chris Kelly, Spoke, Chief Privacy Officer (prev. at Excit @ Home)

Wendy Seltzer, EFF, Intellectual Property Attorney
check out Chilling Effects Clearning House, keeps track of cease and desist letters re: intellectual property

Danah Boyd, Berkeley SIMS PhD student, studying how people construct self in social media, (how cool is that??) (interesting that she's in all lowercase in directory and on the slides)

what are the consequences

AIBO hacks by Aibo Pet
fan fiction

Radio Free Blogistan (guy in front of me)

how should corporations contend with social media?
LP: "watch and learn", free market research, understand the people impacted by you, lose control of timing of when news is released

look up: Ronald Burt, social holes, bridges, connectors
take info from one world into another, intermixing knowledge and thought

book: darknet

BlogOn 2004

I'm off to the BlogOn 2004 conference today in Berkeley!

I'm really excited. The speakers include a lot of people whose blogs I read regularly like Dan Gillmor, SJ Mercury News, plus cool icons of the field like Craig from Craig's List!

The topics include:
Defining Social Media: What is social media and what is the market opportunity?

The Dark Side of Social Media:
While social media offers great opportunities, barriers present real business risks.

Business Models & Business Impact:
How will social media generate new businesses and how will they impact old line businesses?

The Business of Blogging and Social Media:
Join an open conversation on the issues, opportunities and challenges bloggers and other social media makers face.

Hopefully I'll pick up some ideas for our own Online Social Networks 2004 (online) Conference coming in October.

UPDATE, 8:10am: Ok, here I am at the conference! There's great wifi access through the biz school so we're sitting outside with a nice breakfast and almost everyone has a laptop (we are all bloggers, after all). The general session starts at 8:30 inside. I'm at a table with a guy with a Think Pad with an apple logo taped onto the front of it (which for some reason just really amused me). I should probably go in and find a seat or something but its nice and cool out here in the Berkeley fog.

Oh, also, check out Dan Gillmore's piece about the Boston Bloggers. The cyberjournalist page he links to of course has Brian listed! So cool!

Bloglines Updates

Bloglines, my current favorite web site (which feeds my RSS addiction) is celebrating its first birthday and unveiled all sorts of new features today. There's a whole new look to the site and several new features. The biggest new feature is the ability to create your own blogs of your favorite clippings. You can easily move private, clipped items to your public blog and back again, so its an incredibly easy way to publish your own blog and let your friends and family see the items you've clipped and your thoughts on them. And to publish your own RSS feed of it which others can subscribe to and clip from.... not that I need another blog.

I also saw from their list of top links (another fun feature) that Michael Moore is finally updating his blog, but I can't seem to find a link to subscribe to its rss feed...

Apologies

My apologies to anyone (Mom, Margaret, Janice, etc.) who is having trouble viewing my blog... I'm trying to figure out why its not working for you...

Spam

Like most of you, I get a tremendous amount of spam. Mostly I just ignore it and keep deleting (worrying once and a while that I'm filtering or deleting something important by accident of course).

But I find it really sad that people come and post spam comments here on my blog. I'm going to have to install some of the recommended protections and things when I get a free second.

In the meantime, I apologize to any of the rest of you who see the spam posted here before I have a chance to delete it. Sigh.

400!

Another milestone! Post #400 (and possibly more if I finish writing up those last three books I read)

Just like a refrigerator door

I really liked this description of blogs from the social software weblog:

Most importantly, blogs invite people into the blogger’s life and become a key way for others to share in the blogger’s life. In many ways, blogs have the same dynamic, ”living document” role that the refrigerator door has in many homes: provide a central communications hub where information and content constantly reflect, augment, and update the lives of the household’s residents. A blogger’s family, friends, or fellow enthusiasts become the micro-community where the blogger enjoys micro-fame and the community benefits from the continuity the blog provides. A win for everyone.

Some new features