All posts by Jonathan

Internet Librarian: day one

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Rather than blog about every session I attended at Internet Librarian, I’m just going to just focus on the ones I thought were the most interesting.

Designing the Digital Experience
presented by David Lee King.

David told us that basically this is a 30 minute, presentation version of his book by the same name (which I had heard about before and was why I wanted to attend this session).

There are three paths to the experience:

Structure – Create an experience by making the website easier to use. A well designed experience should stay out of the users’ way. You should focus on developing parts of your site that users visit often. Don’t spend too much time on things users only do once a year. Look at your website with a critical eye, think about what would make people stumble. Figure out goals from there, don’t forget the “don’t make them think” philosophy.

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Internet Librarian: preconference

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Internet Librarian always sounded like a real interesting conference, and I’m fortunate to be able to attend this year’s edition. The conference for me began with one of the preconference workshops, Web Manager’s Academy; Redesign 2.0. The session featured four librarians presenting several informative talks throughout the day. The two presentations I found the most useful were ?User Experiences? which covered engaging website users and enhancing their experience, and ?Usability Research? which included things like preference testing, affinity mapping, and task-based testing.

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Todd Rundgren’s arena rock

Todd Rundgren and his band rocked Madison’s Barrymore Theatre last night, and I do mean rock. Oh and for those of you counting, that’s two big concerts in three days for me (it’s been a good week).

The show began in a big way with “Love in Action” from his days in Utopia. When the band repeatedly sang the line before the title phrase, “You can’t stop, you can’t stop…” I thought, what you can’t stop is the energy emanating from the stage. They played with a garage-band-like ferociousness, pounding out the power chords.

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Ryan Adams & the Cardinals’ marathon jam

Last night Ryan Adams & the Cardinals were in town, playing at Madison’s Overture Center in support of their upcoming release Cardinology. Because of the venue, I expected good acoustic sound and I wasn’t disappointed. This could have been one of the best sounding shows I ever attended. Musically the band seemed to give it their all, playing for almost three hours (with a 15 minute break between sets).

The concert started off with two new songs, which went over fairly well with the audience. Next was a solid “Everybody Knows,” a pained and somber cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall”, followed by another new song. By this point Ryan and the band seemed to be functioning like a well-oiled machine, and came to the first big highlight when they played “Goodnight Rose.” It included a wonderful instrumental jam featuring harmonizing guitars, an almost whispering chant of “goodnight, goodnight” toward the end, which segued into the signature musical riff of the song at full volume to finish.

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NASA Images

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Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

I recently discovered a wonderful website for anyone interested in astronomy and space: NASA Images.

In addition to the huge collection of images and multimedia of the universe, our solar system, the Earth, aeronautics and astronauts, it’s also got a nice time line from the late 1950’s until the present day.

High resolution versions of the images are available for download.

Sting Unplugged

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I recently stumbled upon this little gem: a bootleg of Sting’s Unplugged performance at MTV studios, in March of 1991 — back when MTV actually had music on the channel.

Sting was touring to support his latest release at the time, The Soul Cages. He plays four songs from that underrated CD, but the highlights of the session are outstanding versions of “”Fragile,” “Tea in The Sahara,” which segues into “Walking On The Moon,” an excellent cover of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and my favorite song of the set, “Message in a Bottle.”

Although a cover image is included in the archive, I didn’t think the publicity image of a Synchronicity era Sting made sense, so I came up with my own cover based on images from The Soul Cages CD.

Share and enjoy.