Tag Archives: The Web

Internet Librarian: day three

, ,

Crafting the User-Centered Library
presented by Cliff Landis

Why use emerging tech?

  • It’s not enough to shove your bad services (such as our crappy OPACs) into new things.
  • Don’t do it because everyone else is.
  • For outreach.
  • We don’t need things designed FOR the user, we need things designed BY the user.

Planning – it takes too long. Too man hoops to jump through, eventually good ideas can just fade away.

The committee approach ? can take any good idea and destroy it. Exploits the negative aspects. To many times people ask “what if…” Cliff then showed us a funny YouTube video, Association Professionals Through the Ages, that illustrates how good ideas can be destroyed in such a manner.

View more →

NASA Images

,

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.

No longer a Rolling Stone

,

Rolling Stone was the first adult magazine I subscribed to. I’ve been getting it delivered to my home for over twenty years now. But I let my subscription expire this month, and I’m a little nostalgic about it.

Its musical focus was what first got me reading Rolling Stone — especially the music reviews. Over the years though, they’ve added more features on pop-culture things like fashion, television, and video games. Lately a good deal of their random notes section looks like it came from a sleazy tabloid. Often the music news in the bi-weekly magazine was not news to me. I had already heard about it online. I became less and less interested, and issues would pile up, unread. Over the past few years I wondered why I was paying for a subscription, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop.

View more →

The Ultimate Bootleg Experience

,

I recently discovered an outstanding resource at T.U.B.E.: The Ultimate Bootleg Experience. Featuring both live and studio recordings (outtakes, rarities, etc.), T.U.B.E. is veritable goldmine. Some of the more interesting things I found there include:

  • Joe Strummer – Solos, Soundtracks, & Rarities
  • Van Morrison – Gypsy Soul (Studio Demos)
  • Peter Tosh – Equal Rights Demos 1977
  • Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – 1969-08-26 – Los Angeles
    (the earliest completely recorded CSNY concert)
  • Talking Heads – CBS Demos (1975)
  • U2 – Pulled The Covers (1979-2006)

The one minor downside of T.U.B.E. is the slightly complicated downloading process. It usually is worth it however. The files are well documented, and often include cover art. The bootlegs I’ve downloaded have been of very good quality. Every time I check out T.U.B.E., I’m just amazed at the variety and sheer number of bootlegs posted on the site.

Health Care 2.0 and the endless cold

,

I really don’t like to write “complaint posts” but there is a good part to this story, so I’m going to indulge myself.

I’ve had this cold for three weeks now, and boy am I getting sick of it (pun intended). That’s three weeks of coughing, blocked up sinuses, and a runny nose. Several other people I know have had the same virus (they’ve been sick for a long time too). When it got to be three weeks for me I contacted my doctor’s office, to ask if I should come in and get it checked out. After the on-call nurse assessed me, she didn’t think I needed to come in (no fever or any disgusting symptoms I’d rather not mention here). But the good part of the story is I decided to go online and email my doctor about it.

View more →

Reasons why I blog

ArmlessBear tagged me with the top reasons why I blog meme. So, here they are.

  1. I am a web geek.

    Way back in the fall of 2000, I bought this domain name so I could have some web space to play around with. About a year after that I installed some blogging software because blogging was becoming popular and I wanted to try it out. Blogging and messing around with my domain has been fun for me. I cringe when I look back and read a few of my older posts, but I’m still having fun with it.

    View more →

The term 2.0 jumps the shark

There’s been an interesting thread on the Web4Lib listserv about using the term Library 2.0 (which comes from the term Web 2.0). In the discussion, Tim Spalding (creator of Library Thing) said:

I don’t think Web 2.0 is a fad, but it’s clear the term has jumped the shark when the media starts talking about powerful marijuana as “Pot 2.0”.

Of course, everything will change when we have Pot 3.0, the Semantic Pot.

Which was so funny (to this web geek) I just had to share.

And for those of you who might need an explanation, here are links to jumping the shark and the semantic web.

Computers in Libraries 2007

,

Earlier this week I attended this year’s Computers in Libraries conference. While I wasn’t all that enamored with the hotel location, the conference itself was excellent. I got excited about, and learned a LOT of interesting things. Below are a few highlights.

The folks at the South Carolina State Library recently redesigned their site using Joomla, the open source content management system. This was a very inspirational session for me, as I’m looking at adding a CMS to my library’s website. More info is available at Joomla in Libraries.

Another intriguing session was Derick Willis’ talk entitled Creating Browsable Content with Django. Django is another open source CMS I want to learn more about.

View more →

Today’s web links

,

Time’s person of the year is you! (and me too)

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see… a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom… But that’s what makes all this interesting.

Bravo. Excellent choice. It really is amazing how the power of the collaborative web has changed things. Here’s the article and links to related coverage.