john-23things

Great process. Great introduction to the state of the web 2007 & the impact of new services on Libraries. Here's 10 more things that could be next, & it would be great if some of them were:

1. Creation of an OPML format blog subscription list of critical (authoritative, relevant) Library 2.0 blogs, so that interested professionals (all of whom now have Bloglines accounts) can subscribe and stay current with one click (or at least one import!). ALA established basic and advanced reading lists in April 2006. I wonder if they're still being updated? Anyhow. OPML files are lists of multiple feeds. Save the file to your desktop then import it into Bloglines.
   
2. Corresponding culture change (or at least culture-tweak) which says that reading work-related feeds at work is appropriate / useful.
   
3. Continued blogging by staff members to build their 23 things blogs into nationally-recognised forums for the discussion of Library 2.0. Let's interact in the blogosphere outside the county, raise our profiles, and participate.
4. Participation in other forums, whether the Ning Library 2.0 group or elsewhere.
   
5. Continued monitoring by all interested staff of the services evaluated in this program, and of the new services that come along behind. Read Library Clips!
   
6. Space on the Intranet for these staff to share ideas / chat about Library 2.0
   
7. Formation of a staff committee to integrate Library 2.0 into HCL operations.
8. Development of a social customer catalog that allows customers to review, rate, tag their titles / suggest read-alikes etc, and allows other customers to see that information. Think HIP meets Amazon meets Library Thing. Yummy.
   
9. Development of a Library 2.0 area on the staff intranet to link to critical resources.
10. Space on the Library's website for customers to build communities around shared interests or resources. Ning, or Del.icio.us, hosted and sponsored by HCL.
11. OK... one extra. How about podcasts of our bookclub discussions? We could record them pretty easily (MP-3 player and a good line-in mic?) and make them available for download & subscription. Our discussion questions could feature in the show notes. We could establish a forum to share our bookclub experiences with home-bound patrons and with other librarians.
    

I'm excited to observe (and participate on the periphery of) this period of professional self-examination / redefinition, & I can't wait to see what's next.

Nearly the end. I wanted this to be fun times, but Thing #22 was work, I tell ya! I was disappointed with the complexity of this process, enough that I didn't embrace digital audiobooks with as much excitement as I thought I would. Why?, I hear you cry. Well, let's review the 10 steps to migraine-hood that made my afternoon so fun.

1. Browse the collection & bookbag / check out a couple of titles.
2. Attempt to download
3. Error Message. The Overdrive Console is not installed
   
4. Download a "bootstrap file" for the Overdrive media console
5. Download the console itself
6. Install the console
7. Attempt to download the books from your bookbag
8. Receive error message. Windows Media Player Security Update Required
9. Head Explodes. Then update Windows Media Player (Why? I won't be using it....)
10. Finally download to the console
11. (OK, there's 11 steps, but this one is OK...) Export books to player.
12. The files are on the player, but they don't play. Yippee!
    

OK. Multiple frustrations with this process. It was not simple. It requires a special piece of software to work properly. It piggy-backs on Windows Media Player (so will it work on Linux?). The files don't play when they get onto the player. Too many steps and too many problems!

Portable players are already able to play audio files, & pull files down from the web, so why can't this be a simple "download to player at CKO" process? One click? Drag n' Drop? Something! I realise that it will be more straightforward once I can figure out how to get the files to play, since the console is installed at this point, but I'm booking a vacation on the strength of my rough experience here....

What is a podcast?

A podcast is an audio file that has identification information attached so that your computer or MP-3 player can go off & find it on its own. I would so be the king of the podcasts already if I had an MP-3 player and access to a fast connection... Wait a minute....

Where do you find podcasts?

You can find podcasts using any of the available podcast services, & most of them will let you add feeds that they haven't cataloged yet. For starters, check out:

• Yahoo Podcasts
• Podcast.Net
• Podcast Directory
  
• PodScope (which searches the words spoken during the podcast)
• AOL Search Podcast Beta (which does the same)
  

I've decided that podcasts are harder to navigate than blogs. It is more difficult to find good quality & interesting content. A blog post usually links to another, related blog post, which leads you to another blog, and so on, until you're familar with a series of topically related blogs & can subscribe to them and keep up to date with them, etc. I'm having a hard time finding similar quality links between podcasts, & recommendations. I agree with Stacey that the most successful means of finding podcasts seems to be searching. I'm going to keep an eye on Podcasting News for a while, & see what I can see in terms of recommendations and repeat mentions.

How do I get into podcasts?

The tricky bit is figuring out the best way to get the content off the web and onto your player, and from thence to your ear. Some services are web based. Others require that you download a "podcatcher" to your PC. Some seem better than others, or at least better suited to your circumstances.

I'm lucky enough to be using a player that's also a flash drive. At the cost of a bit of your player's memory space (& provided you're not planning on using the player for watching video clips, which require special software etc. before they'll work) you can use a "podcatcher on a stick" to grab and download your subscriptions each time you sync your player, independent of the machine you're plugging in to. Podcast Ready provides just such a program, called MyPodder. Here's what to do:

1. Plug your player into your computer. Note the drive letter.
   
2. Sign up for an account at Podcast Ready
3. Download MyPodder to your computer
4. Unzip the MyPodder files
5. Copy the unzipped files & folders across to your player, placing them in the top level folder on the player, & leaving the relationships between them intact.
   
6. Safely remove the player
   
7. Log in to Podcast Ready & browse their available selection of podcasts. Add a few to your subscriptions.
   
8. Plug in your player once more. You should be prompted to run MyPodder, which will sync with Podcast Ready and pull down new episodes of the shows you've subscribed to. Excellent!
   

So now I'm all set to keep up with the Rugby World Cup and BBC radio a whole new way. Cool!

YouTube is a viral video sharing site, with many of the same features as the other social web services that we've already examined (personalised accounts, tagging, voting for favorites, bookmarking). YouTube is, however, the only one of these services that hosts video of my college dorm being demolished with explosives.



There are a bunch of other great Sorby-related videos too, if that's your scene, (but really, why would it be?...)

Back to YouTube. If you create an account, you're able to search videos, favorite them, compile playlists, rate videos and interact with other users by leaving comments and by preparing video reponses. This allows a conversation to form around certain content.

YouTube doesn't allow videos to be downloaded (as a way of retaining attribution) but several web-utilities that can encode YouTube videos for downloading do exist, so it is possible (though not convenient) to take your favorite YouTube clip with you.

In further evidence that Web 2.0 is catching on, YouTube was also recently used as the medium to pose questions to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidates in the first CNN / YouTube debate. YouTube puts user-generated video front and center on the web. The fact that these are video clips that can be viewed by anyone may also make YouTube the first web 2.0 service to cross over into the mainstream. I would argue that it is certainly the most popular / widely known of the 23 things!! With recurring themes like the Mentos & Coke fountains



and the excellent treadmill music video,



there's no limit to the power of YouTube!

I'm choosing Blummy (Honorable Mention: Bookmarking) as the site I'd like to spotlight. Many of the Web 2.0 services that we've evaluated as part of the 23 things program use what are called "bookmarklets" to enhance the features of the service. These sit on the links bar in your browser. At the most simple, they're bookmarks that will link to another website. They can, however, be more complicated than that.

• There's a bookmarklet to grab images off the web & drop them in your Flickr account.
• Feedburner offer a bookmarklet that gives you quick access to your subscriber stats.
• Bloglines have a bookmarklet that allows you to subscribe to a site's feed with one click.
• LibraryThing have a bookmarklet to place content in your LibraryThing account when you're viewing it on Amazon. (3rd item under "booklists")
  
• Rollyo have a Rollbar bookmarklet that keeps your searchrolls handy
  
• There are tons of bookmarklets for Del.icio.us, like this, and these, and er, this.... Some are for viewing content. Others suggest tags or make bookmarking easier.
  
• There are also loads of bookmarklets to make tags on Technorati.
  

You get the idea. Web 2.0 tools use bookmarklets all the time. See more on Bookmarklets.com. Whoa, Nelly! There's no more room on my links bar....

Enter Blummy! Blummy provides a way to organise these bookmarklets and keep them neat on your links bar. Why not take all those bookmarklets and store them together in, er, a bookmarklet. Blummy is very intuitive and simple, but makes browsing neater & more straightforward. You simply log in to Blummy, choose the bookmarklets that you want in your toolbox, (or write your own if you're so inclined) then drag a specified link to the links bar of your browser, where it will sit quietly until called upon:


When you see a page that you'd like to work over with some bookmarklet mojo, click the blummy link to pop up a lime-green box of bookmarklety goodness from your links bar. Then select the bookmarklet that you want to run.

Neat, tidy, tidy & neat. Blummy is useful for keeping a selection of web 2.0 tech tools handy but hidden, and for building an accessible addition onto your browser's links bar. All good stuff.

OK... So I'm composing this post in Zoho Writer, which is an online word processing application that I used to recommend to patrons in the days before OO Word Processors on the Groovix PACs. I like Zoho writer because of the web-based interface, and readily available editing options for your document. There are lots of fonts, as well as all the text editing options that you'd expect to see in an offline word processing application.

Zoho writer allows you to share an online document with your friends & colleagues, and to invite them to view the document with either read-only or read / write privileges. This presents a great opportunity for collaboration, and is an alternative to the use of a wiki for building a document, especially since there are simple and straightforward versioning tools that would allow edits to be undone.

Oh, hey, there's also a "publish to blog" feature... (goes off to mess with it...)

OK.. back in the Blogger interface, so that I can add some images.

There are two pop-up windows. The first asks you to choose a service & enter your username etc:

The second pop-up lets you select a blog, choose to publish the doc as a draft, and convert keywords in the document into Technorati tags.


Zoho has a somewhat comprehensive "Publish to Blog" help page, but of course I have some thoughts:

1. The post didn't have a title when it was published. It was called "untitled." Perhaps if I "save as" in Zoho first the post would have to document name?
   
2. There wasn't a way to enter Blogger's labels into the draft post, so I end up in the Blogger window anyway.
   

So, not perfect for posting to blogs, but an option. Perhaps a more complete, saved, "ready for prime-time" document with images inserted already and everything would be a better bet for testing the auto-blog feature. Otherwise, great for working on a doc on a machine without a word processor, or for small-group collaboration.

My blog is added to the Sandbox Wiki list of favorite blogs. All v. good, especially with the jazzy WYSIWYG interface. No need to speak Wiki, which is good, because I was never very good at foreign languages....