Although, I hadn’t used these tools at all really until now, I’d been reaping the benefits of other people’s use of them.  Some of the bloggers that I follow will put their presentations up on their blogs using these tools.   By using these online applications I can view slideshows sometimes with audio of presentations at conferences I’d never be able to attend in person.

I’ve written about this before that I believe these tools make professional growth so much easier than it’s ever been before.  I tried Google docs, Zoho, and another program called 280 slides (a presentation application).  All of them were easy to use and both Google docs and Zoho were actually easier to use than Powerpoint.  I recently created a presentation for a conference in Powerpoint and struggled with some of the new features of Office 2007.    I’m looking forward to trying these applications more often and trying to incorporate them into my workflow.

It’s a terrible thing to say, but I rarely use another search engine besides Google.  I have a dropdown menu of search applications IMDB, Wikipedia, are the two I use most frequently after Google.  Since Google is built into my toolbar its more of a matter of convenience, than superiority of results.

Guinness and Guinness

For this task I searched for Dachshounds in Google, Rollyo, Mamma, Dogpile.  Surprisingly I liked the results I got from Rollyo best of all four.  I would be willing to try Rollyo more frequently, and see if I continue to like the result I get.  My bias against metasearch engines was that they seemed so slow, in the past, though all of them brought back results quickly, so that bias is one that is no longer valid.  This has been an interesting task, but it feels a bit like making New Year’s resolutions to try something new, that I’ll be backsliding to my old Google ways in no time.

Podcasting is such an amazingly adaptable tool for communication.  I’m an infrequent listener to podcasts.  In the past I’ve listened to Keith Olberman’s podcast for his funny political commentaries.  And I’ve listened to NPR for author interviews and recently discovered that they also have podcasts of concerts!  I listened to REM at the SXSW festival in Austin which was terrific since I was going to see them in Vancouver only a week later.

The library podcast that I’m listening to nowadays is the Library 2.0 Gang on Marshall Breeding’s Library & Technology Guides website.  The episode I listened to really demonstrates the power of podcasting to link people all over the world.  The three people who were discussing 2.0 were spread around the world in different timezones;one in the USA; another in Sweden; and a third in the Mediterranean.  The audio was terrible because they were all talking on phone lines and someone was a  heavy breather..ugh, but even so the content was very interesting.

I think there is definitely a place for podcasts in Sno-Isle both internally and externally for our patrons.  Internally, I think the challenge is for us to lose the culture of perfection and think of these as kind of recorded conference call conversations.  We could use them for all sorts of training modules and host them on the Intranet, so they could be played for staff meetings, or individual training.  If we can stop worrying about them being perfect, then we’ll be able to get these going–otherwise I fear that it won’t happen.  After all people are busy and perfection takes a long time, but a phone call takes a few moments.  I’d say put webcams on pcs and laptops for those people likely to be called to create these internal podcasts and then develop topics and go from there.

The key to making them usable I think would be to annotate them so we’d know when information in a podcast needs to be updated, or taken down.  I could go on but for now, I’ll conclude by saying that podcasting definitely has a place at Sno-Isle.

I can see how these online image generators would be very helpful in either making images for presentations, or using as an emphasizer for a blog posting. I’ve used flickr toys and dumpr for my flickr account either to make calendars or as a way to remind myself of something like the Sno-Isle mission statement. I wanted a way to have the mission statement in front of me all the time–but a simple text file–becomes invisible after a while so I came up with this.

I’m going to add this list of image generators to my delicious feed so that I can find it again–otherwise I know I’d be wondering where did I get this again…

Okay, it would be silly for me to talk about this as if it was my first time installing the console and exploring the collection.

However, I would like to thank everyone who has submitted or will be submitting a comment about this service. Your feedback is very valuable be it of the ‘oh, this is wonderful’ or whether it is ‘oh this is awful’ variety. Of course with both types of comments a bit of detail really helps me. If you have a story to share about why you feel the service is good or bad–then please let me know, since something perhaps can be done about it. Case in point, one comment I’ve heard is that the teen collection isn’t very good–and that we need more titles of teen appeal–that’s great feedback because I can search to see what’s available and check against suggested titles. If there is stuff available I’ll purchase it, if there isn’t material available I can voice that opinion at the publishers round table in Cleveland this July.

A couple weeks ago, ForeWord magazine invited me to be the guest blogger for their magazine in June.  Despite my stage fright–make that page fright–I did what I usually do when someone asks me if I’d like to do something I’ve never done before, I say “sure, I’d love to….”.  So, the past couple weeks have been involved in thinking what’ll I say…….

If there’s one good thing about deadlines though, they force you to stop thinking about it, and just do it–oh my god–I’ve strayed into Nike commercial land, time to sign off.

I’ve been using del.icio.us since 2005, and I find it very useful for a number of reasons.

Having my bookmarks with me has been invaluable when I’ve been out in the branches giving presentations. Not being tied to a computer has meant that the Q&A portions of presentations have been more flexible. Before I begin, I usually just open del.icio.us in a second browser, and then I’m ready to go.

Also, occasionally I work an information desk, and having my bookmarks right to hand is very helpful. There is really nothing more frustrating than knowing you saw a site that would exactly answer a patron’s queston and not being able to locate it again. Certainly this can still happen with del.icio.us after all you can’t bookmark everything — they’d soon become unmanageable, but for those sites that I do bookmark I have access to them anytime.

Where I really find del.icio.us to be helpful though is in following the bookmarking of people I know. There are some really great library bloggers out there, many of whom give brilliant presentations at conferences around the country. I’ll never be able to see all of the presentations I’d like to see, but I can track the websites that these brilliant people find worthy of note, and since the bookmarks are frequently annotated I can glean a sense of what they found useful.

The process I use for discovering these smarties is this:

• Read blog post of a library leader.
• Visit the sites mentioned in the post,
• If the site author has a unique perspective I find useful, I look at their profile to see if they’re on del.icio.us and if they are, I’ll add them to my network.
• Then when I browse my network in del.icio.us, if I find myself consistently saving their sites to my feed, I’ll view their network as well to find out who they’re following.

This process of finding the smart people and then tracking what they’re reading isn’t anything new, and harkens back to the old citation indexes that we learned about in library school.

I’m a firm believer that del.icio.us is an important tool in fostering collaboration among work groups. Del.icio.us can become the workplace bulletin board that is so frequently used to post photocopies of articles. Of course del.icio.us is better than that since it’s archival and searchable, so its easy to retrieve articles, and websites, or even photographs as needed. The problem I’ve encountered in using del.icio.us with workgroups is one of inertia–it can be difficult to convince people to try del.icio.us which is necessary to start those watercooler conversations. Collection Development has a delicious feed on our blog, I don’t know that anyone is using it besides me, which can be a bit frustrating since I still get emails where someone has sent me a link to look at. These sorts of communications are problematic because emails tend to accumulate and then deleted, so these “i found this cool site” emails can get lost. Sending an email and also saving it to the delicious feed makes these retrievable later when the inevitable conversation rolls around to, “hey, what did you think of that link I sent you last month” where there is then the usual fumbling around looking for the site. It’s all so inefficient. I often hear people say that they are too busy for using tools like del.icio.us, of course these hard working folks aren’t realizing the time savings they’d benefit from using del.icio.us and other 2.0 tools. Time management skills are some of the most difficult to acquire and I certainly have a long way to go, but tools like del.icio.us are a step in the right direction.

While my sons were in high school, my wife and I were very involved the Snohomish High School band boosters. The boosters performed many important functions to support the band. We raised money by selling cookies & coffee at concerts, sold merchandise at football games and on and on. Football games were especially important for fundraising–and required a considerable amount of planning–to maximize the amount we raised ( on a good night we’d raise $500 to $800 in 2 or 3 hours). But these profits were only possible because we spent a significant amount of time, planning and figuring out what sold and avoiding the stuff that didn’t. Through the four years we were involved with the boosters, we also raised a $100, 000 to fund a trip for the kids to Florida to participate in several competitions. It was rewarding work, but at the time I kept feeling that there had to be a way to save some of this collective knowledge we’d gained, so that it wouldn’t be lost when Marie’s term as booster President ended. Looking back, I think we probably should have created a wiki for the group.

So why didn’t I do this? A couple of reasons, one although wikis are fast, they aren’t necessarily simple to create-IMHO. First, there is a learning curve for learning how to create and edit pages–adding links etcetera. Second, there’s the writing of the text and the editing/organizing of pages under a cohesive structure. As someone who’s stymied by the prospect of outlining anything–this organizational challenge was ultimately an insurmountable hurdle. Besides, the difficulty of creating pages, a wiki needs a community of users who are all interested in maintaining, editing, and creating pages. All of these people need to learn these wiki skills, and when you’re talking about a small group of volunteers who are already putting in hours of work a week selling coffee, and raising funds–this learning curve for the community as a whole is a major obstacle to success.

Occasionally, when I hear someone say, “oh we should start a wiki for this project”, I tend to resist because I just feel that the two hurdles I mentioned above outweigh the benefit a wiki would provide, since the community of editors for the wiki are always small and generally nearly everyone would need to learn all the associated skills for building wikis. My general opinion is that for most projects a good blog is much easier to start and maintain for a group of novices working on a project.

All that said, I’m a big fan of wikis created by others, especially the library success best practices wiki. The work these contributors are doing is invaluable to others in the library community, and represent a collective spirit of generosity that I appreciate. I’d like to see Sno-Isle use blogs and wikis more for collaborative projects, and I’m encouraged to see this happening. But, we are taking our first steps, and for now I believe our needs are best served by blogs rather than wikis.

I resisted getting a YouTube account for years. I just never was all that interested in searching through all the videos out there for stuff. I think mainly this was because we had a desktop pc, and I just didn’t want to sit at the desk and watch video. Now, that we have a laptop though I find myself liking streaming video sites like YouTube, Hulu, Fancast, and bliptv a lot more.

The Clay Shirky video I posted on the Sno-Isle 20 for 2.0 video was from bliptv. Besides the fact that I think what Mr. Shirky is both interesting and important, and I was happy to find it available to share. What I really love is that this conference occurred only a few days ago, and yet I can see videos from the conference and experience and learn things easily with just a mouse click. If there wasn’t any video, I suppose I could search the web and find some information about this conference, but it would have been much harder.

I also love the serendipity of conversations that these videos ignite. Yesterday, I mentioned this video to someone and they said, “Oh, I just went to that”. We had a great conversation about web 2.0 and the conference, and other things from it that I should look for.

Sharing information brought back from conferences is challenging. If it’s done in a large scale way, there are all the logistical difficulties of scheduling, who to invite, what their responsiblities are for sharing with others, and on and on. And of course by the time the discussion of whatever was brought back is being told by someone who wasn’t there, to someone else–the meaning gets lost, or distorted. Its the old game of whisper, but that’s how we most often choose to share conference information.

Which is why these conference videos are so important. With these I can not only view the talk, but then if I’m lucky I can read comments from others to get their take on the topic, and participate in the discussion myself by leaving a comment. If I get my comment in soon after the video has been posted and the discussion is still going on, the author may respond as well, and answer questions.

But even if I discover the video and comments months after the event I can still get all the benefits of the video which makes sharing information from conferences much, much easier. I’d love to see us take a hard look at how we share information brought back from conferences either through a staff wiki, or a conference blog, or anything other than what we do now. There just has to be a better way.