Thing 13 - Online Productivity Tools

I chose iGoogle for my uber homepage. Why? Mostly because I already had other accounts at Google, and frankly, isn't that the point of consolidating / centralizing all your web stuff? The customization features at iGoogle seemed pretty good. I moved a few things around and added a list feature Listy. Personalized "start" pages like this might be useful, but as with others of these web tools, it will take time playing with it to see how useful. The good news is that iGoogle seems flexible enough so that you could change it as you discover how it could be better set up to meet your needs.

It strikes me that this whole 'store your computer stuff on the web' trend is most useful for those in situations where they need to access things from various computers, and where the information they store there is more recreational than critical and does not need to be particularly secure. Of course, more and more of us do use various computers to do our work and social tasks.

About these list features. I don't know about you, but many of my lists have to travel with me into the store. I tend to use little slips of paper, so having to print out a whole sheet for 3-4 grocery items does not seem to be progress. On the other hand, if I was a cell phone user, I could send the list to my phone thus eliminating the need for paper -- but adding cell phone fees to my life. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

I have used shared electronic calendars in other contexts and they can be very useful in work settings. I took a look at Google's calendar feature - visually very nice, easy to use. I'm not sure I have a need for it in my personal life - but I can see that those with a more complex set of people and variables to coordinate might find it really handy.

Thing 12 - Diggit, etc

I took a spin around the social media sites Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Redditt. Yes, of course, I see the theme. Editors, bad, wisdom of the crowd, good. Well, maybe.

Still, for all their aversion to editors, the top stories on these sites were often stories from the mainstream media. To be fair, they also feature blog and website content that might not be found at 'traditional' news sites. And I suppose that a story that was not prominently featured on traditional news sites might get more exposure here. The 23 things prompt seemed to indicate the value of these social media sites for librarians is that we need to scan them to be "one jump ahead of library users trying to find behind the headlines information" and "see what people are interested in". [Frankly, I don't know what they mean by 'behind the headlines information'. Rumor? Primary sources on which articles are based? What?]

Sure, being aware of the news that may influence queries from our users is good. Still, I think that an aggregator like Google news offers a better alternative if what you want to do is scan for news that is current and 'hot'. I can see, though, that for that more 'alternatively-sourced material' Mixx, Digg, et.al. would give you a quick picture of the blogosphere buzz.

I realize the unique aspect of these sites, as opposed to a Google News kind of custom aggregator, is that you can share with others what you found cool or interesting or important. For my personal news needs, I don't find this feature compelling, but obviously it appeals to many people.

O.K. I found an article to share at The guardian.uk. I clicked on their "share" link which offered options of sharing to Digg, Redditt, and Newsvine. However, I found that each of these sites required you to register before you could share an article. As I couldn't foresee ever using such an account, I opted not to have my e-mail floating around in the database of yet another website. I tried another article from USA Today, ditto above experience with Mixx, but I did notice a nice feature of Newsvine -- even while it was prompting me to login or create an account, it let me know that the article I wanted to share was already on Newsvine. Nice feature.

Finally, a couple of things I observed make me wonder how good these sites are at providing what they promise. When I checked on the Mixx site, they had in their "Community" area highlighting "new groups", several groups with the words "cheap viagra" in their names. Obviously, someone is trying to use this venue as yet another garbage marketing outlet. So, to stay valuable to their users these sites need to minimize noise from what amounts to spamming.

More disturbing to me was the discovery at Newsvine that if you create a column there "90% of all ad revenue generated from your column will go straight to you". Ad revenue? Generated how? Wouldn't people craft their columns to maximize ad revenue? Perhaps I don't fully understand their mechanism around ad revenue, but despite the high-flown language about 'no editors', or in Newsvine' s case, "editorial judgement (sic) is in the hands of the community", I'd rather have an editor deciding on content, than have it determined by how much ad revenue it brings in. Yes, traditional news outlets' revenue comes mostly from advertising, but at least there is some effort to have a wall between editorial and ad sales. Besides, don't these social media sites' mission statements imply that they are somehow better than the traditional model?

So, I've been kind of negative, but let me say, it was pretty fun to follow link after link of stories that caught my eye. But the comments feature... not very valuable. The ratio of useful back and forth to ill-informed or mean-spirited rants was too low to spend the time reading them. It seems to me that these sites might be most useful to someone who had a particular narrow interest that they shared with a group at the site and together, the crowd could unearth information each might not discover on his or her own.

Thing 11 - Social bookmarking @ del.icio.us

I resurrected a moribund del.icio.us account from a previous web 2.0 learning endeavor and actually added a few bookmarks. Having my bookmarks available at any computer seems like it could be very convenient, but I'd have to see how it actually played out in real life. I'm still trying to get a handle on how useful it would be for collaborative work. As with a lot of these tools, the application in an education setting seems obvious (the podcast tutorial on del.icio.us mentions reading lists and syllabi) but discovering a useful library application proves more challenging.

I like the additional information available about a site through seeing how many others have linked to it and how they have tagged it. It would be interesting to "mine" the site to see what others thought was valuable enough to bookmark on a topic of interest to me. Helene Blowers in the podcast refers to the 'magic middle'. The idea is that when other people look at stuff and bookmark it, the good stuff is what gets bookmarked most often. This provides filtering by authority -- it helps pull out the useful information from the vast sea that is all web content. To the extent that a tool like del.icio.us can achieve that end, i.e. assisting me to find the 'good stuff', it would be very valuable.

I also downloaded the bookmarklet from del.icio.us to my browser. I can only hope it is helpful and not annoying. It's kind of hard to tell before you use the feature over time. We'll see. I noted that there are uninstall instruction in the help section at del.icio.us. :)

Back to library applications of this tool. I took a quick look at the Maui Community College Library's bookmarks on del.icio.us. and tried to find out how they were using this tool. I found the link to their del.icio.us bookmarks buried on the library's website under "About Us" under a subcategory "Our Current Interests". It's hard to assess this. Obviously it's not being presented as a real tool for students or faculty. Is it just a collection of bookmarks that the librarians find interesting? So, it's out there, but what is it's use?

Thing 10 - Wikis

23 Things wiki on PBwiki

Had fun adding to the 23 things wiki. (Hint - look for the Holstein.) The PBwiki interface was easy to use, the toolbar options in the editing / composing screen were straightforward and offered a pretty good range of tools. It was simple to create a table, import an image, or create a link to another URL or wikipage. As I am not fluent in html, this was critical to using the wiki efficiently. Creating a new page was also easy. I liked the template option idea, although the particular templates available might not be very useful in a library setting. They seemed geared more to schoolwork, more for either the student or the educator. But it also looked like you could develop template of your own that might more closely fit a library milieu. Or maybe others in the PBwiki community have developed templates one could use.

I read "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" by Meredith Farkas. She makes some valid points about the possible uses for wikis in libraries. But the whole idea of making the library’s website the online hub of the community -- I'm skeptical. It just seems to be another of those let's be all things to all people endeavors. Mission creep. Why is this a role the library should take on? Does it make sense? Is the library website the best place for local restaurant reviews? Aren't other places doing that better already? I just dunno.

I looked at some of the example of libraries using this for staff information, policies and so on. I think that kind of use makes a whole lot of sense. Our own library is experimenting with some similar uses.

Luv that Lee LeFever and his videos. He's got another winner with his "Wikis in plain English".

I set up a quick wiki on PBwiki, I'm already using it to coordinate Christmas gift buying with my family. I really can see the benefits of this kind of tool for a lot of collaborative efforts. I discovered that PBWiki also had some more useful templates available at the page level. These make it easier to set up a specific-purpose page, e.g. project tracker, document repository, team member list and others.

Thing 9 - Collaboration

Hmmm. Google Docs shared editing feature. I'm not impressed based on my experience with the sample document in this exercise. Here's my story.

I have a Google account, I asked for the permission necessary to edit the document via email as instructed at the 23 things blog. I got an e-mail that indicated that I have permission to edit this shared document. I clicked on the link, went to the doc, clicked on the "edit this page" link and got a message that I don't have permission to edit the document. (I summarize, this circle was reiterated with variations several times, but with the same results.)

If people who were actually trying to co-edit a document ran into this many obstacles, they would just call and set up a meeting at a coffee shop and bring their laptops and yellow legal pads. Maybe the whole setup for 23 things added another layer of complication, but this is NOT straightforward.

I see the value of this kind of tool, but based on the evidence of this experience, not this particular tool.

So, based on what I was able to see of the shared editing of this obscure little document on Google docs -- here are my thoughts. It sure resulted in a mess. I realize this exercise is not really like a true shared authoring situation would be, still... what a mess. Strikes me that the hard part of shared editing is negotiating with the other editors about the content. I couldn't see how this tool allowed for a history of the revisions to the document. Nor did there seem to be the facility to put notes to your collaborators (independent of the doc text) explaining why you were making an edit/addition, etc. Of course, I may be all wet with these observations, since I couldn't get access to the edit function. ;)

A presentation to share - please view!
Anyway, I created a slide presentation on Google Docs. It was pretty straightforward. This tool is limited, though. There were several simple tasks it could not do. For example, when a photo I imported needed to be rotated 90 degrees to orient the correct way, this presentation tool couldn't do that. I found a solution by manipulating the image in other software on my pc, re-saving it and uploading it again. Also, if you want to layer a shape with, for example, text, you can no longer manipulate the shape in any way once you've sent it to the back layer. It is also difficult to place graphics consistently in the same relative place from slide to slide because there isn't a ruler or grid to help you position things. So, if you had a bare bones kind of presentation to do, this could work well. Anything more sophisticated might not be possible.

Thing 8 - Sharing

I was a little tired of uploading photos and messing with graphics, so I choose create a database via lazybase. I created a list of good books I've read kinda recently. Below is the list embedded in this blog post. To share it with others I could give them the public URL to the read-only version of the database.

Initially, I thought I'd be able to create a version where I could create a form and have people input information to add to the database from my blogspace. (You know, some link that said, e.g. "tell me about a good book you've read lately". I must have misunderstood lazybase's capabilities though, because I can't seem to find any way to do this. If it could do this, it would have been an interesting way to mess around with the concept of user-generated content for sharing info, but alas...

Thing 7 - Communication

E-mail.
Great tool, but often hard to manage. I liked some of Merlin Mann's e-mail productivity tips. Especially his reminder that e-mail (for the vast majority of us) should not be a real-time communication channel. If you need to contact someone NOW, pick up the phone, or use IM. Then batch process the e-mail. Also, loved his suggestion to just fire back a reply the first time you touch the message if it can be done in under 2 minutes. Why deal with the message twice? These are suggestions I can put in place at once, though I never have been obsessive about constantly checking my e-mail.

The e-mail program we use at work has some productivity features available. You can organize messages into folders, create rules for semi-automatically processing messages as they come in, etc. As far as I can tell I think our tech folks control the spam filtering feature of the software. At least, I can't see any settings available to me.

Instant Messaging
We instituted IM at our libraries several months ago. We're using it mostly for the ref staff to contact one another it's an alternative to the phone for some simple transaction style communication. It works well for that, offering an opportunity to slightly time-shift these reference interactions. I'm also seeing people use it for those quick, real-time communications between staff that e-mail doesn't do so well -- things like quick questions to a colleague, technical problem status updates, etc. A beneficial side-effect of using IM is that it helps colleagues bond a bit more. In systems with multiple branches, sometimes it's easy to loose touch with your co-workers at different locations. IM offers a quick, casual way to touch base. In those small branches with just one lonely librarian at the helm, it's a reminder that they're not alone. :)

Text Messaging
RU 4 real? No cell, no opp.

Web Conferencing
Minitex Session. Sadly, I have to report that my first experience with Minitex's webinars was very underwhelming. After registering and receiving a confirmation of the session, it turned out I never got a second e-mail I was supposed to receive that had the URL and other information in it necessary to actually get into the webinar (offered via Microsoft Office Live Meeting). So. . . much time wasted.
My rule of thumb for these webinars would be:

• The first time you attempt a webinar, you'll probably want to register for a session you don't really care if you miss (and one that has no fee).
  
• Then you'll want to either download the LiveMeeting software or check on technology requirements for accessing the web-based version of Live Meeting.
  
• Then make sure you have the right 800 number to call to get connected to the audio.
  
• Then double check that you've received the URL and entry code you'll need for the meeting (webinar) session.
  

If all that goes smoothly the first time you try this -- you lead a charmed life. :) If not, use the first time to do all the troubleshooting and see if the second session you attempt actually works out.

Update - tried to attend a web conference on web design offered via Webjunction today 10/7/08. Sadly, the network connection at my branch library was down. Aargh, Qwest!. I seemed to be cursed when it comes to web conferencing.