C'est fini?

You mean it's over? Already? Can't be.

I had a lot of fun, but not for the reasons *you* may have had fun. I enjoyed:

• Hacking the backend of WordPress, hooking it to a mySQL database used to track your done deeds
  
• Collaborating with our colleagues at Broward County Library, Dave, Debby, and Marty; it's always a pleasure and delight. We built a separate BCL site behind the skin of our project, with their own 23 things and separate approval list.
  
• Recording the few sound bits that I did (and I rue forgetting to do the others I was supposed to do :))

If we were going to do it again:

• Give everyone more time for the activities
  
• Structure collaboration - somehow, require teamwork
  
• Update the activities - some were stale and new technologies were missed
  
• Use blog posts for the home page!
  
• Integrate TLC and personal blog registration better
  
• Figure out how to get management to participate

My favorite activity was reading the blogs of other participants. We all learned about each other, which is probably more important than any particular piece of 2.0 gadgetry.

Special thanks are due to Carrie Sioux, whose inspiration and hard work made it happen, and the other members of the steering committee, who made it all fun. So, thank you, Carrie, and thank you, team!

Facebook

I've used Facebook for a while now, but it's not an important personal tool. It may be generational; my friends aren't on it, so it doesn't work for me the way it might for many. I marvel at some of the networks, though. My son has more friends than all the people I've ever known in my entire life! How can this be? And most of them are really cute, too.

I think it's real, it's powerful, and it's got a long way to go. Howard Lindzon says it well.

Podcasting

Authoritative sources don't always get it right. The New Oxford American Dictionary's definition of podcast, "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player," is not very good. Wikipedia's definition is better: "A podcast is a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers."

So, posting an audio file on a website for downloading does not make it a podcast. Distribution via a feed (RSS or Atom) does.

I tried the three search engines listed. Yahoo is going out of business: "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007" Yahoo is in a struggle to survive and Jerry Yang is chopping many money losers to focus on core mission. The other two didn't find TED Talks, a great series, so bah, humbug! to them. Again, the problem isn't discovery. The problem is the incredible surplus of riches and lack of time to enjoy them.


I use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. Favorites: WGBH, TED Talks, and the BSO. I use podcasts the sames way I use RSS feeds: they are reminders of great stuff to occasionally revisit. I'm sure my next car's radio will have an iPod connector, so I'll probably use podcasts more then.

YouTube

YouTube is a lot of fun.



Check out Keith Jarrett for something a little more recent :)

There are all kinds of videos we could make for the library, if we were clever and skilled in video editing. Maybe someday.

Best of...

Got all excited on this one! The winner in the Web Development and Design category is a tool I've wanted to explore for a while, CakePHP, an application framework for building web applications. I've used several other frameworks, but never Cake. A couple of years ago I built a system with Ruby on Rails but didn't want to stick with Ruby, an elegant but obscure programming language. Last spring I was playing with Symfony but found too many issues to want to pursue it. So, this week I played with CakePHP.

These frameworks let you build database driven applications very quickly by following rigorous naming conventions and design rules. The problem is the steep learning curve, with resulting code that is not obvious unless you are well steeped in design patterns like MVC (Model - View - Controller).

So, how did it work out? Honestly, it's still a work in progress. I decided to set it up on my Mac laptop. It still had some symfony detritus, so I had to spend a chunk of time cleaning that out, restoring Apache defaults, and cleaning up php and mysql, the other main components. Then last night, in my final pre-deadline push to make something work, I ended up in a library in Boca where the wireless would not stay connected for more than 30 seconds. Argh. Even their books were useless! Shelves and shelves of Idiot's Guides in the 005's didn't tell me what I needed to know about the default mysql user installed in OS X. Did I say argh? So, I dithered away my precious TLC 2.0 time (15 minutes squared). My first CakePHP application (subject guides for Sherman) is yet to be built.

How does this fit into libraries? This is the direction that software engineering is going. So we will someday be using apps built this way, and, maybe, even building a few ourselves.

Zoho Writer

This was created in Zoho Writer, yet another word processor.

NOTE: Jeremy Denk is coming to town! Come to Miniaci Saturday night to see this fabulous pianist and great blogger!

Superscripts and subscripts: H₂0 => a² + b² = c²

Can't do integrals, though! LaTex is still safe.

Pictures? Sure, why not.

And it even saved my data when IE crashed! Woohee!

Once you publish to your blog, though, the tie between the writing tool and the post is gone, so you have to go into your blog to edit.

ALSO

One of the gripes about All 2.0 [Anything 2.0?] is the plethora of logins and the lack of a secure identity system on the Internet. For me to post from Zoho to my blog, I had to give them my blog login information. What if Zoho is run by a bunch of crooks in (pick your favorite criminal lair)? Now they can monitor my email, watch for passwords or receipts sent to my account, etc. Ugly. Micro$oft tried to solve this problem but nobody in the industry trusts them and the project collapsed. Remember Microsoft Passport? They recycled it as the identity system for XBox Live, I think, but it didn't make it as an industry wide standard.

But, anyway, I liked Zoho and will return to try more of their tools.

Jeremy Denk

Jeremy Denk is playing Saturday night, 7:30, in our own Miniaci Theater.

Denk is a brilliant pianist. He played last week with Micheal Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony; he's been touring for a year with Joshua Bell.

The blog connection? He runs a blog called think denk that's... well, don't take my word for it, read what Alex Ross says in this week's The New Yorker:

Go... to Think Denk, the blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk, a superb musician who writes with arresting sensitivity and wit. The central predicament of Denk’s existence is that he is struggling to master the great works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries while meandering through a twenty-first-century landscape of airports, Starbucks outlets, and chain hotels.

Ross missed one of my favorite Denk posts, Bimbo Genius, a musical take on Miss Teen South Carolina:

The proper vehicle for addressing this text is musical, not semantic or grammatical (though it refers to the semantic and grammatical in order to create its pseudo-musical paradigms). It begins innocently enough, with seeming Mozartean grace:

Antecedent phrase: I personally believe the US Americans are unable to do so…
(moving from tonic to dominant)

.. and so on.

Hope to see you there!