Tallmanicus

C'est fini?

2007-10-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-19T07:40:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

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!

A Vision of Students Today

2007-10-17T16:46:00.001-07:00

TLC wikimania

2007-10-16T19:52:00.001-07:00

So, the wiki tool we got to play with is easy to use and easy on the eyes. I still think wiki-coding is a barrier that most people won't overcome. TBL's original view of the web was predicated on people being willing and able to write HTML, but it didn't work in the real world. It wasn't until blogs made the markup invisible that the web really took off as a personal publishing platform.

Library wikis

2007-10-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

Wikis... love 'em and hate 'em.

I used to be a big wiki fan. At Broward County Library I made a wiki for the Business, Law, and Government department. (It's a long, funny story that can't be told in a public forum :)) It served as a link depository for the many resources we needed to tell our patrons about. A few of the librarians were brave enough to try editing pages, and a couple actually figured out wiki coding and made nice pages for their sections. So, for that application (no website, no tools, no training, no support, totally under-the-radar) it was a Good Tool.

The library wikis out there are good at what they do... Meredith's ALA wiki was a breakthrough that showed the library community the value of the tool. Best Practices has also found a niche. I like 'em.

Going forward? I suspect the tools we will use from Google next week will make wikis look - hmmm, so 90's? If you want a shared workspace, collaboration, an easy to use interface... a wiki may work, but other tools might be handy too once they work "in the cloud". As the platform improves, the apps keep getting better. New tools like Adobe's AIR are coming. You'll need more techie chops to hack Air than to paste up a wiki, but the result will be more robust with a richer interface.

Library 2.0

2007-10-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the essays in this exercise. John Riemer's essay about improving library services resonated particularly well with my thinking. Ever since my first digital library course, I've thought the essential problem facing libraries as we go digital is that of findability. Too much good stuff, and too few good tools to find it! That's still the case, on so many different scales.

LexisNexis Academic, a single database, contains a multitude of data sets and search interfaces. Then scale up by adding the other 271 databases to which NSU subscribes, each with their own interfaces and modules, and you are another order of magnitude lost. Then scale up again to include OCLC, the Library of Congress, digital archives around the world, and (finally) the open web, and we see how far away we are from having a good way of finding information in this digital world.

Sadly, there's no magic 2.0 button to push that will make all this information available and organized. Google, Inc.'s corporate mission is to do this: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". As long as the advertising stream stays strong they may just pull it off!

Technorati

2007-10-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

This is pretty funny. I tried to register with my favorite user name (richmond) and it said someone beat me to it. Argh. Just on a whim I tried to log in with a couple of my passwords, and voila! The door opens. Sad or funny? I dunno.

Technorati and its ilk may have started out being all about discovery and popularity, but the elephant in the room today is MONEY. As blogging has grown, mainstream media has turned from scorn and dismissal to investment and co-option. Advertising money is flowing by the billions out of print and classifieds into online. Measuring metrics, in turn, is big bucks. Recent IPO (up 60% in the past month... Bubble 2.0 anyone?) ComScore, for instance, is competing against traditional companies like Nielsen to measure traffic. And now, it seems, mainline media companies are trying to buy the flow from blogs - they don't want to host the blog, but they are paying blog authors to give their flow statstics to the conglomerate.

Technorati was an early player, and theoretically it should be in the middle of this frenzy, but its buzz these days is terrible. Users are upset with changes in their focus from ranking to discoverability. They are upset with how long it takes Technorati to see changes and new links. When I go there it mostly looks like spam. The top searches right now:

Huh? The "Top 100" isn't much better - the #11 website in the world, according to Technorati, is icanhascheezburger.com ! (@#*$&#!)

Technorati probably was the best thing going two years ago when the original Library 2.0 program was set up. It looks like the world has moved on.

del.icio.us

2007-10-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

I always liked the idea of del.icio.us but never found it that useful. If I used many computers it would be a no-brainer, but I don't, and it isn't. I logged in to my old account and found some old bookmarks, long abandoned.

Cruising other people's bookmarks is semi-interesting in a world of infinite time, but who lives there? Coincidentally, Jorn Barger (of Robot Wisdom (and aux) fame) currently links to a del.icio.us feed ("Topnotch del.icio.us feed" (getpost)). Jorn finds wonderful stuff but this one didn't do much for me.

Tagging? User generated tags are good discovery tools in situations where more formal structures don't work or are not available. I did a research paper in 2005 when Flickr was about a year old in which I collected and analyzed metadata for approximately 150,000 images as they were loaded into the system. I've always meant to go back and revisit that data, seeing if users recategorize material as tags evolve. One of these days :)

rollyo

2007-10-01T18:03:00.000-07:00

I tried to see if I could do this exercise in 15 minutes. The clock is still running but there's hope!

I read some VC blogs and thought it would be easy to rollyo them.

And yeah, mostly it was.

I've been thinking a lot about federated search lately (:)) and this is just another instance. There's nothing new under the sun, just rearranged bits.

Uses for Rollyo? Well, just being able to search our own library's website would be nice. I'm sure someone has built that one. Now, how do I find it? I need a TLC participants' blog search box. Heh, I know just the tool for that.

P.S. No, didn't make it in 15 minutes.

LibraryThing

2007-09-30T13:41:00.001-07:00

Having just repainted my living room and freshly restocked the bookshelves, I knew the "first row" had some great stuff. I pulled a stack and went to the computer. The easiest signup ever gave me my LibraryThing account, and then it's time to add books.

First up, "American Scenery" from 1840. This has sentimental value. LibraryThing finds it at the Library of Congress. No cover art, which makes sense because it was published as a serial. NYPL has it in their digital library. I did some scans for a school project that are better than the NYPL scans I looked at - "Lake Winnipisseogee, from Red Hill is my one of my favorites.

Next up, "The Book of the Tarpon". I love this book, with its many early photos of tarpon fishing. I run into a little problem with LibraryThing; it doesn't show edition or publication date when it finds multiple instances at Library of Congress. It shows a field as "(date?)" when in fact the metadata does have dates. I find my 1911 edition by picking both and drilling down. Could be better.

On my next book, "A Geographical View of the World Embracing the Manners, Customs and Pursuits, of Every Nation", I strike out completely. It's a pretty rare title, I guess, since it's not at Library of Congress or in WorldCat or in LT. Still, AbeBooks has four copies for sale. I don't see a way to use AbeBooks for book discovery. Once you have a found item you can look it up there; why not hit it for discovery too? I do like the feature to add more sources; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was particularly welcome as I have a lot of maritime material.

My next addition is another favorite, U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere. This is in the U.S. Serial Set collection at Library of Congress. It's a multi-volume set with wonderful maps, illustrations, illustrations, and descriptions of South America circa 1850. LT works well; again I'm the first with the book.

Number Five. I was going to do another tough one ("The American Ship-Master's Guide and Commercial Assistant, Being an Enlargement of the Seaman's Manual Useful to Merchants, Ship-Masters, Consuls, Supercargoes, Mariners and Merchant's Clerks", 1838) but what's the point? Let's see if there's some social networking around contemporary stuff.

Let's look at Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down." I don't own it but it's a good book. Much better metadata; editions more clearly defined; and cool networked effects. "Swap this book" shows me a store that will take my supposed copy, presumably in trade for something else? Tried to use BookMooch but it needs another registration. Yeah, right. "Conversations" link had a few outdated threads; probably much more active on a newer title. The one thing that impressed was the social information / recommendations machine; I had read 13 of the 20 titles on the list. Yeah, we are all unique, just like everyone else :)

Looking around a little more, I find the BookSuggester - how much are we paying Thomson Gale for What Do I Read Next? I'll have to do some searching and find a comparison. Seriously good tools in the tools tab, and then there's LibraryThing for Libraries. I sent away for some info; we'll see where it takes us.

I've been reading about this for a while. Now I see why! Very nice.

w5/e10/generators

2007-09-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

Fun topic, fun tools. Found the Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues video generator on the generator blog. Recognized Allan Ginsburg, but who knew Bob Neuwirth? Wonder if Tim and Dave saw the original?

I was going to make a Dylanesque announcement of a new database, but our most recent is Dun & Bradstreet's Key Business Ratios. Argh. Dylan and Wall Street didn't work for me, so I sent my older son a reminder of an upcoming event (click on it to load):

OK, is is just me, or does anyone else see Ellen Fleiss in Dylan's expression at the end?

Finding feeds

2007-09-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

My problem is weeding, not discovery! Too many blogs, too many feeds. Along with the classics (shifted, stuff, researchbuzz) I like It's All Good (http://scanblog.blogspot.com/) and Catalogblog (http://catalogablog.blogspot.com/) for their interesting mixes of content.

I played with Feedster for a while, and it seems like it is mostly commercial or borderline spam. I played with topix for a while (new to me) and found some interesting local material. Local is the big kahuna that nobody has really cracked, despite billions of dollars spent trying.

Another find today was Google Blogsearch - http://blogsearch.google.com/ - which I had read about but never used. It turned up quite a few interesting blog articles about things happening around town, and very little commercial cruft. Funniest (saddest?) was South Florida Housing Bubble ( http://www.soflahousing.com/ ) documenting pain in the local real estate market. 50% off peak prices? Ouch.

RSS redux

2007-09-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Ah, Bloglines, check! I added a Sun-Sentinel feed; didn't know they were there. Cool. I remember when the New York Times added RSS feeds; they were the first major player to adopt RSS and it marked a turning point in the acceptance of the technology.

In the early days, most people thought RSS was useless. There's a chicken and egg problem will most social tools; they don't make sense until there are a lot of people using them, but people don't want to use them unless there are a lot of reasons to do so. Now it is obvious, what with podcasting (RSS with enclosures) and every media company in the world supporting feeds. Wasn't always so.

The person who did the most to make this week's technology happen is Dave Winer; his blog is http://scripting.com If I could only read one blog, I think that would be it. OK, slashdot. No, Winer. No, slashdot. Whatever.

The only good thing about blogging on the Bloglines platform (where I guess Susi is still stuck!) is that your blogroll was automatically created with all your Bloglines feeds. From here I have to point you to http://www.bloglines.com/public/richmonda but I'll warn you there's a lot of good stuff in there!

TLC blogs and RSS

2007-09-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

~~This week's instructions say the TLC blogroll is RSS-powered. In that case, pay no attention to the php behind the curtain:~~ Yeah, OK, I fixed the page so it doesn't say that anymore. But maybe someone still wants to see a little php :)

Wow! Here are all the blogs registered in TLC:
";
$incs = "E:\wamp\www\\tlc\db_info.inc";
include($incs);
$cnx = mysqli_connect($host, $user, $password, $dbname);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM userblogs ORDER BY library DESC, blogname";
$result = mysqli_query($cnx,$sql);
echo "\n";
while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result))
{
$n = $row['blogname'];
$u = $row['blogurl'];
$l = $row['library'];
echo "\n";
}
echo "

($l)

";
?>

Somebody probably has a list of all the RSS feeds for our blogs, but it ain't me :)

Random technology post

2007-09-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Yeah, Tallmanicus moved from Bloglines to Blogger. I was a Movable Type fan in the early days of MT - it was written in perl, making it easy for me to install on my server. (Too bad the Wayback Machine didn't save my CSS :)) Blogger was always out there too. Now I can see how it is doing.

Blogger was started in 1999 - eight years ago. It's included on this cool map of web trends, whose design was inspired by the famous London tube map (Harry Beck, 1933). Also included is Edward Tufte (way over on the left), who discussed the London original in one of his books - I think The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

I wonder if anything on that map was invented by a librarian?

First post

2007-09-06T13:48:00.001-07:00

Another joke: "First post" is the tradition of making the senseless comment "First post" in response to a new article posted on Slashdot.