And then we came to the end

As one of the people who has 12:00 flashing on her VCR, I take the teeniest exception to Seth Godin's assertion that I am therefore an incurious person. I have enough clocks in my house, and only use the VCR to play back things, not record things, so setting the correct time on my VCR is not a huge priority. But I am somehow incurious because of this? Harumph.

Oh. It was a metaphor? Never mind.

Anyway, I would be amused to know if any Project Players say "No, not me. I'm not a curious person." Of course we're all curious. Just like we're all unfailingly patient with our children, and never just gesture in the general direction of the cookbooks instead of taking the patron there, and especially never feel like saying, with just a tinge of sarcasm in our voices, "Under that big yellow sign that says TAX FORMS."

I think incurious types wouldn't have signed up for PP in the first place. Some of us may be more at ease with the technology and conventions of Web 2.0, but this was too much of a commitment [and I mean that in the best possible way] to see through to the end for anyone lacking in the curiosity department.

It's been quite a ride. I have learned so much, and have some very cool new tools to play around with. Tops for me have been Remember the Milk, GoogleDocs, Bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts. I've already implemented lessons from PP in my work and personal life, and I have lots of ideas for tackling some work challenges with new tools in my toolkit. Once a productivity enhancer, always a productivity enhancer...

I know Web 2.0 isn't going anywhere, and I'm far from a Luddite. However, as I think I've made clear throughout my blog, I have an issue or two with information overload and the general overall quality of much user-generated content. As an interesting coincidence, I listened to a podcast yesterday of To the Best of Our Knowledge called Dumbing Down, Smartening Up which was a nice capstone to PP. [I'll be back later to add the link; gotta get Junior off to school now]. It covers more than just Web 2.o, but includes an interesting interview about Wikipedia and makes some really good points about problems with the anonymity of user-generated content. Food for thought.

Well, I hope we keep on playing in some form. It's been real! So long...

Monster Mashup

That's what I created when I played around with this week's toys. I wound up with an iGoogle page tricked out like a Christmas tree. Cute cat photo widgets? Sure, I'll take two. Photos from NASA? Why not? Cleaning tips? Yeah, need that one. And I just love how the sun travels across the top of the page throughout the day. (Those little details make such a difference.)

Best of all, I mashed together Google Calendar and Remember the Milk and made it show up on my page, along with the day's weather forecast. I do this with some trepidation, since it essentially means I am currently maintaining two calendars, which is a great big time management no-no in my book. I think, however that I have discovered a way to sync my trusty Palm with my Google Calendar, without having to buy a smart phone to do it. It does involve some software downloads and installations, so who knows if I will really be able to pull it off?

Anyway, I probably spent more time exploring and playing around with mashups than any other single Project Play gizmo. The zip code census dashboard has me awestruck. Such a simple way to get that demographic info you need for the report that's overdue. (How did anybody get anything done Way Back When?) I couldn't ever get it to load right, but if Every Block Chicago works the way I think it's supposed to, it would be cool to have something similar for one's own locality. I can get squarely behind this kind of user-generated content.

Too much of a good thing? Maybe. I pared down my iGoogle page with an eye toward making it functional instead of including every bell and whistle I could find. Still, I had to keep the Bush Quote Generator. You know what they say about all work and no play.

And now for something completely different...

Let's try embedding a vid and see if it works.

Tubular

Two and a half hours of my life that I will never get back.

That's what I just spent poking around YouTube, looking at silly videos with, shall we say, minimal production values. An awful lot of bandwidth is being used to show the world jerky amateur films of college boys doing bad Paula Deen imitations. And worse.

And yet. It had never occurred to me that I could use YouTube to view a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. Now THAT could be useful, and I really haven't ever used the words "useful" and "YouTube" in the same thought or sentence before. I'm thinking about my student days as a history major and marvelling at how easy it would be now to view certain kinds of primary source material. No chattering projector required!

Other things I like about YT: it's kind of fun to find clips of live performances (although picture and sound quality are frequently dreadful), and to search for things like the name of your high school and see what you get. Fun, but not all that useful.

I don't like how there doesn't seem to be a great way to improve the precision of your search results. At least for the searches I did, there is always a lot of noise, and no obvious ways of whittling down your results, except by adding more search terms of course. Like all of Web 2.0, there's tons of dreck mixed in with the gold nuggets. Just because YouTube "doesn't allow" gross-out videos and porn doesn't mean I feel confident that I (or my kids) couldn't stumble across something icky that flew under their radar. And please, save me from the inane comments and vulgar language that seems to pass for discourse in much of the Web 2.0 world.

So I guess YouTube gets a mixed review from me. Of course we'll all be using the technology at work soon enough. But cute kitty videos, stupid human tricks, and flatulence wear thin after a while and all the silly and stupid stuff dilutes the power of YouTube, IMHO. Maybe the Google people could split YouTube into two sites: one for the America's Funniest Home Videos stuff and another for clips that perform a function other than making people laugh so hard they pee their pants.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up

Obviously I was not thinking clearly during week 6 when I opined that podcasts would be a good way to release me from having to teach people how to set up email accounts. Booktalks, OK. To The Best of our Knowledge, I'm there. Talking someone through a process, not so much.

I am struck by the wide variations in quality in the screencasts I looked at. Some had a lot of annoying microphone noise, which was very distracting. The tutorial on setting up a Gmail account? Bleahhhh. If you aren't computer savvy enough to do it without a tutorial, I doubt it would help much. Some, like the University of Calgary, were just awesome. It is very apparent that having a script makes your screencast sound worlds more professional, and less like something you did in your garage or basement.

How would I use screencasts? Well, obviously, I was jumping the gun a few weeks ago with my email tutorial idea. Something I do a lot of at the desk is demoing how to search and place holds from home, as well as how to use some of our databases, especially EBSCO. Invariably I wind up showing the patron and writing down the steps on a piece of paper so they can replicate the search at home. How much better it would be for me to give them the URL and say, There's a tutorial embedded right there that will walk you through it as you're doing it, instead of handing them a scrap of paper covered in my scrawly handwriting that they will undoubtedly lose anyway. I think I would still show them while they were with me, because it goes against my nature not to demonstrate things when asked about them, but I would totally stop writing down the steps for sure.

I'm not sure if I'll get to the optional assignment or not. I'm doing pretty well to complete this assignment before we get the next one. It's nice to know how to do it, though, so that Frenzied Librarian and I can get together and whip out useful screencasts in our copious off-desk time.

(Pod)casting the net a bit wider

Oh dear. More goodies to keep me chained to the computer. I fear that podcasts will become like library books for me: "That one looks good; oh I need that one; whaddya mean I can't renew it anymore, I haven't started reading it yet!" My Bloglines feeds keep growing and growing, just like the pile of books on the floor next to my bed. Gotta get that iPod.

Once again, TMI. Maybe if I just stop sleeping, I'll have enough time to read, listen and fool around with the computer. Nah, I'd probably have to stop working, eating and raising my children too. Thanks a lot, Project Play.

The thing I like about podcasts for libraries is that there are so many different ways to use them. Booktalks and book reviews. Teen applications. Stories for kids (though I must say, I'm having trouble with the idea of plopping a kid down in front of the computer to listen to a story, however artfully it is told by Disembodied Children's Librarian Voice. Parents, there's just no Web 2.0 substitute for plopping the kid down on your lap and reading the book together).

Maybe podcasts could take over some of the one-on-one computer training we currently do. If I never had to walk someone through the process of setting up an email account again, I wouldn't complain. And syndicating programs for people who just couldn't make it to the library that day? Sweet. What a great way to reach beyond the walls of the library. And if only two people show up to your program, you can tell yourself that it wasn't a dismal failure after all, since undoubtedly hundreds more will listen to the podcast.

I have to stop now. My computer chair is in serious danger of permanently molding itself into the shape of my posterior, and my kids are starting to tell me that I've really had enough screen time.

It's not you, I just need MySpace

Oh, MySpace. If we kept stats on that sort of thing, I've little doubt it would be the most visited site on my library's public internet computers. After school, we should just hang out a "MySpace Cafe" sign and forget about that whole book thing.

I have a couple of favorite MySpace stories. The first happened several months ago, when I was trying to help a young patron with a misbehaving computer. He just gave me a withering look and said, "This is MySpace. You don't know anything about this." The latest happened this past week when we found it necessary to ban three young men from our hallowed halls for an extended period of time. They use our 'brary in the evening and on Saturdays, when we have fewer staff on duty, so some of my comrades were not sure they knew who the guys were. I found one of them on MySpace, and got to the other two's profiles because they were Friends of the one I could find. I snagged their pictures, printed them out on our color printer, and now feel confident that they won't be able to sneak in when someone they don't recognize is working.

I felt like a latter-day Nancy Drew. Kinda clever, if I do say so myself, although probably not what the Project Play folks had in mind for libraries using MySpace.

But anyway. Generally speaking, MySpace just gives me a headache. All the backgrounds and the page elements make for very difficult viewing. It just screams bad design to me. Something else I thought was not so cool was one library's page that had lots of comments from what appeared to be patrons (good thing), but a lot of the comments were just stupid (Thanks for the add, Jessie! Thanx 4 wishing me a happy b-day luv ya and hope 2 c u today), and one frequent poster goes by the name Shithead. Call me a grumpy old librarian, but I don't find that things like that really add anything useful or positive to that library's web presence. Of course, this isn't confined to MySpace. Any site where people can post comments gets cluttered with stupidity. I can't read the news online without wading through loads of comments that are just dumb, ignorant, and (worst of all) ungrammatical. I should just stop reading the comments, but sometimes there are good insights there underneath all the garbage. Someone should invent a "dumb comment filter" for Web 2.0 applications. I could get behind that.

I digress. I liked the screen shots from Facebook much better, though I haven't created an account there yet. Maybe later. The layouts just seemed crisper, less distracting, more useful and navigable.

While I do buy into the notion of meeting our users where they are (and Lord knows they are on MySpace), I just can't get excited about my library having a presence there. We have users and potential users in Home Depot too, but we don't set up a satellite branch there (next to the hot dog stand in the entrance) with books from our home improvement collection. We don't set up a table at the hip-hop club to let people know we have hip-hop CDs at the library.

We're all trying to do more with less, and I don't think that having a MySpace page is something a library should necessarily do unless it can do it well.That's not to say that a younger generation of librarians won't be able to do it right, but not this curmudgeon. Is there anything more horrifying than a middle-aged mom trying to dress and sound like her teenage daughter and not quite getting it right?

Shudder.

Besides, I kind of like them to think I don't know anything about what they're doing. Mwahahaaaaaa.....

No forgotten milk here

Yeah, I know. I'm behind and I should be blogging about MySpace and podcasting. But I truly cannot believe how cool Remember the Milk is and how quickly I've gotten addicted to it.

It definitely has little quirks that just annoy the living daylights out of me. But somehow, it manages to overcome the historical problems I have had with both written to do lists and gadget-y to do lists (like the to-do feature on my otherwise-much-beloved Palm). I can stay focused on what I need to do today without worrying I will forget about something further out....and the further out things don't distract me from today's priorities. It's SO easy to make adjustments to due dates or priorities as conditions change. And tags? Invaluable for helping group like tasks together (Oh, I see I have a lot of errands to do, so I'll do them all at once) If I could have it on my Palm and sync it up, I could die a happy woman.

One of the way cool things I think we could do with this would be to keep a shared to-do list of things at work that need to be done, but not necessarily done by any particular person. There are six of us who kinda sorta job-share, and wouldn't it be great if I didn't get something done on Tuesday and the person who is in on Wednesday morning could just see that it needs doing and do it?

I am trying to evangelize my co-workers. I'm sure that like most True Believers, I grow tiresome, and they groan and try to hide when they see me coming.

I'm testing out how...

I'm testing out how to blog using Jott. This is really weird. listen

Powered by Jott

Makin' a list and Jottin' it twice

Oh. My. God.

This could be life-altering.

I can't really say that I'm an inveterate list-maker, but I am an inveterate list-loser. If I had a nickel for every list I've started and lost....well, I wouldn't be sitting here doing work things at 11:45 on a Sunday night with the temperature a lovely six below zero. I completely love the idea of lists, but the actual implementation of them is where I sort of fall down. [Click here for a book that, by strange coincidence, I happen to be reading at the mo.]

I don't just love to-do lists. I am prone to making lists of all kinds, and some of these now exist in my brand-new Remember the Milk account. Such as Wish List (things I don't have, but want like an iPod and a microplane grater), Organizing Needs (things I don't have, but need to solve an organizing problem at home, like a container to corrall my various electronic device chargers) and MP3s (songs I would put on that iPod, like Radar Love and Thunder Road.)

I rely heavily on my PalmPilot to keep me organized, but one feature I have never had much luck using is the To-Do list. Much as I liked the idea of having all my to-dos in one spot, with no pesky paper scraps to lose, it has just never worked for me to do all of that data entry. I'm not entirely sure that RTM will work any better for me, but I'm willing to give it a go. At a bare minimum, I can type a lot faster than I can write with a stylus.

I find the interface to be a little clunky, and it seriously bothers me how things jump and move when you mouse over them. I think it will take a while for the whole thing to become second-nature, and to start using all of the functionality to its fullest capacity. For a start, though, I can envision reading my email with RTM open in another window, transfering to-dos into it and DELETING the email instead of leaving it in my inbox to get lost among the other email clutter. That's something.

One problem I can foresee, especially at home, is that I don't always happen to have the computer on when I need to make note of a to-do. Oh, wait, that's where Jott comes in, right? I must say, though, that calling Jott from my cell phone to remind myself to buy toilet paper while I'm sitting in my living room approaches the bounds of the surreal for me.

Jott transcribed the Jotts I sent perfectly, but for giggles I want to try out a few accents and see what happens. I noticed some goofs in the Project Play list, such as where someone who clearly meant "bring the wood in" got transcribed as "bring the wooden." (Bring the wooden.....what? And where should I bring it?)

Cool as all this is, my problems with information overload continue. So now, besides my work email and personal email, I also have inboxes on RTM and Jott. How many inboxes does one person really need?

This could all be even slicker if I didn't have a geriatric Palm that does not have Internet capabilities. Maybe I need to put a Palm upgrade on my Wish List. Or maybe what I really need is an iPhone, so I could send myself a Jott, which I could access on the iPhone, reminding myself to download The Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends, which would go into my MP3 list on RTM, and which would prompt me to put the song...on the iPhone.

Is that full circle, or just way too complicated?

Does Google control the world?

Jeez Louise! Is there anything that can't be done from a person's Google account?

This was so totally and completely cool, I hardly know what to say. I thought I was very au courant with my little flash drive, carrying my files around with me, but honestly, it seems downright quaint compared to the Google Docs model. I don't have to worry about losing it, inadvertently sending it through the wash, or wreaking digital destruction when I forget to eject the little beast before removing it. Not that I've ever done that.

Always on the cutting edge, my cohort Frenzied Librarian has already started putting a few work documents on Google docs and inviting collaboration from the rest of us. I'm wondering how this compares with something like Basecamp for working collaboratively. I find Basecamp a little confusing, to be honest, and I'm not sure the same thing couldn't essentially be accomplished with Google Docs, but maybe I'm missing something wondrous about Basecamp.

When I was learning about Flickr, I felt vaguely uneasy about my photos being stored someplace other than my own hard drive. What if Flickr goes away, and I can't access my photos? Perhaps the more relevant question is, what if my hard drive crashes and I don't have everything properly backed up? Given the ominuous clicking, grinding and moaning sounds that sometimes emanate from my relatively ancient CPU, this is not an academic question. Not that I don't do regular and exhaustive backups. Daily even.

Besides just collaborating on projects, I now have a new way of helping patrons save documents that they are about to lose because their internet time is running out, instead of fumbling with the staff flash drive. Or giving patrons a documents option when they're using our express internet machines, which do not have Microsoft Office on them. Or making nifty display signs at my computer and printing them at the one computer networked to a color printer, without the clunkiness of emailing an attachment to myself, messing with the flash drive, or even inserting a floppy into the computer before remembering that there is no floppy drive behind that slot. Not that I've ever done any of those things.

I also think this would be an awesome way to do schedules and time off requests. Instead of our current piece of paper tacked to the staff bulletin board, we could have a document on which to make our schedule requests. We could update the master schedule in one place when someone trades or makes some other change, and all of our supervisors-in-charge would have access to the most up to date version of the schedule without us having to fax, email or otherwise communicate changes. We would avoid problems when someone forgets to fax the schedule to the supe-in-charge when she calls and asks for it, and fails to remember until the next day. Not that I've ever done that.

I've used Google Docs to share expense information with a certain ex-spouse, and find it a big improvement over the former system of emailing spreadsheet attachments and the multiple versions that process used to create. My only beef at this point is that I still have to email copies of receipts as attachments, since the files are too big for Google Docs.

Cool cool cool. What will those Googleites think of next?

More IM thoughts

I finally did get IMing to work. I found that the Meebo Me widget works just fine on my home computer, but not at work, unless you're using Firefox. I am still having just a wee bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the intersection of Meebo and other services. My middle-aged brain tends to think of Meebo as something that is essentially the equivalent of Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger, so I'm wondering why anyone would use anything other than Meebo or Trillian, since you're not limited to just one service. I am faintly, dimly aware that you can't necessarily IM someone using Meebo unless you already have an account on one of the services. But honestly, I am not even 100% sure that is true, since anyone can Meebo me through my widget.

Right?

I think I need to get our twenty-something page to explain this to me. This is definitely a generational thing. I know this from reading the blogs of some of my young whippersnapper colleagues, for whom IMing is yesterday's news.

I'm IMing (or not)

As you can see, I got the Meebo widget up on the ol' blog. I'm not sure it actually works, as my only buddies are offline at the moment, but we'll try again another time.

When I first heard about using IM at the reference desk, I thought it was a really dumb idea. But having an IM widget come up when a patron has an unsuccessful search in the catalog is quite possibly the most brilliant thing I've ever heard of. David Lee King is to be worshipped. So out-of-the-box.