#Mumbai

I woke this early this morning to the horrible news from Mumbai. I first heard about it – not on the radio- but on my iPhone via Twitter. After all the radio only has scheduled news times. Twitter is instant and constant … and quick.

I had recently started following @BreakingNewsOn who were covering it but also there were also several people in my stream retweeting people who were in Mumbai. There was one person @Vinu who was in the immediate area who twittered his experiences AND very quickly uploaded his disturbing photos to Flickr . Someone else pitched in and bought him a Flickr Pro account just as he was about to run out of space. 

Also, very quickly, everyone Twittering about it started tagging their tweets #Mumbai. Anyone can use that tag to see a constantly updating stream of the news via search.twitter.

And here I am (very quickly) blogging my impressions, not of the event itself, but of the impact of social networking and social media on the way I recieved the news. 

It’s just another reinforcement of Mark Pesce’s notions of hyperconnectivity, he wrote of after the China earthquake in May. I am wondering whether its more mainstream (after all CNN rang Vinu) or am I just more used to it?

PS Twitter is really becoming mainstream now that the likes of Malcom Turnball, Kevin Rudd, Richard Branson and Telstra (or their PR staff) are all using it, some more effectively than others.

On play and dithering perfectionism

Jessamyn used the term “dithering perfectionists” on Twitter last night in reference to a library she was in. It resonated strongly with me this morning probably as I have spent the week trying to convince colleagues that they are allowed (nay – required) to play with our WordPressMU installation

I think that it is dithering perfectionism that we are trying to get away from in our 23 things explorations and the “library2.0″ movement. As librarians attention to detail and perfectionism are highly regarded traits. But perfectionism that stops us from exploring and trying new things out is hand in hand with fear of failure, leads to dithering perfectionism and hinders innovation and growth.

In Helene’s 23 things programs the trait that is desired is playfulness. A desire to try and tinker and learn from mistakes and not worry about getting things right or perfect.

We all know rationally that without the possibility of failure there will be no innovation. And I am certainly not the first one to point this out in the biblioblogosphere recently. The trouble is knowing it rationally does not overcome our inate dithering perfectionism. We need to practice our play regularly.

Facebook v MSM.

We all know that local mainstream media (MSM) filters the news. There is that old adage that a fire down the street is worth more airtime than the 1000s killed yesterday in the Sudan. But if you try and keep up with all the news everywhere then you can feel overwhelmed. You can set up alerts in Google news but they will be restricted to whatever your interests happen to be at the time.

If there are events happening in the world that we ought to be aware of how do you find out?

I have presented before about the value of online social networks in keeping me aware of the latest news in my web, library and online interests.

Today Facebook came to the rescue in keeping me a bit more aware of a human tradegy happening. My cousin worked for the UN and is connected to me on Facebook. Yesterday my cousin commented on this photo and that comment was on my Facebook newsfeed. It has not been made private so I hope very much that the poster does not mind if I post the link here. I then had to go a seek out the news of what was happening in that part of the world.

I am not sure a what I can do but I am using my meager part of hyperconnectivity to respread this bit of news just to remind us that there are others things happening in the world besides the US election and the release of a new browser. 

Facebook won this round.

Iphone blogging

This is a test but it is mind blowing if it works. I am posting this from my phone. Imagine if you will the consequenses when (not if) this becomes mainstream.

The photo is my hubby practising.

[EDIT] There was no edit option so I have hopped back on the lappy to expand. The photo was also taken with my phone. The whole post took a matter of a few minutes to write, take the picture and load. The consequences that immediately come to mind are for journalism. When a good proportion of the populace have a blog and a web and camera enabled phone any event can be immediatley recorded and published. Actually I wouldn’t need a blog. I could just have easily posted something with a photo to Facebook or Twitter with better effect as more people read my streams there.

Sharing links

Because I am a librarian and sharing information is what we just do I wanted to start a list of tools that help the easy sharing of links and clips with colleagues and clients. So here it is. The trouble is that I have been working on this for days and I keep finding ones that I didn’t know about and new ones keep getting released. I was going to expand it out into the features, pros and cons of each etc but it is a much bigger project than one blog post. Maybe I should start a wiki for it but maybe it already exists??

I have broken the list below up by the source of the original information.  The first list is just the ones that I have tried.

From Browser ie Web Page/Link

• Email
• Google share stuff bookmarklet
• Delicious bookmarking
• Friendfeed bookmarklet
• Facebook bookmarklet
• Evernote clip
• add to 2collab bookmarklet- targets Science community
• Googler note in reader bookmarklet
• Google Notebook

From RSS Reader- sharing a post or link

• Feeddemon
  • send to
    • email
    • delicious
    • digg
    • blog
  • clip to clippings folder then share via RSS
• Google Reader
  • star
  • share
  • share with note
  • email
  • tag to a public folder

Sharing journal articles

• Connotea
• CiteULike

John over at Library Clips has had a series of posts about many more sharing tools that he has tried:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/05/08/google-reader-notes/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/12/19/a-quest-to-discovering-a-private-text-and-link-sharing-service/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/09/21/google-shared-stuff-and-other-common-ways-to-share/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/09/21/siphs-link-blogging-and-sharing/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/05/30/link-sharing-with-sharethis-and-others/

These are others I have found (some in the last day or two) but have yet to try:
Furl
Spurl
Diigo
Simpy
Mister Wong
Mento
Zigtag
ma.gnolia
Awesome Highlighter
Citebite
Shareaholic
SharedCopy

If I do expand this out to a wiki I want to limit it to the type of sharing that can be directed to people of groups of people so I didn’t want to include social news aggregation sites like Digg, Mixx, Newsvine or reddit. Or personal clippings and links management tools that don’t have sharing features or at least an RSS feed.

What is your favourite tool at the moment? Opinions, additions ….help???

Ping.fm – not so great for conversation

I have been a Twitter addict for about 14 months now and have been playing (lemming like) with other microblogging tools as they have come along been bought to my attention via Twitter.

Plurk was launched recently a few of my Twitter friends went over there so I went too- just to have a look at the shiny new toy.

The trouble was that not everyone did. While Twitter has had problems recently no-one quite wants to abandon it completely. These social network sites are all about the community. If your friends are not there they do not have much value. So the issue becomes how to keep up with those on Plurk and Twitter at the same time.

Plurk is great for conversations but at the moment it has no integration with other sites as Twitter does. It is not yet supported by Friendfeed and I couldn’t get Feeddemon to see the RSS feed – but that could be because I have a private feed.

Ping.fm is designed for those, like me, wanting sometimes to update their status on several sites at once eg Plurk, Twitter, Facebook. It offered a iGoogle gadget from their site so I added it to my iGoogle page and had a very convenient place to post status updates. I shut down Twitter etc when I don’t want distractions but I always have my homepage open.

Trouble happens when someone responds to the status change i.e. wants to start a conversation. Great but if you havent got the site open in your browser or desktop client (like Twirl) you will miss the response and the opportunity to connect. If you had those sites open you wouldn’t need Ping.fm in the first place. It all depends on how and why you are using these types of sites whether you will find Ping.fm useful.

Them and us

I had a couple of email conversations on Thursday which lead to a couple of conversations on Twitter about people’s uptake of reading online using an RSS Reader rather than email.

After mulling over it (I need time for reflection – I learnt that at a recent train the trainer training session) yesterday morning I had a realization.

I live in my browser- other people live in their email client. They aren’t wrong just different. but that is where my barrier is in talking to them about some things.

Actually at home I live in my browser. I work I have dual screens. One generally has my email client and the other my browser.  This is because the preferred communication method in my organization is email.

This post took a couple of days to write and in the mean time Richard at Science Library pad says the same thing (only much better).