The one conference and one keynote I wish I was at

We don’t get many (any) tech librarian conferences coming to this city. And we rarely get the resources to go interstate let alone overseas.

The program for the next Information Online conference in Sydney wasn’t exiting enough to motivate me to compete for a place to go at the time that I needed to apply. I am regretting that somewhat now.

However when I saw the program for Online Information in London (happening right now) I thought “wow”. It had names I recognized and would kill to be able to hear. But it wasn’t going to happen.

Thankfully one of those same people is blogging the sessions. Shifted’s post of Clay Shirkey’s keynote is long and comprehensive and almost fills the gap for me. I was greatly impress by a video I saw of his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo NY “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Its message resonated with the role that Information Specialists are trying to do here.

As I said Shifted’s post is long, but worth reading right to the end where, in response to a question, Clay discusses a librarian’s role in the new world of online communities.

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.

Browser wars

I have written before about how my broswer is very important to me and the way I work.

At my place of work we cannot have IE7 (or IE8) installed on our PC’s as some of our inhouse systems do not play nicely with anything but IE6 (or havent yet been tested).

Thankfully though our work machines are not locked down and we can install and try anything that we like. And Firefox comes installed by default.

Despite Firefox being installed plenty of my colleagues and clients do not use it.

However I LOVE tabbed browsing. I extol the benefits of being able to run a search and keep the search results in one tab and examine likely prospects in other tabs whenever I can. The productivty of using of a web based RSS reader is multiplied when combined with a tabbed browser. Even Microsoft recognized this key feature by including it in IE7.

Firefox has plenty of other advantages including its extensibility through plugins and other addons. I don’t use many- currently I have Zotero, Toodledo, Delicious, Snagit, Ubiquity (I keep forgetting that its there) and Evernote.

I think its part of the skills an “Information specialist” ought to have, to be aware of the differences between browsers and why some things don’t always work in all browsers. Especially as our clients could be using anything. I also have Google Chrome installed and Safari but I haven’t played with it much yet. I very much like Chrome but it doesn’t yet support the addins that I have in Firefox. Its easy enough to remember to light up IE6 for those times that I need to use it.

I have enough web dev people in my online social networks to know that IE6 is not web standards compliant and many web pages do not display as they should in IE6

Having said that I got caught yesterday. I was helping a colleague set up one of our in house current awareness blogs and she was saying that one of the standard pages that I had set up was not displaying the right sidebar correctly. I was puzzled for a while as it looked fine to me. Of course the answer was that she was looking at it in IE6 and I was looking at it in Firefox. I had completely forgotten to test the page across the browsers.

It’s not an important problem as the theme we are using is temporary. However I WILL be extensively testing the new theme in as many browsers as I can.

Slideshare embed test

I just found the link on Slideshare which gives the code for embedding Slidehare media into WordPress.com posts. (Click on the options link under the embed box on the right hand side of the page.) So of course I had to try it.

The selection du jour is a presentation from Kathryn Greenhill (Librarians Matter) to a Collections Australia Network seminar on 9th September. It has lots of relevance to our 23 things program and to things I ought to be considering when proposing the use of new tech at work.

[Edit] The embed didnt show in Google reader. I should have included the link as well- its “…but I don’t have time and THEY don’t get it”: Finding time and reasons for emerging technologies

Ode to a lappy

It’s just a very ordinary Dell D620 but there area couple of things about it that make it the key tool that supports my professional development at the moment:

• it is provided by my workplace
• I have administration rights
• I get to take it home at night

The admin rights are the IT policy of my organization (I know- you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out). They mean I can install and trial (read “play with”) whatever I like without asking permission all the time. Mind you I am trusted then to know how to fix it too. Non SOE is not officially supported by the IT help desk but they are usually understanding. I also need to be aware that there are reasons that I must not install certain things (like IE7- not compatible with in house financial systems).

Being able to take it home was a consequence of working at multiple sites not a deliberate policy. But using the same lappy at home and at work means that I get to use the same configuration and keep trying things out where ever I am.  It gives me more time for online reading. I don’t have to bookmark or install things twice. If it is time to go home or to work and I am half way through something I can just shut the lid and resume after I get there. My kids will tell you that it means I am working more but conversely I can easily work from home without prior planning if I or they are sick.

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???

Why use a RSS reader??

For those doing their online reading by visiting and revisiting individual web sites selling the advantages of using an RSS reader is easy. You can just point them at the wonderful video from Commoncraft.

But what about those subscribing to updates by email. Well thats OK because that may be where they live. (see previous post). But if they have never tried an RSS reader they may not know what they are missing.

So what are some reasons for subscribing to online reading by RSS into an aggregator rather than by email?? What are the really basic selling points.

Email overload
We all complain about email overload and there are reems of books and posts on methods to overcome it. Why not start by only using email for what its best at? Email isn’t bad it just needs to know its place. Email is at its best used as for lengthy communications between two people. Not for sending or receiving broadcast messages or collaboration. See this RWW post for a great analysis and this from Library clips on alternatives to email.

Batching
Batching your reading can be more productive than reading in a piecemeal fashion as in comes into your email box.

Maintenance
Email folders and rules only work so far and, especially if you are practicing GTD in your email, your subscriptions are just adding to your inbox maintenance.

Post Control
When you subscribe to updates by email often you are getting a digest when contains many posts. Some may be relevant and worth reading or saving, some may not be. In a reader you can mark individual posts for reading, sharing and saving.

Subscription control
To subscribe to a feed you need the URL and usually will get it from the originating site but after that unsubscribing can be done in the reader with a click. No need to revisit the site. FeedDemon has a “dinosaur” report that lets you easily see with feeds are no longer updated.

Search
The better readers have better search options, for rereading that half forgotten post, than Outlook.

Archiving
A lot or organizations put limits on your email inbox. If you shift your subscriptions to a reader then you can archive in the reader. The web based ones are limitless, the desktop ones are dependent on your PC .

Sharing
Most RSS readers offer many ways to share an article with colleagues and clients beyond email. For example, depending on the source of a post, FeedDemon will let me email, send the post to any blog that I own, add a post to del.icio.us or digg, add the post to a folder that can be shared by RSS.

Subscription Simplicity
Not all websites that provide RSS feeds provide an email subscription option. Restricting subscriptions to email means that you would need to use a third party RSS to email service and a lot of clicking and pasting or URLs to set it up. Using the RSS directly usually means one or two clicks to subscribe to a feed depending on your browser and your reader.

Spam and security
Using a RSS reader limits the number of places to which you are handing over your email address.

Extra Tip
You can take one more step and turn those email list that don’t provide alternatives into an RSS feed with this howto from Lifehacker

What else??

For some of us this is basic stuff that we take for granted but how do we communicate it to our colleagues and clients? The points above are just the possible selling points of using an RSS reader over email that I could think up for now. I am sure that there are more and I would appreciate additional suggestions via the comments.

[UPDATE: Richard Ackerman commented this via Twitter "rss reader is controlled info flow. Reader + other web tools (share item/bookmarking/friendf) is participation in websocialnet " ]

[UPDATE 2: Richard Ackerman's second  comment also via Twitter "the other thing that occurs to me is that by reading RSS headlines/batches, you can see trends as they emerge"]