Archive for the 'Social software' category

Feedly, your RSS magazine

Jan 20 2011 Published by Fiacre under Present, Social software, Technology

There was a recent online fracus about the death of RSS. If you missed it, Mathew Ingram over at Gigaom gives a good overview of the main players and their thoughts. The end result seems to be we can all calm down again, it isn’t going anywhere.

That is why I want to bring you attention to Feedly, which takes your Google Reader feed and turns it into a magazine style display. Using your Gmail ID to log in, it synchronizes with Google Reader and displays content on an easily organized and customizable page. I have been using it for a while, and beyond been beautiful to look at, it gives you plenty of insight into how you think about your feed, what you really focus on and what you may be missing, by allowing you to visualize your feed differently.

As librarians are passionate RSS users, it is certainly worth giving it a try.

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Libraries, ebooks, and The Kindle Lending Club

Jan 17 2011 Published by Fiacre under Books, EBooks, Social software

A new startup, called The Kindle Lending Club, has been developed to meet the needs of Kindle owners in response to the new lending capability.

The Kindle Lending Club is the brainchild of Catherine MacDonald, who said that when she heard Amazon announce on December 30 that it was finally adding a lending option for Kindle, she decided to set up a Facebook group – a way to help people find others who were willing to share their e-books. But as interest in the group exploded, MacDonald realized that Facebook just didn’t offer the scalability needed for such an undertaking. “I had no idea how viral the idea was,” she says.

What is most interesting is how quickly she made this happen (emphases added).

So in less than two weeks’ time, she has pulled together the resources – about $12,500 in angel investment and a Web development team – to launch the Kindle Lending Club.

Two weeks!

This site brought a  few questions to mind and I want to throw them out there and hope I get a response or two.

  1. I’ll say it again: two weeks. Why don’t libraries have this sort of turn around from idea to implementation? Can your library move this fast to grasp hold of an idea and get it past the gate? In light of the speed that the world now moves at, shouldn’t we be able to move this quickly? Do we have the option not to?
  2. Why didn’t a library step in to fill this need? If ebook downloads are rising, shouldn’t we be facilitating our users in getting ebooks for devices our vendors can’t/don’t/won’t support.
  3. Due to the ease with which ebooks can be created and shared online (for example, see my previous post on the upcoming Book Saver) will libraries just be pushed out of the ebook lending business? As we are wedded to vendor applications that are often slow and difficult for first time users to understand and use, will library users just take matters into their own hands, stop waiting for us and simply create the means to get what they want?

I’m looking forward to your feedback!

(Thanks to Nicole Hennig for the link)

One response so far

Amber Case at TEDWomen

Jan 12 2011 Published by Fiacre under Information, Mobile, Present, Social software, Technology

I have been a fan of Amber Case’s work for quite a while and was excited to see her talking at TEDWomen on cyborg anthropology. As we move towards a world where mobile is the norm in any urban environment, her conceptualization of what this means can open doors to interesting insights for librarians as we deal with this change, seeking the balance between space for reflection and silence (a traditional role for libraries) and time for information gathering and our online “second-selves”.

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Tuesday Tech Links: Efficiency

Jan 11 2011 Published by Fiacre under Present, Social software, Technology, Tuesday Tech Links

Messy desk by andhij (CC License) http://www.flickr.com/photos/andhij/

I thought it was time to revive the Tuesday Tech Links on my blog, and since it is the New Year I’ve decided to focus on technologies that allow us to work smarter and give us the extra time needed to achieve some of those non-work related resolutions, or at least time to talk about them.

1) Dropbox is a free web-based service that allows you to synchronize your files automatically. When you sign up Dropbox gives you 2GBs of secure storage that can be shared between two computers. This “access anywhere” folder saves you from all those “I’ll email it to myself” moments. It includes automatic backup of your files, allow you to restore previous versions of your files, and offers 30 days of undo history so you don’t have to recreate a document because you were too hasty with the delete button.It is available to download for Windows, Mac, Linux and also has a mobile app (for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android). You can get more space by participating in their incentive based program or by paying a monthly fee.

2) RescueTime is for all those people who can’t figure out where their time vanishes to online. It is a service that installs software to track every task you perform while on your computer and returns a detailed report of your activity, allowing you to manage your time effectively. You can, for example, voluntarily block distracting sites for any period you wish and even track your time offline when you are taking a call or in a meeting. RescueTime offers a free bare-bones version or you can pay a monthly fee for the full suite of tools. Download the 14 day free trial and find out how you really spend your time.

3) Instapaper is a free service that is great for catching up on all those articles that you find online, bookmark, but never get back to. It allows you to save on-line articles and view them in a text-only reformatted version, that can be read off-line. It is ideal for effectively using those free moments during the day, when you are waiting for a bus or grabbing a quick coffee, by reading an article or two on your mobile.

Wildcard) Real paper won’t be going anywhere soon. While it is often associated with inefficiency Scott Belsky, author of the book Making Ideas Happen, has some interesting insights into the positive role that “analog rituals”, such as physically writing to-do lists, can have on productivity

The manual labor involved with productivity is valuable. Repetitive rituals will make you pause. You will feel burdened, but you will also catch a glimpse of just how busy you are and what you should prioritize.

In light of this at the beginning of the year I began an experiment involving a Molskine and a very light weight version of GTD. I’ll let you know later in the year how this goes.

So, reorganize your computer storage, track your internet usage, bookmark those articles you always wanted to read and make your to-do lists and lets see what we can get done.

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Facebook in sixty seconds

Jan 03 2011 Published by Fiacre under Present, Social software

Facebook has…

…seen its founder declared Time’s 2010 Person of the Year
…its own movie
…been valued at $50billion
…changed our understanding of privacy (It no longer exists, right? Might want to check those settings, just in case.)
…given rise to an open source alternative

It also has millions of actions taking place on the site every minute, thanks to us.

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