CustomGuide Free Computer Training Quick References, Cheat Sheets
switchAbit Like the "Cc:" function in email, switchAbit lets you write content once and publish to multiple services. (e.g. Send a tweet and switchAbit will route it Facebook and Jaiku).
Feed Sifter: Get only the good stuff (mt) Enter an RSS feed URL and one or more words or phrases, and it will build you a version of the RSS feed that contains only entries matching one or more of your requested words.
But when can you truly say that a company has “made it?”
It’s when people start hating you, of course.
Sites like Yelp-Sucks and IHateYelp have been popping up, with the general theme being an angry business owner who was Yelped. Those business owners that think they must use Yelp for competitive reasons are getting frustrated over some of Yelp’s policies, and are starting to complain about it. Loudly.
The good news for Yelp is that when businesses are afraid of you, it’s only because they realize how much power you really have. See, for example, Paypal and Ebay, two of the most reviled and profitable businesses on the Internet.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said recently in the NY Times, “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.” Their goal is clearly to make businesses need Yelp, but not to expect a lot of help when it comes to disputes. Complain all you want, you’re just proving that you need Yelp more than they need you.
I’ve been a member of Yelp since soon after my wedding when I had a big complaint to post about my photographer! I then sort of forgot about the site until I started working for LibLime. I am traveling so much that Yelping has become a hobby for me. I review every place I go while traveling and have been going back to review places I have been in the past. Unlike the implications above, I actually have mostly positive reviews on my account with only a few below 3 stars.
This is a great tool and over my vacation I invited something like 50 people to join Yelp and share their reviews. Now I’m inviting all of you! Join in the fun!
Several librarians I know have Moo cards. I however stuck to my custom business cards ordered from VistaPrint because I preferred the standard size. Now Moo is offering full sized business cards!
Going to have to hide the credit cards so I don’t go crazy buying cards with puppy pictures
I broke down and installed the new beta of Adium because I wanted Facebook chat - and it’s awesome!!! I was just able to have a Facebook chat right in Adium without having to login to Facebook.
Cocoalicious Cocoalicious is a del.icio.us client for Mac OS X. It acts as a desktop interface to your del.icio.us bookmarks Cocoalicious is open source, available under the terms of the BSD License.
When is Good An easy way to find out when everyone is free for your next meeting or event.
NUS Library Online Public Access Catalogue Rapi is an open-source project of the WING group in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore licensed under the MIT license. Rapi provides an OPAC package
TripIt | Organize your travel TripIt is a free personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans.
100 Useful Niche Search Engines You?ve Never Heard Of This list features a huge variety of search engines that can be useful to students, including tools that find photos, sound effects, summer internships, health and medical information, reference guides, and a lot more.
Open IT Online Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit your documents from everywhere!
Yapta! Let Yapta help you find the best flights, track prices, and alert you when prices drop so you can secure the best deals on airfare.
iPresentee - Keynote Objects iPresentee presents free Keynote Objects for Apple?s Keynote, iWeb and Pages! The package combines 100 easy to use and attractive objects. The background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background.
Open Web Design - Download Free Web Design Templates Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!
centrif When you search on centrif, you’re searching other users’ questions. If you had the same question they did, you’ll discover the answer they found useful.
LibGig | Your Career, Your Community LibGig is a new professional networking website dedicated to bringing together everyone who accesses, organizes, creates, manages, produces or distributes information for a living.
Smultron Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful.
Toluu Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.
HelloTxt Send out status updates to several social networks at once.
I decided to play with Wordle. I didn’t have a paper or article that I wanted to use, so instead I decided to generate a cloud for my del.icio.us bookmarks.
I think this is the perfect image of me - open source and libraries being my biggest terms!!
This is a fun little generator. I think I’ll play with it some more.
Okay, now this is a bit much! I started using Twitter, because I was on IM all day and it was easy to keep up with friends using the IM functionality. Now there is only partial IM functionality - I receive tweets, but can’t send them. I kept my faith that the functionality would be restored and used the web to update my status - particularly because I’m at SLA Annual and want to let people know what’s going on. Then, this AM I go to log in and update everyone about today’s sessions and I get this:
It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore … Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.
I’ve been telling those who attend my class to not even bother with MySpace and to focus on Facebook (unless they’re teen or children librarians) - and now I have numbers to back up my personal preference
Facebook now has chat (if you hadn’t heard already). I don’t use it much because it means going to Facebook and keeping it open. Up til now I had only heard about one app that let you chat on Facebook - and that’s Digsby - but it doesn’t have an app for Mac yet. So I thought I’d look around and see what I could find. It turns out that Adium will have Facebook support in version 1.3 - time to keep an eye out for that upgrade!
Google AJAX Feed API - Dynamic Feed Control Wizard Embed a Dynamic Feed Control on your web page and let your users see customized views of the feeds. Customize how the dynamic feed control should be displayed, and this wizard will write the code for you.
UM Library: MLibrary Labs MLibrary Labs is where the University of Michigan Library shows off some tools that are not quite ready for prime time.
zembly At zembly, you easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. And, you do it along with other people.
Swaptree Trade books like a book swap or trade video games and swap cds or trade dvds
Netvibes.org netvibes.org is netvibes’ website dedicated to its Open Source projects. By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.
Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces.
This seems to be a response to the runaway success of the user-edited online reference tool Wikipedia. (See for yourself. Do a Web search on a topic and note whether Wikipedia or Britannica shows up first.) Scholars have been adamantly opposed to Wikipedia citations in academic papers because the authors and sources are always changing. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, agrees with this, but in next week’s issue of The Chronicle (click back to our home page on Monday for more) he also points to some changes in the reference tool that may make it more palatable to scholars.
It will be interested to see what happens with this new tool. Read more from The Chronicle.
Real Job Titles for Library and Information Science Professionals Job titles used to be fairly simple: Librarian, Cataloger, Director. The following job titles have been found in job listings in American Libraries, College and Research Libraries News, or have been sent to me by employed "librarians."
Soundflavor Music Videos | Online Music | Video Playlist | Friendster Playlist | Myspace, Facebook Playlists
280 Slides Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world.
ShipGooder ShipGooder compares shipping rates instantly. Search for rates from FedEx®, UPS®, DHL®, Purolator®, the U.S. Postal Service®, Canada Post® and local carriers.
Some employers think that IM can lead to a lack in productivity - but I’m here to tell you that that is not true! Right now I’m working virtually, so IM is necessary, but when I worked in the library I used IM to eliminate some of the silly interruptions that came from people coming to my desk and calling me by using IM. Now a study at the Ohio State University proves that IM not only makes me more productive, but others as well.
We all know instant messaging has great potential to lead down the path of non-productivity, but researchers at Ohio State University and University of California have found it can be a productivity booster—if used efficiently.
“It is not the case that people are engaging in extensive conversations or trying to resolve complex problems over this very limited medium. Instead, people are using the technology to solicit answers to quick questions from colleagues and coordinate their conversations at more convenient times.”
Hi all! I’m looking for recommendations for the best RSS to Email tools out there. I still get people asking me how to get RSS updates via email so I want to offer them good suggestions and I haven’t played with any of these tools.
I have to say that I love the power of the web! I have called companies and written emails and never gotten the response I get when I write here about those same companies. If February it was Comcast that contacted me personally after writing a post here about my service and last night it was Adobe who wants to help me fix the display of the new Acrobat.com website on my computer (how awesome is that?).
You have to love that now we finally have a way to get support
That said there is also a message here for libraries - are you monitoring the web for what people are saying about you???
Adobe has built a suite of online office applications to compliment Buzzword, the company’s online word processor. We’ve covered Buzzword in the past. It’s pretty, fast, and not really all that much more useful than similar products from Google or Zoho. Here’s a rundown of the other applications you’ll find at Acrobat.com:
ConnectNow: A web conferenceing tool that lets you share your desktop with others, chat, talk over a VoIP connection, or share files and mark up whiteboards.
Share: Selectively share files with other users. Adobe Share lets you send files to a list of contacts, and lets the recipients view PDF image, and video files online.
Create PDF: Seriously, do we need to tell you what this does?
My Files: Store and organize up to 5GB of files online.
Sounds neat - but it seems to have a small graphical issue on my computer - I think there is a menu across the top of the homepage, but it’s cut off.
I’ll probably give these tools a test before my next Office 2.0 class
Today I watched another talk that touched on some of the issues I mentioned after watching Clay Shirky’s video. In Yochai Benkler talk entitled Open-source economics, he talks about how people who are passionate about topics and technologies are using the web to change the way we look at economics.
Once example he used was Yahoo! versus the Open Directory Project. Yahoo! used to hire professionals to review the pages in its directory. If it was in the directory it was good. Compare a page on the Yahoo! directory to the Open Directory Project which is run by passionate volunteers and you’ll see that there is much more valuable content on the latter. People don’t mind spending time online helping out a cause they find worthwhile or that they’re passionate about - imagine what our patrons could do for our library sites?
That’s all I’ll say (since I don’t want to repeat myself). You can watch the talk for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Google Earth API - Google Code The Google Earth Plug-in and its JavaScript API let you embed Google Earth, a true 3D digital globe, into your web pages.
Reuters Spotlight Provides a non-commercial community platform to allow users to innovate and develop their ideas by harnessing the content Reuters publishes, which includes news, video, pictures and multimedia articles.
AllPlus Universal Meta Search and Discovery Engine
Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.
