What I Learned Today…

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.

Category Archives: Blogs/Blogging

The Twitter Exodus

July 7th, 2008

At first I didn’t see a point to using Twitter – mainly because I don’t pay for text messaging on my phone and I didn’t want to visit the Twitter site on a regular basis. Then I started working from home and had IM open all day. Twitter’s IM functionality was very handy and so I jumped on board.

For a while now, Twitter’s IM functionality has been disabled – but now I don’t want to lose touch and so I find myself visiting the Twitter site. The questions is – how much longer are we all going to put up with this nonsense?

The answer is – not much longer! There is a general exodus going on (at least among my friends). People are switching to using FriendFeed over Twitter.

Now, while FriendFeed is awesome – and well worth checking out (see my page), it’s not a replacement for a site that lets me IM my quick messages – like Twitter did. So, what do I do? Do I drop that means of communicating? Do I lose touch with those I keep up with on Twitter? Or do I subscribe to a bunch of FriendFeeds and just forgo the communication side of things?

I don’t have an answer – I’m just ranting and sharing :)

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New WordPress

April 1st, 2008

Last night (after uploading files to the wrong directory – duh!) I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and I have to say this is going to take some getting used to! I know that there are a new features and tools and such – but the new layout is confusing me! I can’t find my tools! Most importantly, I want my categories to be on the right hand side of my post – why should I have to scroll down for them (now they’re below the post and tags).

Anyway, this will take some getting used to.

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Blogging keeps you healthy

March 7th, 2008

Who knew?? In an article titled Blogging’s Good For Your Health Claudine Ryan let’s us all know that our blogging is actually keeping us healthy!

Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new research has found.

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who didn’t blog.

I mentioned in a post a while ago about how our blogging sometimes upsets those around us:

A friend of mine recently started blogging. She is still learning the ropes and really wants to give it her all. This means that she’s spending a lot of free time blogging and reading blogs. Sometimes this bugs her spouse.

What does this have to do with NFAIS? Apparently Michael went through the same thing. He talked about how before he brought blogs into his organization he spent his nights and weekends driving his spouse crazy by using his free time to play with blogs. He encouraged attendees to really take the time to experiment and learn about the technology – even if it means driving your spouse crazy. I guess I’m lucky that I have a geek for a husband – he wanted to learn about blogs right along with me!

So now – those of you going through this can tell your significant others that blogging is actually good for you :)

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Giving Twitter another shot

February 27th, 2008

I know I’ve said in the past that I’m no fan of Twitter – but I’m giving it another go. I’m trying to use it via IM now. So far this is going pretty well. With my new job I have to be online all day – and on IM & Skype & IRC, so using Twitter via IM just fits right into my regular daily workflow. I’m not sure how much I’ll be updating my status – but it’s nice when I’m at a conference (like this week) to update others on what I’m learning.

We’ll see how it goes – but no one can say I didn’t give Twitter a fair shot :)

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Using DOIs in Blogs

February 12th, 2008

When I was at the Seminary we were looking for a persistent identifier for our digital collections. We ended up choosing to use DOIs. So, when I saw this press release I thought – cool – we made the right choice:

CROSSREF LAUNCHES FREE CITATION LOOK-UP TOOL FOR BLOGGERS

Lynnfield, MA. February 12, 2008. — CrossRef, the association behind the well-known publisher linking network, announced today that it had launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI®-enabled citations in the course of authoring a blog.

The plug-in, which is available for download at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/crossref-cite/, allows the blogger to use a widget-based interface to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed and the author can then either click on a hit to follow the DOI to the publisher’s site, or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into their blog entry (as either a full citation or as a short “op. cit.”).

Thanks John for pointing it out.

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