When I teach my RSS class, the first moment that blows everyone away is about 45 minutes in when we do a Feedster search and they save the feed of the search into Bloglines. Jaws drop open and you can hear the "wows."

Which is why I'm happy to hear that Steven has started a new blog dedicated to Feedster Hacks. Into the presentation it goes.

Keep up the great work, Steven!

Jessamyn has posted her notes from the taking the library to our users conference at Dartmouth. I really wish I could have gone to this one, since it sounds very shifted. In terms of the present, I particularly liked her notes about the virtual reference session, although I think all of the statements would apply to VR done via free IM accounts, too.

"same or greater use than email - drop-off during mealtimes and SATURDAYS
'why don't patrons ask for help?" 27% don't want to go to library building ALSO librarian looks 'too busy'
people use live chat even IN the library
what we learned 'we don't like it but patrons do'
text messaging eliminated a lot of technical issues"

The sessions about taking reference to where the users are sound interesting, too, as that is the direction in which libraries need to shift. We have to start thinking out of the 4-walls box and find new places (both virtual and physical) to meet patron information needs.

While my site is in transition, readers are reporting the following problems:

• The site doesn't work in FireFox/Mozilla/Netscape browsers.
• The feed doesn't appear properly in Bloglines (CDATA tags appear and the text is messed up).
• Some of the divs overrun each other, so content scrolls off the side of the screen.

Plus, comments aren't working yet and the Javascript on the XML buttons is screwy. Unfortunately, neither I nor Aaron have a lot of time at the moment to work on all of this, but are you experiencing any other problems? If so, please email or IM (AIM: cybrarygal). Thanks!

Getting Teens Beyond Textin'

"Up until June of last year, teenagers, who are more apt to try new technology, were an anomaly in the wireless world, especially when it came to text messaging. Though 60 percent of all Virgin Mobile USA customers send texts, averaging about 25 messages a month per user, overall U.S. appetite for wireless messaging and other forms of wireless data has been extremely tepid.

But the cumulative effect from dramatic cuts in prices and the spread of Internet connections to all phones, is finally making basic offerings, such as short text messaging and downloadable ring tones, more mainstream.

Revenue from Short Message Service overall in the United States will reach 1 billion dollars this year, according to various industry estimates. In a sign texting has gone mass market, in June 2004, there were 2.8 billion messages sent from U.S. cell phones, compared with the 2.8 million sent in June 2003." [CNET News.com]

It took a while to get going, but going it is. We're catching up with the rest of the world, and it's not just kids doing it.

Can these kids text your library or access any of your services this way? Because they can get answers via text messaging from Google, you know....

In preparation for next month's Internet Librarian conference, make sure you check out my previous post (which you probably never saw) about the UThink project. Some incredible stats....