There have been some interesting things happening with the internet at our house during the past few months. The first started back in August when all of Brent’s neighborhood friends discovered Runescape, an online RPG (“role playing game”). Basically, you walk around and talk to people, collect things, trade things, work a little, and sometimes fight. Amazingly, basic play is free, although you can subscribe to an enhanced membership for $5 per month. Since the game is free, the software blocks out swear words (although the kids know how to get around that to a certain extent), and the violence is minimal (cartoonish when someone is killed), we parents have been letting them play it.

At the time Brent started playing, I didn’t think it was going to last. He was much more of a console player, focusing on his PlayStation 2. He didn’t like the social aspect of games much, either - he just wanted to play, play, play. But he surprised me. Five months later, Runescape has completely overtaken console gaming, only fading for a few moments this past week when Santa bought him Jak III for the PS2. Once he beats that game, though, we fully expect him to go back to being obsessed with Runescape. And obsessed is the accurate term here. It’s all he can talk about. He’s always reporting what level he is on, what armor he’s trying to acquire, who he met that day, and which of his friends swore while he was talking to them. When you meet somebody in the game, you can type messages to talk to them, a feature that has definitely improved Brent’s typing. He’s also reading faster because the messages scroll up the screen.

It’s been fascinating to watch him embrace the social aspects of the game, and it’s given us excellent avenues for discussion about online identity, particularly fraud. The first time he went out in “the wild” and someone killed him, he was devastated. He was crying harder than at any of the times he was hit with a pitch in a baseball game. But you get to start over again right away, and he proceeded to con a stranger into giving him a sword by claiming he was a little girl who needed help. Now Brent is at a much higher level in the game, and he likes to trade for swords and armor so he can fight other players. Runescape is usually the first thing he thinks about doing when he wakes up and the last thing he talks about before falling asleep, even though we do limit his play. In the morning and evening, he and his neighborhood friends are often playing the game, talking to each other where before they never ever used the telephone to talk. This one game has definitely gotten to him more than any console game.

But as fascinating as all of this is, it’s been just as interesting to watch how the girls’ reaction to the game. After the boys became obsessed with it, the girls had to try it. They’ve all got their own files (accounts), but they do completely different things in the game. They’re also not as obsessed, asking to play far less frequently. When Kailee plays, it’s usually to walk around and meet people or to accomplish a specific goal. Today, she met King Arthur and Lancelot, and she’s trying to save Merlin. She’s not interested in armor or fighting, but rather she likes solving puzzles, exploring, and talking with others. Whereas the boys talk in the game in order to accomplish something, boast, or trade insults, Kailee will talk to someone just to meet them (which was a whole other parental discussion we had with both kids). While it’s a generalization within a game that has thousands and thousands of players, the girls definitely aren’t in it to fight.

So the shift in gaming has been very interesting to watch, but this past week has also seen the kids dive into instant messaging. I was sitting at work a couple of days ago, while Sheree was home with the kids. She was AIMing me some questions and as so often happens these days, Kailee saw her and wanted to do it, too. Kailee immediately loved messaging, and we traded messages back and forth for the next half hour. When I got home, we had to set up her own screen name, which Brent saw. He then wanted a screen name, and the rest is history. At no time did they ask why someone would want to use IM, and they’re both asking their friends if they have screen names so they can add them as buddies. Kailee and I have even been messaging across the room (me on my laptop) because she’s so enamored with it. They’ve started teaching her how to type at school, so again this is excellent practice for her.

In fact, the only problem so far is that when they’ve wanted to go on AIM, it’s been at times when no one else is online so they’ve been disappointed. They’re constantly asking, “Can I go on that thingy to see if anyone is online?” Just wait until they realize they can IM from our cell phones….

So, I’ve officially noted that the kids shifted to online gaming and instant messaging at the ages of nine and ten. How were you communicating with your friends when you were nine and ten?

Child's Play: Part II

"Donkey Kong is 'lame.' Tetris is boring.' Space Invaders 'needs a superbomb or something.' And why play Pong when it's more fun to 'jump up and down on one foot'? Hey, save your irate letters--we didn't say this stuff. The nostalgia-nuking commentary is from EGM's November 2003 issue, in which we had kids of the PlayStation generation playtest classic games from the '70s and '80s....

It was our most popular article ever. So we're doing it again, with a new batch of brittle truckers and a new bucket of classic games....

[Defender]
Bobby: I've played this on my cell phone.

EGM: [Pointing to the humans on the ground] What do they look like?

Parker: They look like those little characters in the game Life, the little people you have to stick in your car.

EGM: Before this came out in compilations, we used to put quarters in arcade machines.

Parker: You wasted quarters on this?

EGM: Yeah.

Parker: That's so sad....

Rachel: If I knew what any of these buttons meant, I might push them....

[Galaga]
Parker: Space Invaders...all these games are exactly the same--there's no real difference.

EGM: What does this game need to make it as good as Space Invaders?

Parker: Worse graphics." [1Up.com, via Gadgetopia]

The whole article is a scream, but it's depressing that you can play Defender in a Hallmark card now!

I'm in the process of reverting to a default Movable Type template because I can't stand the fact that my site is illegible in any Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser. No one seems to be able to translate Radio templates into MT ones so I'll lose the cool design Bryan Bell created for TSL, but I'd rather have you able to read the content.

I also hate the fact that I can't get my YACCS comments code to display no matter what I do. Based on the MT comments horror stories I've heard, I'm reluctant to go that route. So after a search to resolve the YACCS and MT issue turned up nothing, I'm asking for help from anyone that has successfully gotten the two to play nice together. If you are such a person, HELP! Email or IM links are on the right-hand side of the page. ANY help is much appreciated!

LISFeeds 2.0

"Even though I had nothing to do with it, I figured that I would mention that we (well, Blake) rolled out a new version of LISFeeds this week. Didja notice? There are now 123 library-related feeds included on the page with a bunch of neat little options." [Library Stuff]

Nice job, Blake!

I'll Give You a Bell : 20 Years of the Mobile Phone

"In just two decades, the mobile phone has become the fastest-selling, most loved - and hated - consumer product. Britain is the world's most mature mobile market, with more mobiles per head of population and higher bills than any other country. Almost all adults now have at least one mobile phone, one in two teenagers has a 'moby' and a new British firm, Communic8, has just launched MyMo, a simple phone for four- to eight-year-olds. Some 23 billion texts have been sent this year and more than 20 billion calls made. The total value of this electronic white noise is £15 billion....

Perhaps the biggest change mobiles have wrought is in the language of communication we all use. Textsperanto - the amalgam of abbreviated words, acronyms and coded punctuation that teenagers developed so that they can fit more words into their space-limited SMS messages - was designed to be impenetrable to adults but most of us have a grasp of it now. When a pupil at a Scottish secondary school handed in an essay entirely written 'in txt', her teacher gave her a 'C+ 4 e4t'....

For the refuseniks, however, the battle against the tiny power tools is about to get a lot tougher. Twenty years after Ernie Wise first pressed the green 'call send' button on a brick-sized Motorola handset, the latest tiny, third-generation - 3G - phones are about to hit the market. Today, thousands of teenagers and adults are poring over geeky phone manuals, configuring their new handsets so that they can surf the internet, download real-time TV and video clips, take photographs, make video calls and play MP3 music files." [The Guardian, via textually.org]

I had to call Sprint today to find out why I haven't been able to access any data services at home on my Treo for the last 10 days or so. The new recording that you hear - first thing - is a message noting that activations may take up to 24 hours because so many people are revving up their new phones.

I find the following overheard conversation to be pretty typical:

"College Girl: Yeah, I called mom and dad and left a message on their machine. I've been calling their cell phones too but they never pick up. They just don't understand. (pause....) Yeah, they don't get it -- cell phones are supposed to be carried around with them." [CamWorld]

DRM at Its Worst? Here's a Prime Example

"DRM is actually a part of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and has been for a while, but it wasn’t until I picked up a DVD recently that I witnessed the ugly and very user unfriendly side of DRM in person. The DVD in question, T2: Extreme DVD, produced by Artisan Home Entertainment Inc., is a two-dvd disk set, which holds a digitally optimized version of the T2 movie on one disk, and a high definition version of the same movie on the second disk, encoded in WMV9 format....

Unfortunately, after trying to play the DVD back with Windows Media Player 9, I couldn’t get it to work. For some reason I needed to install a 3rd party application, InterActual Player, that was required to play back the content. I was a bit surprised as to why I needed to install InterActual Player as it clearly says Windows Media Player 9 on the cover. Why can’t I simply play the content back without having to install yet another application? But then it became quickly apparent that I did not only have to install and download an update for the InterActual Player over the internet in order to facilitate playback, but would also need to acquire a license. So obviously the WMV9 content on the DVD was protected by DRM and could only be unlocked after connecting to the license server to obtain a license, which it failed to do. I was surprised to find that it failed to give me a license as it had determined that my physical location was not in the US or Canada. Apparently the content was only to be played back in either one of these countries and nowhere else. After routing my IP address through an anonymous proxy server in the US I however managed to unlock the content just as well and was presented with a license agreement I had to agree to prior to being able to play the content back.

That agreement, amongst other things, stated that I could only play back the content for a period of five days, on the computer I installed the InterActual Player application onto, after which I had to re-acquire a license. To be honest that really pissed me off, I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I’m only being given a temporary license, where’s my rights as a consumer?... Shame on you Artisan Home Entertainment Inc. and may this serve as a prime example of DRM at its worst." [Hardware Analysis, via Slashdot]

I wonder if any libraries bought this title. Unfortunately, looking in just my local catalog, SWAN, some did. I wonder how their patrons are faring trying to access these features. Would you go through all of that to watch a movie? I sure wouldn't.

Whatever did happen to fair use and the right of first sale in the digital world? I miss them.

Side note: I've almost got my new Treo 650 loaded with the software I really need, but I'm having a problem getting the Audible software for audio ebooks up and running on the new laptop. According to Audible, they can't activate the Treo or the desktop software because I'm over my allotted number of activations. Say what?

We have three desktop computers in the house, I used to download Audible titles at work, and I'm typing this post on the second laptop I've used at home. Who knew I was restricted to fourthree instances of AudibleManager? Must have been in the fine print that wasn't so fine.

At first, I thought I would be okay because Audible has a nifty option that lists all of the activations that they have on file for you and lets you choose which one(s) to de-activate so you can activate the new one. Great, except that whatever code is running the whole shebang won't let me actually deactivate any previous activations.

So now I'll have to contact their tech support and ask them to kindly de-activate a previous activation for me, just so I can load titles I already bought onto my new device using my new laptop. Thanks, DRM!

Not.

• RSS: a Shift, from What...to What?
  "He also neatly sort of answers his own question - with greater precision than I can ever muster - by saying: 'If I visit houses of content, as I seem to do on the Web, that is very different than the content as “visitor” to my house.'... What we’re seeing is the creation of personalised information hypermarkets.... Over time, you develop a rich cocktail of sources and you develop a new habit for browsing information. Some things you look at hourly, some daily, and some you deliberately save till Friday pm for a catch up. This is light years away from sitting down at the table in the morning looking at your paper, or even your paper’s website.”
   
• RSS and Blog Directories
  "Inspired by The Media Drop's list of newspaper RSS feeds, I thought I'd compile a list of RSS directories. Enjoy and spread the link."
   
• Newsmap as a Model for Smart Aggregation
  "Information overload. It’s the next big issue in publishing, and technology in general. The day you have 400 e-mails in your inbox, 900 new items in your RSS aggregator, and 8 Instant Messenger windows on your screen will come. For some people, it’s already here.... The key to our information gathering lives is all about smart aggregation. The days of media companies deciding what’s on your 'front page' are numbered. Within five years, I believe customizable newsreader technology (whether client-side like Net News Wire, or server-side like Bloglines), will be as prevalent as the web is right now."
   
• 500 down, 3061 to go
  "At the beginning of this week I had 310 feeds showing around 25,000 unread posts. I had toyed with the idea of declaring RSS bankruptcy and just starting again, but I was getting increasingly unhappy with chaotic state of my feeds and deep down I knew that hitting 'mark all posts read' would do nothing to solve the problem in the long run."

• What Famous People of the Past Would Have Googled
• Bohemian Art Show
• A Giant Step Forward for Punctuation
• Modern Advice for Parents-to-be

• Three Reasons to Publish an E-Newsletter AND a Blog
• TIME Person of the Year 2004: 10 Things We Learned About Blogs
• The 6 Top Reasons Marketers Should Blog
• 10 Reasons Nonprofits Should Use RSS

All from within one 24-hour period in my aggregator.

Alternate title for this post: "Why Your Library Should Be Blogging"

Even though there has been a ton o'stuff I want to blog lately, I've been busy with my "big work project," the holiday season, and now gadget overload. I finally bought a new laptop this past weekend (which I will blog about soon), so I've been having fun playing with it and installing software.

Then today my brand-spanking new Treo 650 came in the mail. I don't even know where to begin, but my heart is a-flutter just holding it in my hands! More on that in the near future, too....

Paddling Out to Catch the Enterprise Wave

"From the shore, they look like tiny dots slowly making their way out past the breakers. They're the software vendors positioning themselves to catch the Enterprise RSS wave. My, that's a lot of tiny dots...." [MoonWatcher]

RSS was big in 2004, but next year is going to be something else. It's killing me that I can't say more, but I know of two major library vendors that will make big announcements about RSS in 2005. It's going to be a fun year!

More Schools Offer Cheap Music Downloads for Students

"Several top schools began offering these services in September, either free or highly subsidized. Now, student demand is spurring more university administrators to institute programs in January instead of waiting for fall....

Some schools have reported huge acceptance rates by students. More than 1 million songs have been downloaded by Purdue students since Cdigix began in the fall.

But at the 31,000-student University of California, Berkeley campus, only 1,000 have signed up for Rhapsody. Like Michigan, Berkeley asks students to pick up the tab — and it's a low one, $2 a month, compared with the normal $9.95 monthly charge.

At those kinds of rates, both Rhapsody and Cdigix say they don't make much money — if any. The hope is to turn students into paying subscribers when they graduate.
Napster is free at Cornell. Senior Andy Guess says he uses it every day and hasn't set foot in a record store since the service came to the campus in September. "I listen to it all day long," he says. 'It's really convenient for me.' " [USA Today, via Furdlog via The Kept-Up Librarian]

I'll bet it's been even longer since Andy set foot in a library to get some music. When I talk about information shifting and The Heavenly Jukebox, I always ask if the audience thinks the kids accessing these services, and current Duke freshmen in particular who all get iPods this year, are going to visit their local public library for music after they graduate.

Not that circulating music is our main mission, but it's been a popular one, and these are our future taxpayers we're talking about.

Personally, I'll never give up Rhapsody the concept. You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead, virtual hands. I don't think either of my kids will ever buy a physical CD ever again.

Whoa.

Fascinating future history. [via MetaFilter]

When I first started watching it, it was like a summary of shiftedness, a timeline of topics my site has covered. By the end, though, I felt like I was watching Terminator 3.

So the big news is about Google and libraries. I don't feel the need to comment on this right now, as you can find plenty of other places for that. However, here are a few angles I haven't seen discussed elsewhere in the library blogosphere.

• Libraries and the Internet
  
  "More broadly, the Internet can profoundly improve the relationship between libraries and society. For example, there are two major libraries in my town -- a college library, and a public library. My library card works in both places. I used to favor the college library, because there was open WiFi access there -- which meant, among other things, that I could use LibraryLookup from my laptop to find books in the stacks. Recently, though, the college shut down its open access point. And from an IT administrator's point of view, I can understand why. Not long after, the public library installed an open access point. So now it's my favorite spot, and lately I notice other mobile professionals congregating there too." [Jon Udell's Weblog
  (Click over to read Jon's story about getting locked in the library, too!)


• "A quick calculation using the figures above suggests an average scan rate of 3200 volumes per day (assuming 365 days/year for 6 years) at the University of Michigan site alone." [Tito Sierra on the WEB4LIB mailing list]


• "An even quicker calculation shows that they will need to digitize 2.25 books _a_minute_, 24 hours/day, 365 days/year to digitize 7 million volumes in six years." [Roy Tennant on the WEB4LIB mailing list]

It's times like this when I wish Karen Coyle had a blog.

D-Skin

"Every library in the country should get a supply of these for their DVD collections, which are, invariably, the most scratched up set of media in existence." [Gadgetopia, originally from undisclosed location]

This is a great suggestion if we can get a bulk purchase price.

D-Skins

"Just snap one of these onto your music, movie, game or data CD’s and consider them protected. The amazing Liplock Seal snaps onto the edge of any standard size disc and holds tight. Leave your d_skin Protective Disc Skin on while you play away — outside and inside your media players. Seriously. Your discs are totally readable right through the Skin."

View the [loud] demo. Slick!

Cellphones: Once a Status Symbol, Now a Necessity

"The notion of the cellphone as necessity may not be universally agreed, but if you're in doubt about whether the device is transforming American life just try wresting one away from a teenager you know.

With a popularity and versatility that spans continents and generations, the cellphone may be on its way to becoming mankind's primary communication interface and a lifestyle tool that exceeds the personal computer in ubiquity, say watchers of technology culture....

'The cellphone has moved from a helpful service appliance to a necessity,' says Tom McPhail, a professor of media studies and communication at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. 'Older Americans are realizing they are needlessly cut off without one, and for youth it has become a part of their persona and identity without which they feel naked, shunned, or isolated.'...
Voicing an oft-heard observation, CEO Silk says he recently crossed the Ohio State campus and couldn't find a teenager without a mobile or music headphone in their ear. As in decades past, the students did not congregate and share stories, he says, but rather remained connected to others solely by cellphone. Other sociologists worry that teens use all their free time messaging or talking to friends so that they no longer spend enough time in mental solitude crucial to understanding a separate self, problem solving, and allowing space for creativity and intuition." [Christian Science Monitor, via textually.org]

Couple this excerpt with the news that mobile phone subscribers around the globe totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population [CNN], and ask yourself if your library is prepared to serve these folks via cell phone in ways other than voice (instant messaging, texting, searching, etc.). Other interesting statistics from the CNN article:

• "The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totalled some 1.85 billion today against one billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users."


• "And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 percent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 percent of growth in the market since 2000."


• "By July this year, China was reporting 310 million users -- about one-quarter of its total population and more than the entire population of the United States, the ITU said."


• "By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time."

Bloggers Beware: Debunking Eight Copyright Myths of the Online World

"Kathy Biehl addresses eight 'myths' about copyright law with factual responses, resources and guidelines that are of special relevance to bloggers and website owners." [LLRX.com]

I live for lightbulb moments when I'm teaching or presenting. Christine Peterson made my day by letting me know that she has started her own blog after attending the blogging/RSS preconference Steven and I gave at the Internet Librarian conference last month! You can find her blog, "Library Technology in Texas," at http://libtechtx.blogspot.com/, while her Atom feed is at http://libtechtx.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

There's already some great information on her blog, including this that I hadn't seen posted elsewhere:

Just 20% of Your Time

In a posting from a Google employee, he said that 'Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose.' In his case, he has been working on Google Suggest.

Just think . . . what project(s) would you work on if you had 20% of your working hours to devote to it? A book? A re-write of the web site? A new service? More outreach? Reading? Learning new technologies? Attending college classes?

Like Christine, I love this idea, and I think it's a great one for librarians. I know how hard it is to find 20% of your time to devote to something other than the five hats you're already wearing, but when I've stolen time out of my schedule in the past to "play" with something unexpected, something good always comes of it. I've been doing that here and there with the new calendar I'm working on for MLS, and I think it will show in the details.

I'd also encourage library vendors to allow their employees this luxury, because it's probably the closest they would get to something like Google Labs. I know some of the vendors do encourage creative thinking and brainstorming from their employees, but this would give them the chance to implement the resulting ideas. Maybe then they would come up with stuff like LibraryLookup for their customers and maybe, just maybe, we'd have native RSS feeds from our catalog by now.

Blogging at ALA Midwinter - Be a Part of it

I will be working with the Public Library Association on an official weblog (you heard that right - official). We will be kicking it off by reporting on PLA-related events at ALA Midwinter. This is going to be huge. Very huge. There will be photographs. There will be interviews with presenters, attendees, exhibitors, and PLA members. There will be reports from the meetings (if allowed), keynote addresses, dinner meetings and networking functions. There will hopefully be special reports from committee members. My point? We're going to blog it and we're going to blog hard. And, we're going to do it right.

Why do I say we? Because I need your help.

I am looking for a bunch of people (20 or so) who will be willing to report on the conference and post to the PLA blog....

Steven gets one of the biggies! Help him out, because this will be the start of something big. Congratulations, Steven - way to go!

I finally found my notes from last month's talk at the Internet Librarian conference. It was really Greg's show, and he did a fantastic job talking about how to make the most of the blogosphere from an information foraging perspective. (His Powerpoint presentation is here.) He sent me his slides ahead of time, so I knew he had covered all of the bases. Therefore, I decided to talk about the flip side of the coin, making the most of the blogosphere for your library's blog. Here's the abbreviated version.

I think librarians are getting pretty good at blogging. We've been doing this for a while now, both professionally and personally, and we're one of the most well-represented professions in the blogosphere. Whatever your library job, there is a blog for you, and we have a healthy record of the different types of blogs that can help any type of library. For the most part, library blogging 1.0 has consisted of announcement blogs ("what's new"), and that's appropriate. Yes, we've also seen some innovative uses (subtle information literacy lessons, book clubs, reviews, etc.), but now I think we're ready for the next step; I think we're ready for library blogging 2.0.

1. The first thing I'd like to see happen in the next round of library blogging is what I call "the key of we." I am sick and tired of library web sites (and newsletters and press releases) referring to everything in the third person. "The library" isn't putting on that program, "the library" isn't pleased to announce that big piece of news, and "the library" sure as hell isn't providing that great new service. Who is doing all of that? You are. We are. We make up the library and its services, and it's time to start using language that reflects this.

   One of the best things about blogging is the informal tone, the voice that comes through. When you write in the third person, you kill that voice, and we desperately need it. Library web sites are too formal, too staid, too impersonal. Blogging humanizes library sites, and we need to take full advantage of it. TNT movies to the contrary, librarians know that the networks are missing the best reality show of all, the day-to-day at the library. None of that vitality comes through online, but blogging (and especially moblogging) can change this.

   Name one library site (an institutional one, not a personal one) that gives you a sense of the people behind it. It's tough, isn't it? On the other hand, I've had people tell me that they feel like they're in my head or that they know me before we meet just from reading my blog. That's what library blogging 2.0 needs to jumpstart.

   Examples:
   

   
   
   • Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog and It's All Good, both of which have brought a more human [online] face to OCLC
   
   
   • Scobleizer, the ultimate blog that humanizes a company that no one thought could be humanized
   
   
   • ALA's blog. Oh wait, they don't have one.
   
   
   
   
2. Some other things that could be part of library blogging 2.0 if we kick it up a notch:
   
   
   
   • Pioneer the integration of SFX and OpenURL in blogs (Shane Nackerud at the University of Minnesota is leading the charge on this one).
   
   
   • Integrate our virtual reference services into our blogs. Some libraries forget to link to their VR service altogether, but take it a step further. If you post some statistics, a link to a news story, an announcement about an event, whatever, include a link in the blog post itself so that someone can ask further questions.
   
   
   • Metadata, metadata, and still more metadata. Let's show the blogosphere why it's so important.
   
   
   • Keep sneaking in more information literacy lessons and pointers.
   
   
   
   
3. Overall, though, we have to be more creative in taking better advantage of the currency of the web (in this case, of the blogosphere) - the all mighty link. Blogs are all about buzz: links, conversations, citations, comments, trackback, and links. Oh, and links. We need to be more proactive at spreading our message and services via blogs. In other words, we need to get buzz.

   When you think of the biggest library stories that made the rounds of the blogosphere this last year, what were they? I'd say the two biggies were OCLC suing the Library Hotel and SFPL's decision to implement RFID. (Note that I'm concentrating on stories about libraries, not library reactions to non-library stories like TNT movies or the PATRIOT Act.) Both were negative buzz that could have been mitigated in part by institutional blogs written in an informal tone that humanized their side of the story.

   Some ideas to illustrate how libraries could go about generating buzz:
   

   
   
   • Find your local bloggers and treat them like the press. For example, if I worked at Chicago Public Library, I would let Chicagoist know about new events, services, and resources that would be of interest to them. I'd ask them to link to my virtual reference service, and I'd be a reference resource for them. Make sure they know about all of the various databases they have access to thanks to your subscriptions. And in the spirit of the blogosphere, I'd link back to them from my site. This isn't just a strategy for big, public libraries, either. To help generate library buzz (and even to help improve pagerank), universities have student bloggers who can help generate library buzz; school libraries have blogging teachers, parents, newspapers, and community members; and even corporate librarians may have internal bloggers or marketing bloggers.
      
   
   
   • Moblog your events to actually show people using your services. Show the fun! The quality of cameraphone images is so crappy that you won't have to worry about any legal waivers. ;-)
      
   
   
   • Blog your statistics and your projects. Blog user comments.
      
   
   
   • Work more with your local newspaper. When they do an in-depth story on something, blog some resources for further exploration. Go teach them about RSS so that you can display their content on your site and (more importantly) yours on theirs. If they are blogging, get them to link to your virtual reference service. Keep after your ILS vendor until they give you RSS feeds out of your catalog so that you can display new materials on other sites, like the newspaper's. (Imagine a feed displaying the newest library items about Iraq next to their stories about the war.) While you're at it, make sure they know about your databases and the full range of services you can provide.
   
   
   • And finally, treat your blog as a new information channel. In fact, treat it like you do your newsletter. Devote specific resources to it - staff, time, design, consistency, etc. And of course, do it all in "the key of we."
   
   

Blogging itself is easy - it's the content that's hard. Except that we have lots of great content if we just look around us. Have some fun with it, tell some stories, take it to the next level.

A 21st Century Century Affliction: Media Obesity

"...whatever the root causes, I'm feeling media obese. And obesity, in any form, is Not A Good Thing. I'm realizing I have to treat media with far higher discrimination than I do currently -- and that this will mean ignoring that which is only good and relevant, and focusing only on the very good and very relevant. As a media junky, this restraint will be difficult. We'll see how it goes." [PeterMe]

Wow, is this ever me these days. My favorite part of this post, though, is the first comment by Fred Sampson:

"Reminds me of Schopenhauer's statement that 'Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.' Which Warren Zevon misquoted as 'We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them.' I say that I'm being more selective about what I read, and watch, and listen to; but the fact is I keep buying books thinking I'll make time to read them, when in reality I'm thinking that just having them on the shelf will transmit their contents to me by osmosis. I buy DVD's so I can watch them whenever I want to; then I watched 'Lawrence of Arabia' on TCM last night when the DVD's sitting on the shelf behind me. Not to mention all the new podcasts I've downloaded but will never listen to because I never get away from the computer and stereo and television and work for long enough. Media obesity? You betcha."

Amen, although I have to admit that I feel like I know more now than I ever have before, even if I feel like I'm not retaining all of it.

A Library and Cinema in Your Pocket

"The increasing power of cellphones is fast shaping innovative forms of compact culture: micro-lit, phone soap operas and made-for-mobile dramas that can be absorbed in less time than it takes to flick through a book introduction....

One pioneer is Media Republic, an Amsterdam company that is successfully reaching young women with the mobile equivalent of the French "roman photo,' a sentimental genre of romantic still photos and text that dates to the postwar period.

Dutch users register their mobile phones to follow the adventures of the hormone-driven characters of 'Jong Zuid,' or 'Young South,' which is now in production for its fourth season. Customers receive two episodes daily, each with six photographs of well-known Dutch actors and text describing the travails of glamorous young people seeking their fortune in the big city....

In Japan, major publishers like Shinchosha and Kadokawa Shoten have created Web sites to offer telephone reading material. Japan is also home to probably the most successful telephone venture. Earlier this year a mobile novel jumped from phone screens to the silver screen, evolving into a feature film, 'Deep Love.'

In the book industry in the United States, the initial reaction to mobile-lit is: 'Are you kidding?' as one veteran put it.

Still, some major New York publishing houses are pondering the future. 'We are paying attention, but we haven't entered the market yet,' said Kate Tentler, vice president and publisher for Simon & Schuster Online. 'It would be crazy not to look at this. Smart phones are everywhere and it's the fastest-growing device.' " [New York Times]

Rephrased for librarians: "Still, some major libraries are pondering the future. 'We are paying attention, but we haven't entered the market yet,' said Famous Library Director. 'It would be crazy not to look at this. Smart phones are everywhere and it's the fastest-growing device.' "

The whole article is interesting (I could have excerpted a lot more), so be sure to read the whole thing.

A Life Where TiVo Has Always Existed

"...My daughter was only 3 months old when it arrived and we set it up. As far as my daughter knows, TiVo has always been around. Now that she (and our TiVo) are three years old, and there are some very interesting things I've been able to observe.

First - she doesn't watch much TV (an allotted hour per day), but when she does watch it, she gets a choice of a recent episode of any of her favorite pre-recorded shows (current favorites are Dora the Explorer and Caillou), and she can watch it at any time of day. We get to choose what shows we'd like to allow her to watch, set up a Season Pass, and we're done.

Second - Commercials are an infrequent novelty to her. We always fast-forward through commercials, or watch non-commercial shows. When she does occasionally see a full commercial, she's fascinated, and will often ask us to stop so she can see what's going on. How can we demonstrate to her the evils of commercial interruption, when she has never had to experience it?

Third - Ignorance of Schedules/Programming - she has no idea when her favorite shows are on, never has. She gets quite confused when we are watching a non-TiVo TV, and she asks to watch 'a kids show', and we have to explain that this TV won't do what ours at home does. We've sometimes shortened this explanation to 'This TV is broken', which she seems to accept, and will wait until we get home to watch our 'fixed' TV.

Fourth - pausing taken for granted. She is now the master of paused TV - saying 'Can you please stop this for a minute - I have to use the Potty'....

I compare all of these observations to my TV-watching experience as a child - always excited about Saturday Morning, because that's when cartoons were on - swapping stories about the latest Evel Knievel motorcycle I saw on a commercial with the other kids, knowing they had all seen the same commercials as well. Feeling disappointed when my parents would switch off a show mid-way through because they decided it wasn't appropriate. The pain of commercial interruption, the disappointment of 'nothing's on', or the missed shows that were probably gone for good. (On a side note, anyone else remember the days where if you missed a movie in the theater, you'd never get a chance to see it again?)

There are a lot of other home entertainment developments that have changed since I was a kid, but none so radically as the TiVo experience. I never cease to be amazed when I'm zooming past a commercial with a woman dancing with a 'swiffer', and I hear my daughters small voice say: 'Wait Papa, I wanna see that'." [Eintagsfliegen]

Kids growing up like this view their entertainment and multimedia very differently than the rest of us. Heck, as an adult I'm completely spoiled by this revolution, and the desire for this functionality spills over into other mediums (why can't I press a button to go back 7 seconds and hear what I just missed on the radio or pause it?).

It's an interactive world for them, and they shift everything.

In winding my way through email from the past few weeks, I find that several people sent URLs to help Linda in her quest to find blogs devoted to the topic of water and the environment. Amazingly, out of the eight emails I received, there was only one duplicate URL. Major score to the blogosphere, and muchos gracias to everyone that responded!

For the Google cache record, here are the links folks sent in:
http://www.wilsdomain.com/blogs/environmental-blogs.html
http://earth-info-net.blogspot.com/
http://www.badlani.com/blog/weblog.php
http://www.oceanjournal.org/
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/waterlib.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101170/categories/coloradowater/
http://northwestwatch.org/
http://cascadiascorecard.typepad.com/blog/
http://www.eco-portal.com/blog/
http://www.waterconserve.info (particularly http://www.waterconserve.info/blog/)
http://www.polizeros.com/categories/thePoliticsOfWater/
http://www.rtumble.com/
http://www.keepersofthewaters.org/

Are you Chief Blogging Officer Material?

"Government is already rife with chiefs, why not one more? HighBeam Research, Inc. has set the pace by announcing today the appointment of Christopher Locke as Chief Blogging Officer (CBO). Looks like the role of CBO is a pace setter who creates a buzz about the company products and enlists others to blog the cause. Ironically, the announcement came in the form of a (oh, so 20th century) press release." [RSS in Government]

Yes! More ammo for my theme that libraries need to treat blogs like newsletters and devote the same types of resources (time, training, graphic design, staff, etc.) to them. Blogs humanize, and library web sites desperately need some humanizing. I really do have to find my notes and write up last month's conference talk.

Want an SMS for Christmas?

"The survey, commissioned by Motorola Australia's Personal Communications Sector (PCS) and carried out by Galaxy Research, found that 70 precent of 16-34 year olds surveyed planned to send text messages this Christmas.

'The survey also found that half of all young Australians would rather receive a fun text message than a Christmas card, with fun messages particularly popular among 16-24 year olds,' according to a statement from Motorola.

Nearly half of those surveyed preferred to send text messages rather than talking on the phone. Sixty one percent of 16-24 year old respondents preferred text over talking on the phone, and 67 percent of those living outside capital cities preferring this method of communication.

One in three respondents also intended to take their mobile phone to Christmas parties so that they could take photos, the survey found." [iTnews, via textually.org]

A bet: if you're under age 35, you probably will do just what the survey says and take your phone, use it during parties, and communicate while multitasking F2F (face to face). If you're over age 35, you probably view this behavior as rude and you don't want to be interrupted by phone messages (text or voice) during F2F parties.

A generalization that will naturally have exceptions, but I think we're getting to the point where the U.S. is starting to catch up to the numbers in this article....