"Truthiness" is Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

"First the American Dialect Society picked 'truthiness' as the Word of the Year for 2005 and now voters who took part in an online poll for Merriam-Webster have also picked Stephen Colbert's favorite word as Word of the Year for 2006...." [TV Squad]

He's even modified the MW Dictionary itself - check it out - with a tongue-in-cheek plea to viewers to not add the page to library copies.

From my morning mailbox:

"Howdy!

This is an invitation to join Superpatron - The Friends of the library Network, a FeedBurner Network coordinated by me, Edward Vielmetti (edward.vielmetti@gmail.com).

FeedBurner has launched a new service to give its publishers the ability to organize themselves into networks, groups of folks who publish similar content and want band together to leverage the power of many to cross-promote their content and get more attention.

Superpatron - The Friends of the Library Network is a network comprised of feeds with content similar to mine. By accepting my invitation, you'll be associated with this network and will have access to some promotional tools to help us increase traffic and "discoverability" using network badges, chicklets and BuzzBoost, which promotes the top posts from the feeds in our network."

My favorite part is when I went to accept the invitation, instead of calling my unique ID number a "code" or "pin" or some other obscure label, it read "Golden Ticket."

Unfortunately, the screen wanted me to add the ALA L2 podcast feed I created last summer, and it was a single radio button so I couldn't say no. I'll have to see if I can fix that later. I hate to create a new feed URL for The Shifted Librarian, because I don't want to confuse folks.

Now I'm contemplating if ALA can use FeedBurner to create a network of our feeds that we can then use to show our own ads on? I'll have to investigate this further. Actually, we already have some software that could potentially do this in-house and we've started talking about it, but it would also be interesting to organize a network of library blogs in a national marketing campaign.

I have to tell you that I was inspired talking to Ed Vielmetti this week. We came up with a couple of very interesting ideas to pursue just over dinner Monday night.

Have you talked to some patrons lately?

How Matt Haughey Beat Google

"Just as importantly, Jessamyn is a librarian. I can't overstate how much a site that's about providing information benefits from the presence of a librarian, someome who's an expert at retrieving and disseminating information." [Anil Dash]

We can't say it enough, can we? So hear you go again - Why You Should Fall to Your Knees and Worship a Librarian.