UK eInformation Group

Many conference twitterers use hashtags in their tweets. Hashtags help identify tweets on a subject or event and those who are twittering. Include a hash sign immediately before the ‘official’ tag of the conference  in your tweet and services such as Hashtags and Twemes will pick up the tweet. If you are a twitterer, you will first have to ‘follow’ hashtags on Twitter itself. Then hastags will automatically follow you and monitor your tweets. If you want your hashtagged tweets to be picked up by Twemes you must have a photo or image in your Twitter profile. No image, no listing in Twemes (apparently it is an anti-spam measure).The hashtag can appear anywhere in your tweet, for example ‘#interlend08 Public libraries losing USPs e.g. supplying out of print books. Lots of online competition e.g. ABEbooks’.

If you just want to see what has been twittered about a conference, simply go to http://www.hashtags.org/ or http://twemes.com/ and browse or search for the tag.

Hashtags for interlend08

[Originally posted on Karen Blakeman's Blog]

CV not getting you those all important interviews? Nobody answering your job advert? Or perhaps your corporate publicity is not doing the biz? Processing your document through a tag cloud generator might give you a clue as to where you are going wrong. Sue Hill gave a presentation at the recent City Information Group open day on CPD and skills. In passing she mentioned that they sometimes run a CV or job description through a tag cloud generator to show people why their lovingly created prose is way off the mark.  The tag cloud  brings to the fore your most used terms and it can be a shock to discover that you have placed the emphasis in totally the wrong area. It then struck me that you could do this with any form of literature - a web page, training publicity, membership recruitment forms.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tag cloud generators on the Web and most of them are free. For starters try Wordle, Tagcrowd, or Tag Cloud Generator. The example below is a tag cloud of the UKeiG home page generated by Wordle.

Another application for using a blog - keeping your users up to date on the progress of your library’s refurbishment. The University of Bolton Library Refurbishment blog does just that and the department has been praised for the approach they have taken in informing their users of the progress of the project.

TwitterSnooze is a way of temporarily ‘unfollowing’ someone. It is ideal for when your Twitter friends contract conference twitterrhoea - just snooze them until they get back from the conference. The TwitterSnooze web site also suggests:

• It’s a nice way to get back at someone for saying something stupid… give them the silent treatment
• It’s a good way to ignore someone that just flooded your timeline for no good reason… but it was just a one-time offense and doesn’t merit permanent unfollowing.

When Google Sites was first launched in February 2008, it was part of the Google Apps group aimed at enterprises . Now anyone can create a wiki web site using Google Sites, without the need to have their own domain. You can keep it private, share it with a small group of people or make the whole thing public. You can also choose who is allowed to edit the pages on your wiki. The pages are hosted on Google at http://sites.google.com/[your-website] and you can have as many pages as you like for free.

The WYSIWYG editor allows you to format the text; embed documents, calendars, photos, videos and gadgets directly into the page; and offer options for commenting. You can even customise it with your own logo. You can view previous versions of a page, roll back or revert to a previous version of the page, and receive email alerts of changes to pages.

There is a short tutorial that takes you through the basics of setting up a Google Site.

Page2RSS monitors web pages for changes and notifies you of those changes by RSS. Simply type in the URL of the page you wish to monitor and then add the feed URL to your favourite feed reader. Excellent tool for pages that do not offer their own RSS feeds. Hat tip to Phil Bradley for this.

I ran a Web 2.0 workshop for North West Academic Libraries (NOWAL) on 2nd May 2008 at Salford University. The aim of the event was to give people a taste of what Web 2.0 is all about and an opportunity to test drive some of the applications. Inevitably, we were limited by what we were allowed to use on the computers in the training suite, and the absence of speakers on the PCs meant that I had to do the commentary for Common Craft’s YouTube video ‘RSS in Plain English’ . I suppose one could regard that as a mashup of real/1st life and the electronic world!

At the end of the day, I asked the participants to think about which applications they would definitely use, those that are worth considering (the ‘maybe’ category) and those that would get the definite thumbs down. As they had varying experiences of the technologies, and were looking at them from different perspectives, it is not surprising that some ’stuff’ ended up in more than one category. We even invented a new award (see And finally… )

No!

There was only nomination for this category. Second Life (SL) did not seem to have any supporters on this workshop. As one has to download software to run SL and run it on serious, heavy duty network connections we were not able to experiment with it on the day. Some of the workshop participants had had bad experiences with it in the past and I did not help matters by recounting the tale of my disastrous attempt to attend an SL meeting the previous evening. Those of us who had tried it agreed that the technology is still getting in the way and it has a long way to go before it is promoted to the ‘maybe’ list.

Nevertheless, it is being taken seriously by Manchester Business School who have commissioned design and new media agency Corporation Pop to develop a Second Life island for them

Yes

Pageflakes - for pulling together frequently accessed information of all types. Can be kept private but also made public as a Pagecasts, for example Dublin City Public Libraries, East Lothian Libraries, ActiveIT.

Flickr - publicise your events, launches/relaunches of services, new library facilities

RSS - great for personal current awareness, but also a way of adding content to your web site, blog, Facebook etc. and generally facilitating the sharing of content.

iGoogle - your very own personalised Google start page for frequently accessed information of all types, but ‘tabs’ can be shared with colleagues.

YouTube - link to ‘how to’ videos, create your own virtual tours of your library, or make videos of your key events.

Wikis - great way to collaborate on documents for example a glossary of acronyms and abbreviations (under development by one of the workshop participants).

Blogs - can be used as sources of information and as a quick and easy way to provide news of services, events and ‘What’s New’ to users. Several of the workshop participants were already active bloggers.

Maybe

Social Bookmarking for example FURL, Del.icio.us, Connotea, 2Collab - could be a good way to provide access to evaluated subject and reading lists. Connotea (owned by the Nature Publishing Group) and 2Collab  (owned by Elsevier) are aimed at researchers and scientists. “If only we could persuade our academics to use them” exclaimed one workshop participant.

Facebook - worth a try but, because of its structure and minimal import/export options, beware of possible extra work in having to re-enter content held on web sites, blogs and start pages .

Google Docs - several people thought that they might use Google Docs as a way of collaborating  on documents but only for personal use and for applications where it would not matter if the document was inadvertently made public.

Presentation sharing services for example Slideshare, authorSTREAM. A good way to share lectures and also presentations on library services.

Nominated for both the ‘Yes’ and ‘Maybe’ categories were: YouTube, RSS and iGoogle.

And finally…

A new category. The winner of the John ‘you-cannot-be-serious’ McEnroe award goes to - ta da, ta da:

Twitter

I did try very hard to convince them of how wonderful Twitter is and was joined in my endeavours by some of my followers (thanks chaps and chappesses, your efforts were appreciated by at least me). The presence of the BBC, Timesonline and even No 10 Downing Street on Twitter did not help. I suspect that the main problem is the Twitter associated jargon and nomenclature. The name ‘Twitter’ generated enough titters on its own, but when quickly followed by tweets, twitterstream, TwitKit, Twitterfeed, Twitterment, Tweet Clouds etc … well, I think you can see the problem.

There are several ways in which you can add RSS feed to Outlook 2007 but the quickest way seems to be:

1. On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed.
4. Click Add. In the next box you can change the folder in which it is to be stored.
5. Click OK

For some applications of blogs it may be more useful to list your postings with the oldest first rather than the standard ‘newest first’. Examples include a CPD blog where you are recording your training, thoughts on your professional development, meetings with mentors etc or a blog that records the progress of a project. At present, neither Blogger nor WordPress offer an alternative to the standard reverse chronological order: TypePad, which is a subscription service, does. Go to Configure and under Post Listing Preferences, Order of Posts check the Oldest first (Ascending) radio button.

There are several TypePad pricing options starting at USD 49.50/year.

As well as RSS alerts for new blog postings and comments,  you can offer your readers email alerts. There are several services that will convert your RSS feed to email. One is Feedburner.  Sign up for a Feedburner account and follow the instructions to create a Feedburner version of your feed. Once it has been set up click on the title of your new feed, then the Publicize tab followed by the Email Subscriptions link on the left hand side of the page. Follow the instructions and you will be given the code to add to your blog. In WordPress, add a Text widget to your layout and paste the code into that.  In Blogger, under Layout select Page Elements and then Add a Page Element. Choose HTML/Javascript, give it a title - for example ‘Email Alerts’  - and then paste the code into the box.

Blogarithm is another RSS to email conversion service. Set up an account, follow the instructions to get the code and paste it into a Text widget if you have a WordPress blog or an HTML/Javascript Page Element if you are on Blogger.