Category: blogz

Slow Library, a 2.0 idea

Posted on by jessamyn

I missed Ryan Deschamps discussing a talk by Mark Leggott about the Slow Library Movement. As someone suspicious about the Slow Food Movement, I was curious about this. Go here to listen to Mark’s lecture and peek here to see if the Slow Library blog is up and running. In Mark’s words “The idea behind the Slow Library site is to propose, promote and discuss the concepts of a new movement called Slow Library. Slow Library applies the philosophies and concepts of the Slow Food and Open Source movements to the development of library services and resources.” In Ryan’s notes from Mark’s talk he says

Mark is saying “ubiquity is not an end in and of itself. Here are some thoughts that may or may not apply to the Slow Library Movement:

  • Let’s focus on realistic, local solutions and build community first.
  • Let’s forget about Web 2.0 for a second, understand our customers needs and then apply or give access to resources that help them satisfy those needs.
  • Let’s play.
  • Let’s Let’s shun pressure to “keep up” with Ann Arbor (sorry John Blyberg), Hennepin County (sorry Glenn Peterson via Tame the Web) and etc. and apply our own strengths to come up with our own creative ideas.
  • Let’s focus on what we can do right now to make the community a better place.
  • Let’s notice the beauty of things right before our eyes, and let supporting that be our Return on Investment.

Good comments by Jenny on Ryan’s blog. [anarchivist]

Ask Metafilter in the news

Posted on by jessamyn

Just a few cool media mentions of Ask MetaFilter this week, neither of which were written by me or people I know.

1. NPR in their Five for Friday column says “Mom always said two heads were better than one. What would she say about thousands of heads, all with varying tidbits of knowledge — and all willing to help answer anything or everything on your mind?” I think I might like to be friends with Melody Joy Kramer.
2. The Chicago Tribune gives AskMe a nod while reporting on the demise of Google answers saying ” While Yahoo Answers is more about facts, Ask MetaFilter, in its best moments, is about feelings, opinions, theories of life. A recent, not atypical question: ‘Did you marry someone despite misgivings and have it actually work?'”

ALA invites member participation, sort of

Posted on by jessamyn

Dear ALA’s Member Participation task force,

I am happy you have a blog. I am happy that its URL is fairly short. It’s very attractive. However I think one way that you could help members participate would be to make the links in some way distinct from the text that surrounds it. They are, on my monitor, the exact same color and boldness as the text around them. The underline only shows up when you hover over the link making using your blog an experiment in hide and seek. Usually links are indicated by a distinct color, an underline (not just a hover underline) or by being in bold when the surrounding text is plain. Using two out of three of these increases usability dramatically.

Two other smaller points which are more a matter of personal preference.

  1. Usually titles of blog posts link to the post on a page by itself with the comments underneath, a permalink. The blogging software you use does not do this. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is non-standard and might confuse people. One of the great benefits of blogging is that it allows people to use a user interface that does not change much from blog to blog. You might want to consider configuring your blog to work the way most blogs work.
  2. Linking to Word documents is a less than optimal way to get your message across. While I think allowing people to look at a Word document with “track changes” turned on is a neat way to show the evolution of a document, it relies on a proprietary piece of software that people may not have (or Open Office if they are savvy enough to use it) and makes the information contained in the linked document unavailable to search engines and posterity except for the pull-quote you provide. It also increases download times for people on dial-up which is a non-inconsiderate amount of ALA members. Consider making the text of documents you describe available in some way that is more findable and usable to the widest range of people. While I wish it were not the case, ALA member are not always the most tech savvy people around and anything we can do to encourage their participation is a good thing.

Sincerely,

Your friend
Jessamyn

a few from the mailbag

Posted on by jessamyn

There has been a definite drop-of fin email since I decided to get rid of the mailform and just post my email address which is a definite shame. However, I don’t get a lot of mail, so having to wade through hundreds of spam emails per day just to read a note or two was not worth my while. In any case, people still send me inteersting stuff, here is a sampling of what I’ve liked recently.