Technically Random

Artful Blogging … a print magazine about … blogging?

In the immortal words of Tom Hanks in Big, “I don’t get it.”

It seems to be a never-ending quest to find a blog editor. As good as the editor in WordPress is, I just don’t like dedicating a browser window to it and it feels too much like typing in a web form and not an editor. (Picky, picky…) I wrote earlier about blogging from Word 2007, but the limitation of only being able to select one category, and the time it takes to get Word up and running has kept me from going back.

Now I think I’ve found just the thing. ScribeFire is a Firefox plugin that lets you easily post to your blog. By default it runs in split-screen mode, but you can also have it launch as a new tab or in its own window. It has some nifty features that make it very easy to include a link to the page your looking at or to drag and drop formatted text. Best of all, it’s always there in the browser so I don’t have launch another app or open a new tab and go to my blog to add a new post.

This is the second post using ScribeFire and so far no deal-breaker irritations. I’ll keep you posted.

So Word 2007 now lets you write and publish blog posts directly from Word. I’m trying this for the first time with this blog post. I like having the big edit window of the Word document and some of the autocorrect features are actually pretty handy, especially for quick and dirty posts. I don’t have any fancy formatting in this post, so we’ll have to test that out later. My only gripe so far is that I normally use CTRL-N to create a new document and by default it creates a new Word document. If I want to start a blog post I either have to move my hand all the way off the keyboard and use the mouse or do an ALT-F (to bring up the file menu) then select ‘N’ for a new file. This is nothing new, of course. This is what I have always had to do to create a new document using a template. A minor irritation, but one I’ve grown accustomed to.

So, here goes, I’m about to press the ‘Publish’ button.

Oh, wait… seriously, it will only let me select one category? Well now that’s really irritating.

-Corey

I started playing around with the Google Dynamic Feed Control and Yahoo Pipes to see what it would look like to bring together all the RSS and blog feeds in the Libraries.  I put up a couple of test pages:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss.html
and
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss2.html

The first example is just using the Google Dynamic Feed Control and the second is using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed and Google Dynamic Feed Control to display the feed on the page.  I like the simplicity of the second view, but (as was pointed out to me) you lose the context of the feed source that you get in the first view.

I only include the half dozen-ish blogs and feeds that I could find.  If you know of any other UW Libraries feeds, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

And, to give credit where credit is due, Jake was playing with both of these tools long before I was.  He has a test page using the Google Dynamic Feed Control at:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/rss/intlstudies/newspage/newstest.html
and all of the new books lists that he does for International Studies is using Yahoo Pipes.

Corey

The beginning of the new year and ALA Midwinter brings lists of top tech trends for the coming year. Here’s a short wrap-up of some of the trends being predicted for 2008:

Eric Lease Morgan (LITA Blog):

• Linux on the server and desktop will increase
• Open access will grow
• Social networking spaces maturing
• Blogging will continue to effect the way we communicate

Sarah Houghtan-Jan (LibrarianInBlack.net):

• Tough Budget, Tech Stays
• Widening of the Digital Divide and our Inattention to It
• User-Centered Content Production
• Virtual Reference Software a la Rest-O’-The-World?
• We Stop Being So Bossy
• Another Day of Open Source

Karen Schneider (Free Range Librarian):

• Interoperability
• Open systems, open data

Karen Coombs (Library Web Chic):

• Ultra-light and small PCs
• New uses of wireless
• Blogging ceases to exist as blogging
• On the Go Applications and Data

Then this from the publishing world, 15 Trends to Watch in 2008 by Mike Shatzkin at Publishers Weekly.

And, finally 10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life, published by LiveScience during the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

Library 2.0: an academic’s perspective blog has information about Zotero Commons, a new Zotero collaboration among scholars. (It will rely on the new Zotero 2.0 Server technology when that appears). Zotero Commons is a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive.

“Its purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable. .. “

An amazing, significant project of course, but what raised some eyebrows was this statement from an Inside Higher Ed article:

“Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead …”.

Which, although journalist-speak, raises all sorts of interesting questions, issues and lively discussion in academic libraryland . Anyway, check out the blog post and discussion.

The blog btw is a favorite – deep, thoughtful posts . On your RSS radar, or you can keep up with a live aggregation here (click on Blogs: Libraries and scroll down the page) .

I use Zotero, admire it,  and cuss it regularly because it doesn’t do what I want (yet). But the potential is absolutely stunning. If you can imagine a world (perhaps in the not-too-distant future) where our metadata is free from the OPAC and exists as a plug-in module or a web service, then add scholar-produced tags/links and full text access – you get a glimpse of where this could go.

There are lots of ways to share your powerpoint presentation in a blog. One that is quick, easy and free is to join Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net).
Slideshare is a big community of online presentation fans (including scads of educators). If your current powerpoints are, well, a tad snorey…..it is also a goldmine of creative inspiration. Simply get an account, upload your presentation then paste the ‘embed code’ into the blog post. Oh, here’s one now…

| View | Upload your own