Google and Librarians — the lovelorn relationship

Well, if you haven’t heard all of the chatter and buzz, Google Librarian Central hadn’t been updated in a year (before today, that is)…and Google wasn’t at ALA leaving some librarians to call out google for punking librarians or even using librarians, while other librarians proclaimed, we weren’t surprised!

While I fall more on the side of “google is a business, google is a corporation” , I do understand a little bit why some people feel, eh, jilted(?).

and really, You can make money without doing evil doesn’t necessarily mean that they will do good. Because some good things are not profitable, ya know?

Golly, it’s the equivalent of a bad soap opera romance — so, where’s the child spawned by the rival (microsoft? yahoo?)

Google reader tips

A few of my favorite shortcut keys in google reader:

s -> Star
j -> Open next
k -> Open previous
r -> refresh
gs -> starred

…and lots more here

resources about web analytics

The Web Analytics Association web site is a reputable:
http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/

..and then there is the web analytics forum in Yahoo Groups (see
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/), if you can put up with a yahoo group..

Of course, google bought my favorite web statistics/metrics service, urchin, a few years ago.

OCLC and Google team up

Link: http://liswire.com/node/63

Excerpt:
OCLC and Google Inc. have signed an agreement to exchange data that will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google search services.

Under terms of the agreement, OCLC member libraries participating in the Google Book Search™ program, which makes the full text of more than one million books searchable, may share their WorldCat-derived MARC records with Google to better facilitate discovery of library collections through Google.

Google will link from Google Book Search to WorldCat.org, which will drive traffic to library OPACs and other library services. Google will share data and links to digitized books with OCLC, which will make it possible for OCLC to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat.

Internet Explorer 8 in Beta (IE8)

It sounds like Microsoft is continuing to head down the path to standards compliancy…

http://blogs.computerworld.com/web_standards_in_ie_8

and a quick overview of some of the new features on the way (webslices looks amazingly like snapshots, which provides a little rollover live popup of a page as used on this website…. hmmmm…)

http://blogs.computerworld.com/five_things_youll_love_or_hate_about_ie8

I won’t be testing IE8 as I gave up on IE around 5. Thank goodness for firefox.

google eyes the grocery aisle?

Interesting article about the science between text recognition in images:
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=205208105

Google takes on about.com? wikipedia?

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

from Google Blog, at
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

more at
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-14-n19.html

Sounds interesting. I’ve contributed sporatically to wikipedia, mostly just in a few edits and revisions. I’ve also written for the New Georgia Encyclopedia which is fact checked, reviewed and edited. If Google does not verify info, I do wonder how successful Knol will be in the long run. Wikipedia has a huge user base and a reliance on ANY user review/revision. About.com seems to have more reliable authors (in some cases) but it is sometimes hard to determine an author’s expertise beyond interest and the interface at about.com leaves something to be desired. I’ve haven’t spent enough time in Helium.com to know how reliable it is, but it seems to be similar to about.com. Citizendium seems to be more along the lines of Knol, except that anyone can submit their credentials for writing.

I do always wonder about these invitation things, though. How do they choose? Just google for particular subjects they would like to see written on and then contact those folks in hope that they will agree to participate? Choose users with pre-existing google accounts? Bloggers?

Anyhow, it does sound like an interesting project, at least as interesting as wikipedia.

google vs. yahoo (interesting little visual)

Sometimes I find the most interesting things on the internet…

A cliché true, but I found this little google vs. yahoo comparison today. I’ve no idea
of its accuracy (but I would think it probably is), but a very neat little tool to compare results ranking for a particular term in yahoo vs. google.

practical & productive networking tools

A friend of mine who is a k-12 art teacher asked about getting started with social networking. She does a little blogging here and there, but she is knee deep in teaching at the moment, which limits her time online. I thought for a bit about how to respond to her question. Her question focuses more on personal professional networking, not so much focused on social networking with her students (some of her students would most likely be too young to network with her online and she already interacts with her students in person).

There are quite a few teachers, educators, librarians, and other professionals who are using facebook, linkedin or namyz to create professional web presences and networks. Some of them use those presences to connect to their users; others are more focused on a professional level. However, in the long run, how useful are those sites on a day to day basis in terms of networkng professionally and in getting real work done? Sure, they may (or may not) provide opportunities for outreach, opportunities for freelance or consulting work, collaboration opportunities, but are those sorts of sites (linkedin, facebook, etc.) really the best bang for the buck in terms of professional networking?

What web tools provide a means to increased productivity, better resources, and networking opportunities? Tools which are very easy to use and practical?

I came up with my own short list of tools, which are easy to use, engaging, and provide a means to streamline work in some way, while providing opportunities for discovery and networking.
These are all tried and true, very popular applications.

Google docs / Google pages
Google docs is a web based wordprocessor, spreadsheet product, and more recently presentation maker. Think, Word, Excel, Powerpoint — all in one easy to use place on the web. Documents can be shared by invitation (makes collaboration a breeze), emailed in the more popular formats, and also published out the web (as very simple web pages, but still!) . Once they have been published out on the web, there’s really not much of a limit in terms of what can be done with them. Googlepages is a free web page creator from guess who. Yes, Google now has their own free web editor/website design service. Not a lot of flexibility but a very easy way to get a website up QUICKLY. All that is required to use these services, is a google/gmail account, for which anyone can sign up. Certainly a useful tool in terms of project groups, working on documents from multiple computers, or creating web pages. Published pages via these Google services each have a unique URL/address, so they can be linked to, shared, blogged, etc. I use google docs a lot when I need to collaborate.

del.icio.us (bookmarking)
del.icio.us (or any other free centralized storage spot for internet bookmarks) makes organizing, and sharing bookmarks easy, as well as finding resources that are used by other professionals. For those who haven’t used del.icio.us, it is amazingly easy. Create a user login, install a button for your IE or firefox toolbar (very very easy to do). Once the button is installed, when a website is found that you would like to keep, you click on the del.icio.us button, and a menu pops up. You give it the title YOU want it to have, and then you can include a description, tags (keywords) and click save. Voila!

Anywhere in the world that you might be, if you have internet access, you probably have access to your del.icio.us page. Finding like-minded people (teachers, artists, whoever) and linking to their network, is probably one of the most valuable tools of del.icio.us. A great way to discover new and interesting resources! Anything online can be probably be linked to in del.icio.us. Google docs pages can be linked. Image files can be linked. Video files can be linked.. A del.icio.us page could easily be a bibliography, a lesson plan, a pathfinder, or even a class syllabus. I use del.icio.us to organize all of my presentation resources — everything! The powerpoint presentation, the links that are cited, and other supplemental info.

Youtube (video)
Youtube, google video (any other free video/videocasting site), etc. could be very useful in the educational and training realm. Youtube already hosts quite a bit in the way of tutorials, and it would be neat to include those in lesson plans. Youtube videos can be embedded into websites, presentations, and other documents. Another idea would be to take lesson plans and use video to either illustrate the lesson plan or supplement the plan (and then share it on youtube!). Students can also contribute content in either creating video responses, writing comments/reviews about videos, evaluating content, or even creating videos as the product of an assignment.

Speed up your website!

For those of you who create websites, here is an interesting article about speeding up websites (and a free little tool, too!):

ySlow a firebug/firefox plug-in: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Most of the rules revolve around making sure the browser doesn't haveto work too hard to load and display your Web pages, particularly bymaking maximum use of the browser cache. That's where your browserstores bits and pieces of the Web pages someone downloads.

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2197256,00.asp