Archive for the ‘Twitter’ tag
See how they browse
I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was worth sharing.
Google were worried that 10% of people (using small browser windows) were missing content on the right-hand edge of one of their web pages, so they did some analysis of several weeks of visitors’ browser sizes, and created this:
It’s a huge generalisation, but interesting to note that for (e.g.) L&LR’s public home page on the Lincoln corporate website…
- 99% of visitors can see our opening paragraph without scrolling
- 98% can search the catalogue and see links to opening hours & contact details without scrolling
- 90%-95% can watch our YouTube video and see our news-blog headlines without scrolling
Try it yourself on any web page.
Mash’um in the middle.
As threatened, I was at BCU in Birmingham a week ago (30th Nov) for #middlemash. The morning after the official mashed library Pre-conference Networking Activity (PNA), a good few of us met on the train up to Perry Barr railway station near the campus.
One of @chriskeene's slides.
I’m not going to do a chronological write-up of the day (you can find other people’s here, here, here and elsewhere): instead here are five disconnected #middlemash-related statements…
1. I gave a presentation in the morning.
I’ve tidied up the slides a bit from the version created on the day (which were a bit last-minute), and added captions. Also, here’s the latest list of examples of subject feeds created using RefWorks:
Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences
- New books for Biological Sciences
- New books in the Holbeach LRC (Food Manufacture / Agriculture & Environment)
Faculty of Business & Law
Faculty of Health, Life & Social Sciences
2. I wave my hands around a lot when I speak.
3. Twitter got some serious hammer.
(Image: word cloud of #middlemash tweets, created using www.wordle.net)
Owen Stephens (OU) has already noted on his blog that this was one of the most ‘tweeted’ conferences he’s been to; it certainly felt that Twitter played an important fuction as a backchannel / reporting tool / way of opening up the discussions to people who couldn’t attend in person.
- Here’s a feed of #middlemash tweets
- I also like this – ranked list of hardcore tweeters (fifth!)
4. You can do good, practical stuff on the day.
At the first two Mashed Library events, I found it difficult – and a little bit intimidating – to get involved in the practical mashing activities. I tend to find I only start to have usable ideas several days after the conference ends.
So I was pleased that, suitably inspired by Tony Hirst’s Yahoo Pipes walk-through, I managed to take an idea that came up in conversation with Jo Alcock and turn it into something practically useful, there and then.
The idea was this:
It would be useful if subject librarians could be automatically notified about the existence of new editions of books on reading lists in their subjects.
The practical solution was ready-made, in the form of this pipe which makes use of OCLC’s xISBN web service.
So, mid-mash, I added an extra button to my existing new-book feed pipe, which takes the working ISBN for each book and throws it at the xISBN pipe – the result is a list, in RSS format, of all related versions of any particular book. Anyone can subscribe to this feed and – here’s the killer bit – be notified when a new edition (and thus a new ISBN) is added!
I can see this being a really useful addition to any bibliographic service, especially for the subject librarian or interested academic.
Gives…
I’m going to try and tweak this to make it prettier, then I’ll blog more substantially.
5. A summary of each of the presentations is on the #middlemash blog
Quite a few of the presentations are on slideshare, too.
[cetsEmbedRSS id='http://middlemash.wordpress.com/feed/' itemcount='5']
Next stop – hopefully – Liverpool in early 2010.
Mashing in the Midlands on Monday
I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash.
I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop Wordpress MU as a platform for a devolved union catalogue.
You can follow Monday’s discussions on Twitter, if you’re so inclined (hashtag #middlemash).
Agasp at awkward Mash hashtags, lads? Aah, that’s grand…
(With apologies to Christian Bök for the title.)
I’m going to the long-anticipated Mashed Library 2009 (“Mash Oop North“) tomorrow at the University of Huddersfield.
If you want to follow the action from afar, here’s what one of the organisers (guess who?!) has suggested in a post on the event blog:
If you’re wanting to keep track of what’s happening on the day, there’s a few things you can keep an eye on…
The hashtag for the event is #mashlib09 and you can keep track using Twitter Search or Twitterfall.
Ideas from the event
We’ll be encouraging delegates to publish their ideas under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence and you’ll be able to see them all via this RSS feed.
Ian’s Text Wall
Ian McNaught, who works at Huddersfield Uni, has developed an experimental SMS Text Wall which we’ll be playing around with at the event. It currently works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
Videos
We’re hoping to video all 6 of the opening sessions. Unfortunately we’re not able to stream them live but we’ll try and make them available to view online as quickly as possible. (If any delegates have experience of putting video online, please make yourself known on the day!)
There’s also the useful Mashed Library Ning site at: mashedlibrary.ning.com
I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s event, mainly because last year’s (the inaugural, held in London) was so interesting, and also because this year I’ve got the chance to talk about a couple of the mashup-inspired things I/we’ve got in the pipeline. Also because of this, and due in no small part to this.
I’ll be tweetin’ wi’ t’ best of ‘em on the day, and I promise a full writeup (plus slides from my two ‘lightning talks’) when I get back.
Wordcloud Wednesday
Because wordclouds are everywhere…?
This week – a wordcloud created from the biographies of the 164 people who are currently following me on the social-networking website Twitter.
They would appear to be mainly librarians working in universities (as opposed to mad axe-murderers, which is good…).
This cloud was created using a site called Twittersheep (www.twittersheep.com), which if you’re a Twitter user you can visit yourself and see who’s watching you…
Poetry and the Cyber Library
In the spirit of the BBC’s Poetry Season to ‘let poetry into your life’ I’m re-tweeting a link to a poem commissioned by Essex County Council to mark the inauguration of their new ELAN library computer system, posted by a librarian on Twitter. The link will open the poem in Word. http://bit.ly/hW6Ok
2 early starts in the name of journalism and copyright
I’ve been in London for a couple of days, obsessively seeking out free wifi so that I can test out the new L&LR netbook PC, which is one of these.
Observations on the device: 9″ screen fine; mini-keyboard fine and actually easier to use in a confined space (e.g. the 17:03 from King’s Cross to Grantham, coach D, seat 15A) than a normal keyboard; but the tiny, tiny trackpad has been a problem for me (I don’t mind them, normally); I haven’t yet figured out how to turn off the screen resize option which kicks in every time you accidentally brush the pad with your thumb.
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On Monday I accompanied Prof. John Tulloch of the Lincoln School of Journalism to a meeting at Channel 4’s offices. The meeting was about the possibility of Lincoln’s taking on an important archive of journalistic material. I’ll be assisting the LSJ in writing the case for the University’s involvement. Watch this space.
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On Tuesday (today), I was at CILIP headquarters on Ridgemount Street, for a UKeiG seminar:
- ‘Essential Copyright for Information Professionals: What You Need to Know – and Preparing for Change!‘.
The presenter, talking all day with unbelievable stamina, was Laurence Bebbington of the University of Nottingham. He patiently took the delegates through the UK copyright landscape, from basic principles, through the complexities of moral, database, and performance rights, licencing, and the particular concerns attached to copyright in the digital domain; before finishing with a discussion of Gowers Review and the future.
Single, key idea of the day: librarians must engage with national debates around the future of intellectual property law.
After recent conversations at Lincoln, this seminar couldn’t have been more timely. I hope it’ll be really useful in informing my(our) conversations with the faculties, with updating our guide for academic staff, and with arranging our own programme of training.
Some ‘live’ notes and conversations from the day are available on the social-networking site Twitter, tag #copyright.
Do you Yammer?
Joss introduced me to Yammer today… it’s a ‘microblogging’ service, similar to Twitter or the Facebook ’status update’, but designed for work – it looks like an interesting way for groups of dispersed colleagues to keep in touch with what the others are up to in a non-threatening way!
There’s a small (6 users!) but growing University of Lincoln presence.
- Web address: http://www.yammer.com/
Paul
