Below are a couple great presentations I came across via the Slideshare newsletter. The first one is from a year ago and does a bang-up job of explaining what social media is and why it's important. The second is a sequel of sorts that updates some of the information for today.
This is especially timely since I'm doing a presentation for a local service club in a couple weeks about…what social media is and why it's important.
But even though it's basically the same topic, I don't think I'll crib (too much) from these presentations. And I'm pretty sure I won't title my presentation “What The Fuck Is Social Media?”
On the long weekend, we made a loop hitting Fort Qu'Appelle (a resort community an hour outside Regina), Katepwa Beach, our family cottage on the other side of the lake, our farm, Indian Head where I grew up then down to Weyburn to spend the night with Shea's folks at their camp site.
Here's one of my favourite photos from the day…
Not sure what it is about the long weekend but here's one we took at almost exactly the same time last year. Crops are late this year and man, it feels like our weather's been crappy since last winter. Freezing cold winter, ugly cool spring, a summer where I bet we haven't had three days over +30.
Some of the folks on MetaFilter are reporting bugs but after a few trials (admittedly with fairly well-known and recent books), I had no problems with BookSeer. It's nothing ground-breaking – simply a pretty cool interface to present the book recommendations provided by Amazon and LibraryThing in a unique, streamlined fashion.
“I honestly believe that I have the best job in the library.”
That made me think, shouldn't a library's goal be to hire people who *all* say that (sincerely, of course), no matter what their job at the library is?
I used to love any sort of riddles, word games, math puzzles and the like when I was younger. So when I came across this one on Reddit tonight and it brought back my childhood. (Er, that is if my childhood was spent trying to figure out how to time the stock market perfectly!)
My guess for this question was one whole number lower than the average guess of the 1000 economists surveyed which you'll learn when you click on the link below.
So now I'll break to let you read the question and click through to the puzzle for an explanation of how the 1000 economists guessed…
It's interesting that the average guess turned out to be only halfway there (I thought I was all the way!) in that, if you then take 2/3 of that average answer, you get a number that only 3 people out of 1000 picked!
This still isn't the “right” answer anyhow, only the most common answer, at least according to the top comment in the Reddit thread, which attempts to explain some of the logic behind people's different guesses.
I especially love that some people picked numbers higher than 67 which
should be the ceiling for answers when the conditions are to pick a
number that is 2/3 of a range of guesses between 0-100. Professionaleconomists made this mistake. Man, no wonder there's a recession going on! )
Anyhow, click through and hopefully this will all make sense.
(Oh, and in case I was being too cryptic above, I guessed 25 but should've guessed 17 which is 2/3 of what I picked as my final answer and although, not the right answer (that would be 0), it's the “right” guess if you were trying to pick
closest to the average of all the other guesses.)
As I mentioned before, the first book I downloaded to read on my new iPhone is “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow. I'm quite enjoying it – both the story and the convenience of always having a book with me in a very compact form. I also just finished “Free: The Future of A Radical Price” by Chris Anderson in the old-fashioned dead tree format.
Reading these books, which deal with overlapping themes in some ways, made me realise what I think will finally be the think to make e-books gain widespread acceptance.
I should step back a second.
When I worked in publishing from 1997-2001, digitization, e-books and any and all related subjects were very hot topics of conversation (as I would imagine they still are.)
In 2000, I was fortunate enough to attend the Association of Canadian Publishers AGM in Toronto and I remember e-books being a major theme of the gathering. They had displays of the current cream-of-the-crop readers and I remember one presenter saying “By 2005, we expect that fully 50% of the population will be using e-book readers.” Well, like other famous tech predictions, you know how that one turned out.
Although e-books are gaining ground every year and especially in the last few years with the growing prevalence of much improved e-book readers and smart phones, they still haven't reached anywhere near a mass acceptance.
So reading that Chris Anderson book, the light bulb went off as to what would finally make people adopt e-books in a more widespread fashion. Right now, it's a pretty standard function to be able to highlight and search your own e-books on a single device. But what if there was a web site where you could easily upload, tag, comment on, search and do all those other standard things you do on YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing and other social networking sites – except instead of videos or photos or books as stand-alone objects, this site would be all about user-submitted quotations from e-books?
Google Books has this function to a degree but obviously, there's a huge difference between a machine doing the search and the social web, human-driven way of doing things (at least for now.)
Imagine you're doing interested on “library science”. You could search this site for quotes tagged “MLIS”. Or search the quotes themselves. Or find a user who tends to upload quotes in that subject area a lot – maybe a current MLIS student or a tech-savvy prof?
Oh yeah, this idea (c) Jason Hammond 2009 All Rights Reserved. ™. Patent Pending. All around The Block, All Around the Universe, So Help Me, Gord.
Loudon Wainwright III played on the closing night of the Regina Folk Fest last night. He didn't play this ode to breastfeeding (at least I don't think so – Shea and I were still outside the main concert area playing with Pace in the kiddie park so only heard his set from a distance) so I thought I'd post it here since Pace is now over two years old and still breastfeeding. Good for him (literally!)
A web site called BachelorsDegreesOnline.com has posted a list of 100 Best Blogs for Librarians of the Future and guess who's #100? Yep, that's me! I guess if I'm not #1, #100 isn't a bad spot to be in terms of where you'll get noticed – especially in a list that long.
They gave me a head's up that they'd be linking to me and I have to admit I thought it was just another piece of blog spam – a trend I've noticed lately, both in people linking to me and also from those who are posting comments is that they'll take a moment to personalize their e-mail just a wee bit (I just deleted a comment in my John Hughes post that talked about how much “Breakfast Club meant to them” then linked back to a Runescape-related site ) rather than being completely blatant about being a desperate attempt for Pagerank.
The fact that the site doesn't actually mention library degree programs on its front page – when you select “Masters” programs or when you browse through their list of Degrees by Subject – makes me think my initial assessment isn't far off. Maybe not 100% spam but definitely not a totally altruistic link either.
Oh well, it's all about the reputation/attention economy so why not let them link to me and I'll link back to them and maybe we all get to bask in each other's Google-enhanced glow?
Plus that page
with the list of the “100 Best Blogs for Future Librarians” is titled
“Learn-gasm” and has a picture of a saucy-looking librarian-type with
glasses pictured so what could possibly be suspect about that!
[Edit: Jessamyn did a post on why we shouldn't link to these types of sites because of how it undermines Google's search algorithms. I don't tend
to think of my site as having a lot of weight in the biblioblogosphere
and therefore, the link I made to this site as being relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. Plus, in my post, I said the site was spammy and that it was a dumb site overall (“Learn-gasm”? Seriously?) but it's true that Google's robots don't understand that sort of context…yet. So I do realise that my linking to them is a vote for their site in some way – even if I do it in a somewhat tonque-in-cheek manner. But I guess, even if they're a thinly veiled attempt to get eyeballs to their off-shore degree programs or whatever, the list they've come up with is still useful so, after some internal debate, I think I'm going to let my link stand and maintain my belief that people who do end up on this site will know it's crap or follow the links to sites that are actually helpful. I'll also continue with my hope that soon Skynet Google will even figure out how to tell the crap from the good stuff even better than they already do!]
When I'm forced to choose, “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” is one of the movies I often pick as my favourite movie of all-time. “Breakfast Club” pretty much defined my high school days with its perfect delineation of the main high school cliques (as well as being a script which is the rare example of not having a wasted line or scene) and “Some Kind of Wonderful”…well, I'll just say that one reminds me of high school a lot too!
So first it was Michael Jackson and now it's John Hughes and it feels like a lot of MAJOR 1980's-defining icons are dying WAY earlier than they should. I mean, obviously, we're all going to feel older as we get older. But it's like that game that you sometimes play – “how old do you feel?” and for me, the answer is usually much younger than I am.
Except that lately, I'm feeling my age. Not numerically but in the sense that I no longer feel like a young person. I feel like a…well, not a middle-aged person either but whatever the step is between the two.
I don't fit into the 18-25 demographic anymore, let alone the 26-35 one. I have a kid. And a mortgage. (I think) I've finally accepted that there's no way I could ever join a rock band (which was always a possibility in my 20's – lack of talent notwithstanding! I'll do a blog post about my “folk punk” band, The Banned, someday! ) Or pick up and move to Europe for a few months like I did at 22. Or the fact that I'm generally going to bed by 10pm (if not earlier) and getting up at 7am (if not earlier) every morning.
Shea and I had a backyard fire the other night which we stayed up quite late for, enjoying one of the few nice evenings we've had this summer. It made me wonder when the last time I stayed up all night was. And it had been so long, that I couldn't even remember when this was something that used to be a regular occurrence. Similarly, I can't remember the last time I was rip-roaring drunk (er, but that would be expected now, wouldn't it? ).
