some meta

My last post wasn’t titled because I didn’t know 100% if it was going to appear. It did and maybe you were wondering what that was all about.

I’ve added a section to the site titled “Presentations” so that I have a place to send people after I give one. Not all of the presentations are links to the content. Yet.

Thanks for reading and have a good week.

internet librarian 2004

Through some crazy turn of events, along with Barbara Fullerton and Sabrina Pacifici I’ll be on the closing keynote panel at internet librarian 2004. It is titled “Wacky World of Gadgets: The 70’s and Beyond!” and should be fun. I’m a bit of a gadget enthusiast, but I’m sure there are some I’ve missed. If there’s some sort of cool tool you think needs to be mentioned, just lemme know.

Aside from this, I’ll be talking with Michael about IM as well as giving two quicky presentations. One will be with Jenny about the books on MP3 program, ListenIllinois and the other will be a short primer about library and newish technologies.

A Starter OPML File for Librarians*

Blake of lisnews fame wrote an interesting post on his personal lisnews blog/journal today. I’ve been waiting all day to write about it. The jist of his post is that he, although he started lisnews, doesn’t read many blogs.

Blake hasn’t been using an aggregator. It isn’t a surprise when he writes, “Part of the reason is I don’t go blog reading much is just forget to find my way back, my bookmarks file hasn’t been touched in ages…” Steven has encouraged Blake to get on the RSS train, I know. Blake knows this too. The last sentence of his post is “Steven M. Cohen keeps my prayers would be answered by an RSS reader, maybe he’s right. “

I happen to think Steven is right. I’m not sure if Blake has fooled around with bloglines before, but I decided to populate an account for him, forcing him to at least try it. I exported the OPML out of my bloglines account, imported it into an new one and then edited it a bit.

I’m about to change the email address associated with this new account to Blake’s address so he’ll get an email from them. I’ve already sent him an email telling him the password. We’ll see what he thinks of all this.

If you are interested in setting up any kind of aggregator for librarian colleagues of yours, don’t duplicate my work. Grab the OPML file that I’ve created, I’ll call it A Starter OPML File for Librarians*, by right-clicking, and saving. Send it to friends and have them import it into a desktop aggregator or pull a bloglines trick and import it there.

*The title probably should be elongated with “interested in technology” but that wouldn’t make it as catchy.

fhew!

Hiya. It is kinda late and I’m doing some coding. I took a break to check out what my aggregator could distract me with for 10 minutes and I ended up unsubscribing to every BBC News feed which was coming in. There were so many posts that I would never get to reading. It was a liberating experience. No more guilt hitting the “Mark All As Read” button.

call for interviews

Hiya. Michael Stephens and I are preparing an article and would like to interview as many front line library bloggers as possible. So if you work in a library and write about it, please take a few minutes to answer some questions for us. Please spread the word all over town too. Below is a link to the questions with some more info. Thanks.

http://www.walkingpaper.org/survey.txt