February 2007
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Month February 2007

My Friend Flickr

My Friend Flickr is an article from Edutopia about using Flickr in a school setting. The ideas presented relate to school and public library use of as well. What I like most are the good tips about exploiting Flickr’s fairly rich privacy options to customize how walled you might want the garden to be. What’s more, Portland tech-principal Tim Lauer gets a quote.

better than a bookmark

I don’t think I’ll ever look at a bookmark suggesting book titles in the same way again! Check out this video from the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.

This video injects the humans and humanity of the library into the library’s marketing. So much more than a static list of titles could ever do. Not that those lists don’t have their place, but this type of marketing makes a personal connection. And we all know by now that people like connecting with others, and the web is now a big part of this for many people.

This video appeared in my box as a submission for the 2007 InfoTubey Awards. There will be an awards ceremony on Tuesday the 17th of April at Computers in Libraries 2007. I get to co-host the event with Bill Spence on Info Today and Rebecca Jones of Dysart & Jones Associates. We’ve received some great submissions so it’ll be an entertaining show!

yahoo pipes

Yahoo! pipes is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen lately. This new tool lets non-programmers create web mashups in a sandbox like environment. The tech barrier to making mashups is being lowered, just like weblogs pretty much smashed the barrier to putting content on the web.

The interface consists of easy to understand modules that are arranged through drag and drop.

I was super impressed when I put in an OPAC URL into the “URL Builder” module and it parsed out all of the URL’s elements:

No progress on doing anything useful with it yet though.

I did however clone a pipe already made and created a feed of Flickr photos related to keywords coming from LISNews posts.

Right now there’s a post on LISNews about Seattle Public Library and the “March of the Penguins” based “March of the Librarians” video, so in the photo stream there are pics of SPL and, well, penguins! The “March…” video, by the way, is entirely well done.

Yahoo! pipes could be an interesting tool in the kit of libraries’ web development folks. Mash away!