Thing 32 – Google Maps & Mashups

Oh, good, an excuse to learn more about Google Maps, one of the most exciting new products on the Web. Also one of the quirkiest. A search for William Mitchell College of Law returned the correct address, but the marker was in White Bear Lake. A search for the Minnesota State Law Library returned an address on the East Side. Searches for the Minnesota Judicial Center or by our street address fared no better. Our street name—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.—is a mouthful. Also it was changed in the not-too-distant past from Constitution Ave. Take a look at the correct information on my map, then try searching it yourself so see the weirdness that results. The map I made shows the law libraries in St. Paul. Maybe someone will find it helpful.


View Law Libraries in St Paul Minnesota in a larger map

There were some interesting mashups on the lists, such as the map of UFO sightings. Our library doesn’t deal with geographical questions very often, but it is good to know that if a map would make a good visual, we can now make one.

Thing 31 – More Twitter

Oh, gad, not more Twitter. After Thing 27, I was at the presence stage of Twitter, willing to give it a try, but that Thing took so much time for so little reward that now, faced with another Twitter time sink, I am in the denial stage. Twitter is terribly tiresome. My library, on the other hand, is in a form of the dumping stage. We are using Twitter in place of having a blog or press releases.

Personally, I see Twitter more as a black hole than as the big bang right now. Also, I don’t want to give the whole world “enough information about you so they have some sense of who you are as a person.” Haven’t we lost enough privacy in the computer age? We have shovel the rest of it out the door ourselves? Isn’t it bad enough that your FaceBook friends now have instruction on how to turn your FaceBook posts into Tweets without your consent? Do you really trust your friends to get the privacy setting right? And that 9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World article? Admittedly some of those ideas sounded good, especially if you have a mobile device (which I don’t), but an equal number sounded scary.

I may come back and look at Thing 31 again later when I have time to waste, but to sum up, Twitter is not currently part of my social networking plan. You don’t like that? Sue me.

Thing 30 - More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

RSS and Delicious (typists are glad they dropped the periods) were two of the first 23 Things that I have used the most, so it was good to see them again. I check my RSS reader regularly, usually just skimming the titles of most articles. That is one way to keep up; another is to be selective about what you subscribe to. I try for a balance between the two. For my favorite, read-all-the-posts feeds I also added them to my new NetVibes page.

So far, I have been using Delicious for the bookmarks. The most extensive use of the service is the one I set up for use by the reference librarians.






For my personal page, I have added a subscription for a few tags that I would like to find other sites for. We will see how that works. This isn’t an area where the keywords would be unique. That is the downside of tags—no controlled vocabulary for the subjects that need one.

Thing 29 – Google Tools

I signed up for Google Alerts to track the serial I am writing for the MALL Newsletter and discovered someone who blogs under the name of Conan the Librarian. (I never claimed the play on words was original to me.) Another alert looks for references to my library. That one should not generate so much traffic. Finally, I am tracking an ongoing research interest in case I ever get back to finishing that book. So far, it is retrieving blog traffic and things for sale. This could be a really useful feature though. I have used the update features on ProQuest and WilsonWeb to help me keep research projects and a pathfinder up-to-date. It is nice to find something that works for the Web.

For the other tool, I decided to take a closer look at the Gmail account I had set up for the original 23 Things. After setting a theme (if it is prettier will I use it more?) I tried having my yahoo mail forwarded. Guess what: it doesn’t work with the base account. Figures. I did find some interesting things in the Labs. Under Who Thought That Was a Good Idea? is the Default Reply to All. I know too many people who have gotten themselves in trouble by accidentally replying to all with a message intended only for one. Needless to say, I didn’t pick that one. The forgotten attachment detector, on the other hand, seems like a really good idea. I also added a couple more, such as the task list. If GMail really doesn’t get spammed, I may have to start using it more.

Thing 28 – Customized Home Pages

After reading the reviews, I chose NetVibes to create a home page because it seemed to have the features I wanted. I had tried iGoogle in the first 23 Things program and agree with the reviewer who said it was ugly. Also Google is getting a bad rep privacy-wise.

Netvibes was fairly easy to set up, although I couldn’t figure out why I seemed to have a blank column on the left until I added an RSS feed. I do like having my FaceBook, Twitter, Delicious and Gmail accounts all available from the page, as well as weather, a calendar, a calculator and Google Maps. Convenience counts. I hardly ever used the iGoogle page, but I will use this one.

Our library already has a customized page, housed on our shared network drive, for staff to use at work. It looks like the top page of our Web site except that it includes links to our subscription services that are available only in-house. I think this is preferable to using a third-party site. I wouldn’t want all my personal links on a shared site.

Thing 27 -- Twitter

My first experience of Twitter was at a conference. The presenter was talking about Web 2.0 tools, including Twitter. One of the other speakers was in the audience, sitting toward the front with his laptop open Twittering about the presentation as it was going on. The speaker treated it as part of the discussion, even putting the tweets up on the screen for the audience. On any other subject, I believe the keyboard tapping sounds would have been distracting.

My experience trying to sign up for Twitter did not get off to a good start. It was the middle of the afternoon and the connection sl-oooo-w. At about 3:45 I got the fail whale. (Cool!) It was time to sign out for the day. I did finally succeed (my Twitter user name is BlankAnn.) Trouble is, I have a hard time thinking of anything worthwhile to say.

It seems to me that Twitter in libraries makes the most sense as an adjunct to the library’s blog or website—assuming the reader would want more information. Our library has no blog, but we decided to set up a Twitter feed. Last I checked, we had 22 followers, many of them news organizations.