I’ve finally gotten around to watching a video that I’ve had saved in my google reader for weeks - We Think.  (Found via Web 2.0 (Video/Powerpoint))

It’s an animation that accompanies a book that was published in the UK recently, also titled We Think. It’s about the web and creativity and sharing and where that will take us. Whilst not directly on Web 2.0 it is about the concepts and technologies behind it, and is about the direction that the web is heading.

The first three chapters of the book are available online here.  Go, read.  I know I will be.

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Closing a bunch of tabs on my Firefox here, so I thought I’d share some interesting search related resources I’ve come across in the last few weeks:

Brijit is a tool that aggregates content and abstracts it to 100 words or less. It has a pretty comprehensive scope, and covers some sources that you might not otherwise think to keep track of, including certain subscription-only sources. They are primarily of consumer-interest (think things like Wired, GQ, even Playboy!), but does also contain some more business-oriented or ’serious’ sources, such as BusinessWeek, The Economist, The New York Times, and so on. Though many of these sources do have rss feeds of their own, it might be useful to instead get this aggregated short form content. They also produce feeds by subject, rather than by publication, which is also a pretty awesome feature, though I’m not sure of the comprehensiveness of this service. Though I’ve subbed in to a couple of feeds on this, I haven’t yet been really scanning them for content in a serious way, but as a starting point it looks like a pretty useful resource that might cover some content that you may otherwise not have access to.

Voluminous is a catalogue of free e-books, with apparently over 20,000 books listed. It’s not free, but is a paid-service (though there is a free trial) – it’s also only available for Mac, not PC. Why do all the interesting book-apps come to mac first? /grumble/ It’s kind of interesting, but as it’s searching books that are in the public domain anyway, I’m not entirely sure that I’d be keen to pay for it, as you should be able to search for them for free somewhere. The screen-caps look nice though – think iTunes for books – and I suppose if you were really, really into ebooks it might be worth the purchase.

Searchme is a new search engine that visually breaks down searches into conceptual categories to help you find what you’re looking for. It’s dynamic, so the categories pop up and change as you type, which is pretty neat. Searching for, say, ‘rain’ (what? No – of course I’m not frustrated with the weather!), brings up categories such as weather, music, poetry, (the dreariness must make people more creative!), software, etc. If you add ‘boot’ to the search, you get categories for clothes and sales added. The search results themselves are visual, so you can see the page before you click on it – this doesn’t really enamor me, I like lists, but I suppose if you’re a really visual searcher, or knew what you were looking for, it might help. I don’t think this is a desperately practical search engine, but it’s quite pretty, and rather interesting, so I thought it was worth a mention.

GoogleHacks is seriously old news by now, but for some reason it’d completely passed me by. It’s a pretty neat tool that lets you perform quite complicated and powerful Google searches. Now, whilst you technically can do these searches manually, it’s nice to be able to have a tool that makes it that much easier. It’s mostly focused towards finding new media, and lets you search for various file types.

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Today I came across a very cool website - Get London Reading. It’s done by Booktrust with support from 3M. From the name I thought it was going to be a new initiative for getting more people to read (which it is), but the best bit about it is the Google maps mashup they have that shows books set in London.   Being a Google map, you can zoom into street level and find books by each area or street, as well as click on each cover to get a short synopsis and author and publisher details.

There is also a free edition of the Rough Guide to London by the Book, which sounds fantastic and who doesn’t like random trivia about London?

There’s currently only around 400 books, but it has potential. I’ll be using it to find new books to read that’s for sure!

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A few months ago I wrote about the Asus Eee PC, and how much I loved it and wanted one. I never got around to actually buying one, and I’m glad I didn’t as they’re about to bring out the latest version and it sounds even better! The screen is bigger, the hard drive is bigger (20Gb instead of 4Gb), and my favourite, gestures on the mouse pad! There’s a review here which goes into detail about all the changes.

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I read a post yesterday about how in Japan, rather than putting a whole URL on an advert, they tend to use a search box with key words in it, so that if you search for those terms, the product will come up. There is some interesting discussion in the comments about how this relates to Japanese culture in particular, with increased use of internet-through-mobiles, and the problems of turning Japanese characters into URLs, and things like that. But the thing that struck me most is how it really is a sign of the ways in which people use the internet are changing, and how ubiquitous search has become.

Since I’ve started using del.icio.us I’ve tended to shy away from bookmarking sites on my computer, particularly at home. I have a relatively large list of bookmarks at work, as they’re quite specific, but at home I don’t have a single site bookmarked. But this does mean that I use search a lot. And not for complicated things. Often, it’s for desperately simple things, to the point where I’m guilty of searching for ‘maps’ or ‘calendar’ so that I can get to the Google variants of both. And yes, I know that they’re linked just from the top of the Google homepage, but in Firefox it’s quicker for me to search for them – I don’t even have to open up a new tab. Searching is a whole lot quicker than opening up a new tab/window and typing in the tedious ‘doubleyoudoublyoudoublyoudot’ of a URL, and that’s when you actually remember the whole thing. I’ve taken to using search as a giant, distributed search engine – so long as I can more or less remember what I’m looking for, chances are I’ll be able to find it.

I think I like the move towards search-oriented, rather than url-oriented advertising. Who knows, it might even help people develop better searching habits? If they can’t find what they want on the first try, they might be moved to searching a better way. What are your thoughts?

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It’s trainee season again, and if other firms are like mine, the library staff are busily arranging numerous training and induction sessions. As a result I find myself being asked to take training sessions.

I remember back in Uni, oral presentations were the worst. I hated practicing (still do) so I would only do one or two run throughs and hope for the best. And inevitably, the sessions usually went badly. I’d fumble and stutter and speak too fast or too quietly. Even presenting at a day long symposium in front of industry people (including people from Red Hat) I was so nervous that I skipped points, and put myself down.

I’ve had more experience now and I actually enjoy doing the training sessions. Quite often the sessions turn out to be fun, depending on the content and, of course, the audience. I love having groups that are really involved and willing to have discussions. But every so often I’ll get a really unresponsive group and it’s hard to keep positive and smiling when the people in front of you would obviously rather be somewhere else.

Some of the things I try to remember when I’m doing a session that’s not going as well as it could be are:

• stay calm and positive
• act like you’re having a conversation with one of the audience members rather than the whole group
• have a list of all the points you need to make in front of you, and if need be tick each one off as you go
• and no matter what, don’t say anything disparaging about yourself, or your department.

Mostly, I just try to remember that they don’t know what I’m telling them, and therefore I have the upper hand. That usually makes me feel a bit better about the whole situation!

Peter Bromberg of Library Garden recently posted a top ten list of articles on giving good presentations which is a post I’ve bookmarked and will be working my way through. And another post I’ll be working my way through is Stop Doing Sucky Presentations by Emily Clasper over at Library Revolution.

In the same vein Michael Stephens of Tame the Web has a good post - Ten Tips for Technology Training. Most of the tips aren’t relevant for my training sessions, but the first one has a good point - “Be ready to present just from your notes if all the tech fails.”

Oh and tip eight - Rehearse, but go with the flow.

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We’re 1 today!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year already. It’s been a fun ride, and thanks to both the blog and tools like Twitter and Facebook we’ve developed quite a network of friends.

Thanks everyone for sticking by us, and we’re looking forward to the next year!

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I haven’t yet blogged about law.librarians, the newest experiment in group blogging from an international crew of law librarians, mostly, I think, because I’ve been spending so much time there!

It’s turning out to be a great community and resouce for everyone involved. Law.librarians is being used to share resources and links, both serious and not-so-serious, as well as becoming a place to ask community opinion on a question, to try and find a resources or just to chat with like-minded people.

As much as I like and enjoy using Twitter, I’m finding the ability to comment, and the better signal-to-noise ratio of law.librarians to be very appealing. If you haven’t gone to check it out yet, do drop by and have a look!

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I haven’t had a whole lot of spare time in, well, the last few months or so, and my online reading time has been very much curtailed. Because of this (rather unsurprisingly) I haven’t been reading a lot of blog posts. Particularly, I haven’t been reading almost any library related blog posts - I’d rather have the time to read them properly when I do, so I’ve been putting it off. Trying to trudge through this backlog of posts has made me think about how I read blog posts, and what makes me read a post when I’m short on time. And so (and because I don’t have time to write a real post - soon, I promise!), I present my top three things that will make me read your blog post when I’m short on time.

1. Give good head(line)

I read my feeds using Google Reader, and I have it set to show me just the headlines. If I don’t have a good idea of what you’re going to be talking about in your post from the headline, chances are I’m just going to skip it. I want to know if it’s a review or a short link or something not really relevant at all, and I want to know it without clicking through to the whole text (this is particularly true if you’re posting conference notes - there’s almost nothing more uninteresting to me than conference notes, unless it’s real-time conference notes, which are even worse).

2. Name your blog well

I have my feeds listed alphabetically, and I expect most people do too. It’s lazy, but it works. And chances are, if your blog starts with the letter T or below, by the time I get down there I probably have done all the reading I want to. The library community repeats itself a lot (hell, the blogosphere repeats itself a lot - it’s how the whole thing works), so if I’m reading en masse, I’ve probably covered most of the major recent issues by the time I get about half way down the list.

3. Don’t update too often

Whilst there’s something to be said for posting a lot, if I look at a feed that I haven’t looked at in a week or so, and it has double-digits of unread posts in, I’m probably just going to mark them all as read. Or at least not skim them very hard. Marking all as read goes double if you fill out your feed with useless things that I don’t want to read (I’m primarily thinking Twitter and del.icio.us updates here) - if I want to follow what you’re doing on other services, I’ll follow you there. Put the links in your sidebar and don’t bother me with them again.

Ok, ok, so these are all pretty self-explanatory, and mostly just go to show that I have too many feeds to read (a perennial problem of mine), and that I need a better way to manage my information flows (I’ve been playing a bit with Dapper lately - any thoughts on it?). I’d like to hear other thoughts though - what makes you stop in your tracks and not read something? Or what always will make you click into a post?

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Working in a law firm there will come a time when you are asked to do research that goes against your personal morals. Law firms have the potential to deal with controversial issues, that you may personally find uncomfortable.  These could be religious, environmental, personal/human rights issues or even just situations or topics that you don’t necessarily disagree with but find uncomfortable anyway.

Hopefully, this is something that you’ll only experience very rarely.  But how to deal with it when it does happen?

I’ve been pretty lucky in my career that I’ve been able to mostly avoid this happening. But ever since the first time it did, I’ve been aware that it might happen to me again. The first time I was able to avoid asking too many questions about why a particular piece of research was needed, and only had to do a very superficial job.  Next time, I might not be so lucky so I thought I’d brainstorm a few ways of dealing with it.

1.  Pass it on to a colleague. This is not so useful if you are in a one person library, or the sole researcher. But there is the possibility that one of your coworkers may not feel as strongly about an issue as you do.
2. Stand up and say something to the person who requested it. This probably isn’t a very good option, but you could at least make your feelings known. If you’re lucky, the requester might be someone who’s willing to pass the research onto a trainee, or even do it themselves. This does have the potential of backfiring unfortunately but could gain you respect as someone who stands up for what they believe in even if in the end you end up doing the research anyway.
3. Say nothing and do the research. This rankles with me, but if option one fails, this is the option I think I’d be most likely to go with unfortunately.  I don’t personally think I have the confidence yet to stand up to someone and say that no I’m not doing that piece of research.

And then I come to a screeching halt. So, is this something that any of you have had to deal with? And if so, what was your strategy?

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