Jason Puckett.net

Blockbuster is finally catching up to the demand for digital media… sort of.

They’re piloting a program that allows customers to — get this — bring their portable media players into stores, plug them into a kiosk, and download videos.

What’s wrong with this model?  First of all, why on earth would anyone bother to drive to a store to buy digital media?  One major advantage of using media in digital forms is its portability: you can grab it online without having to go anywhere.  Consumers accustomed to the convenience of iTunes are never going to go for this.

Second, the pilot program only works with Archos media players.  (Do you know anyone with an Archos player? I don’t.  I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of them before this story.  When I decided not to go for an iPod this time around, I don’t even remember considering them.)  Like Netlibrary’s audiobooks, any program offering digital media content that doesn’t work with the most popular portable player out there is doomed to failure.

The Hollywood Reporter news story refers to the transaction as a “rental,” rather than a purchase, which if true suggests that there’s some sort of DRM in place too.  That’s probably the third strike against this idea.

Libraries, pay attention to everything Blockbuster is doing wrong here.  It’s still far, far easier for users to download bootleg movies in the comfort of their own browser that will work on any device they want.  Media providers are still offering alternatives that are more difficult and less useful to the consumer than piracy, and they’ll continue to fail.

[Photo credit: RocketRaccoon]

Flashing Lights Warn Library Visitors to Be Quiet

“When [noise] exceeds the level by at least 15 decibels, the red light illuminates and a siren can go off, too.”

Good plan.  That’ll help maintain a subdued study space.

(Via Wired Campus)

Thanks to the Swiss Army Librarian for posting this tool: The Awesome Highlighter.

It allows you to select and literally highlight text on a web page, and creates a custom URL for your highlighted version that you can share. It adds a “jump to highlights” link at the top of the page to make it easy to spot your emphasized section.

For example, I highlighted a few words on the Library Society of the World FAQ. You can see my highlights at http://awurl.com/lxsevi52186.

How great would this be for IM or e-mail reference, to point out a particular area on a typical over-texted library page (cough)? The only hitch I can see is that it wouldn’t work with most of our licensed databases since they don’t generate stable URLs.

100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better

via iLibrarian.

Of course, now that I have a non-iPod media player, some of these may not do me any good — I know iPods can handle text (though I never used that feature), not so sure about my Zen.  Still, tons of links and info here I’d never seen before!

I’ve been playing a game called PMOG: Passively Multiplayer Online Game (currently in closed beta, but I have some invitations available; if you want one, leave a comment). It sort of adds a second background layer to the web — one with a game in it. Players install a Firefox extension and accumulate points as they visit different websites during the course of their daily surfing. You can lay mines as traps for other players on sites (in the first screenshot, I tripped a mine laid on wikipedia.org by another player; don’t worry, my browser was wearing armor so I’m fine), or leave portals (links) from one site to another.

What I’m interested in here is the missions feature. If you’re not familiar with MMOGs, a common gameplay feature is the quest-giver or mission giver, who offer tasks for your character to complete (in World of Warcraft, they have big yellow question marks over their heads so you can spot them). In PMOG, players leave mission starting points all over the web, and you either happen across missions serendipitously or pick them from a list on the PMOG site. (In this photo I ran across a mission on flickr.com.)

A mission is basically a tour of a series of websites with explanatory text. Since you get PMOG “datapoints” for visiting new sites, you get points as you complete missions — but the really interesting feature is that it provides a way for one user to lead another through a series of sites and comment on each one. I haven’t seen another application that does this sort of thing. My first thought was “Jeez, I wish there was an easy way for us to use this to create tutorials.” How cool would it be to add our own commentaries on database sites for our users? Or lead them from one database to another? Or to a research guide?

An application like this allows for commentary to take place without interfering with the actual browsing experience, or requiring any content to be added to the page itself. It makes me think of the help text that appears onscreen during a game play tutorial, which prompts the user to try certain actions but allows actual play to continue. I’ve been thinking for a while that game tutorials were a help model that libraries should try to emulate. They usually take place in the live game environment, so you don’t have to read a manual before starting to actually play; they just add a level of instruction to the live experience.

iPods are not machine-washable.

A couple of weeks after I discovered this, I bought a Creative Zen 16gb mp3 player. My friend Adrien has dubbed it “Swanky McSexypants.”

I think I did well in choosing this one. I had to give up 14 gigs of storage, since my old iPod used a hard drive and this one uses flash RAM (Creative has a new 32g model coming out, but it was more than I wanted to spend right now). I don’t think I’ll miss the space, though; at a certain point I just don’t really notice the difference. My music collection is over fifty gigs, so I can only ever load a subset anyway.

Things I like:

• No DRM. I loved my iPod, but I hated the artificial restrictions on moving my own media back and forth. The Zen allows me direct access to its file system without garbling filenames, and allows me to copy files back and forth no matter how many computers I want to plug the device into. I can also choose my own media library software (Mediamonkey, at the moment) instead of being stuck with iTunes.
• Nice display, certainly as clear as the iPod video. I haven’t played a video file on it yet, and may never do so.
• I think the battery life is better than on my iPod, probably due to the lack of moving parts. Hard to say for sure.
• A customizable shortcut button. I have mine mapped to “shuffle all tracks,” which is how I usually listen to my music anyway.
• A “look up artist/album” feature, for when I hear something I like and want to hear more of it.
• More features than an iPod! It’s got an FM radio and a voice recorder, and it takes SD cards for extra storage space.
• Uses a standard USB cable for charging and syncing, no proprietary plugs.

Things I don’t like: Not much so far.

• The controls are slightly more awkward to use than the iPod. I sometimes have to squint at the buttons to figure out which one I want, and more than once I’ve skipped tracks forward or backward when I was just trying to page through a menu. Not a big deal; I’m just adjusting to a new interface. But I was used to the iPod almost immediately.
• The radio — and I’m really nitpicking here — only allows you to save stations by way of an autoscan. There’s no way to enter a frequency manually, and if it programs in stations you don’t want, and you delete them, it leaves a gap in your presets. In other words, if I delete all the stations I don’t want, I might have to page from preset 1, through 2-4 which are empty, to preset 5.

Though actually, I never listen to the radio — I always have a player full of my music and podcasts.

My institution just announced a contract with iTunes U. I’m going to be as involved as possible with the pilot program this fall, and I’m really excited.  I’ve really felt like there’s a bottleneck in my team, as far as producing a/v materials goes — there are only two or three of us doing it, and I think there’s a sense that it’s hard and mysterious.

My sense of how iTunes U works is that it will make the publishing part very easy, and I’m hoping that this will get the ball rolling and inspire more people at my library to record instruction materials.  As I’ve mentioned before, our real problem with producing podcasts has been the lack of an easy publishing platform, so this should remove that hurdle.

We get lots of questions at the end of the semesters and before midterm breaks about audiobooks, when our students are getting ready to travel home and want something to listen to en route. As a research library, we just don’t have many.

I’m going to set up a web guide on free online audiobooks so I’ll have somewhere to direct these users rather than just saying “Sorry.” I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner: I have been collecting audiobook links since I got my iPod last summer.

Some stuff I’d include: Podiobooks.com (optional donations), Simply Audiobooks (has some free content), AudiobooksForFree.com and LibriVox (public domain). Fiction podcasts like Cory Doctorow’s Craphound; Pseudopod and Escape Pod.  Archive.org’s audiobooks section.

I haven’t really started searching yet, and probably won’t get the chance to really work on it until after my vacation. Any good sites I don’t know about? I’ll add them to this post.

Lifehacker: 13 book hacks for the library crowd

Well, some of these don’t have much to do with libraries, but they’re kinda neat anyway. I wish that LibraryBooks toolbar weren’t Mac-only (it’s the only OS I don’t use).