Jason Puckett.net

Cindi Trainor included my “How to make a Libguide” page on her Librarian’s Guide to LibGuides in the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase.  Thanks, Cindi!

ALA has created a Google Maps mashup listing all ALA-accredited library and information science programs. I know a lot of people (myself included) come to librarianship later in life when we’re married, own homes, etc., and relocating can be a major concern.

It’s nice to see ALA using some technologies a little more modern than HTML.

ALA-Accredited LIS Programs on Google Maps

Slideshare offers a very cool feature they call “slidecasting,” syncing audio with a slide presentation.

Unfortunately, they not only make the common mistake of referring to an mp3 as a podcast, they’re actually using an RSS icon to indicate an mp3.

I keep meaning to do more with Slideshare. It seems like it would be a great way to do tutorials and such. We’ve got an audio tour in the works that’s basically a slideshow with narration even though we’re producing it as Quicktime video. I should consider doing a Slideshare version.

I admit I’m usually amused by articles like this:

More (Unintentionally) Funny Student E-Mail Messages to Professors

But check out this quote:

“A student who didn’t show up for class on Monday morning just Facebooked me to ask where the class was. I am not responding to a Facebook message! Cripes!”

…um. This just makes me splutter in incomprehension.

Why on earth would a professor bother to set up a Facebook account and then refuse to use it to communicate with students? Yes, it’s possible that she set it up to network with friends and colleagues, but I’m willing to bet at least a dollar that that isn’t the case here. If it were, she wouldn’t consider text transmitted via Facebook’s server to be somehow inferior to text transmitted via the campus e-mail server.

A while back I got an e-mail from Twitter: “zotero is now following you on Twitter.”

Cool! They (he? she? does Zotero have a gender? It writes about itself in the first person) must have found me via my Zotero workshop outline, which I had sent to them. They (I’ll stick to “they” until I learn otherwise) don’t update very often, but maybe if they had more followers they would. It’d be a great low-key way to drop news and updates about the application.

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.

http://www.last.fm/user/neilhimself/

“Your musical compatibility rating with neilhimself is:

High

You share a few artists in common, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, The Dresden Dolls, and The Velvet Underground.”

Last week Karin Dalziel blogged a couple of great posts: Professional Social Networking: Why and How and Do’s and Do not’s of professional social networking. Every LIS student and new librarian should read these! I can personally attest that her strategies for visibility work for her — I found her by looking for CC-licensed Zotero images on Flickr for a web guide on citation managers I was making, and noticed her user icon a day later on a twitter feed and then went on to check out her blog from there.

I’ve actually set up a “New Librarianship” folder in my Bloglines to keep an eye on some of the great blogs on the topic I’ve run across.