Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Twitter and updating others about what is happening

Many of you may be familiar with RSS feeds. Another option to post updates is through twitter. Most sites are set up to allow a user to receive RSS feeds but these are very one sided, while twitter is about having the capacity to interact with what you are monitoring.

With twitter the user can reply to what has been posted, thus making it more interactive. Through the ability to follow they can also have the tweets appear in their own space. When someone is following another all their followers can see what they are monitoring. An example of using twitter to update others on what is happening can be demonstrated with Creative Commons Australia at http://twitter.com/ccAustralia.

With twitter the user can set up software on their desktop to access their twitter account. Installing software like twhirl makes monitoring those that they are following as well as updating their own tweets much easier.

The other aspect with twitter that makes it more than a match for an RSS feed is like with RSS feeds twitter can be set up as a feed into another site.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ever wonder where YouTube videos go to die?

Well, now you can check...
YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. They monitor the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

In the click clique?

www.dontclick.it is a webspace without buttons to click on. You navigate by moving the mouse to whatever interests you... and pausing there.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Clouds in the OPAC

Imagine a library catalogue record made up from two distinct sources. The first part is the bibliographic data which we already have, but below this is a tag cloud fed in from Library Thing. For those of us who are visually receptive...

Source: LibraryStream

Panadol or Prozac in the first aid box?

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) Report found that most adults diagnosed with depression have full time jobs. Reporting on the relationship between Past Year Major Depressive Episode (MDE) among Full-Time Workers Aged 18 to 64 and Occupational Categories, "Education, Training and Library" ranked 6th at 8.7%.

Source: United States Department of Health and Human Services: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration