Twitter Search and Google Alerts

For Thing #24: Feed Your (Library’s) Ego, I started with Twitter Search and searched "Criss Library." Most of the tweets were actually from the library or the university, but there was one from a student saying our women's restroom contains "the most flattering mirror in the world." Who knew? They all seem like rather ordinary mirrors to me.

I subscribed to the feed for that query. Over the course of the next several days, watching the Twitter Search feed for mentions of my library made me start to like Twitter a little.

Then I went over to Google Alerts and set up a comprehensive search for "Criss Library" to be performed once a day. (Including the quotation marks turned out to be important, as proximity does not seem to be weighted in Google searches. Without the quotation marks, the top hits included multiple articles which happened to include the words "criss-crossing" and "library," not particularly near one another.)

Before I could finish setting up Google Alerts, however, Google went down. (5/14/2009, shortly before 10:15 am CST.) Boom. I couldn't load Google, Blogger, Bloglines, or any other site associated with Google, including sites that had nothing more than a Google ad on them. But I could get non-Google sites to load. I searched Yahoo news for "Google," but I only got links to Google sites and services, no actual news about Google being down. So I went over to Twitter Search and searched Google. I immediately saw a passel of tweets about Google acting funky, taking a dive, etc. The hash tag #googlefail was already beginning to show up. Refreshing the page every few seconds provided more information, in many languages.

My respect for Twitter jumped enormously. It turned out to be the only useful news source on the Google outage. Even if I have nothing to tweet, I can envision myself using Twitter Search often from now on, whenever things go "weird." (Watch, now that I've said that, Twitter will be the next thing to go down.)

Google was back up in a few minutes, but still, it was truly astonishing how many things were inaccessible during that brief outage.

After Google was operating again, I went back and changed my Google Alert to a feed and added it to my Bloglines subscriptions.

Then as long as I was in Bloglines, I decided to try the Bloglines Citation Search. I did it exactly as described in the exercise, and I got NO citations for the Criss Library website.

To ensure that I wasn't just doing something wrong, I tried a citation search for UNO's website. That brought in quite a few hits.

So now I know, no one is citing our site. How sad.

Interestingly, however, when I did a citation search for my library's catalog (a different URL than our website), I actually got one hit. Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, it was from one of my own blog posts, which had a link to a catalog record.

One thing I learned, though, is that the citation search does not include the open web. If it did, the Wikipedia entry for my library would have come up, because it contains a link to my library's website.

I did subscribe to the feeds for the searches for my library's website and catalog, however, just in case anyone ever decides to cite us.

I didn't bother trying out Flickr Comments, because I have no photos uploaded to Flickr. However, on a whim, I went to Flickr and searched "Criss Library," and I was rewarded with a lot of nice photos of my library. I decided to see if there was any way I could subscribe to a feed of that search. After exploring a bit, I determined that it was not possible. From various posts on the Flickr forums, it seems like quite a few people would like to have feeds of search results. I wonder if in the future, Flickr will decide to add that feature. That would be very useful. (Note that feeds based on tags are possible. However, I didn't find that useful because the photos of my library were not tagged consistently).

After reading the description of FairShare, I decided to give it a pass for now. If no one is citing my library's website, then it's unlikely that anyone is reposting the content from any of our RSS feeds. Even if they are, since the feeds are mostly lists of new library materials for various collections, I don't think we'd care if anyone passed that info along. However, FairShare sounds like a cool service, and I might explore it later when I have more time.

Now, part 2 of this assignment. "Respond to at least one of the results you found. Wait a few days to see if they respond back." This is the hard part for me. I enjoy using technology, but I am not by nature a social person. I like to read discussions, not participate in them.

Darn these exercises, forcing me to overcome my fears.

Well, the most recent thing to come though the Twitter Search feed was from heatha_bee, who had "Library-envy" for our single-service desk and Kaneko sculpture. That made me smile. Of course, I had no idea what to say back to her. Eventually, I responded, "You envy our single-service desk and Kaneko? What library are you at? I'm a cataloger at Criss Library." That's excruciatingly lame, I know, but it's the best I could come up with.

Not long after, she responded that she was the head of ILL at UNMC, and had been at my library for a meeting. I responded with something even more lame than my first tweet, and I never heard back from her, presumably because she left for Alaska. I know if I went on an exciting trip, I wouldn't be tweeting about anything remotely work related, so I can't blame her.

In other news, just this morning, Google Alerts alerted me to a post on the California Oregon blog, which reposted the text of the Wikipedia article for the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. Looking over other posts on that blog, I can find no pattern whatsoever. I can discern neither theme nor purpose for the blog. The only common thread is that all of the content seems to be reposted from other sources. I can't tell who is creating this blog, nor who the intended audience might be. And so I can't figure out the reason for their interest in the Criss Library, nor why they would simply reproduce a Wikipedia article with no context or comments. The about page for the California Oregon blog is just a spiel about Wordpress. It is very weird. The sheer randomness of the reposted entries and the lack of original content makes me suspect it may be run by a process rather than a person, but I can't tell for sure. It seems harmless, but also useless.

Anyway, out of this exercise, I plan to keep following the feeds for Twitter Search and Google Alerts related to "Criss Library." If I see anyone ranting or questioning something about my library, I will have an opportunity to open a conversation or refer something to one of my colleagues. Maybe this could help us to solve problems we may not be aware of. That's not necessarily what I think of as "marketing," but it is public relations.

The 23 Things Revisited

Nebraska Learns 2.0 is starting up again. Hooray!

Before I get into the new exercises, I'd like to take a moment to review the original 23 Things and how they have or have not become part of my life.

Thing #1: Discovery has never been so much fun! And it remains fun. I always enjoy learning about new things.

Thing #2: Lifelong Learning. Ditto Thing #1.

Thing #3: Grab yourself a blog in 3 steps. I love blogging. I'm just not very good about posting on any kind of regular basis. But I think it's a fantastic tool, and I enjoy it.

As vice-chair of the NLA Paraprofessional Section, one of my duties is to gather topics for fall conference. As an experiment, I used a blog for this. (Blogs are easy and fast, and it required virtually no effort on my part to set it up.) It worked, but not as effectively as I would have liked. I feel as though I used a hammer to drive a screw. A wiki might have been a better choice. So, much as I love blogs, I have discovered that they are not necessarily the best platform for collaborative communication.

Thing #4: Register your blog and join the party. I think I will reuse this same blog for the new round of Nebraska Learns 2.0, rather than starting fresh. Although I will probably have to change the name to something other than "Anj's 23 Things," since I don't even know how many lessons the new program will contain.

Thing #5: Instant Messaging. Other than using Meebo on the public service desk, I don't really IM. It's not my preferred mode of communication, but it's handy to have around.

Thing #6: Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader. This one really has changed my life. I would never want to go back to checking all those blogs and sites manually. I have some specific technical issues with Bloglines, but Google Reader gave me some fits when I tried it out, too. But even though the readers all have flaws, they are still incredibly useful. I have two accounts, one for work and one for home. (I don't want to be reading comics at work, nor do I particularly want to be reading about the latest OCLC initiatives at home.) This is a technology that has become as fully integrated into my life as email and telephones. (And significantly more integrated than my cell phone.)

Thing #7: Finding Feeds. I've ditched a lot of the feeds I picked up during the original exercise, and I have discovered several more. My collection of feeds is organic, changing as my needs and interests change. That's one of the wonderful things about this technology.

Thing #8: Discover Flickr, Thing #9: More Flickr Fun, and Thing #10: Play around with Image Generators. Much as I loved Flickr and image generators during the original exercises, I honestly have not gone back to them. They're good services and it's nice to know they're there if I need them, but I don't have much use for them at this time.

Thing #11: Blog about Technology. I totally stand by everything in my original essay.

Thing #12: A thing about LibraryThing. As with Flickr, I liked LibraryThing when I tried it, and have not gone back to it since. I'm glad it's there, and I am a fan of Tim Spalding as the self-appointed watchdog against OCLC. I think LibraryThing is changing the library world and will continue to do so. So even though it hasn't become an integral part of my personal life, it is an integral player in my professional life.

Thing #13: What are you doing? I tried. I really did. I just can't bring myself to give a tweet about Twitter. It doesn't fill any needs in my life.

This doesn't mean I don't see Twitter's impact on society, though. Twitter is even better than blogging for spreading information quickly. Witness the Amazonfail wildfire. Twitterers are already a force to be reckoned with. What the future holds, who knows?

Thing #14: Tagging & social bookmarking in Delicious. Delicious has become an indispensable part of my life. As with RSS readers, I set up two accounts, one for work and one for home. If I happen to stumble across a website or blog post in one place that I want to send to the other, I use the for: tags to send it to my other mailbox. In this way, I can access my home and work bookmarks from anywhere, send selected bookmarks back and forth between them easily, yet still keep my professional and personal bookmarks largely separate. It works well for me. I did not blindly port all of my browser bookmarks into Delicious, though. I took the time to open each link so I could better tag and describe it. This also allowed me to discard dead or no-longer-relevant links. With the exception of the few daily-use bookmarks I keep on the browser's toolbar for one-click access, I have deleted all of my static bookmarks. Delicious is just that much easier to use and maintain.

Thing #15: Presentations go social. SlideShare is another one I've never gone back to, but I still think it's quite useful.

Thing #16: On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0. I still agree with my thoughts on this one, as well.

Thing #17: So what’s in a wiki? and Thing #18: Playing around with PBwiki. Not much new on this one for me. I still use Wikipedia almost daily, although I edit very infrequently. I use a Confluence wiki at work, and I edit procedures, code lists, and other core departmental documents as needed. I haven't really gone back to PBwiki in particular, but I haven't had a need for a new wiki. Wikis occupy a basically stable position in my life right now.

Thing #19 : Apps, They're not just for desktops any more. I haven't created many files in Google Documents, but boy-oh-boy am I ever grateful for the ability to view Microsoft PowerPoint presentations at home on my Mac, where I do not have PowerPoint installed. So I've found it to be a very handy utility.

Thing #20: Discovering Web 2.0 tools. I looked at several different web 2.0 tools back then, and I haven't revisited a single one of them.

Thing #21: You too can YouTube. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube. A couple weeks ago, I even created my own YouTube account and uploaded a video. (A brief video capture from the Spore computer game I've recently become addicted to.) So this is another service that has found a stable niche in my life.

Thing #22: Podcasts. I have never found a particularly stable or routine use for podcasts. I still sometimes listen to the NET Radio news podcasts while I fix breakfast, but that's about it. Perhaps someday I'll get into it, but for now, it's enough to simply be aware of the technology.

Thing #23: Is this really the end? Or just the beginning? Obviously, it's not the end. Thing #24 was posted today, and I hope to participate in this new round of Nebraska Learns 2.0 for as long as it runs. I expect I will have a similar experience--finding a few services I don't like, many I do like but have no immediate use for, and one or two that will become essential tools in my life.

Onward!

Thing #23: Game Over! Continue?

Gooooooooooooooooooal! I made it to the end!

Thing #23: Is this really the end? Or just the beginning?

Yeah, of course it's not really the end. It may be the end of this particular set of exercises. It may or may not be the end of my posts on this particular blog. However, it's definitely not the end of my learning and growth. That will continue for as long as I live.

* What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

Google Documents is at the top of the list. Even if I can't access it at home (*cough* Firefox 1.0 *cough*), I'm finding it incredibly useful. It's replaced the flash drive in my pocket for documents I need to work on both in my cubicle and at the service desk.

I'm also liking YouTube quite a lot. Sure, there's a lot of junk, but there's also plenty of useful, informative content. Plus, if not for YouTube, I would never have gotten to see President Obama's inauguration and the various associated speeches and ceremonies. I am so glad this service exists.

* How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?

Even though my supervisor gave me permission to do these exercises at work, I discovered that I really didn't have time. There is simply too much work to do at work, and I couldn't shoehorn these exercises in. Once I started doing the majority of them at home, I developed the homework mentality. (Yes, even though this wasn't technically a class, I actually referred to each of the things as "homework.") It's gotten me thinking about going back to school and getting an MLS. I don't know for certain that I'm ready to make that leap yet, but I feel much closer to it than ever before.

* Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I'm not sure I'd call this unexpected, but I've had to face my essentially asocial online behavior. I love cool web 2.0 toys and tools I can play with on my own, but I'm not big into interacting with others. I love Delicious, and I tag all of my bookmarks for my own use, but I never think to look at other people's bookmarks. I love Google Documents for making my documents more portable, but I haven't shared any of them with anyone else. That's just part and parcel with my introverted nature. I need to be more conscious of the social part of the social web.

* What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

Not sure. I thought it was pretty well organized and most of the things seemed to flow fairly naturally into one another.

* If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again choose to participate?

You bet! This was great!

Thing #13 Revisited: I'm Just Not That Into Twitter

Well, I've given it two full weeks now, and I'm still not twitterpated with Twitter. Following only ten people, I receive so many tweets that every time I visit Twitter I have to go back multiple pages to see what I missed. I wish I could set it to show me the most recent tweet from everyone I'm following, so the people who tweet a lot don't crowd out the people who tweet only once a day or so. I honestly don't know how hard-core users who follow hundreds or thousands of people keep up with any of the threads. And I don't tweet much myself, because my life is just not that interesting. I dislike Twitter less than I imagined, but I just can't seem to really get into it.

Thing #22: Podcasts

Thing #22: Podcasts is one of the things I was dreading when I started this program, but by the time I reached it, I was enthusiastic. I'd had so many good experiences during Nebraska Learns 2.0 exercises that I was hyped and ready to go.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm died quickly. Searching for podcasts was much less fun than searching for YouTube videos or blogs to follow. After more than two hours sifting through several different podcast directories, I still hadn't found anything to keep my interest. I'd listened to the beginnings of several podcasts on a variety of subjects, but hadn't made it to the end of any of them. They all bored me to tears. If they couldn't hook me within the first few minutes, I moved on. Don't waste my time.

I realize that, for me, the main problem with podcasts is that they're just like radio programs. When I listen to the radio, the instant I hear a DJ talking, I change stations until I hit one that's playing music. I can't stand talk radio.

Rather than sifting endlessly through directories of stuff trying to find one gemstone in an endless beach of common sand, I decided to check out blogs and comics I was already following to see if they had podcasts. That way, I stood a better chance of finding something to my liking. But even the podcast by the creators of one of my favorite webcomics bored me. It was still just like a radio show, with more random, tedious banter than interesting content. While the podcast was playing, I found myself reading unrelated blogs, just to keep myself from leaving the computer altogether.

I finally found some decent, non-chattering podcasts from NET. These were informative and enjoyable. Finally, I'd found podcasts produced by people who valued the listener's time! Not one word was wasted. Even so, I'd still rather read news than listen to it.

I added a couple of the NET podcasts to my Bloglines account--News & Features from NET Radio (audio) and Arts in Nebraska from NET Television (video). I'll follow them for a while to see if they grow on me, but right now I'm suspecting that I'll eventually drop them in favor of blogs and text-based news. The video podcast will probably be the first to go, because the .mp4 files take too long to download, even with DSL. YouTube is much faster.

For Library-related podcasts, I really enjoyed Uncontrolled Vocabulary. It was nice to hear the voices of people I follow in the blogosphere, like Michael Sauers and Tim Spalding. The podcast was focused, organized, and informative. However, I'm not sure I heard much info there that I hadn't also read on various blogs and mailing lists.

I'm not saying I dislike the concept of podcasts. Many people do prefer to get their input through audio-visual channels rather than reading. Podcasts are undoubtedly valued and valuable tools for many people, and I completely understand that. However, I just don't think they're for me.

Thing #21: YouTube

When I first started the 23 Things, I was dreading this exercise, Thing #21: You too can YouTube. At that time, I had a dial up connection at home and no sound at work, so I was originally going to have to do this assignment "elsewhere," probably the library's public machines.

Well, things change. A little over a month ago, I managed to upgrade my home connection to the lowest grade of DSL. Suddenly, watching videos at home was not so unattractive. I still have to wait a few minutes for a video to load (on average, about twice the total run-time of the video), but that's not unreasonable, at least not compared to having to wait four or five hours to load a five minute video with a dialup connection. Maybe for some people, any load time is a deal-breaker. For me, it depends on how badly I want to see something.

Since getting DSL, I have wasted a lot of time on YouTube--the good, the bad, and the stupid. YouTube, like the open web, like the shelves of a grocery store, and even like the library, is filled with an immense variety of things. Saying you like or dislike YouTube is like saying you like or dislike a particular library. Some of the stuff on YouTube bores me. Some of it offends me. Some of it informs me. And some of it is just plain fun. The same can be said of any library. YouTube is like an online video library with no collection development policy.

I did not know how to imbed a video in a blog post before this exercise. It's fun learning new things about tools you already use.

Throughout Nebraska Learns 2.0, we have watched quite a few episodes of Common Craft, explaining everything from wikis to Twitter. Looking at other Common Craft episodes, I see that they cover much more than web 2.0 tools. There are episodes available to explain everything from money management to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

And so I present an episode of the Common Craft show that we didn't watch for these exercises: Zombies in Plain English. (Content warning: fake blood and implied violence.) Hide your brain and fire up your sense of humor.

Nebraska Learns 2.0: My Favorite Posts

Reflecting on last night's post, I realized I ought to have listed all of my favorite Nebraska Learns 2.0 blog posts, if only for my own future reference. Some blogs merited more than one post in my list, because sometimes people say good things on a lot of subjects.

For Thing #11 (on technology):

Clywdshire offers a some cautionary advice on technology and cites several interesting articles and books.

Rayma's Genealogy Blog talked about using Facebook to help identify unclaimed bodies. This blew me away. What an amazing and brilliant use of a technology for something that its creators probably never envisioned. This is technology at its best--generating creative and unexpected solutions to problems.

Susan's experiments in Library Land makes some fantastic points about the fleeting and migratory nature of social technology, the proliferation of IDs and passwords, and inconsistent corporate IT policies.

Upward & Onward may be getting in touch with her inner Luddite, but she makes an eerie point with her example of the emotionless texters in the crowd at a football game.

For Thing #13 (Twitter):

Learning As I Go cited an excellent article, "Is Twitter TOO good?" by Kathy Sierra, in addition to making some good points of her (?) own.

Upward & Onward cited another excellent article, "Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you're doing," by Helen Popkin. And I love the use of Mr. Hyde Tweety.

For Thing #15 (SlideShare):

Clwydshire posted a beautiful slideshow of paper art.

For Thing #16 (on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0):

The Antiquarian Librarian reminds us not to get lost in the technology, but to stay focused on having meaningful interactions with people. Social networking sites are just another means to that end, and are in addition to, not in replacement of, face-to-face interactions both inside and outside the library. He talks about the library's role not only in preserving culture but in creating it.

Books and More synthesized one short, sweet, salient point from all the articles: the idea that we can not hope to teach all of our users how to use our systems, so we must change our systems to make them so intuitive our users don't need help.

Prairie Prose wrote, "I need to recreate my role in a world that thinks 'it's all on the internet,' but doesn't know how to find and evaluate what is there." Teaching how to evaluate sources, and building tools that help users do it themselves, seems to be a growing part of librarianship.

Susan's experiments in Library Land lifted up key points from several of the readings.

TheCorey may be right about "web 2.0" and "library 2.0" having devolved into meaningless terms that get slapped on various lousy projects to make them seem more trendy.

Upward & Onward leads with a cartoon that I think nearly everyone can identify with, then makes the excellent point that while we're considering what the library will be in the future, we must also consider what it will not be.

For Thing #19 (web-based productivity software):

Learning As I Go explored Google Documents in great detail. I was glad to learn about the ease of including special characters, which I had not discovered on my own. (For some reason, I was unable to post comments on this blog.)

For Thing #21 (YouTube):

In spite of his well-thought qualms about the bandwidth issue of YouTube, The Troglodyte Librarian provided some excellent examples of how his library is using it well for summer reading promos and might use it in the future for tutorials.

Addendum 1/26/2008 -- All of these have now been added to the Nebraska Learns 2.0 Favorite Posts wiki page.