Twitter is like …

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Peter Bromberg started it by asking a mob of techno-geek librarians on twitter what twitter was like. Check out his extended list.

Michael Sauers continues it by juxtaposing some of the answers with some fantastic images to produce this laugh-out-loud slideset, Twitter is like ….

Three blog posts is a little excessive for a Thursday morning … back to twitter and drunk sex with a kaliedoscopic whippet ….

What if I was my own blog ?

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Lovely Dave Pattern wanted to cheer me up for not winning the Edublog award, so very sweetly combined

ImageMagick, 30 minutes of furious Perl coding, a little bit of random font rotation, a suitable JPEG source image, and the RSS feed from Kathryn’s blog

And redrew my twitter profile photo with words from this blog. You can read the words in the large version of the image. Yes, that’s the same Dave who drew me and a bunch of other librarians as book covers in February.

kg_001 Uploaded on December 11, 2007 by Dave & Bry

Thanks Dave. I’m smiling. Widely.

Im in ur sociation takin ova the library world

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If you recognize the leetspeak of the title, then you know about I can has cheezburger? – an anarchic site that captions photos – mainly of cats, but sometimes of walruses, gerbils and invisible things. It’s not all fluffy bunny, sometimes they are in very adult situations.

Twice a year or so, I read something so funny that tears roll down my cheeks, I have an asthma attack and giggles bubble out for the next couple of hours. This was one.

It’s got me thinking about the informality, injokes and creativity I’ve seen online in the last couple of weeks. For me, it’s moving away from blogging, reading blogs and commenting on blogs and into more synchronious collaboration, read/write and re-mixing. If what the young kids have been doing is reaching the olds like me, I wonder what the young’uns are doing now?

The main place I’ve been hanging out is still twitter. I think it’s beginning to get a bit quieter but at its peak, links and lives were flying backward and forward at a very fast pace, and just as the Perth blogging contingent would begin going to bed, the US biblioblabbers would be most lively.

Lolbrarians was a link thrown out by Steve Lawson to twitter that sent everyone off to look at the lolibrarians site, comment and then create their own post. As a mix of erudition and junk culture it is only second to the Shakespeare lolcats.

The Library Society of the World is the best, most efficient, egalitarian and effective alternative to any library association ever. Why? Because we say it is and we are not taking it seriously. After the ALA election results were announced there was the usual malcontent expressed via twitter by people who would love to make a difference but don’t have time…why can’t things be different?, can’t we have another association? Yada yada.

So Joshua Neff put up the wiki. Heaps of people have joined and chosen our positions (I’m Antipodean Antibibliorthodoxist). During the brief blip of collaboration, here’s the policies that were nutted out:

  • No Parliamentary Procedure
  • No one chairs meetings; no one motions; no one seconds. Just change things and see how the rest of us respond.
  • No Elections – Just give yourself a title and we’ll accept you!
  • No Budget Process – If you give someone a donation, they are going to keep it and spend it how they like.
  • No Unnecessary File Types -If the information can be displayed well in HTML, use it! Links to PDF and Word files are frequently unnecessary and inefficient.
  • No Policies – oops. I was just kidding about that first part. Sort of.

I’m Kathryn. Read me.

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Pootling about in Canberra, at a public Internet PC, waiting for taxi to airport. Idly leafing through my RSS feeds with about 1 minute of credit left.

Get to Dave Pattern’s blog…see another image of Micheal Stephens with a Patternated twist. Not a watermelon this time, not even Norman Bates, this time his photo is “bookified”. 3720 book covers, matching the colours of the photo.

Then I scroll down…the access counter blinks “15 seconds”…..and I see this….and then “pop” access denied. Hysterical librarian runs away from PC laughing loudly and publicly.

If you want to see just what I’m made of, you can see the actual book covers in this image – all 3600 of them.

kg_300.jpg

Library Lovers Day – sing along

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Wednesday may be Valentines Day for some, but for Australians, it’s Library Lovers Day.

ALIA and the New South Wales Public Library Network have a site devoted to Library Lovers Day. There’s even a competition with REAL chocolate at the end. Just answer 7 reading questions to fill up your vitual choccie box, print out the receipt and take it to a participating library to claim some real chocolates. Yum!

The arrows of library lurve have pierced Andrew Finegan‘s heart as well. He’s written, recorded and illustrated his own Song for Library Lovers Day. Hoik up those pelvic floor muscles before you watch it. I liked it so much, that I just nominated it for an Info Tubey.

(Video embedded below)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/RTYklHU6DKM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

SL mirrors RL mirrors SL mirrors….

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I’m after a new look for my Second Life avatar. She’s going to be showing a few folks around, so I want her to look good. In Second Life, I can buy an entire new face, body shape, skin and hair. It means I’ve given the Linden Labs my credit card number, so I’m cashed up with Linden dollars for the first time. As Mr9 would say, “the money’s burning a hole in my head”.

My first purchase was a too-dark skin, with a face that reminds me of a vapid cow. Seemed OK when I tried it on in the shop.

toodark_001.jpg

With a location search on “skin”, I can get to the Centrefold shop and the Hot ‘n’ Sexy shop. I asked someone where I’d find the “attractive and intelligent and interesting shop”…but strangely, he didn’t know. I bet that if I opened a branch of that near Info Island, I’d do a roaring trade to librarians.

In Second Life, most people are young, attractive and can fly. I thought I’d never see that in Real Life. But, today I took the kids to see “Aureo”, a very stylish and sophisticatedly lit performance by aerealists from Western Australia’s electronic circus company Skadada. They were breathtaking and reminded me that with determination and practice, people can do wonders.

aureo_2.jpg

To a kid with a hammer everything looks like a nail, but today wasn’t the only time Second Life has spilled into Real Life. Thursdays are Laughter Yoga days. We spend an hour trying to laugh as much as possible to coax our bodies to release endorphins. Last week we did an exercise where you pretend your boss has just given you an impossible job, due in half an hour. We look up from our typing and laugh uproariously and say “you want it when??”.

So, there I was, in a circle of people walking around with all of us typing on our imaginary keyboards in front of us. This is the exact position your Second Life avatar takes when you are typing in the chat window, so the yoga exercise wasn’t the only reason I was staring at the others and LMAO.