google

Manamanah! Streaming YouTube video into Google Lively

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Oh yeah. Amy Buckland invited me to play on Jambina’s raft’ in Google’s Lively (virtual-world-in-a-browser)

I dipped into my inventory, pulled out a TV set, used the edit option to add a YouTube URL to it …. and here’s a little movie of what happened…

I wonder whether Google has moves to create a U-Stream kind of service. I can image a whole bunch of avatars sitting around on a raft, watching a U-stream type of show and using Lively as the chat-room, instead of the boring little window at the side of the screen at the moment.

Sirexkat Island in google Lively Beta virtual world

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Google announced today the beta release of their virtual-world-in-a-browser , Lively .

If you want a serious review, try the one in ArsTechnica: Hands-on: Google’s Lively social 3D world is 20 percent done .

First impressions? Easier to get into and get going than Second Life. I think it’s cute the way that entering an emoticon in my chat animates my avatar eg. a smiley 🙂 makes her jump and laugh. Obviously not as sophisticated as Second Life, but very, very interesting to see what can happen once some decent editing tools are released. And I wonder just who owns the intellectual property in what you create …..

I’ve created my own island, Sirexkat Island. I’ve taken a photo, made a movie and embedded the room right into this blog post. I’d be interested whether that comes out in the RSS feed 🙂

The photo

Sirexkat Island

The movie

Britannica wants our links

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Encyclopedia Brittanica, which charges USD70 per year for an online subscription, is allowing free access to:

people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers.

You can even link to the content and your readers can read just the page to which you refer.

Why?

Well, they have to rejig their model in light of the popularity of Wikipedia, this is true. Reading through the comments on the Techcrunch page that discusses this, Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers , I see a reason that makes even more sense to me. It’s all about Google. Getting the maximum number of links and hits on their website so that their page rank increases.

I am sure that this was the motivation behind publishing on the Brittanica blog Michael Gorman’s rant, The sleep of reason, about reliability of online works.

In the comments on the Techcrunch piece, someone who was in the beta trial mentions that he tried looking in Brittanica a couple of times, but found it easier to search across many sites via Google – rather than just the one source that may or may not have what he is looking for.

(Incidentally – this may be the key to students not using the library catalogue in academic libraries – why search a single source with authoritative and useful scholarly material ( material that is not available via the web), when you can search across many sources to get something you can link to ? (Yes, you and I know the answer , dear reader – but it’s rhetorical))

Now, notice that I’m not linking out to Brittanica. I’m not even sure why not. They are a venerable organisation that deserves to survive, it’s true. I’m not quite sure what they have done to annoy me.

Data as a social space.

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A change is happening in how we relate to our documents and data. We’re moving toward using them as social spaces.

At conferences, where the presentations and papers (the “data”) are the ostensible reason for people to be there, I’ve always found the informal exchange (the “social”) much more fun and beneficial. This is now happening online. Here’s some examples of what I mean…

1. Adding a “meebo me” widget to your library home page. Users don’t have to leave the site to connect with a librarian.

2. A “discuss” function in google docs. Ryan, the Other Librarian, and I have been sharing a couple of google docs while we work on a library related something. Last night I noticed the “discuss” tab on a shared spreadsheet and emailed him so we could test it out. While “in” the document, we were chatting, and uploading and amending the document. We could have opened another document and continued our chat there. He’s in Canada, and – while I can pretend to be a jaded, 2.0 kind of gal, used to the way the net has shrunk the world – I still found it novel and it gave me a buzz.

3. A couple of weeks ago I blogged on VLINT about visiting the Michigan Library Consortium’s library in Second Life and climbing all over a 3D graph they had, representing library membership.

mlcpiegraph_001.jpeg

4. Distance learning in Second Life. I can imagine a building set up with all the resources needed for a class…links to external sites and cached documents..video presentations available on a player. The difference between that and a tradtional web site is that students can send their avs. to that “place” and see who else is there. While accessing the info, they can discuss their experience of the course and are more likely to ask each other for help once they have made that casual contact. More like the intangible social and academic benefits gained by going to lectures or tutes on campus.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Up until now

Skype and google..they’re talking!!!

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Now that I’ve installed skype, my google search results display clickable links to some telephone numbers so I can start a VOIP call with just one click. That’s them below with the Australian flag next to them.


My vague and not-so-tech-savvy-this-morning-brain thinks…..”is this something to do with microformats, and should I find out more about them…they look fun”.

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Librarian bundles for philosophy scholars.

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My last post discusses how some clever librarians are using web tools to bundle useful resources to clients. Here’s an example of how a philosophy subject librarian could use them.

1. SEARCH BOX FOR MURDOCH UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES.

The search box below uses google to make a single search of these resources. (Try it – it’s a real one and works)





HOW TO: follow the steps at Google Co-Op searches. (I added the banana on wheels image just to play around with adding a logo).

2. BUTTON TO ADD ABOVE SEARCH BOX TO IE7 BROWSER TOOLBAR’S LIST OF SEARCH ENGINES

If you click this buttonreferral link you’ll see a page with a clickable button. Click it to add the search box above as a “search provider” in your Internet Explorer 7 toolbar.

HOW TO: follow the steps at Innovate

3. STARTER BUNDLE OF USEFUL RSS FEEDS FOR PHILOSOPHERS
Some useful blogs for philosophy scholars are:
Epistememlinks list of blogs
Conscious Entities
Pain for philosophers
Philosophy of friendship

I’ve been playing with OPMLManager.com, but didn’t quite get it together to create an OPML file for importing into an RSS aggregator, but I’m sure you get the idea.

HOW TO: Follow the pointers from What I learned today.

Thanks to CM for sparking my interest in this one.

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New librarian skill – bundling!

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New toys are fun. Even better when they herald a change in how we do things.

Their play paves the way for regular librarians to combine our collection development skills and powerful web tools to “bundle” electronic information, resources and searches for our clients

Prerequisites to use some of the powerful “bundling” tools are:

  • Librariany skills to select something useful to bundle
  • Ability to follow step by step instructions
  • Ability to cut and paste text
  • A bit of knowledge about where to embed code in a web page…or skills to use the “View Source” option and steal ideas from other web pages.

I work as a Philosophy subject librarian. In my next post, I’ve used the “how to’s” from the posts above to show some of the relevant “bundling” services I could create for philosophy scholars at my university.

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