LINT

Group blogging survey

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Are you a librarian contributing to a group blog? Can you tell us about your experience with group blogging?

Yes, I am looking at you board members of ALIA, and at you too Library Garden folk, and ALA Techsource people. And don’t think you can duck staff at Yarra Plenty or Mosman Library.

The Thali, who administer librariesinteract.info, would be grateful if you could fill in a short survey to collect data for a paper to be given at the VALA conference in February.

Please click here to go to the survey about Librarian group blogs: experiences and motivations. Thank you.

Thali tags

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I like it when people work on projects for fun and produce beautiful things.

Corey, who is one of my co-conspirators in librariesinteract.info, yesterday launched thali tags.

thalitags.jpg

Thali tags is a tag cloud built from the most novel terms from posts in the personal blogs of the mob (the thali ) who look after lint. Blogs indexed are:

Corey explains the process in more detail in his blog. It involves scrunching the feeds up, forcing them through a Yahoo Pipe for some content analysis and then spitting them out into a tag cloud.

You can click on each tag and see the blog posts that they are from. I read all these blogs and I would have said that there was very little overlap. Now I see that over time, we often blog about the same thing, but from very different angles.

It came from one of those idle gmail chats we were having about some less exciting aspect of administering lint months ago. “Hey Corey, Dave Pattern has done this with a whole bunch of international blogs, wouldn’t it be cool if we had something like this for lint “. And then off he went, did some tinkering and produced the thali tags. Wish I could do stuff like that, but I guess I’m happy to be cheerleader.

I’ve really enjoyed watching the thali work together with this. Corey would tweak the tags a bit more, show it to the rest of us and then we’d give him feedback, or encouragement. It’s given the rest of us a better understanding of how the tags work and provided Corey with a sounding board as he went.

By the way, things might get a little quieter here in the next month or so. I have a few family camping weekends plus Mr4’s “whole-class-and-a-visit-from-Fireman-Kev-and-his-firetruck” fifth birthday party coming up. And MPOW launches a 23 Things program in 2 weeks, and it looks like our uni will have more Second Life activity soon, and then there are those VALA papers that need to be written if I want to pop across Australia and hang out with some very interesting folk in February. Last time I said I would be blogging less, I think ended up blogging more – maybe it acts as stress relief.

Come blog with me…

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… or at least post on a blog that I help administer.

Do you have a vision of what your library will look like in 2010?

crystal ball in library

Crystal Ball uploaded to Flickr August 22, 2006 by Isobel T

To celebrate Library and Information Week 2007, we are asking you to write a post for LINT (librariesinteract.info) telling us about your future library. We’re even offering a prize for the best entry – a signed copy of Meredith Farkas’ book Social Software in Libraries.

So hop over to LINT and check it out before May 20th…especially if you are blog shy or blog curious. Even though we always welcome posts from other people now is a particularly good time to dip your toe in the water and get it bloggy.

Party in Second Life for Australian Libraries

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Here’s our official notice about the Christmas party LINT is holding for Australian Libraries in Second Life.

By the way, congratulations to fellow-linter, Michelle McClean who has been award a Ramsay and Reid scholarship to spend 3 weeks travelling the US looking at Library 2.0 technologies in public libraries. Imagine getting to visit with John Blyberg and then checking out the Imaginon in Charlotte.

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Virtual end of year party for Australian Libraries in Second Life.

The Australian libraries blog, librariesinteract.info, is hosting an end-of year party in Second Life on 13th December, 6pm to 8pm Western Australian time. [This is 1am San Francisco time; San Francisco time also being Second Life time.]

Second Life is a virtual world, with a population of over 1 million, in which large companies, schools and universities (IBM, Dell, Harvard) have set up shop. Reuters newsagency has its own correspondent there. According to a September 2006 Popular Science article, Second Life, through currency trading, shopping and land sales, has a GDP of $64 Million. Recently, Australian Libraries were given a free building for a year on Cybrary City, courtesy of Talis and the Alliance Library System in return for 2 hours per week work on library services for SL residents.

The party will include a tour of Info Island and Info Island II by Lori Bell from Alliance Library Systems. We will follow the yellow brick road from the Oz library to the Kansas State Library Virtual Branch next door. Then, back to our building to hang out… dance on the dance floor, snare some cyber snacks, and go easy on the virtual alcoholic beverages.

You can join in virtually from your own PC, or come and look over our shoulders in real life. If you join in virtually, it would be a good idea to check out Second Life before the event:

1. Go to the Second Life website.
2. Check the systems requirements.
3. Go to the join up page and choose one of the family names offered..and make up your first name.
4. You will be asked for your credit card details, but do not have to give them.
5. Download the Second Life client to your PC.
6. Choose how you’d like your avatar (representation in SL) to look.
7. Enter…explore.
8. Teleport to just outside our building at: 207, 68, 23. (Often passersby can help you out to do this) Alternatively, we can teleport you to our building, if you send a message.

For further details, please contact Con Wiebrands (flexnib at gmail dot com) or Kathryn Greenhill (sirexkat at gmail dot com). If you are already exploring Second Life and would like to meet up, our SL names are Paradoxa Kurrajong (Con) and Emerald Dumont (Kathryn) – feel free to IM us!

Hope to see you on Info Island!

Kathryn and Con

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