SMS logistics question June 9, 2008

I’ll be one of the panelists at the ACRL President’s Program at ALA this year (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions). After watching a Google talk where the speaker took questions from the audience by going back and forth between people at the microphone and questions on a screen that were being texted/emailed and also after reading about different library events where people twittered throughout the program, I suggested and got the ok to attempt something similar at this program.

The program will begin with Dr. Ariely’s presentation, followed by a normal Q&A, then the panel discussion. The idea is if you have something to contribute in the flow of the discussion, you can text it in. I’ll be monitoring the texts and will try to fit what I can into the conversation when appropriate.

On the most bare bones level - I have a text plan on my cell phone and anyone who wanted to participate could just text me, but what are my other options? We’re looking into whether the room has wireless. If so, I could monitor a twitter account on my laptop rather than my cell which would help view more than one at a time. I’d rather give out twitter information than my cell phone number to a huge room of people, but since it’s already limited to only people who know how to text, do I want to limit it further to only people who twitter? Are there other options I’m not aware of?

Animoto May 6, 2008

Just playing with Animoto:

See other variations.

My mini review:

It’s definitely cute and adds a dash of pizazz to a slide show. It also has enormous time sink potential as you tweak the number of pictures, their order, the music and keep refreshing it until you like the effects it adds. It does allow you to embed your show when you’re done, but only with javascript, so sticking them in things like wordpress blogs won’t work unless you export them to YouTube (and lose some image quality) first.

ETA: This particular  musical selection was not one of the choices - it’s from The Lovely Sparrows. Now I did not ask permission to use it, but I don’t think my boyfriend is going to say no, especially since I built his website for him

Going where our users are? April 11, 2008

I was at the College of DuPage teleconference today, Trends, Fads or Folly: Spotting the Library Trends that really Matter. It was mostly a Second Life sales pitch and I got myself so worked up that I decided to do some research and number crunching.

Before I rant though I’d like to qualify my tirade by saying that I think some organizations are doing amazing things with Second Life, my own college being one of them. I’m very hopeful that we’re going to open up at least a portion of our island to some of our programming students to use as a sandbox. With that caveat however, I offer the following statistics: (All Second Life stats from their key metrics excel file.)

• World Population: 6,660,687,784 (from census.gov)
• US Population: 303,831,195 (from census.gov)
• Registered Second Life Users as of February 2008: 12,671,638
• Number of Active Users: 526,915
• Active US Avatar Count: 182,698
• Registered Premium Second Life Users as of February 2008: 91,531

If every one of those registered users was actively using Second Life (which we know isn’t true) and was located in the US (also not true), that would be 4% of Americans on Second Life.

But only 35% of Registered Second Life Users are in the US. Thats about 4,435,073. Which is 1.5% of Americans. And only 182,698 of those are active users. That’s .06% of Americans. Not even one tenth of a percent. And we haven’t even discussed what percentage of those are companies or people with multiple accounts…

Well it’s what the kids are doing, right? Actually the 25-34 and 35-44 both out number the 13-24 and even the 45 and older spend more time in Second Life than the young’ns. Note that the teens make up less than 1% of all users.

And please note that most of this is talking about registered users, not actual active, habitual users. For more on the difference read Clay Shirky’s explanation. In short:

“There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.”

Informal Survey April 1, 2008

I’m doing a presentation at TLA on Simple, Practical Library Applications of Web 2.0 Technologies. I’m going to cover the topics below in order roughly from easiest to requiring a little bit of know how. What do you think of this order? Would you change anything? Add anything? Thanks!

• Flickr
• Facebook/MySpace
• Blog
• Personalized Start Pages
• Widgets
• RSS
• Social Bookmarking
• Browser Plug Ins
• 404 Page