Here’s a short little audio summary of what I’m up to at ALA Annual 2009.
Direct link to the AudioBoo, in case you have a problem with the above.
Category: Personal
I discovered an audio tool the other day that was too well done and too interesting not to use in some way. Audioboo is currently an iPhone only audio blogging application that knocked my socks off when I tried it out. You sign up for an account, and download the application from the iTunes store.
Once you have the app installed, you can use it to record up to 5 minutes of audio, title it, tag it, attach a photo, and hit send…up it goes to the Audioboo site, and to your personal page.Ă‚Â If that’s all it gave you, it would still be a great app, but it goes the full 2.0 route and automatically feeds your audio into iTunes podcast store for download via iTunes. It gives you a raw RSS feed which you can do with as you will, and even supports embedding of the “boo” anywhere else on the web. Oh, and of course, it with Twitter for you. Here are my first two tries at playing with this new tool:
I’m going to play with this a bit at ALA Annual 2009 in Chicago, maybe track some people down and do flash interviews with them. Try and find something interesting to share, and see if this tool answers some questions on making media available to the masses.
So: Keep your eyes on this space, or even better, subscribe to the RSS feed directly. Let me know what you think, and see if this tool gives you another option when it comes to creating and distributing media.
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Wolfram|Alpha post at TechSource
Forgot to mention here that I have a new post up over at ALA TechSource about Wolfram|Alpha and how libraries can use it.
Check it out! I’m playing with W|A and still thinking a lot about proactive reference these days, while I put the finishing touches on my Mobile Technology and Libraries book for Neal Schuman that will coming out sometime in the Fall as a part of a 10 book “Tech Set”. Once I get the manuscript turned in, expect to see a lot more rambling in this space.
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InfoLink Tech is IT Day 2009
On Thursday, I’ll be speaking on the campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ for InfoLink’s 6th Annual Tech is IT day. I was asked to talk about podcasts and videocasts, and given two and a half hours total to try and educate people about practical how-to stuff about both.
This will be the first speaking gig where I’m going to try and do the trip with my Hackintosh (a Dell Mini 9 running OSX). I’ve tested the video-out, and aside from a minor glitch it works well. Keynote runs well on it, and I’m curious how it will hold up displaying Keynote and recording audio at the same time, but we’ll see!
As long as the recording holds out, I’ll post my talk, along with slides and such, next week. If you’re going to be at Tech is IT day, make sure you say hi!
Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
As many will probably say about The Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s almost scary how precient it was. To put it into perspective, when the authors were writing Cluetrain, Google had less than a dozen employees and has just moved out of a garage. The word “blog” had yet to be used to describe a chronological website. Napster hadn’t shattered the media industry yet. And statistics put the number of people on the Internet at just about 150 million, or around 10% of the current number.
Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger put together an amazing set of principles that are even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago.Ă‚Â The sad part about Thesis 17, in particular, is that companies haven’t yet learned this lesson. Some of them are trying, with standouts like Zappos. But far too many companies are failing to see the benefits of participatory marketing and extreme customer service.
The market is no longer passive. Almost no one under the age of 35 these days interacts with products in the way the older generation did…we expect to be involved in our consumption, connected to it. We ask friends, we poll our social networks, we take recommendations of the people we know very seriously. We have to love both the object and the process or we just don’t buy. And loving means becoming involved, knowing more, interacting with the makers, asking questions, and otherwise being active.
We want a relationship with our products, and producers who try to feed us advertising may be ok short-term, but the days of the passive are over. The new market is fragmented and participatory, and content producers will have to adjust or die. Making a better product isn’t enough. The companies that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that understand and cultivate the one-to-one relationships with their customers and their potential customers.
This post is a part of the larger CluetrainPlus10 project. Follow other reflections on the Cluetrain there!
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Kindle 2 on Techsource
Just a note for those that might have missed it…I’m one part of a three part post over at TechSource on the Kindle 2 and libraries. I’m pointing it out mainly because of the fact that I did the very first, I think, video for TechSource, showing off the Kindle 2’s Text-to-Speech feature. Go take a look, and let me know how you think it came out.
I asked on Twitter, but thought I’d ping the brains of all 3 of the people that read me here. I’m shortly in the market for a new TV, finally upgrading to HDTV after our 37″ Toshiba of a decade or so is losing it’s picture.
So: who’s bought an LCD HDTV in the last few months that they really like, and WHERE did you buy it? I’ve gotten two recommendations for the Vizio 42″ LCD, but so far I’ve only found it for sale at one place online, Target. Love to find it somewhere with free shipping…
So: What TV do you have that you love, and where did you procure it? Under $1000, please, and 40-42 inch or so LCD. 1080p preferred, but 720 acceptable if there’s a cost/savings analysis there that makes sense.
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Joss Whedon on Humanism
I felt exactly the way that Joss did during Obama’s Inauguration…it was a historic moment for the President of the United States to recognize the huge numbers of people in the country that are not religious.
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Gmail hack
Not sure how many people know about this gmail hack, but it’s come in handy for me recently, so I thought I’d throw it out. Suppose you have an account on a service like Twitter, but now need to sign up for a different username, or just want one account for business and one for personal use. Twitter (and other services) won’t let you use an email that is already in their system to sign up for a new account.
Here’s where the gmail hack comes in. Gmail has one feature and one bug that allows you go get around having to have a secondary email address. The first is that Gmail allows you to create an infinite number of + aliases for your gmail account, in the format:
griffey+TEXTHERE@gmail.com
You can use any text at all after the plus sign, and gmail will ignore it completely for the purposes of delivering the email to you, but WILL let you filter and search on it. So I could set up a second twitter account called fakegriffey, and give it the email address griffey+fakegriffey@gmail.com, and Twitter will let me, since that isnt in their database. Gmail will happily deliver it to my griffey@gmail account, and all is well.
The other hack is that Gmail completely ignores periods in any account name for delivering email. griffey is the same as gri.ffey is the same as griff.ey is the same as g.r.i.f.f.e.y. By giving Twitter some variation, you can get around their email limit and still keep your email organized.
Hope this is useful to anyone who didn’t know about it!
Just put a new post up over at ALA TechSource: Saving Your Digital Life. Here’s a blurb:
I have, basically, three kinds of data that I’m worried about protecting in some way: working files, files that are important but replaceable, and files that I can’t afford to lose at all. Working files are just that: files that I’m currently working on for whatever reason. Might be a photo I’m editing, or a document, or an MP3 that I need to move to another computer…anything that requires action. Files that are important, but replaceable, are things that make my life easier if they are in digital form, mostly media. DVDs I’ve purchased and CDs I own have all been digitized, because I want to be able to watch them when I want and not when I remember to have a disk of plastic with me. I also want to be able to move them to my iPhone or other portable media player. If I lose the digital, it’s ok, because I can just re-digitize them, but I really, really don’t want to have to do that. And finally, there are the files that I just can’t lose for any reason. Things like tax returns, photos of my daughter, receipts, and other digital items that need to be safe even if there’s a natural disaster.
So how do I handle all of this? With one piece of hardware, a few pieces of software, and broadband.
Go read the whole thing if you’re interested in how I handle MY digital life.