Eliza saw the ocean for the first time when we spent 4 days at Rosemary Beach, Florida. Although it exhausted her (in a good way), she absolutely loved it. She had no fear whatsoever, even when the waves knocked her around. She wanted to stand there all by herself (“Eliza do it!”). She also enjoyed digging in the sand with her new shovels, picking up sea shells, and watching the birds and airplanes fly overhead. All in all, a great trip. Can’t wait to go back when she has a little more stamina!
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Proactive reference
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about something I’m calling “proactive reference.” The way I’m thinking about it, proactive reference is the monitoring of the real-time web (Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic, etc) by librarians who answer questions relating to their area or specialty, whether subject or geographically based. Public librarians who answer questions by searching for mentions of their city, county, or library, and Academic libraries who monitor for mentions of their university are two examples, but are many more possibilities.
I’m doing a bit of it now, just to see how effective it is at marketing the library’s services and such. Is anyone else out there actively monitoring these communication channels right now? My instinct is that this is going to be a HUGE market in a very short time, and that libraries should dive in fast and get used to it.
She is almost a year and a half old! To celebrate, and because she has been feeling terrible with a fever and sinus infection, we took her to a local ice cream place. She insisted on eating it all by herself, like a big girl.
Favorite foods: Ketchup. Asks for it at almost every meal and will dip absolutely anything into it. Ice cream (vanilla). Pizza. Applesauce (more for spoon practice than for filling her belly). Peanut butter.
Favorite music: Still completely obsessed with the Laurie Berkner band, as featured on Jack’s Big Music Show. She also now loves to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Old McDonald, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Clean it up (Laurie Berkner), as well as some songs she has apparently invented or learned elsewhere.
Favorite toys: Anything like an action figure, especially her family dolls from Melissa & Doug and her Elmo and Ernie figurines; magnets; water table with shovels, scoops, and sponges; books (see below); Foofa doll (from the Noggin show Yo Gabba Gabba); gel window clings
Favorite hobbies: Singing, talking, dancing, marching, stomping, wiggling, throwing, tickling, scooping, digging, climbing stairs, climbing into and out of chairs, taking baths and “swimming” in the tub.
Favorite books: “Flip a Face” book called Colors; Froggy Green; Fifteen Animals (Sandra Boynton); anything with Elmo or Zoe from Sesame Street
Dislikes: Too much sun. Getting too hot. Sitting still in her high chair to eat breakfast. Someone trying to help her do something she insists she can do by herself (“Eliza do it!!”).
What she knows and can do is scary sometimes. She now recognizes and says most colors (and tells us her favorite is pink), several shapes, and quite a few letters, and can count to ten. She can accomplish just about anything with phrases like “See it.” “Hold it.” “Do it.” and “Want some.” The other day she looked at her piece of toast and told me, “Cut it,” because she wanted it in triangles.
Her social understanding is also amazing lately. She is great at saying “thank you” and “you’re welcome,” unprompted. We’re working on “please,” which she will say when told to do so, but not on her own yet. Is now telling people to be careful, like when we’re carrying her down the stairs (“Careful, Daddy.”). And she checks on everyone’s well being: “Happy, Mommy?” “Happy, Daddy?” “How doing?” “Where Nanny go?”
Eliza the baby, I think, is all but gone. Eliza is now our little girl. And that’s pretty special.
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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!
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Let’s Get Physical
Eliza has started catching up with her playmates in terms of physical prowess. Suddenly she wants to climb onto anything and everything: stairs, chairs, boxes, computer monitors daddy leaves lying the floor. It’s a little scary.
She’s also trying to jump, which basically means she stands up on tip toes with her arms in the air and yells “jump!” Once in a while, one foot will come up off the ground.
Besides climbing, her favorite movement is stomping. She goes around yelling “Stomp Stomp!” while she does it. Also does “march march march,” which is a little disconcerting. And of course, there’s “wiggle wiggle” and “shake shake shake,” which she gets from the only TV show she watches these days, Yo Gabba Gabba.
And, she now runs like crazy. It’s amazing to hear her giggle so hard she nearly falls down as she’s getting chased by the daddy monster.
Sometimes, it’s just nice to laugh at industries that are desperately attempting to hang on to their relevancy in a changing world. Exhibit A for today is the Copyright Clearance Center, and their interesting attempt to educate users about copyright via their Copyright Basics video. Let’s examine the ways in which CCC fails at modern web usage.
First: here’s the opening screen of the video
I think that’s enough said, yes? Among the nearly-unreadable text is the prohibition to “distribute copies of the Program to persons outside your company, or post copies of the Program on any public website (including any video sharing or social networking site).” Â Yep, that’s the CCC…all about education. Wouldn’t want those non-paying people to easily get your content that explains why they should pay for your content.Â
Second: To get a copy of the video to use internally, on a non-public server that is limited to only your employees, you have to fill out a form on this page. Or, you know, just look at the page source:
Where the FLV file is handily linked for anyone who might want to use it.Â
If ever there was a direct example of how the modern web breaks copyright, the CCC just gave it to us. The answer, of course, isn’t to ignore the de facto standards for the distribution of video on the web, to limit the ability to share and distribute content, and to generally treat people who want to use your content like criminals. The way to make yourself valuable and heard is to share what you make as widely as you possibly can…something that the CCC can’t bring itself to do. It’s really hard to participate in the modern conversation when your very business model is tied to archaic and irrelevant legalese.
I forgot to blog about her checkup the other day.
She is enormous. 97th percentile for height (!) and 90th or a little higher for both weight and head circumference.
And while the average for her age is saying about 10 words, I lost count at 75 and I’m pretty sure she says over 100, including “sentences” like “Mommy hold it,” “Daddy do it,” “mas (more) appy sauce (apple sauce),” etc. She’s also starting to sing, and it’s recognizable enough that we can identify “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” (sounds like “tickle tickle li sa” but with the right melody), the alphabet song, and “Ashes ashes we all fall down!”
The doctor joked that she would be a genius basketball player.
She has had a runny nose and watery eyes for almost three weeks now. And yesterday she was extremely cranky at daycare, so I finally took her to the doctor. It doesn’t seem that anything is infected, so we got the green light to try Zyrtec. Although her doctor thinks she is technically too young to have allergies, it seems that once again she is ahead of the curve. So we’re going to try it and see what happens.
It was an eventful weekend for little E: National Cornbread Festival in South Pittsburg and Sewanaroo music festival on Saturday; Chattanooga zoo complete with carousel ride and a visit to the farmer’s market on Sunday (see picture of her playing in the kids’ area). We all had a great time, but we were exhausted by Sunday night.
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BIGWIG Social Software Showcase 2009
It’s hard to believe that it’s already time to start the planning for the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase 2009, but indeed it is! We’re going to be swapping up the format just a little bit this year, but the thing that isn’t changing is that we want the library community to tell us what they want to hear about. For those who may not have attended the SSS over the last couple of years, here’s how it works:
Step 1: We put out an open call for topics to the library world. You tell us the topics you want to hear more about.
Step 2: We find experts on those topics who are willing to participate in the Showcase.
Step 3: Those experts prepare a web-based presentation on their topic, and put it up sometime before ALA Annual 2009.
Step 4: At Annual 2009, those same experts will attend the Showcase and will discuss their topic, answer questions, tapdance, and otherwise entertain and educate. The format is slightly different every year, but the Showcase at Annual 2009 will be fun, educational, frantic, interesting, and guaranteed different than any program you’ve ever attended at an ALA Conference.
Step 5: After ALA, the conversation will continue online, on YourBIGWIG and other places.
Come join us for one of the most interesting presentations you’ll ever see, and more importantly, help us put it together! The “social” in “Social Software Showcase” isn’t just about the tools, but about the process as well. Be a part!
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. 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!