Category: ‘puters

just to make sure we’re all on the same page here

Posted on by jessamyn

“A team from Google interviewed dozens of people in Times Square the other day, asking a simple question: What’s a browser? This was in an effort to understand and improve the customer experience of Google’s own browser, called Chrome.

Turns out that over 90% of the people interviewed could not describe what a Web browser is.”

Don’t believe me? Watch the video. Granted, this comes from Google, but while we’re all being “blah blah Firefox, etc” there are many people who just see what happens when you “click the e” and go forward from there.

Website 2.0 – why a cms is in your future

Posted on by jessamyn

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and WordPress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

what is the cloud, please

Posted on by jessamyn

People at drop-in time who are just learning to use email have been asking me if I know what “the cloud” is lately. I assume the NY Times wrote something about it. I know it well enough to explain it to someone who also doesn’t know what Bcc is, but I wasn’t sure I understood it enough to be talking to other librarians about it. Here is a good First Monday article that spells out a lot of it: Where is the cloud? Geography, economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing. Some more discussion about how this affects libraries from the latest Library 2.0 Gang podcast. [thanks justin!]

iphone apps for librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

I rarely post others’ lists, this is an exception. I have an iphone that isn’t a phone per se, but I can load applications on it and carry it around with me and pretend I have important business to attend to. Kenley Neufeld made a nice post a ways back about top 10 iphone applications for librarians. What do you have on yours? What should I have on mine?