LibraryThing

I've spent an enjoyable part-afternoon exploring LibraryThing on behalf of the Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group (or WCRG as it's known). We have a (fairly dull) website, which includes list of all the books we've discussed since the Group started in 2005, but I'm still asked quite regularly what sort of thing we read, or by regulars for a reminder of what we've read, so this is another way to collate the information.

So far I've just added the books we read this academic year, with the tag '2009-10', but I'll add the back lists in due course. The next step will be to add an email address to the profile so I can generate a Developer key and embed links and images into the WCRG page on the College website. In the meantime I've used an individual cover image for our next book, Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna to spice things up a little (cf. also the image for the current Lee Library 'Book of the Month' which also looks the better for some colour; next stop cover images for our New accessions RSS feed, which I presume will require a bit more technical know-how! I'm hoping though it'll be possible once Aquabrowser is live...). So, more anon on the embedding side, but this is a start.

The real value of LibraryThing though would as a repository for comments and reviews, both by individual WCRG members and the Group as a whole (a good source of reference when the lucky 'volunteer' comes to write up the year's meetings for the college magazine...?). The challenge there though will be persuading people to use the site, and then to contribute. I suspect there won' t be a mad rush. Most of our members are busy people, and I myself am often guilty of speed-reading the final sections of a book minutes before the meeting. Still, if only a couple of champions cotton on, we'll have a more dynamic facility than we have now.

[Let's hope they're more efficient than I am at maintaining this blog...]

Getting into bed with Google?

It's curious to think that just about a year ago I was starting to prepare my contribution to a debate on 'Is Google making us stupid?' with an improbably distinguished panel of speakers for the Alumni weekend at Wolfson last September. The upshot of the afternoon was that I projected a rather more downbeat view than I'd really intended, and didn't show the librarians' view in the best light. However, the regrets of hindsight aside, I retained (and do still harbour) some real reservations about Google as the single most powerful information hoarder and provider I know. Tags for my concerns might include 'commercial_power', 'privacy', etc., none of which are original, but they are no less troubling for that (perhaps more so, indeed, since the more articulate and knowledgeable detractors are able to articulate with concrete evidence just how powerful and all-pervasive such firms are, e.g. Bill Thompson and others on Google Books settlement).

But Google offers much that is useful. I'm bound to admit that I search Google multiple times a day, and since re-establishing an iGoogle page for Cam23, I've enjoyed exploring more of what's available. I first set up a Google account to view statistics on the College website delivered through Google Analytics (again, not set up by me, but I was particularly keen to see how the college library webpages were fairing, though, alas, found the detail to be a bit too broad to be useful in the event), and had dabbled a bit with Google Reader. But it wasn't a page I visited regularly, thus defeating its purpose as an RSS repository. 'Thing 1' helped me set up the page more systematically, and with a few additions over recent weeks as I've tried to make it useful in more contexts, here is the result:

[Now, as promised in my last post I started writing this as a blog post in Word. At this point I saved the post as a draft and viewed it in Blogger direct. The text transferred fine, but not the screenshot, so I switched back to Blogger to add it, as instructed. I used Paint.net as the image editor, which is the free application I use in College for all picture editing. Next on my 'to do' list is to spend time looking at the other options Andy recommends. Meanwhile, I'm still bothered by this Picasa business - same thing as happened when I loaded the Library entrance photo: has my image now been stored in Picasa...? No.2 on my 'to do' list - find out!]

Blogging free

Worth adding some reflections on blogging in general, methinks, before ticking off more 'Things'. I set this up using Blogger, as suggested, giving me the chance to try out a different blogging tool. We use WordPress for news on the College website: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/ (with separate categories for the local homepage and Library, each displaying on the respective pages) where I add and edit most of the content. The setting up, including the linking to the 3 HTML pages was done by the webmaster, so I've always felt like the end-user without any real understanding of what's going on underneath, but I have regular contact with the interface and am glad of the opportunity for comparison.

Despite being so slow to date, I can see the real potential of a blog as a reflective tool, and was highly enthused after first setting this up to establish one for my CPD activities. When I've caught up a bit more here, I'll be thinking more carefully about which tool to use (at the moment I'm slightly inclining towards WordPress, but the jury's still out...), and about how far I would want to publicise the site. One of my frustrations with WordPress on the Wolfson site at the moment is the very limited way it can display images, but that I think is to do with the amount of space afforded to the feeds on the HTML pages. Working with the blogging software in full screen mode will hopefully allow more flexibility.

Finding this blog! Now that I've created a feed to 'My Cam23 Diary' on my iGoogle page, I trust it'll be easier to hop to it than I've managed so far. Previously I was having to open (yet another) new tab in Firefox to get to it (the really bad moment was when I ended up doing a Google search for it!).

For my next blog post I'm going to try writing it in Word and uploading the post from there. I came upon the instructions for doing that by accident the other day, while looking for something else. One advantage is that it will create a copy of the post on the server (worth thinking of if I want to create a blog archive for portfolio purposes, perhaps?), but the other side of that coin, of course, is that the offline archive copy is stored in one place, and not accessible from elsewhere, except if downloaded to a flashdrive, etc.

Catching up

Taking advantage of 'Reflection week', I'm trawling through the Cam23 blog archive to catch up on the 'Things ' I've missed. The fact that I'm where I am at this stage in the programme reflects my concern that I've not yet managed the trick of building the real advantages of Web 2.0 into my working day. Most of the 'Things' we're working through are not unfamiliar, by name at least, and I can see lots of advantages to them, but they still feel like 'add-ons', yet more balls to keep juggling in the air. Let that be an incentive to try and keep up a sensible pace from now on...