Google

Google has just turned 10yrs, I read an article in The Good Weekend about how it grew so quickly and permeates our lives. What will Google achieve in another 10 years?

99% of Google's income comes from advertising.

Does Google have any other choice but to continue growing?Anything but will see it get left behind.

What other areas will Google move into?

Google is offering $3o million to the first company to send a robot to the moon, land and transmit video and images back to Earth. To find out why go here, it's to do with saving the planet or something. Whateva.

Above is how the page looked way back when.

This is Google's Corporate Philosophy which seems to come up because it is so huge, particular it's point of making money without being evil- those who question Google's level of evilness say that Google has more information about "us" than governments do.

Library Tours

After reading this post @ Information Wants To Be Free Blog I got to thinking about how difficult it must be to engage the public when they attend a SL Introductory Tour. (the video from the post is not bad too).
I really think this is something that I could work on - a similar clip but alot shorter showing how to get a Readers Card, Request a book and use the Set Aside service.
I'm not saying it will get used but for a little bit of effort it might get someone talking about the idea of how do we inform our clients on how to use the library.

Library 2.1

I was checking out this Blog and it got me wondering how do you add screenshots to a Blog? Just to make things a bit more visually appealing and to learn something new while I'm at it.
Also reading this Blog reminded me about looking into Library 2.1 which I'd like to do too.
See how other people can inspire you?

Chrystie Hill

Recently Chrystie Hill came to Australia and gave talks at a few public libraries including The State Library of NSW. I was kinda disappointed to tell the truth- Chrystie herself was enthusiastic, told some good stories and generally was a good public speaker.

I just couldn't help thinking during her talk that if you've done the Library 2.0 course that you would know all about the tools she was speaking of and that some of the community building things she was speaking of weren't quite applicable in a library such as The SLNSW.

At the same time I'm keen to see the tools used to prove me wrong and a little impatient to see these things happen now rather than later.

What was excellent was finding out about WebJunction and all the learning possibilities therein and hearing this term Webinar which is a kind of online conference.

I'm still reading the Meredith Farkas book and just days after hearing Chrystie talk I read the two pages that she contributed to Meredith's book- in particular how libraries get it wrong with building community online. I wish I had of read this before the talk as it would of been great to hear her further insights into why some libraries succeed more than others using these tools.

The Almighty All Blacks!!

Last weekend the All Blacks beat the South African Springboks 19-0, what is so amazing about this is the fact that the game was in South Africa. I am certain without checking the record books that no team has EVER kept the Boks scoreless in their home country.

It was such a strange game:1) Dan Carter missed something like four penalty attempts, 2) Percy Montgomery missed 2 penalty attempts, 3) The Boks just couldn't finish off-at least 3 times the last pass went to the sidelines. It was Percy's 100th game and it's possible it may be his last! Poor Percy had a shocker and alot of people may hold him to blame for the embarrassment of a scoreless loss at home.

For those not in the know, South Africa won last years Rugby World Cup and their world ranking previous to this game would was #1- but not now. It's somewhat typical that the AB's do something like this 10 months AFTER the World Cup- break a record like this and humiliate the World Champions @ home. When apart from the Tri-Nations a record like this amounts to very little in the scheme of things- New Zealanders will be asking why can't they perform like this when it really counts: at The World Cup. Since 1988 it has been a frustrating rugbylife being an All Blacks supporter- 1987 was the 1st Rugby World Cup and although "we" won it we haven't won it since, despite being favourites each time.

Ok, i'm going to go lookin for some reviews of this game.....

I found a 10 minute highlights vid on You Tube:

According to the IRB website:"The 19-0 victory - the first time South Africa have failed to score at home in the history of the Tri Nations - means that New Zealand now sit on top of the rankings with 91.21 rating points, more than three points clear of South Africa".

It's still my contention that the Boks have never been kept scoreless at home- I've just gotta find the stat to confirm it!

According to this blog it's the first time the Boks have been held scoreless at home since 1903!
I'm able to confirm that from The Rugby News that i bought today!
This is my first post about sport.... The Olympics is on at the moment but that's pale in comparison to the above news!

+3.7 megapixels

Here's the same spot as my last post, shot a week or so later, but this time with a 5 megapixel camera- I wanted to see the difference in details for myself. The water looks a lovely shade of blue in this shot-as you can see we are enjoying some nice albeit cool weather in Sydney.

Stuff

I had two weeks off and went to see my family in kiwi land- my brother's partner gave birth to their second boy and it was my sister's 40th birthday, so it was very much a family break and no real time to work on this blog tho i took some photos's for another blog I will start on soon.

This past week I saw an iPhone in the wild- Mitchell RR to be precise- for the first time. I saw a client typing the wireless password into this handheld device and quickly sussed out it was an iPhone, I wonder how he got on with the wireless .......

I was using the libraries wireless (midday Sat 2nd August) and it was so slow, went to speedtest.net to check just how slow it was and got a reading:

But it seemed alot slower than that!

When I was d/l it was less than 30 kb/s where at home my broadband d/l's at 50+.

On the up side, I saw on the library catalogue a little box with a picture of a mobile phone promoting the use of the site on mobile phones. A pat on the back for all those involved in making that happen.

More phone stuff: I went for a walk the other day, heading towards Iron Cove Bay and I took a photo with my phone (a Sony Ericsson K608i) which has a 1.3 MP camera:this is the result:

It's pretty blurry but i guess what can you expect from 1.3MP. The map below is a rough indication of where this photo was taken.

Streetview on Google maps in Australia has been big news.

View Larger Map

I'm still hanging out for a iPhone but Optus won't talk turkey even tho I have both my home phone and broadband with them they just said the prices are the prices. I can wait and just like everyone I'll be waiting for an iPhone that has:cut and paste, a better camera, video camera and less expensive plans!

Bad News

No sooner than I speak and the Beijing Olympics Blog won't be happening. (Why?It's not that unusual, check here, #3, bullet point 3)
That's life.

I've started reading this book called "Social Software in Libraries". I've got it on staff loan but luckily for you there is a companion website. (And authors Blog here) I strongly recommend that you check out the website if only for all the links- try this one for starters, RSS feeds for librarians.
More tips as I come across them; I'm happy to say that an RSS idea I suggested in a previous post has been in use by a few libraries overseas.
The Robert Scoble book I ordered has arrived- he encourages businesses to use blogs to show a human face and enable two-way communication or risk being left behind. He mentions a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto that started as a website whose view was that thru the internet people are talking about the way companies treat their customers. The conversation is happening not locally but globally, and big business mightn't like whats being said. Amazon review here.
That's two books on the go! I wish i could read faster or have more time to read.

Good News

So the green light has been given for the Beijing Olympics Blog, now the real work begins! We now number three; draft posts are in the works; we'll be going live and showing our team mates very soon. The possibility of a link on the library web page has been mentioned, so if it's up to scratch we'll be out their for all to see!


The video blog I couldn't find was on the BBC- it's a program called Click and presented by Kate Russell who gives tips on new web applications and they publish a video each Friday to the net. It's worth a look.

I thought I'd have a look at the Library and Information Technology Association website- don't ask me why, or what came over me to do such a thing, but I did and I headed straight to their Blog link where I read this story. The post was about "Top Technology Trends for the American Library Association Annual Meeting"

What caught my attention and what I could relate to was the following points:

Visually appealing websites- wow what a novel idea! Costly I'm sure but too important to ignore.

Mobile phones/iPhones - Telephone enquiries being taken and answered with text messages? Yes. Requesting a book by mobile phone or sms on the way to the library to save waiting for a book? Yes. A mobile phone browser friendly website.

Social Networking - Using these tools to connect our clients and our unique content is just waiting to happen.

OK, that's all for now.

Busy busy busy

It's been a bit busy in the Reading Room lately so time has been in limited supply, however......

I was walking around stack looking to see if a new copy of Macworld had arrived when I found a copy of Library Journal (v.good site) on the Journal put shelves. The copy I found was from November 2007 but it had a headline that said "Why we Blog" that caught my interest. So i thought i'd check it out and I thought it was great- really positive and encouraging and something I felt compelled to show others. So click here and have a read and be enthused like I was.

This is too weird- i'm checking out library science journals!!

I was checking out a BBC Blog about mobile video (further to a post i wrote about journos using their mobile phone to file video news events) and the writer linked to another Blogger who is big in the techie/blogosphere.

The guy is Robert Scoble who has worked for Microsoft, written a book (no we don't hold it but this is the results from a Libraries Australia search) about blogs for business and more. So i've signed up for RSS feeds from his blog and read a post where he mentioned Mahalo (which is thank you in Hawaiian) - so i then check out what that's all about.

Mahalo claims to be a "human powered search engine" with results only to great links. They have a browser extension whereby you can have Google and Mahalo results side-by-side for your comparison- hmmm, tempted. It will be interesting to see if this search engine will catch on. If nothing else they promise less spam.

See how easy it is to go off on tangents?

The whole time i was looking for a video blog that i saw the other day but can't remember where i saw it.

The Beijing Olympics Blog project has been going along slowly, I think we will reach a crossroads shortly- it's hard to say which way it will go.

I haven't made a podcast/audio instructions on how to request a book yet but it's on my mind.

And to finish off with a visual, here's a clip about the announcement of the 3G iPhone, ya know, in case you didn't hear about it.