Innovate

Wibiya toolbar trial

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:47:35 PST

If you are reading this in a feed reader you won't be able to see the Wibiya toolbar I've installed on this blog. If you are reading this via the blog site, then you will probably have seen a notification pop up on the site and may have taken a look at the utilities appearing at the bottom of the page.

Wibiya adds some social media tools to the page.

The toolbar adds the following to the page:

blog search and web search box
twitters by me and about "inn0vate" (keyword)
rss subscription button
translate this page feature
recent posts
random post
sharing utility
notifications
Facebook integration

and some other options I haven't bothered with.

Wibiya is currently in beta - I had to wait a couple of days for my account to be created.

The wibiya bar can be hidden by users if it gets in the way.

On the Wibiya site I can get some statistics about the usage of the features.

Would love to hear what you think of this - so please visit the site even if you don't usually visit it, try out the features and leave a comment.

Buckets and spades and Google waves

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:25:00 PDT

I've had Google wave access for a couple of weeks, and fortunately have enough contacts with accounts to be able to try a few things out.

So far I'm thinking it has potential, but in this beta stage there are a few drawbacks - and at present there are a lot of experimenters still working from an email mindset. No judgment intended here, just we are all constrained/influenced by our past experience and make assumptions about how to use new things that don't quite hit the mark. A few thoughts on playing in the waves (perfect beach day here on the Gold Coast - can't help the bucket and spades analogy):

Waves with more than 10 or so "members" get messy and hard to follow pretty quickly
Waves that are too broad in topic/purpose get messy and hard to follow. Best used for specific purposes like a organising a single event, or task.
Waves really need to allow people to remove themselves (currently greyed out option) especially when you don't get an option to accept being added to a wave, and when some of them are public
Waves really need to allow people to delete/remove files and images. I haven't found this option yet, but I can imagine it would be difficult if subject to a "take-down" notice for copyrighted materials.
Gadgets and Bots - some are a bit dodgy but generally add some useful functionality
It's all good fun

Early expeditions with global position tracking

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:16:07 PDT

Since getting an iPhone back in May, I have been playing with GPS applications. Motion-X I mentioned in my last post. Since then I have started using RunKeeper (the free version). Its focus is on tracking exercise activities - so quite different to motion-x. Although I was using Motion-X quite happily to track my walking and jogging.

Runkeeper uploads a track from my iphone to the RK site (http://www.runkeeper.com) where graphs tracking my weekly and monthly are presented. Very motivating to boost the distance travelled every week. RK also shows my split times - my second kilometre is always the quickest it seems.

Check out this morning's walk with a friend at beautiful Kingscliff. The link will give more information, but this screenshot gives a good idea of what you'll find.

Runkeeper exports the data in a gpx file, which cannot be imported into Google Maps.
However, GPS Visualizer offers a service to convert file types. Google maps uses .kml or .kmz or geoRSS files. Google Earth uses gpx.

RK iphone app screenshot.

iPhone Apps I use

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:45:42 PDT

I can't remember who, but someone suggested a post on iphone apps I use - I think with a view to comparing with some of my online community members.
Here are my latest thoughts on iPhone apps I use...

Flickr - Hooray. So glad that this one arrived on the scene recently. I had been using a FlickR uploader app, but now the official FlickR app is available I'll stick with that for the time being. I like the way contacts' photos slide across the first screen once the application opens. It is quite mesmerising and meditative. The upload interface works well and lets me choose tags and privacy settings and add descriptions. With the previous application I had to go into FlickR to change the privacy settings to make them public. But I can now choose the setting as each image is uploaded. Much better.

That image is not by Fiona Bradley, it is by JIGGS Images, but I snapped this as it was transitioning.

Facebook - It's OK, in fact the latest version is quite good, but since I use facebook to play scrabble the web version is still frequently used.

MotionX GPS - This took a bit of getting used to. But now that I'm familiar with it, I'm using it to keep a record of my exercise. Recording tracks of my walks and jogs shows how often, how far and how fast I'm travelling. Each update brings some nice improvements and I'm using this at least every other day. It allows me to email myself the tracks or share via Twitter and Facebook.

Twitterrific - Not twittering as much lately, but will continue using it.

Sudoku - for those times when I need some logical thinking. This too can be meditative.

Dictionary (from dictionary.com) - this is downloaded to the iphone, so apart from updates does not need to look up an online database. It takes a little while to open up, but on occasions is useful.

OzWeather - excellent for radar pictures to see where the rain and storms are, sun up and sun down times. Although my friend tells me we are still a couple of days away from the equinox, yet daylight hours are already reporting 1-2 minutes longer than dark.

Skype - I haven't had much success with this calling a landline in Australia. Audio was all broken up. But I've just got the latest update so maybe there will be an improvement.

Evernote - occasional use. No problem with the app, I just don't have the need to use it very often. Will probably use it more when travelling.

Email/Calendar - use this quite a lot at work. It gives me access to Exchange and Gmail, and handy for checking on times and locations of meetings when I'm not at my desk.

I have a few other apps including the Stanley spirit level, but I don't use them very much. These include LinkedIn, wifitrak, iTalk, wordpress, Documents 2, UpCode, FlashforFree, Show the Loo.

Split Personas

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:55:53 PDT

Split Personas, originally uploaded by petaj.

David Warlick (my 2c worth) uses a Personas image as his blog header. When I thought about this idea, the first thing that occurred to me is that over time one could expect their online presence to vary so the header might want some regular updating.

Little did I think that mine could look so different just in the space of 15 minutes.

How does Personas generate these categories?

"Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile. " -- Personas Home Page

Professional Development free

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:35:16 PDT

Looking for free online courses for professional development? via iLibrarian this post by Sarah Russel at BestCollegesOnline include a list of 50 on topics from engagement, writing, technology, operations and education for librarians.

50 Excellent Open Courses for Techie Librarians | Best Colleges Online

ShareThis plugin

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:51:46 PDT

Lately I've been wishing every site had either an "Add this" or "Share This" button on it - so I could quickly send a link via email, or twitter it, or add it to facebook, or send to this blog.

Finally, sick of wishing, I decided to look for a bookmarklet that would do the same thing.

ShareThis offers a plugin - actually different plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer and a bookmarklet for Safari. Depending on which browser I was using I was given different options when I visited their site.

The plugin download in FF didn't seem to work from the site, but I found it via the FF 'get add ons' functionality. It does what I want and I was able to customise it to show the sharing options that I wanted without having to sign up for a ShareThis account.

I then decided to sort out Internet Explorer (being a multi-browser type of person). I was not expecting that there would be a plugin, but I thought a bookmarklet might be on offer, or failing that I could possibly create one based on the Connotea bookmarklet I already use.

ShareThis has a plugin for IE. But I don't like it. It looks like this...

No options ready to go, and no option to customise. One assumes that a ShareThis account is required to make this useful. If anyone can give me a clue about this, please leave a comment.

Then on to Safari to see what was on offer. No plugin, just a bookmarklet - which was really all I needed in the first place. I used this one to set up a bookmarklet in IE by first adding a favourite (to any old page) and then adjusting its properties by pasting in the code from the Safari bookmarklet.

The bookmarklet works like this.

So, now I'm all set to share useful links more efficiently - I just wish there were a few key people at MPOW that I knew were following on Twitter or Yammer.

Next on my wishlist -- Add This and Share This include Connotea as one of their options.

Final OLE Project Report available for comment

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:46:28 PDT

The OLE Project Final OLE Project Report is now available for community feedback.

"With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Library environment project (OLE Project) convened a multi-national group of libraries to analyze library business processes and to define a next-generation library technology platform. The resulting OLE platform is predicated on Service Oriented Architecture and a community-source model of development and governance."

Open Source library applications - a discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:08:17 PDT

Brett Bonfield's post on open source applications for libraries is worth reading to the end. He explains what criteria must be met for something to be 'open source', and looks at the business models, implications and considerations in choosing to go down the open source path. Also some background for applications such as:

Via Sirexkat's citeulike bookmark
W-E-B-S-I-T-E, Find Out What It Means To Me | In the Library with the Lead Pipe

Outsmarting smart editor

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:54:34 PDT

This post is a reminder for future reference.

I've been struggling to get the link to save correctly in our new CMS at MPOW so that the Add to Google works for the library catalogue search gadget. On saving, the clever cms would strip out the beginning of the href and just link to the xml file instead of referring the iGoogle service to the xml file.

Google provides a form to create the html to embed in the web page.
The resulting code looks something like this:

The CMS saved it like this...
The user just ended up viewing the xml file instead of being able to add it to iGoogle.

To fix this I replaced all the "/" with "#47;" after the second occurrence of "http". The result is that the link saved correctly although replaced the "#47;" with "/" in the code. This means anytime we update the page we will have to redo this section.

Anyhow - Google gadget can now be added from this page.

How and Why a Business Presence on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:58:11 PDT

Needing a good overview of how and why business can use Twitter to engage with customers? This article in CIO magazine (print version dated Jun/July 2009 1328-4045, pp 30-32) is worth a read.

It covers things such as:

does your business fit on Twitter
who to follow
Twitter is a publishing tool - be ready for the implications

How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership - 12 March 09

Posted using ShareThis

If businesses are thinking more about using this type of messaging system for internal purposes Yammer offers a more private option.

How to make your email messages stand out in the crowd

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:25:31 PDT

Some great tips in the Xobni blog for better subject lines in email messages. The article looks at how you can make your subject lines more relevant and searchable, and the benefit to organisations in categorising messages.

Looking from a more self-centred view, some of these tips will really help your messages get more attention in other people's inboxes.
Tips include:

Whole of the main message in the subject line
Using acronyms to categorise
Make it searchable
Make it relevant

Re: Fwd: Your Subject Line Stinks - 4 Subject Line Tips - Xobni blog

Updating Libx toolbar

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:32:38 PDT

With the release of Firefox 3.5 some updates to Libx toolbars needed to be made. Libx automatically created a new testing revision, but when I tested the Bond Edition there were some problems with Central Search syntax. It turns out that all the databases within Bond's CS setup needed to be listed.

How to get a list on a weekend from home? I went to Bond's CS search page where users can select databases to be searched. Then, viewed page source and did a "Find in page" for "checkbox". It was then simple to find next and look at the value for each checkbox and copy them to the Libx configuration.

The new version of Bond University Library's Libx toolbar is now released and users can grab it by finding updates for Firefox add-ins in the usual fashion. Or wait until FF checks automatically for you.

Connections are critical in business adoption of social media

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:46:21 PDT

Rob Paterson writes over at the FASTforward blog about what the new organisations will look like after adoption of social media. He reports on evidence presented by Valdis and includes this statement.

“The numbers required for the core are modest. A core of 8 will get you an inner ring of 4,000. A core of 34 will get you an inner ring of 1,300,000. 89 will get you 62,000,000.”

Maybe critical mass is smaller than we think. Will we start targeting those we want to be in our core of 8?

Adoption of Social Media - It’s the Connections!
Rob Paterson
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:40:08 GMT

Notes from a convalescent

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:24:59 PDT

I'm currently laid up, recovering from a foot operation. I have found Facebook to be a welcome distraction over the last 24 hours. I'm not it a lot of pain, but if my leg is not horizontal then the foot starts throbbing horribly. Having a laptop and wifi at home has allowed me to keep myself entertained playing Scramble and Scrabble with folks I've never met. Social networking therapy!

splashurl now has qrcode generator

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:37:03 PDT

I wrote about splashurl previously, when I found the very useful bookmarklet that lets a user create a short url and display it large on the screen for others to write down. Terrific for presentations involving web browsing.
The site now also offers a bookmarklet for creating a short url and generating a qrcode image that can be downloaded and used in print publications, or on signage. QR codes can be scanned by some mobile phones with web browsing functionality and will then open the url in the phones browser.

If the image appears large enough when projected on a screen, I suppose viewers can take a photo with their camera and load the url in their phone's browser right then and there.

I tried this just photographing my desktop monitor at work with my iphone. I used the free iphone app Upcode, and it worked with the second photo i took.

Here is one I prepared earlier... This is the qr code for this blog.
Possible locations I might use this:

In a conference paper as part of my contact details
on business cards
in handouts for presentations

Any other good ideas?

Signage at construction sites would allow viewers to quickly locate more information on the web about the building.

>SplashURL

First encounters with Zotero 2.0 sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:22:43 PDT

I’ve been playing with the new Zotero 2.0 which now has groups, sharing and synchronisation with your local Firefox plugin. Zotero is a citation manager which plugs into your Firefox browser so that you can quickly store citations as you find resources while browsing the web.

I was able to:

Update my public profile
Create a public group. This was really just for testing, but if anyone is interested in collecting citations on anything to do with EdAust09 you are welcome to join and start sharing.
Join a group that I can only view rather than add to the collection. There are different kinds of access controls for group libraries.
See the groups in my Firefox plugin as folders
Drag citations from my personal folders into group folders
Keep my personal folders hidden from others.

Some pluses:

Even if I’m stuck using a PC with no Firefox I can now at least view my zotero citations via the internet
Unlike Endnote Web (at least way back when I last used it) multiple people can contribute to a collection of citations

Update: It is also possible to “follow” other Zotero users. Users are grouped by disciplines also.

Thoughts post Educause

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:25:57 PDT

I had a great time at Educause – not least because of the back ground discussions happening via Twitter. Kathryn, Con and I started coverage using Coveritlive and pulling in our Twitter feeds. The coverage was on show at Libraries Interact and the invitation went out to other delegates to join us, and they did.

So, even in the not so great sessions, it was possible to check out the discussion of what was going on in other rooms.

Networking opportunities were plentiful with tea breaks, lunch, welcome drinks, conference dinner and Sundowner drinks providing chances to meet up with colleagues from other institutions and Twitter acquaintances previously known only by an @ID.

As with any conference the presentations were a mixed bag. Some great, some bad, plenty middle of the road. I enjoyed the repository managers symposium, although I have not been working in that area for a while now. It started off with fast and furious 2 minute case studies and then the audience broke up into discussion groups to brainstorm some burning questions .

I also thoroughly enjoyed the panel session I took part in with Kathryn, Con and Penny. We organised this session via a Skype chat and alter a conference call. This one also elicited a lot of input from the audience and based on feedback it seems we may have convinced some that this social media phenomenon in personal learning environments is not just a flash in the pan – Hi John, nice to meet you at the dinner – wonder if he has started a Twitter account yet.

Other highlights for me:

Arshad Omari's keynote on IT governance. There were a few resonances in that one that related to the project I'm working on.

Kathryn's presentation on why librarians need to learn about emerging technologies was very well-received. She is such an enthusiastic speaker.

Carie Page's closing keynote was another enjoyable session scanning through some inspired ideas for applying technologies in the classroom, or taking the class outside the room.

Disappointments:

There were a few changes to the program on the Friday before it started, and these were not well communicated so attendees may have missed presentations they particularly wanted to see. Although some announcements were made, they did not always have all the relevant details and there was no printed sheet with a list of changes. That could have been inserted in the printed program. The other opportunity lost for communicating these changes was making use of social media. The conference blog contained no content – but was an ideal place to publish changes as they happened. And there was no conference twitter feed – There were heaps of twitterers at the conference and they could have gone a long way to helping spread the news about program changes. “EdAust09” made it to no.2 on Twitter trends – which means very little, other than the tag was used frequently in a relatively short time – so surely asking someone to be the official twitter voice would have been worthwhile.

To finish on a positive, I was glad to have the chance to play with an iPod Touch for the duration of the conference too. Apple must have had quite a few of these available for delegatess to borrow. Conference program, session recordings were easily accessed from the iPod. Also handy to log into Facebook, get directions from Google maps while in a strange town. But I won't be rushing out to buy one.

PS> I might update this later with some links and photos.

Slides for my EdAust09 presentation on Slide Share

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:53:38 PDT

Slides for "Engaging with web 2.o technologies" now available.

Engaging With Web 2.0 Technologies : implementing enterprise content management at Bond University

View more presentations from Peta Hopkins.

Slides and wiki from the Personal Learning Environments, what works for librarians symposium are also available. This was a great panel session with lots of input from the crowd. The room seemed to be a bit like a twitter meet up.

EdAust09 covered live

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:44:01 PDT

Advance notice: I will be part of a group covering EdAust09 (Educause Australasia 2009) using Cover it Live. Kathryn (Librarians Matter) is setting it up and I have volunteered as a "producer".
The Coveritlive commentary will be available from Libraries Interact.

Tuesday might be a bit quieter in the coverage as both Kathryn and I will be presenting at different times. One of those is in a panel together, our other presentations are separate.

If you just want to follow my commentary via Twitter, you can follow @petahopkins
or if you want wider commentary try subscribing to a search for EdAust09.

Preparing for edaust09

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:28:39 PDT

This is the least organised I've ever been only a few days out from a conference.
The presentation, at least the slides, are kind of ready, but i need to spend some time putting the verbal bits straight in my mind. I also have to pack, oh and read the program and work out what sessions to attend.

Today, I received an invitation to join the edaust09 network site. This is a "netspot" site for delegates attending Educause Australasia in Perth starting Sunday. Conference organisers, please try to get these sorts of things sorted much earlier. A few weeks back I found a wiki where some delegates were trying to get some kind of community organised in the absence of an official one. They were even trying to come up with a suitable tag.

The netspot site looks pretty basic at present. It has:

flickr photos appropriately tagged
tweets appropriately tagged
a forum
profiles
instructions to download Pronto a chat application
a list of tags which are words and phrases that delegates have put in their profile descriptions

Problems I have with this:

i don't much like forums
there's little to attract me, but maybe it will improve as content grows once the conference really gets going
Pronto is for Windows users only - so how about a web-based chat room. How about a free Meebo chat room even. How about some way for the rest of us to connect our other chat tools - or is that too open!
I didn't see an RSS feed there - and in any case it is all closed off so I wouldn't be able to access the feed anyhow, at least while i don't have access to my favourite news reader, which will be the whole time i'm at the conference.

Still, there's a good chance that I won't need this closed community anyway - as the subversive back channel will probably take off.

The semantic web and principles of cataloguing

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:28:52 PDT

I found a little bit in a blog post by Bex Huff that caught my attention for a while and reminded me of something I used to do for much of my working day. Bex was writing about the semantic web and the fallibilities of distributed computing and quoted Tim Berners-Lee.

“… in an attempt to breath (sic) relevance back into the "Semantic Web," Tim claims that "Real Linked Data" needs to follow three basic rules:

URLs should not just go to documents, but structured data describing what the document is about: people, places, products, events, etc.

The data should be important and meaningful, and should be in some kind of standard format.

The returned structured data has relationships to other kinds of structured data. If a person was born in Germany, the data about that user should contain a link to the data about Germany. “

It made me think about cataloguing library books. A good deal of my working day, before the internet really took off, was cataloguing books. I created machine readable catalogue (MARC) records which did not just point to books (Dewey & later on LC Call numbers), but to structured data describing what the books were about. This took the form of links to authority records for subject headings about people, places, things and events described within the book. In addition there were links to authority records for people and corporate bodies associated with the creation of the book. These records in turn linked to more books (and other objects) associated with the people, places, things and events.

Talk about a semantic web!

In more recent times in some libraries there has been a drift away from the diligence and time allocated for creating and maintaining the semantic relationships between items in library collections. There has been more focus on just describing the “books” and less on fortifying the structured relationships associated with them. Online keyword searching had a big influence on this thinking, along with the expense of resourcing this labour intensive work. While keyword searching in an online database does enable relationships to be found in a way that could never happen in a card catalogue, it does not replace the wealth of structured data that works behind the scenes bringing greater relevance to the searchers’ results and enhanced access to other works based on the relationships identified in the structured data.

Image “I am sick of bibliographic records” by Litandmore, reproduced here under a Creative Commons License.

The Semantic Web Versus The Fallacies Of Distributed Computing
bex
Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:26:19 GMT

social media club gold coast - resources

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:01:26 PDT

The presentations from the last Social Media Club Gold Coast meeting are now available. Michael Rees has uploaded screencasts and audio to the Internet archive.

Mine is embedded here, but the remainder of them are listed on the SMCGC wiki.

enterprise 2.0 executive forum - presentation slides

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:49:25 PDT

My slides from the enterprise 2.0 executive forum in February in Sydney. Better late than never.

Bond Case Study

View more presentations from Peta Hopkins.

Twittering universities and colleges

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:50:37 PDT

If you are looking out for universities and colleges that use Twitter, this might be a place to start. The Higheredu twitter profile only follows higher education institutions. This link takes you to a list of those it is following.

Twitter / People higheredu follows