Mashups

Mashups are the new applications of images and internet ideas from one site that are put together for a new application. The mashup I found that I will use is from a site called www.2itch.com. It is a mashup of google maps with information about restaurants, gas stations, and a lot of other categories of places. It was on the Mashup awards site. That mashup is useful because it improves the usefulness of the information from the different images it puts together. I have a trip to Solano County Prison library planned for May 7 for a librarian interview. I will be using that mashup to plan my trip there and I will be planning my stops and seeing where the gas stations are and where I can stop to eat while there. That mashup is much better than spending $300 on a Garmin GPS device that would be a distraction while I am driving. I am in Van Nuys and it would be about a 7-hour drive to get to the interview. I asked if it can be a phone interview but they denied my request. I would relocate if offered the job. Usually mashups just make funny pictures. Most mashups are used to make funny pictures, like Alfred Newman merged with George Bush or pictures of political candidates in movie posters. Mashups allow unoriginal artists to make instant pictures that are not creative. They also allow people to view many images at once or create instant visual aids that hve familiar images. I liked the www.2itch.com mashup because it improves the imported information it uses, making it into a multitool, or an online swiss army knife. When done correctly, a mashup can serve as a swiss army knife for the web user. I only hope a mashup is not a form of plagarism from the original users. What intellectual property issues arise out of being able to import images or web data? How much does the image need to be altered before it is no longer plagarism? I have heard theat there is incremental plagarism, which is a form of academic dishonesty where every sentence was stolen from a different source. The first paragraph might have been copied from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the next paragraph might have been copied from a wiki article, and the index might have been copied from an old Vladivostok telephone directory. What keeps a mashup from being a form of incremental plagarism?

Online Video

Online videos require equipment such as web cameras and recording. I use my computer while in my underwear, so I don't always want a camera recording me. Online videos can be very bad for privacy if someone is videotaping me without me noticing the photographer. How do you guard your privacy? There are surveillance cameras in most cities and most rooms. We are one nation under surveillance. How do I keep any of that surveillance from appearing on YouTube for the world to see?

The good thing about videos is their instructional value. You can hear it while reading what in on the cameras. A good instructional video will be remembered. It is also good for the distribution of instruction, since people who don't have money can watch the videos. I used videos to look up old songs I have not heard in years, such as "The Mary Ellen Carter." I look for polka music and found Loituma's song performed live, "Ieva's Polka." I listened to Enya and the visual aids made the songs better.

I will want to be recorded when I am instructing and want my visual aids to be viewed again and again, without me shouting "I JUST TOLD YOU THAT" to people who can;t stand spending three hours listening to someone talking or reading a long boring technical manual. Rote memorization is obsolete thanks to online hosted videos.

Photo Sharing

I used the photo I have of myself. I have it on my blog. The photo was taken on a cell phone camera and I had trouble trying to get it to fill up the space for uploading photos, but it is good for showing what I look like. Photo and image sharing allows visual aids to be communicated from a distance. Visual aids are a good memory tool, graphic tool, and good for showing what I look like from a distance. If I get a digital camera, I will make more photos of myself to post online. I will regularly update my profile with better photos of myself.

Web office tools

Is this the future of all software products? I am referring to Google Docs and Zoho, which I learned about in Week 5 of the MLA CE course I am taking. I think it is the future depending on demand. The value of web office software is that it allows people to consolidate a lot of office functions including document publishing, making presentations, saving spreadsheets, using planners, and sharing files with a local community.

Is it the future of software? That depends on how comfortable people are using them. People will use what they are familiar with to make presentations and documents, but to share them, I think this is the future because of the value in finding every function in one place. I think some functions will be used constantly. I think some software applications will have a dimishig marginal return. People will have a ton of unused features on software applications like Google Docs and Zoho. They will find a feature they like and milk it depending on their needs. There is always a risk of having feature creep.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a tool for managing large numbers of social communities and large volumes of profiles and monitoring your favorite social sites. People need to use a ton of websites to do effective research, keep track of large volumes of updates, and maintain a good presence on the internet.

Social Networking

In week 3, I did social networking. It may be used by MLA members for perpetual contact with each other, constant updates on who you know, competitive intelligence, and free publicity. It allows people to be in a community that consists of people far away from each other. A commuinity consists of people who know each other very well, including favorite games, what they are doing on Friday night, and the names of each other's dogs. Social networking allows people to know all that and keep up with each other from a distance. The social networking is free marketing for a library and it is an instructional tool. It is ideal for self paced education on what a library or organization does and people can learn about it. It is also free publicity for the individuals in the community.

Blogs vs. Wikis

What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? A blog is owned by one person. A wiki is shared by a community of people. Things that might be more suited to a blog are things that one person researched or has an opinion on and wants comments on it, but the creator wants his product or report to be emphasized over the comments. A wiki is the product of a community of people on a subject. Creating the wiki had me invite people with email addresses to contribute to it. The wiki emphasizes the discussion and has many users contributing to its content. A wiki is a report of the opinions of a community of people instead of the report of the opinions of one person. Things appropriate for a blog: The opinions of one person, one person's report on the trends in a subject, how the author of a book wants the content interpreted, and a presenter's ideas on how a power point presentation went. Things for a wiki: A team completing and discussing a project, a meetup group socializing and describing their subject, or a committee of people with ideas on how to do something.

Sip water from a firehose

It seems like in most library blogs and journals, people comment on the misperception that libraries are not necessary because people can google everything. Everything is on the internet. The internet is like a huge library but all the books are on the floor. The catch is that not all the information is of high quality and anyone can put anything on the internet. Wikipedia is not a good source of accurate information. Wikipedia may be good as a starting point for a serious search for information, but it is not good for serious research on anything. It may be good to search the sources that the Wikipedia author used, but the sources may not be more accurate. Google will come up with thousands of hits for anything, but most users only look at the first ten hits. Searches need precision. Trying to get a specific piece of information in the world of i-pods, podcasts, blackberries (more like crackberries) and constant advertising is like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose. A few people have the skills to make searches that are precise enough to get that sip of water. Lexis Nexis is good for getting legal research. Before Lexis Nexis, legal researchers had to look at one book for cases in one area of law, then get another book for the cases in that jurisdiction, then get another book for the codes, then get another book to look at codes in another area. With Lexis Nexis, people can look for legal code in a selected list of sources, they can select the areas of law and the local jurisdiction and the cases that are relevant. Medical research is similar with NLM Gateway, Medline, Clinical Trials, ToxNet, and PubMed. Searches can be very precise for anyone with the right skills. The correct information is there, but it buried under mounds of useless information that people are flooded with every minute.

RSS Feeds

How do I think I can use RSS feeds at my library? I think I can use RSS feeds to link to sources I use for book reviews, to learn about trends and developments in medical research and libraries, and to develop and learn to customize the library and learn about what services are available. I can use RSS feeds to quickly learn about changes in how library services are used, easy quick access to case studies on ideas that were used and tried, and I can use them to keep up with the news about what is going on. By being selective about which RSS feeds I subscribe to, I can only pay atention to the RSS feeds I trust and ignore the overwhelming load of information I don't have use for. RSS feeds can be used to find ideas on how to cope with budget cuts, downsizing, inaccurate perceptions, and other problems the library is facing by seeing what other libraries have done to cope. The RSS feeds might also be a valuable source of information on newly emerging technologies. How do you find out if a new technology is worth acquiring if you don't know who is comfortable using it? An RSS feed might also help a librarian gather information on what the customers want to see in a library and what they are comfortable using.

How might library patrons use RSS feeds? They can subscribe to the library feed and find out immediately how library services are changing, what they can do with the library services, they can find out when the library subscribed to a new database that a patron might want, and they can learn when new library instructional sessions are coming up. They can subscribe to library news, research news, ideas on how to do research and evaluate the credibility of their sources, and they can learn to efficiently use library services. Patrons can also use RSS feeds to receive instruction on library services and adapt the instruction to changes that take place in the library. They can also use RSS feeds to quickly receive updates on information that changes quickly. Medical discoveries and regulations change and researchers need to know quickly. Laws change and legal RSS feeds can quickly alert people on the changes. Patrons can subscribe to RSS feeds to track their area of interest and learn what new literature and trends are taking place.

My first blog post

I am Cliff Bushin and I just created a blog. The internet world could use a lot more of me. I am sure a lot of people want to hear my opinions. That is what blogs are for. Thanks to blogs, everyone is a reporter, just like Scott Adams predicted in "The Dilbert Future." This blog is getting me credit for Continuing Education with the Medical Library Association. I am not sure what my typing speed is but I might get it up to 70 words per minute. Last time I checked it was 40 words per minute. I am taking a course on Web 2.0 in order to improve my skills as a librarian and I hope I will eventually find a job as a librarian.