A Passion For ‘Puters

I haven’t listened to the audio portion of the interview yet – I’ve just read the text part. I’m a little scared to listen to the audio – I always think I sound like an idiot… Anyway, MaintainIT has chosen little ol’ me as the Library Spotlight for this month. Very exciting stuff!!
Update: I just listened to the audio and I actually don’t sound like as much of an idiot as I thought. You all have my permission to listen to it now…

For Christmas this year, I got inspired to do some cooking! My BF’s mother gave me How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (who also does the Minimalist TivoCast, which is great fun) and I’ve been reading it cover-to-cover. So far, I’m through “everything you ever wanted to know about noodles” and getting ready to find out everything about bread. I’ve already been through the veggies, fruits and seafood chapters. It truly is a bible for folks who want a cookbook that gives them more than just static directions on how to make a single food item – there are almost no recipes in the book (so far) that don’t have multiple variations so that you can take the basic recipe (of which there are 2000) and make up to 20 different foods using that one recipe, with just a few variations. My friend Tab also got me the Better Homes & Gardens “pink plaid” edition of the kitchen essential cookbook. My mom has one of these (though I think it’s the original edition – it’s really old and “well-loved”…) and it was the go-to cookbook when I cooked at home with her. Now I have one of my own!! Yeah!
My boyfriend got, also from Doug and Tab, the Alton Brown salt cellar and a set of Alton Brown Plunger measuring cups. Since I got Tab the Gear For Your Kitchen book by Alton Brown, we’re thinking that Alton did pretty well this year…
So far, from the “How to cook everything” cookbook, I’ve made an asparagus and parmesan risotto, a lentils and potatoes with curry dinner and fried zucchinis. Yum! I also noticed a recipe for truffles in the BH&G cookbook last night that I might have to try out…
Also – and you thought I was done – my BF’s mom got me a year’s subscription to the Taste of Home magazine, something that I regularly “borrow” from my Mom. Mom is happy to know that her issues will be staying put from now on!
It wasn’t a *completely* foodie Christmas, though – my family got a Wii (which has inspired me to get a Wii Fit for it – I’m going to have to make up for all the cooking I’ll be doing somehow) as well as a bunch of Wii games. I got some clothes and some cash, which was nice. Alex got mostly cash, so we spent a lovely afternoon at the Columbia Mall last weekend, spending $241 on new clothes for my little clotheshorse… He left the mall with $9 in cash and a beatific grin on his face, so I think he was happy with his Christmas as well.
I hope all of my readers had a wonderful holiday season – while it is fun to play with all the new stuff that the holiday season brings, I hope that everyone also got some rest, some time with their loved ones and a new outlook for the new year!

Reading through Bill’s comment on my previous post, I was reminded that I meant to tell you all about a very cool, and very related, compendium of information that the folks at the MuniGov 2.0 organization have compiled. The Web 2.0 Security page is basically an annotated collection of reports and “thought pieces” from all over the web, put together and given to us for free! There are positive and negative pieces included – you can read through them and make up your own mind, but as Bill so nicely stated in his comment – our job as IT people is to *support* business use, not stand in the way of our internal customers as they try to do their jobs. If we can do that and maintain security, we’re golden!
Update to the update – I just found a link (via the privacyala Twitter account to an article on Facebook & privacy. The sentence that makes it relevant to this post is:

Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.

I’m headed off to read the article now, but thought I’d post a quick update here first, to let others know about it!

For those who haven’t heard about it, Rachel Singer Gordon has started a new review service for libraries that focuses on Computer books & topics. The Tech Static is a resource for anyone who buys computer or technology books for libraries. I am one of the reviewers, and my first review, for The Productive Programmer is now up! Enjoy!!

Check out this slide deck from Razorfish on “What if Amazon & iTunes were to use Facebook Connect” (explanation of FB Connect on slides 1-10, imagination starts on slide 11).

Ok – that’s interesting enough – but what if libraries hooked into FB Connect? What sort of things could we do with the information in people’s profiles to “personalize” their experience on our websites? I imagine a lot of the suggestions for Amazon would be applicable to libraries, but surely we could think of other ways to use that Facebook data, too!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed are probably already aware of this, but for the rest of you…. I’ve just signed a contract to write a book! I’ll be banging out lots and lots and lots of words on the phenomenon of microblogging (think Twitter and Tumblr) and lifestreaming (think FriendFeed) and how libraries can use such phenomena to reach out to their patrons. This book will be part of a series of books all on various aspects of social media/phenomenon and their uses in libraries. I’ll let the other authors announce their own titles, but from what I know so far, the series is going to seriously kick some ass. Emphasis via profanity totally intentional there, by the way….

Anyway – this gives me a bit of pause as to the future of this blog (at least in the short term). Now that the blog has helped me on my way to lots of writing assignments (don’t forget to check out my Library Tech Report from ALA that will be out about the time this book is due in to the publisher next year…), I’m so busy writing other things that I may not have time to write here. Hopefully I’ll be able to do *some* posting, but I will definitely be keeping up with my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, so posting will continue to happen – albeit in a shorter format – there.

The rest of the InMagic interview has been posted. Find out all about what I think about social networks, the challenges of library social stuff and more!

The folks over at InMagic contacted me a couple of weeks ago about a new series they are doing on folks who deal with information in some way or another. The first part of the interview (if you all hadn’t noticed by now – I’m a wordy wench and they had to split the interview into two parts to keep from overwhelming everyone…) is up now at http://inmagicinc.blogspot.com/2008/11/our-inaugural-info-pro-file-robin.html. It’s accompanied by my standard headshot. Cindi Trainor, seriously, I’m going to tackle you at the next conference I see you at and make you work your magic with your camera and make me look pretty in a photo… If you can do that, I’ll owe you more than a couple of refreshing beverages, I’m sure!
Anyway, the interview is up and available if anyone wants to take a look!

The new MaintainIT cookbook is out – with lots of great advice from librarians and library staff from all over the place (including yours truly…). This one, Planning for Success, covers planning & decision making, communication and partnerships, buying and deploying technology, maintaining & sustaining technology, networking & security and innovation. Go download it – right now! Next time you are at a conference, look for their booth – they often have bunches of these all printed up and available.
When you come to the quotes from me, however, please remember that they were given over the phone, so that I couldn’t see the person I was talking to or get any non-vocal cues for just how stupid I was sounding… I really do sound somewhat better than that in real life (or at least I hope so, since people pay me to talk!). They did a great job of transcribing my statements – word for word – all the silliness and crazy sounding-ness is mine.

I’m currently listening to a book on CD (errr, rather .wma, since I’ve checked it out from my local public library via netLibrary and am listening to it via the DRM-filled magic of Windows Media Player – but that’s another post entirely) called “Way With Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion” that brought up an interesting point in the 4th lecture on Audience. The professor, Michael Drout, used the term “common discourse” to explain why you should go beyond knowing who your audience is and actually understand what the common culture of the audience. He used magazine articles as an example – read the magazine and understand what type of language is used (jargon; plain English; first, second or third person; etc.) and what conventions the audience expects. Since you can’t know who exactly will be in your audience, the next best thing would be to cater to what they expect from you. This comes on the heels of a post by Aaron Schmidt, of the Walking Paper blog that gives tips for being a good presenter. Michael Stephens saw that post and pointed to his own collection of tips for presenting at Tame The Web.
All of these things came together for me this morning in a sort of synthesis of information – which I’m going to share with you. Dr. Drout was referring to audience as a writer or speaker, Aaron and Michael were talking about speaking and presenting and this blog tends to talk about (when it’s not overtaken by conference posts) web sites and web site design. All of these creative endeavors require that you take into account your “audience” – but none of them have a well-defined audience at all. Anyone can read a magazine article, show up for a presentation or visit a web site. You may have a vague idea of the type of people who will show up (librarians interested in webby 2.0 stuff, such as the last conference I attended), but even within a fairly limited audience range, you will find vast differences in technological abilities, interests and understanding. Because of this difference, “writing for your audience” becomes pretty much useless advice.
Instead of writing for a particular audience type, check out the audience’s expectations via the common discourse. Use Slideshare to see what kinds of presentations were given at the last conference at which you are speaking; read a back issue or two of a magazine for which you want to write; visit similar or competing web sites that do much the same thing as the web site you are about to design/write copy for/etc. This will require a bit more work on our part as content creators, but it will – hopefully – improve the effects our words/presentations/sites have on our audience – and that’s the point of doing all this writing/presenting/web site creating, right?