A Passion For ‘Puters

I talked to a local IT manager recently about his library’s planned migration to Google Apps. He’d emailed me late last week, saying he’d read my article on the subject and wanted to discuss it with me. We talked for quite a while and, during the conversation, they brought up the fact that Gmail may be E-rate eligible. I had not even considered this – even after learning that Amazon’s cloud services may be eligible.
This is one of the great things about being willing to share what you know – I, at least, always learn something from the people I’m ostensibly teaching or providing knowledge to. I’d like to say that my willingness to share what I know is purely selfless – a true act of generosity, but in reality, it benefits me as much as it does (hopefully) the people I share with!

Updates
I’ve finally gotten around to posting links to the last couple of presentations I’ve done on my Presentations page, as well as the latest information about the Publications I’ve put out (a link to purchase the Library Mashups book and a tentative publishing date for the Twitter/Friendfeed book). Also, I’ve updated the Raves and Reviews page with a new section called Awards. I found out on Friday that I’d won an Honorable Mention in the 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Awards in the Magazine Feature Article category. I’m not sure how prestigious that really is – I’m not among the top 100 listed winners in the category on the Writer’s Digest site, but the letter that accompanied the award certificate said that, “your success in the face of such formidable competition speaks highly of your writing talent”, so I suppose it is worth something…
Cache Clearing
– Google Wave – I’ve got an account and have been using it to conduct extended group IM-like chats with people and to follow the Real-Time Web Summit that happened in Mountain View, CA (Google’s backyard…) last week. The use of the conference wave was one of my favorite uses of Wave so far. Lots of great information at my fingertips!!!
–Drupal – I’m still in the process of working out the kinks in the new MRRL site, but it should be available for “sneak peeks” by the middle of November – it’s going live on the 17th of November. I’ll be posting more about my adventures with Drupal, but lets just say that I still have most of my hair… not quite all, but most. And, if anyone has a lead on a kick-ass editor that won’t eat my PHP code or re-write my content folk’s stuff at random, but will still give some help to those who are HTML-challenged, I’d appreciate it. That’s where most of my hair is going right now – crazy editors that either do too much or to little.

Now that I’ve had my itsy-bitsy laptop for about a month, I’m ready to give you all a full review of it. I love it! Ok, that’s enough, right?
No, alrighty then… The specs for my baby (the Acer Aspire One in sapphire blue) are:

I got the 6 cell battery option, which gives me around 6 to 6 1/2 hours of regular use between charging – which is pretty freakin’ nice! That makes it a touch bigger/heavier than it would be normally, but not so much that it bothers me at all. It’s got a standard keyboard layout with the keys at about 90% of the standard size – so my little hands have no problems and even men with larger hands seem to be able to use it easily. The sapphire blue is gorgeous – but shows fingerprints like nothing I’ve ever seen – I’m constantly wiping the cover down…
It has a quick boot time – under 30 seconds – and is pretty speedy, considering the limited amount of processor in there! The screen is 8.9 inches and it’s fairly small for everyday work (though I end up using it a lot – I only use my desktop setup for writing, and that’s just because I’ve got a dual monitor setup for that one) but absolutely perfect for traveling.
I took the netbook with me to Internet Librarian this year and found that it was just about perfect for carrying around during sessions and such. There were a bunch of folks with these tiny little laptops around, but I still got a bunch of comments about it every time I sat down and fired it up. Helene Blowers has one of the original netbooks – the Asus – and we had to set them down and compare our teeny tiny laptops – you’ll note mine (on the left) is a touch bigger, but not so much as to be really noticeable.

All in all, I love my little tiny laptop and I’m pretty sure that I have found the perfect traveling companion (at least until my phone beefs up and can start to compare with some of the specs I posted above…). For the price ($400.00 at Amazon.com), it just can’t be beat!

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?

I don’t think I’ve completely updated my Presentations & Publications page with all of this yet, but if I do it here, I can just copy & paste later, right? This is my schedule for the next couple of months – if you are going to be around any of these places, look me up and say hi!

Sept 8-12 -National Association of Government Webmasters Conference – speaking on Sept. 11th on Web 3.0, but will be there for the whole conference.
Sept 17th – MaintainIT Webinar on making Public Computers 2.0-ready
October 1-3 – Missouri Library Association Conference – speaking on the 1st on Collaboration 2.0 (2:45-3:30) and Library Learning 2.1 (3:45-4:30) – but will be there for the whole conference, introducing speakers and going to business meetings….
October 19-22nd – Internet Librarian – since I somehow forgot to send in a speaking proposal, I won’t be speaking here – just attending!
Nov/Dec – Computers In Libraries – Article on how to use social media/2.0 tools to collaborate.

That’s it – so far! Hope to see you around at one of these places!!

Now that everything is officially official, I can let my loyal readers know what my next big project will be (besides 4 presentations in 3 months and a changeover from Exchange to Google hosted email)! While I was in Anaheim for ALA, I was approached at my table at the Social Software Showcase by an editor for the ALA Tech Source Tech Reports and asked if I’d like to write one for them. After some discussion of topic and timing, I can now say that the May/June 2009 issue of the Tech Report will be on Collaboration 2.0 (working title – it’ll probably change…) and will deal with using Web 2.0 tools (Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) to provide a platform for collaboration in libraries. I’m pretty excited about the project and am champing at the bit to get started! I’ll be doing some serious tapping into my social network to get examples of collaboration from my librarian buddies on Twitter, Facebook, Ning (starting to sound familiar?) and the like. Don’t feel like you have to wait to be asked, though, if you are doing some collaborative project and using these tools – feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you are doing any time!