Category: Web 2.0

I overheard a comment the other day by a woman who paints, but does not sell her paintings (because she does it for the love of painting, not to create a market) about how she loses time while painting and how that was a sign of how much she loved it. This came a day after I started work on a new client’s website (Colossal Sounds) and completely lost 45 minutes of my life. I sat down to start tweaking his WordPress installation and the next time I looked up it was 45 minutes later and I’d have *sworn* it had only been 5.
Having a passion for your work (or your avocation, in the painter’s case) means that you can lose yourself in the process and get “in the zone” of working on something to the point where the passage of time is completely unnoticed. I’ve had those moments at my day job, too – times when I’ve sat down to do a “quick” fiddle with the site’s backend and discovered – an hour later – that I’ve completely lost track of time!
Have you ever done this? Have you ever been lucky enough to do it *while getting paid*? I’m a lucky girl – I need to remind myself of this sometimes.

The fairly recent announcement of Salesforce’s acquisition of DimDim – the formerly open source web conferencing product – has shaken some folks up. It’s a lesson, though, in the fragility of using free services on the web. While I’m not going to say don’t use them (and I’m certainly not going to stop using them myself), you do have to consider that free services (Ning, DimDim, possibly Delicious and more) have a strong possibility of going away altogether or just becoming a service that requires payment (as both Ning and DimDim have done). Either way, for libraries or other folks with very small budgets, the result is the same. The service is no longer available for them.

This applies to every free service – from powerhouses like Facebook to more niche products like the free budgeting and personal finance tool I use, Mint. Anything that you use that you are not specifically paying for (and things that you are paying for, even) can be pulled at any time. Really, paying for a product or service doesn’t mean it won’t go away – it just means that it may be less likely and will (hopefully) offer better support in transitioning you to a new service.
One thing I keep in mind with any service I use is that if I’m not paying for it, I’m not a customer – I’m the product. If the service can’t stay in business selling me and my data/habits/eyeball attention, they won’t be around for long. For services that have no paid option, this can be scary! The best thing to do is to make regular backups of all of your data (that you can!) on these free services and be prepared for service interruptions or unexpected loss of service at any time. Have contingency plans in place and know what options you have if that service becomes immediately unavailable to you.
Not the easiest thing to do, I will grant you, but a bit of preparation in advance can save hours of panicked “crisis-mode” activity in the future!

I blogged – a long time ago – about the use of web-based operating systems that patrons of public Internet access spots (such as libraries) could use. Things have changed since then. Most have been eclipsed by services like Dropbox – which requires you to have a computer to store stuff on, unlike the cloud-based web OS’s I’ve talked about. One web-based OS that has caught my attention, though, is iCloud. It offers a mobile site, iOS and Android apps and features easy uploading of files in exactly the same manner as Dropbox – but to your cloud-based computer, not a physical one.

This all seems very cool and is something worth taking a look at – the free version gives you 3GB of storage, but you can buy more, of course, and the apps appear to be free (at least the iOS one is). This may very well allow patrons who have iPhones or Android phones but no computer at home to do all kinds of very cool computing tasks from their phones – then come into the library to print and manage things that might be a bit difficult to do on a phone.

Just thought I’d post a short note letting you all know that I’ve written a chapter for a textbook called Telementoring in the K-12 Classroom: Online Communication Technologies for Learning. My chapter is on using Web 2.0 tools to communicate (between telementor and telementoree), since I don’t know the first thing about actual telementoring – but I do know a little bit about using Web 2.0 to make communications easier…

Anyway, just making note of it here so I have a record of it somewhere for my future use…

When asked what a weakness of mine is in a job-interview like situation, what comes to mind immediately is my utter inability to recognize when I’m in over my head and need some help. Jenica Rogers, an utterly amazing woman who is the Director of Libraries at the State University of New York in Pottsdam, just posted a Lessons from 2010 post at her blog. One of her “lessons learned” was the fact that she occasionally needs help. This is an amazingly capable woman who is making the effort to realize that she needs help sometimes – and it’s inspiring me. From little things like hitting the button at the circ desk when I get overwhelmed (we have a door ringer that sounds in the back office and sends someone out to help when the lines get long at the front desk) to admitting that a particular project requires more time/talent/persistence than I have to give, I need to work on not waiting until it’s too late to ask for some help.