- I introduced my Mom (and her new netbook) to Evernote last night. She now thinks I'm a genius , cause she can store her recipes properly! #
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My author copy of Library Mashups came today!! Here, below, is a camera-phone image of the header of the chapter I wrote for the book (Chapter 18: The LibraryThing API and Libraries). Wanna see more? Buy it!!

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For those of you who think that FriendFeed is too much of a time-suck (you are right, by the way, but what a fun time-suck it is!!) but still want to put all your various social network posts and upload into a single place, I will recommend Lifestream. I learned about it via Jenny Levine’s blog, The Shifted Librarian, and immediately thought it looked interesting – despite the fact that I have a FriendFeed account that does my lifestreaming for me. I installed it into my WordPress blog (the very one you are reading now) and then put a simple [lifestream] tag into my “about me” page on that blog. Pretty much instantly, a stream of information started showing up, giving folks who might be interested in me a way to see all of my Twitter posts, Flickr uploads, Facebook status updates and more. Of course, looking back on it now, it’s just Twitter posts and weekly blog updates about what I’ve been posting on Twitter. I need to get working on being more than a one-ring circus, don’t I?
Anyway, that is how I’m using it – a stream of activity, broken down by day, on my “about” page. Jenny chose to have her stream post to her blog, but since I’m already doing a weekly digest of all my Tweets to my blog, I thought that might be overkill…
One thing that occurred to me was that this might be a nice way to get the library’s “stuff” all together. I did the same thing – installed the plugin, entered the [lifestream] tag into the “about” page for that blog and was disappointed. Nothing more than “no events to show at this time” is displaying on the MRRL about page. We have “events” (posts are called events in this plugin), but we don’t have a terribly current version of PHP – which is probably causing the problem. We’ll be moving the site to a new server, which does have a new version of PHP, soon, so I’ll hold off on updating PHP on the old server…
Anyway – once I get it working, it will be a very cool tool for me to use to display all the information and inanities that I post to my social networks, and it will be a nice way to create a page that mimics FriendFeed’s lifestream, but is available to everyone – not just other FriendFeeders.
If you missed the OPALescence conference in Mid-August, you can head over to the (still in progress) Archives page to check out the presentations – they have the audio + slides/chat, the audio and just the slides up for many of the presentations – including mine! Go check it out!!
In order to get attention for the campaign to raise money to help out the Louisville Public Library, a whole bunch of people are blogging today on why libraries are so important to us, both personally and professionally.
My take on why libraries kick ass? Because they provide the necessary tools – for free – to be an informed, responsible citizen of the United States (yes, I’m being US-centric today, others will blog about the importance of libraries in other countries, I’m sure). With the amount of disinformation and rumor that is passed around on topics as important as the economy, health care and our government, it’s nice to know that there is an unbiased source of information that is completely free for our citizens. They can go to their local library and read from a selection of local and national newspapers, check out information on the Web, look up articles from both scholarly and popular magazines in databases and get help with doing all of this from people who have made it their life’s work to provide this information. Without this free source of information, the access to information required for an informed citizenry is based on ability to pay – and that isn’t very democratic!
All libraries kick ass – no matter where they are located. This particular library, however, is in need of some help, so if you have been provided information for free from some helpful librarian, please consider donating a few bucks to help these hard-working librarians out!
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