dis-Pinterest

I played around with Pinterest.
I used my wife's account.
I pinned some things and made a board and so on.

Pinterest is not for me, though.

I appreciate the features and I could see using it if my lifestyle was more cooking and home decor based,¹ but I don't see it as meeting any of my social media needs. I'd rather invest the time into tumblr, which seems more open and strange, than pinterest.²

So this is a pretty minimal week in terms of training exercises. In terms of e-learning and whatnot, I did finally order the last few parts for the computer that I am assembling. Maybe I will blog about if there are other slow weeks. I also found a portable version of the image editor GIMP, so I can now have a copy of that on my work PC without having to jump through the hoops of having it installed for me.

Oh, the interns here made a Vine that I am featured in. It refers to a scene in the movie Her.

1 If I was renovating a house and wanted to see a bunch of examples of--say--trim or floorboards, I could see this being useful. But I don't need a social scrapbooking site in my life right now.

2 Not that I am actually investing any time into tumblr--too many other internet things on the go right now.

Legislative Word Clouds

Last thing for my workplace internetin' this week: Wordle. Wordleing. Making word clouds.

I thought I'd do some legislation word clouds.

New Brunswick Public Libraries Act


Those clouds sure are small Andrew, why didn't you make them bigger. Well, I don't want to have to take screenshots of them, paste them somewhere (why does Prnt Scrn in Windows send the image to the clip board?), safe them, and upload them.



Canadian Copyright Act
Is that in 3D or somthing? That's weird.  I don't know. Maybe? My eyesight is just weird all the time. The professionalism of this blog is really going downhill. Shhhhhhhh.





Canadian Human Rights Act
Let's talk a bit about CanLii. Now I know that you just love digging through random government attorney general websites to check out what your favourite laws are, but have you ever stopped and thought, "Wouldn't it be hella awesome if I could just use one website for all this with a standard interface and features?" Son, welcome to CanLii.

Social Media Automation

Instead of just doing the activities this week (I've already made my share of library memes), I thought I'd talk about automation site IFTTT.

I use IFTTT a ton. It lets you create simple If This, Then That recipes that connect different social media sites and web services. It's basically an intermediary between the dozens of web apps and sites out there that lets you automate and customize actions and activities.

An example that I set up recently for Tania was that when she is using her RSS reader Feedly, any time she labels a story "Tumblr" it gets sent to Tumblr as a draft post with a link to the story that she can review later, add some thoughts, and then post.

The most complicated thing I have done was setting up a series of conditions that monitored Twitter, Facebook, and newsmedia for mentions of a local public library and sending everything into an Evernote where everything was automatically tagged. This required a bunch of workarounds--using RSS feeds and Google alerts, I'd have to pull up the recipes to remember all the details--but the result was an index of all of the times that anyone mentioned the library that you could search, add labels, and then create stats and graphs from.

Corentin Lamy CC 3.0

Now I was hoping to illustrate this with a photo of some IFTTT recipes, but all of them seem to be on flickr, which is blocked at work, so instead here is a picture of the band I am listening to right now:

It's Do Make Say Think. A great Toronto post-rock band who are perfect for when you are typing away in the office.

We don't have any of their albums in the catalogue, so maybe try some Broken Social Scene instead.

MORE RAMBLINGS: The default spacing of that image to the left was annoying me: there was no gap between the image and the text to the right of it. Well I was going to drop an old hspace="10" into the table's html to fix that. And that would work, but double check the HTML 5.0 standards since I learned HTML back in the dark ages. As with most style and formatting issues, you should use CSS instead, so I try adding a margin: 0px 10px into the image style. But then I look at he code and see that there is already a margin-left: 1em attribute in there. So I change the left to right and we're solid.

More Social Reading

So I've poked around a bit and I think that I am going to stay away from Goodreads. I am not interested in sharing that much data with Amazon, who bought the company last year. I'm going to try LibraryThing instead, because:

• They're older
• They seem to handle the nerdy-librarian cataloging side of things better
• There is less emphasis on "social"
• While Amazon does have a stake in the company (due to buying Abe Books), it is still majority controlled by the original programmer of the site.
• They are based out of Maine, which is basically America's New Brunswick.

(More comparison of the two.)

So yeah, I'll try it out if I have the time.

Bibliocommons

I played around in Vison/Bibliocommons. There is a lot of potential here. I should probably just start using it to keep track of what I intent to read and have already read. I have a spreadsheet for tracking that and I don't care for the discovery aspect (I get too many recommendations from traditional media and just seeing things around the library), but I the community aspect is nice. If I can contribute to making it a better place and encourage library use, why not?

Anyway, here is my list from Vision: 20 great albums from the last two years. I'll probably add 2012 and earlier to get the last five represented while on a quiet desk shift.


Thanks as well to another NBPLS librarian for explaining how to do this.

EDIT: Dear all seeing government, I did the tagging and commenting too. :)

Social Reading

This week in 23 Things...

I don't get involved in social reading sites. I think of it as the sort of thing that I'd rather talk about with people in person. Plus I have this worry about giving corporations too much data. Amazon owns all of the major social reading sites now--do they really need more data on what I read and what I like beyond my Amazon ordering history?

I guess that it is a moot point given the number of tracking cookies and beacons that are tracking us online and keeping an eye on where we go, what we "like", and what we say (unless you use a tool that blocks that sort of thing). And I've already given a good portion of my soul to Google, so how is Amazon any worse?

Maybe I've just being cranky. I'll give it a shot and report back.