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Google launched new blog for “Google Book Search” Monday, 19 June 2006 12:15 pm

Posted by Dongmei in What's new at Google?!, blogs and blogging.
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from Learning Time's Feed Room

"Google has added a new tool in its quest to convince people that scanning millions of books in university libraries is beneficial and perfectly legal. The company started a blog devoted to the Google Book Search project." The latest entry is about its Shakespeare Project.

Read the whole story on The Chronicle of Higher Education's The Wired Campus (yet another blog:-)).

Or take a look at the blog (Inside Google Book Search) and see how you like it.

Steven Cohen’s “Advanced Weblogs” workshop at CIL06 (Computers in Libraries conference 2006, DC) Wednesday, 22 March 2006 1:34 am

Posted by Dongmei in blogs and blogging, wikis.
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Hello from Washington DC,

Today I attended two preconference workshops, this was the first one, “Advanced Weblogs: Applications, Technology, Cases”, given by the editor of Library Stuff, Steven Cohen.

I’ve learned quite a few tricks from his workshop, I’m not going to blog about all the details of his workshop since (almost) everything he talked about in the workshop is on the wiki that he created.

Here are a few tips and tricks that I learned:

  • a new browser called Maxthon, besides some of the cool features (which I have to explore once the conference is over), you’ll have the option to hide the ads on a Web page (so if you created a wiki using the free version of the pbwiki software that has ads on the wiki pages, you can use this paticular browser if you don’t want to see the ads);
  • a good idea to set up some posting and commenting guidelines for your blog, check out Charlene Li’s guidelines for her blog, may well be adapted to a librarian’s guidelines for posting and commenting;
  • automatic posting and notification systems (APNS)
  • Ping technology (I haven’t paid much attention to this in my blog, I guess the technology is similiar to ping in UNIX system, I allow pings in this blog);
  • besides Weblogs.com, Technorati, Feedster, there are also Pingoat, Ping-o-matic, Pings.ws (if you allow/enable pings in your blog, it will send notification of new blog post to these centralized service);
  • APNS will get your content out into the blogosphere quicker (instantaneously), great for marketing (your blog);
  • the whole library website is a blog (interesting concept!), check out the Ann Arbor Public Library! Besides a Teens blog, take a look at the Director’s Blog!
  • I really like the idea of adding a catalog search box on a blog (esp. if it’s a library blog), check out the Johnson County Library’s blog;
  • IM presence (check out the Lansing Library);
  • How to display RSS feeds
    • Feed2js; Magpie; RSS Mix;
    • RSS Mix is great, you can combine several feeds into one, then you can embed it on your library’s Web site;
  • some libraries are making full use of RSS
  • Can’t get everything via RSS
    • Watch That Page http://www.watchthatpage.com
    • Dodgeit http://www.dodgeit.com
  • And always remember, and I agree 100%, CONTENT IS KING! No matter how fancy your blog gets, if you don’t have great content, you’ll have no readers!

    • That’s all for this post! I tried to summarize what I learned in 3 hours in one post (and you know what happens … ) and I’ve been writing this for 2 hours, literally wrote from yesterday (23:06 or 11:06pm) to today (01:11 or 1:11am) :-)

    I hope that you find this informative and interesting, if not (or you want more info), check out Steven Cohen’s wiki about this workshop (http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/CIL2006).

    science blogs Wednesday, 22 February 2006 12:45 pm

    Posted by Dongmei in blogs and blogging, science related news.
    2 comments

    while preparing my Thursday @ 3 workshop “Blogging 101“, I came across “more about science blogs” by Richard Akerman, a technology architect and information security officer at NRC CISTI, on his Science Library Pad. Although it’s posted Aug. of last year, it’s still a interesting read.

    Then, there were “more than nine million blogs, with another one created every 7.4 seconds”, it will be interesting to see how many blogs are there now. Then, he quoted the Scientist’s article on science blogging, “science blogs run by scientists and industry insiders are just getting started … This whole thing is still very immature … This may be due to scientists’ caution about retribution, unfamiliarity with the technology, or not grasping the potential impact yet … ” It will be interesting to take a close look at the blogging scenario in the sciences now.