Tweetstats

I haven’t blogged about Twitter lately. It’s still my favorite Web 2.0 application that no one is really using. I thought for a brief second there during the end of the presidential campaign when CNN and C-SPAN were using it that it might have made the leap to “commoner” (i.e. non-techie and non-librarian) use. But I guess not.

And do you know why I still like it? For the conversation. It’s all but weaned me off of IM, although I have been trying to get back onto that this weekend. Today I discovered (through my twitter list, naturally) a new analytic site for one’s tweets called Tweetstats. My tweet cloud appears below:

See all the @ symbols? That’s me talking to someone.

Tweetstats isn’t actually all that exciting of a site…no different really than Wordle or any of the other word cloud sites out there. I just like it because I finally have proof of Twitter’s conversations.

These are the People in Your Neighborhood…

Are blogs dying, being supplanted by all sorts of other Web 2.0 gizmos like FriendFeed and Twitter?  Maybe.  It takes a lot more time and energy to write and read a substantive blog post.  But one way to stave off blog death is to get more readers and have more of a conversation on your blog.

My colleague at UK, Stacey Greenwell, has created the Kentucky Blogs wiki. This will (hopefully) list all of the library and information professional blogs in Kentucky.  I think it’s a great way for bloggers to find each other and blog readers to find us.  And since it’s a wiki, you can add yourself (or a blog you know of) instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

You should totally steal this idea for your state, or if you live in a larger metropolitan area, do a city library/information bloggers wiki.

Powerpoint Jeopardy

I attended my state library association’s board meeting today.  Instead of orienting new members like myself to the structure of the organization by going page by page through the organization manual (which, p.s., is terrifiyingly called “The Blue Book”), they had us play Jeopardy via Powerpoint.  Or maybe I should say “Jeopardy” or a “Jeopardy like game”, since this doesn’t appear to be sanctioned by Sony, Merv Griffin or even that annoying guy from Utah that won, like, a gazillion dollars a few years ago.  [/still mourning scrabbulous on Facebook] [/really doesn’t feel like getting sued for Trademark or Copyright infringement or whatever it is don’t ask me I’ve didn’t take IP in law school.]

Anyhoo, I didn’t realize that you could get that much interactivity with Powerpoint.  I know there is an officially sanctioned version out there, but (a) it costs money and (b) I like multitaskers.  I did a quick and dirty search, and it turns out some nice people at James Madison  University have put a “Jeopardy like game” *cough* Powerpoint template up on the web for anyone to download (with instructions).

I can’t wait to try this out in a classroom setting!  Or maybe I’ll just leave a copy up and running and quiz people that roam into my office.

Memiary

As is the case with many of you, my supervisor requests that I submit a monthly report listing all of my activities and accomplishments so that she has idea of what I’ve been up to when it comes time for her to write her reports to her bosses. (Ain’t academia grand?) And, as I’m sure is also the case with many of you, I have failed to submit one of these reports, since…oh….August.

Don’t you look at me like that….excuse me for being too busy DOING WORK to write a report about THE WORK I’M DOING! Sorry. Paperwork is the bane of my existence and reason #211 that I will never be a library director.

Anyhoo, a nifty Web 2.0 site has recently been developed (October 21, 2008 recently – which also happens to be my birthday….coincidence? I DON’T THINK SO) to help alleviate some of the problems related to keeping track of what you do. It’s called Memiary (the name is a combo of Memory and Diary) and it is a microblogging application that allows one to list up to five activities a day in 140 characters or less. I’m going to give it a try and see if it helps with the record keeping.

Hat tip to LifeHacker.