Some of Libraries Interact’s friends were nominated and we congratulate them on this amazing honour.

Check out the winners and runner ups – I am sure you’ll find something to add to your feed reader.

To meme, or not to meme: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler on rice to suffer
the quirky things our borrowers do,
Or to take arms against a gratuitous pet blog,
And by travelling through the sense of home? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by gamestorming to say we end
The podcasts and collective innovation
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a book review
Devoutly to be wish’d.
To blah, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance sweater p()rn:
ay, there’s the rub;
For in that Pondering Pentecost what dreams may come
When you’re sick in 2011,
Must give us price: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of Too lazy to Post;
For Glenti would bear the overdrive(n) to despair,
The information architecture, and digital libraries,
The progress of despised love, the new blowtorch
The rock star life and the spurns
That patient merit of what are you selling,
When he himself might op shop holiday make

The THALI Tags page is a tag cloud that is generated by using content analysis of posts on our individual blogs, as well as Libraries Interact. The results of the content analysis, undertaken using a Yahoo! Pipe, are fed through a stop word list and the number of posts associated with the remaining tags determine the size of the tags.

Other aspects of the page new in this version include:

• The page is directly integrated with our WordPress blog
• The tag cloud is updated approximately twice a day
• If you click on a tag a list of posts associated with that tag are displayed
• A widget is displayed in the sidebar listing the top 5 tags
• You can now use the plugin on your own WordPress powered blogs if you like

We value your feedback and would welcome any thoughts you may have on the new THALI Tags page, either as a comment or via our Contact Us form.

The photo “King Cloud” was uploaded to Flickr by Karen Ka Ying Wong and used under a Creative Commons license.

My place of work is one of them, using it to host a blogs service for the university and a service for teaching & learning purposes.

The WordPress team recently announced a survey that they are using to help in the development of the navigation used in the dashboard area of the next version WordPress.

If you use WordPress I encourage you to take the poll and help in the development of this important feature.

If you don’t use WordPress, apologies for the noise.

This year we are going to celebrate by hosting a Carnival of the Infosciences. The carnival has not been held since February when A passion for ‘puters hosted the 89th. So, while you are celebrating LIW, keep a look out for blog posts to submit for the carnival roundup to be published on the 26th of May. This LIW is an Australian event, but submissions from all over are welcome. The theme of LIW is libraries are for everyone, so posts on that theme are particularly welcome.

If you have never participated in a Carnival of the Infosciences you can find out more from the infosciences wiki. Post your submissions to blogadmin <at> librariesinteract <dot> info and please include the following:

• The title of your entry.
• The URI (address) of your entry.
• A description or summary of the entry.
• Your name or other moniker by which you wish to be referenced.

Alternatively add them as links to del.icio.us with the tag carninfo and a description of your own and your name (or moniker) in the notes field.

Have a great week!

Image by busymommy Some rights reserved.

Here are some tips to bring things back into perspective:

Tame Your Feeds

RSS out of control? Back them up to an OPML file, then start cutting shamelessly. Start with:

• Dead blogs
• Blogs that are no longer relevant to your current work
• Newspaper feeds – I find these are the most difficult to keep up with. They update several times per day and can quickly spiral out of control.
• Blogs or feeds that update too frequently. They are are often not much more than linkblogs – causing you to spend more time reading as you click through to each link.

Keep:

• Blogs with few subscribers – because you won’t be rereading their comments on everyone else’s blog
• Analytical, thoughtful blogs – they’re worth the time
• Blogs outside librarianship, or with a higher ratio of original content
• Feeds you actually read, if you use Google Reader use the statistics feature to work out which you read the most

Who said you have to subscribe? There are several sites I prefer to browse now and then rather than subscribe, like Lifehacker. Ever had a magazine you bought now and then and liked, but when you subscribed you stopped reading it? If you’ve got that problem identify a few sites you’d rather visit directly now and then, rather than through a Reader.

Email

Email eating away at you? Don’t make things difficult for yourself by using all the fancy flag, follow-up and folder features. The Fatal 3 F’s! Make it easy for yourself to sort and reply:

• Move messages more than 2 weeks old to an archive folder. Check with your IT staff – if your space is generous there’s no need to ever delete most of your emails.
• Make a paper to-do/follow-up list. Easier than keeping track of flags.
• Once you’re done sorting, follow some new rules: Dave Pollard has an excellent and sensible list of “when not to use email“.

Overly Social

Social software too, can be difficult to keep up with. It is all too easy to get carried away by trying everything on Mashable. A good solution might be to try one or two new sites a month, but really only use two to three actively. Personally, I really like Facebook because you can integrate so many other applications into it. That way, you really only have to interact with one website regularly. See Michael Porter’s bigwig presentation on Facebook for more.

How do you manage your feeds and online presence? Leave a comment!

Duncan thinks that this is ironic – a consultation paper for a consultation blog – the comments argue the case from both angles.

Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else — Duncan Riley @ Techcrunch

Responses to the discussion paper must be submitted by 1st December 2007 via email or snail mail. It’s worth a look at just 30 pages with some questions to consider about privacy, security and usability. It’s quite concise compared to your typical government publication.

Australian Government Consultation Blog : a discussion paper (PDF)

• Using a new Yahoo! Pipe for the analysis of posts to extract terms;
• The PHP code used to generate the tag cloud was cleaned up and generally improved;
• Tags are checked against a list of “stop words”;
• The SimplePie RSS and Atom class for PHP is now being used to retrieve the Yahoo! Pipe; and
• Tags that are more than two characters in length, and have two URLs associated with them, are the only ones used to generate the cloud.

I encourage you all to take a look and let us know what you think either by commenting on this post, or by sending us an email.

[Update: 27/09/2007]

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is the addition of an RSS feed of the top ten most popular tags in the THALI-Tag cloud. This RSS feed can be aggregated into places such as the side bar on a blog, or in your personalised iGoogle page.

• language hat – I’ve always had an interest in words and translations, nevermind changes across editions. I came across this blog in the blogroll of an old favourite that ceased a year or so back.
• Dark Roasted Blend – I’m a little undecided on this one at the moment, however I’ve linked to the post that attracted my attention rather than main page. This blog is picture intensive covering interesting quirks.
• The Presurfer – This is an old favourite that I’ve not read in a long, long time, a site for generalists. It’s been running since 2000.
• xkcd – one of my favourite cartoons, it appeals to the geek philosopher in me.
• Arts & Letters Daily – Another old favourite I’ve recently returned to. I used to cite articles from it regularly in my early blogging days. Somehow I overlooked it when populating my aggregator. Revisiting the blogroll of my old blog reminded me of its absence in my current reading.

One of the primary blog discovery tools I used, or used to use and now lament, is the humble blogroll. These days I read most blogs via an aggregator and rarely visit the actual blog. In doing so I miss the bits around the blog: the look and feel, the colour, the typesetting, and the blogroll. Some sites have extensive rolls and others keep it tight. It was always a delight to happen upon a long and interesting list, plenty of food to pick at, avenues to explore. I would jump from blogroll to blog to new roll and on, finding myself in faraway places, feeding on curiosities ranging from the mundane to the outlandish.

1. Social Networking Libraries – Research on social networking tools and their use in libraries.
2. iLibrarian — News and resources on Library 2.0 and the information revolution.
   The title kind of reminds me of Tarzan movies. I Librarian, You Jane?
3. Ambient Connections via Ron Edwards — Innovations in game, mobile and other cool technologies that matter
4. infotangle — Elyssa Kroski’s interests in emerging technologies, web 2.0, information and libraries.
5. intranetblog.com — intranet musings, best practices, case studies and evolution.

BlogDay2007