j's scratchpad

Garrett shared some cool links in his weekly email, including news about Google’s search changes I read in The Boston Globe earlier. I’m just going to copy and paste from his email.

How to Search For Certain Colors in Google Images
 http://ow.ly/1owr
(Source: neiljohnford)
…
Top 10 Electronic Reminder Services
 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,234…
(Source: ResourceShelf)
Two new improvements to Google results pages
 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/t…
…
100 Free Useful Mac [...]

I probably don’t need to repeat how much I love the radio. Weekend America is among my favorite radio shows. I think I started listening to it right when one of my local public radio stations began carrying it a few years ago. They replaced their broadcast of a great standard and I decided to [...]

ALA has a wonderful site for libraries called “Advocating in a Tough Economy Toolkit”:
Contents:
Introduction
I. Talking Points
II. Making the Case
III. Outreach to Patrons and the Public
IV. Talking to the Media
V. Working with Government Officials and Legislators
VI. Staging a Rally
VII. Library Checklist
Contacts
Resources
For the whole toolkit:
http://tinyurl.com/8y9y8d
h/t to Stephen’s Lighthouse blog:
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/
Posted by Rich

I’ve been hearing a bit about the Amazon Kindle, an electronic book reader the folks at Amazon.com developed. There was quite a bit of buzz about it in its early days. I happened to catch the segment on last Friday’s Oprah where Oprah raved about the gadget, how easy she finds it to use, and how [...]

The October 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal had an article called Twitter goes mainstream: A lot more people — and businesses — are finding new ways to tweet:
“One of the hottest technologies in Silicon Valley is also one of the simplest.”
“The online service from Web start-up Twitter Inc. prompts users to do one [...]

Dan Lester of the Boise State University Libraries gave a talk called “Who Moved My Ultrafiche & 8-Tracks: Insights For The Future:”
Dan, who’s retiring on October 31, after 43 years in the library field, gave a slideshow of the changes in technology over the years:

Picture showing Videodisc player and OCLC Catalog Card Printers.
Technology failures: [...]

Sarah Houghton-Jan of the San Jose Public Library and Shannon Staley of the San Jose State University Library gave a talk called (Microsoft) SharePoint for Libraries: Streamlining Your Intranet Management. Both of them created a joint intranet using Microsoft SharePoint, a free content management program. It offers shared workspaces and documents, wikis, blogs, [...]

NELINET is hosting it’s IT Conference 2008 – Web 2.0: Where Are We Now? at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island on Friday, October 10, 2008:
“This year’s IT Conference – Web 2.0: Where Are We Now? will feature exciting new developments, updates and improvements to Web 2.0 tools in the library world and beyond. Attendees [...]

“Oh, in case you hadn’t heard yet, here’s a new browser for you to test on ” joked a friend of mine yesterday. Lots of folks are talking about Google’s new search engine Chrome, especially how it might effect the browser market and compete with Firefox and Internet Explorer. The Boston Globe published a [...]

I was thrilled to see Hiawatha Bray write about the Boston Public Library’s cool tools, the library’s value, and why researching via a library can be better than researching via Google. The tech reporter writes:
“[F]or deep research, you can’t beat a well-stocked library, with its books and specialized databases. Yet you can access many library [...]