I dig a pony

Thing 18: Social Bookmarking

I held off doing this week of things so that my husband could participate. He has been asking me about Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg and I told him it was an upcoming thing. I didn't find having someone by my side helped. However it helped him because he had never seen any of the common craft videos. Those videos are good.

I already had a Delicious account (set up in another 2.0 class). It took me a little while to remember my account name, but once I found that I remembered the password. I have plans for that account, but first I have to finish tagging the hundreds of bookmarks that I’ve imported. I’m hoping that I can find some widgets that’ll allow me to finally replace my old web site with something that is easier to maintain. I know the code is around there somewhere.

Perhaps it was having someone look over my shoulder, but stumbling and digging weren’t very attractive. I did not find the StumbleUpon interface intuitively obvious and the Digg screen was awfully busy and off-putting. Maybe I’ll come back and do some more stumbling and digging another time. Unfortunately, both of these accounts rejected my 23things password so I had to create another, I’ve written them down, but it makes it less likely that I’ll remember them when I come back.

Ah, I've lost my hanger-on.

Went back to Digg and started customizing, maybe that'll clean it up some. Ew, I see it announces how old I am. I don't need that to appear on my Digg home page! Sure, I can see a service wanting to know the demographics of their users, but displaying that info? Have never seen that kind of labeling before. Thought I turned that off in the privacy settings, but it is still displaying. More than ick, these are some of the most dugg appearing even after I've edited my topic preferences.

• Moron Gets Probation for Sodomizing Dog to Death
• 11 die in crash between truck, church van headed to wedding
• 1st Person View of Getting Hit In The Nuts By A Football watch!

Those are the most egregious of the suggestions, but I'm not really interested in any of the others either. Even the ones that are barely of interest, I had already heard about through traditional news channels. Okay I'm done with Digg.

StumbleUpon is making better suggestions. Sometimes, when I'm looking to kill a little time I'll go to Wikipedia and click on the Random Article link; I've learned some interesting stuff doing that. And so I've often wished there were a similar Random Article button for the web. StumbleUpon is it without the worry that the random video will be porn.

Domo arigato

Thing 17: Animoto

Made a quick Animoto video using photos of W.K.H. "Pief" Panofsky, SLAC's first director. Quick is the word, I picked photos quickly from our photo database, tried to use only ones that SLAC owns outright. The server was hiccupy so searching for the photos was the longest part. Uploading the photos to Animoto was quick and easy, arranging them in an order was easy. Selecting the music was a little more difficult because the SLAC Archives doesn't have any recordings I could use. So I turned to the Animoto offerings. Their free choices are heavy on current and vocal music while the classical selections are pretty trite. But once the choices were made Animoto took over and it was all done pretty quickly. And uploading to YouTube was quick too.



We still miss Pief.

Movin' right along

Thing 16: Video Sharing

I have used YouTube before (who with a computer hasn't at this point? at the very least you've seen kitten on the keys or some such silliness). And I've uploaded videos on a home account (most videos are my husband's) so that I could embed them in one of my other blogs (careful about watching that video if you are prone to motion sickness). However, for thing 16 I set up a separate account, searched, subscribed to a couple of channels, and favorited a couple of videos.

Figuring out how to find those digitized historical videos is a project. I tried using keywords historical and archival with some sort of subject such as physics or Oak Ridge or whaling and got plenty of hits, but not what I was looking for. So I decided to approach the search from a different tack. I thought "What archives is most likely to have posted digitized film from their collection?" and immediately thought of the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California. They're cool and hip and have a huge volunteer base (they have to with their professional staff waxing and waning over the years because of funding). So I searched for GLBTHS and behold, they have a whole channel which includes tours of the archives, digitized historical material, and events. I was particularly taken with the series of videos about the archives based on a tour given by the director to a group of school kids. He covers so much ground, interspersed with examples of what they hold. The segment here is How the Archives Works and he covers issues of preservation and respect des fonds with the school children (not sure what type of class they are from: diversity? history?). The next segment goes into aspects of historical research and why to collect and what is so cool about original material. Be sure to go to YouTube and check out the whole series.



I looked but didn't see a way to favorite a whole channel so I subscribed to it. I am guessing that subscribing means that when I log in I will get notification of new videos from my subscribed channels. I then wanted to find a video to favorite so I searched for "archivist" and found a video from a visual resources archivist at the Beinecke about how he became an archivist (love that he includes the image credits at the end), but it was part of the Yale Archives channel so I subscribed to that too. Hmm, finding I keep wishing to favorite whole channels rather than just individual videos.

And I haven't really seen a lot of digitized historical films and I'd like to include one in this blog post. Finally, somehow (and now I can't reconstruct how, grr!), I hit upon a bunch of 'em and noticed that they are from the usnationalarchives. D'oh! of course NARA would be a goldmine of historic films. So I skimmed through the listing and hit on one about TVA. I grew up in TVA country so I take a look. I notice that NARA provides quite a bit more info about their videos than the average user of YouTube. It is clearly from their catalog and I appreciate it. I wonder if it improves their traffic. And in the related videos I spot another from NARA about the Smokies so I watch that. Pretty cool reminder of the good that came out of the Depression like the WPA state histories and the FSA photography.

Do the mashed potato

Thing Thirteen: Mashups

I could have used something a little more high level about mashups before being dumped right into creating specific mashups. One mashup I keep meaning to get around to is something with our memorial tree web page, something map based. I'm sure it is doable, possibly using Google maps. Another geographically- minded mashup is to combine the SCA membership directory with a map, that would be so useful when trying to find folks for local arrangements.

Thing Fourteen: Widgets

I added the Twitter widget to my blog. It behaved kind of funky, not loading the tweets, just doing the little rotating flower petal thing to show it was trying. So first I logged out of my Twitter window. That helped, but the little tool icons for the blog owner still showed even though I had signed out of the blog and was trying to view it as a reader. So I closed out all of my browser windows, but when I returned I still had the tool icons. Finally I went to my Google Reader, ah, that had kept me logged in despite having exited the browser. Signed out of Reader and returned to the blog without signing in. Success. But now I see that one of my other widgets is lining up to the left rather than under the heading. Unfortunately that is a blogger-defined widget; justification is not a setting option and it won't let me into the code to fix it. Guess I have to ignore my inner obcom and live with it for now. Nope, realize now that widget adds little value, it's outta here!

Will have to explore other widgets and badges later. Like those places-I-have-been things that you can embed in your web site. I remember the Great Turtle Race having some fun widgets in the past for tracking the race and your chosen turtle, but the site seems to have retreated in functionality, perhaps it's just that the race is not on at the moment.

Motherless child

Thing Ten: Photo Sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, etc.)
Thing Eleven: Geotagging
Thing Twelve: Creative Commons

I was all ready to sign up for a Flickr account and instead got dumped into Yahoo, didn't realize Yahoo had acquired Flickr. When I tried to sign up for a Yahoo account I was refused until I got parental permission and to give permission, they have to have a Yahoo account. WTF, WTF WTF! In the past I've suggested my father join Flickr so he can share his photos without emailing us huge files. Wonder how he would get his parental permission, Nana died ten years before the web existed. Sure it is amusing to be occasionally carded at the store, but this is a little ridiculous. Assuming it's a glitch on the Yahoo end, maybe I'll come back later, but I'm trying to do all my catchup now. Well, at least I've poked around Flickr as a viewer many times before and I've participated in some image tagging projects elsewhere.

I would have liked to play with geotagging, but see problem with Flickr above. The cheesy music at the end of the Flickr Help Screencast video earned a snort.

Tiny boxes

Thing Nine: URL shorteners

It seems like it was made perfect for Twitter, but I have seen TinyURL around for a while and always wondered how it worked and whether users got any sort of feedback from TinyURL.

I see in the Wikipedia entry that there are some concerns such as link rot and privacy issues, but I don't see my current use being subject to these concerns. Link rot implies you expect a link to be good for a long time, but seems like the use of a shortened URL is more for something temporary anyway. And privacy? You don't sign in to an account for TinyURL so what are they tracking anyway? My IP addresses, they're not just mine and what about those using public workstations?

@loharasukidog

Thing Eight: Microblogging (Twitter)

I've been thinking about Twitter for a long time. This included considering how it might be of use to the Society of California Archivists (SCA). Perhaps we'd be able to embed Twitter widgets in the SCA web site to make it easy to post updates and announcements, particularly ones from committees such as Government Affairs, Education, and Outreach & Publicity (O&P). But the SCA-related thoughts are on hold while waiting for the result of the Electronic Environment Task Force (EETF) which may be able to use them or provide a good alternative.

I have unofficially followed a number of tweeters for some time with a folder of bookmarks. Some of them I check every day or so, some I check once a month or so, others I check when I'm looking for a break. So doing this assignment was actually a little more difficult than the others because while I will probably abandon other accounts set up during 23things, I intend to hold on to the Twitter one. This meant finding a username that meant something beyond the 23things time.

Of course this led to frustration as my usual username had already been taken. I have been lohara for 26 years. And then my other possibilities were also taken. Twitter is limiting their audience by the restrictions on usernames -- only numbers, underscore, and lower case letters, though they don't bother to tell you the parameters. They are also limiting users by not cleaning out squatters, people who have clearly set up their accounts and abandoned them. At least in the domain name world, you have to pay some minimal amount to own a domain name forcing you to express your continued interest. So as time goes on people will be forced into longer and longer usernames which'll hurt in the 140 character limit. I considered something like loharchivist, but I didn't want to tie my Twitter identification to a single aspect of my self. I ended up with loharasukidog which ties it to my home domain.

Once I had set up my profile, I went through my list of bookmarks and now officially follow a few. Two are bloggers I follow, a few are organizations, and one is a friend. She has followed me back so now I feel an obligation to occasionally tweet.

One observation after a week of use…

I thought that by building my follow list I’d be able to abandon my folder of bookmarks. I find that my home page on Twitter feeds me retweets and plain tweets, but not tweets that are in response to another tweeter (@replies?). So on your Twitter home you get the announcements, but not the conversations. Seems at odds with the whole open conversation concept.

However, I do plan to continue with Twitter and am looking forward to learning the ins and outs such as hashtags, synching twitter to a blog or a web site and vice versa, just seeing where it goes. As I said I’ve been following some tweeters for a while and I’ve noticed that tweeting goes from one way announcement postings to a conversation after a while. Hope to join in the conversation.

Degrees of separation

Thing Seven: Professional and career networking

I have to disagree about so many points re LinkedIn.

First is the comment about the size of your connection pool. I have connections that have only a handful of connections, but I have other connections who have in the hundreds. LI is about networking and you want to network beyond your closest associates. You want that network of who you know and who they know so that you can find someone to advise you about something outside your ken. I do admit, if someone has over 500 connections they are most likely a headhunter. Even LI tops out the count at 500+ in their displays.

Second is the implication that LinkedIn is all about job hunting. Right now I would never expect to find an archival job through LI though I would use it to learn more about a potential employer or employee if I were on the hunt. I do agree that the career/professional aspects of LI are strong. My husband has used it twice to recruit for openings in his company. The second time he only used LI because the quality of the applicants was so much higher through LI than it had been through any of the other mainstream recruiting services. He still has to sift through a lot of resumes.

I do use LinkedIn to keep track of colleagues that I only see once or twice a year at conferences. Without LinkedIn it could be a few months to a year before I learned that someone has moved to a new job or is working on a fabulous project.

But for me it is also about connections beyond my usual cadre of archival suspects. I use LI to connect with the professional side of my friends, mostly in the software field, a very useful body of knowledge. And then there is my college alumnae networking, a great and supportive bunch of women, some of whom I knew then but many of whom I've met since. It is about discovering those degrees of separation. Actually, I found myself with a second degree of separation to the archivist at Fiskars not through any of my archivist connections but through a longtime friend in the software field who had grown up with someone who was connected with Fiskars dude. I haven't done anything with that connection, but it was a fun discovery. Use this network to find advisors or maybe even a speaker for an event. Those degrees of connectedness can be fascinating.

LinkedIn used to have an interesting news feed function based on your profile. In that I used to get headlines related to higher education and research as well as specifically about my institution. I don't know what happened to that. I found it very useful. Now I have some automated feeds from LI's Q&A feature. The Using LinkedIn category is sometimes useful. And when I was involved in planning an annual meeting I used the Event Planning Q&A to get ideas.

A recent upgrade to LI is the organizing that is possible on your connection list. It used to be simply an alpha list, but now I can tag them as colleague, classmate, friend, etc. Or I can sort them by company or location or industry. And the network statistics are interesting.

And finally, the image. That is a topic that has been hotly debated in the LinkedIn forums. You'll see my image is not of me. And several of my connections are the same way. The photo is the only place to personalize your profile be it with a face or just something to make a statement that doesn't come across elsewhere in your profile 'cause otherwise it is just a white page with black text and some blue and green highlights. The debate rages, but everyone agrees this is not the place for your drunken or risqué photos, go to Facebook for that. You don't see pets either though one of my connections did have a sheep for a while; I never did figure out what that meant, he was the least sheepish librarian I ever worked with.

P.S. There is currently an archivist job posted on LinkedIn! Unsurprisingly it is digital and corporate.

Don't worry, be social

Thing Six: Social networking

Facebook

What can I say? I'm a lurker. I haven't set up my own profile, but I do use my husband's on occassion. He's friended with the one friend of mine that I like to follow, he's friended with my siblings and their wives as well as his relatives and friends, and a couple of my friends have friended him in an attempt to get to me but they don't post much. There's one sister-in-law that I do not know very well except through her Facebook updates and I was totally surprised when we all spent Christmas together this year. She is a very different person in person than on Facebook and I mean TOTALLY different. Which one is her? I kinda like her fb persona better.

But Facebook is a little scary too. Recently I got yet another invitation to friend someone and to this invitation Facebook added a list of others who have invited me in the past. Thank you Facebook, I know very well 'cause you keep sending me reminders, quit harrassing me! Friends who know me know that is the exact opposite thing to do to sell me on something. But that's not the scary part. The scary part was the next list, the list of people Facebook thought I might know. One is a friend married to a college friend, two are archivist friends, one is a museum friend, two are from the archival world who I know of but do not actually know, and three I think are friends of friends from a college alumnae group. Only the archivst ones would be even remotely connected to the friend who provided the opening for this latest onslaught. Just what information has Facebook already gathered about me? And what are they going to do with all the information everybody is so freely giving them? When LinkedIn does this it isn't scary 'cause I can tell how they think that based on who I am connected to. But I'm not on Facebook and the people on the list are not connected to each other. The one bright spot is they have my name wrong?!?! For once a programmer's laziness in dealing with names with apostrophes in them is going to help me.

Ning

I already have a profile on Ning, but I couldn't reconcile that with the invitation to the 23things Ning so now I have two profiles on there. I can't comment much right now about the 23things Ning 'cause I just got too frustrated trying to unify my two profiles and the lack of guidance on the Ning homepage. I will say that the other Ning I am on has gone totally dormant. This type of thing needs a critical mass to keep it going and STABA (Science and Technology Archivists of the Bay Area) just doesn't have it. The in-person group has gone dormant too. I do check in on the Lone Archivists Ning from time to time and they have interesting discussions sometimes. So far, I have not cared for Ning sites, they are far too cluttered, but I don't know whether that is Ning's fault or just everybody trying to use all the bells and whistles. I am too far behind on my things to spend much more time here right now.

Life intervened

Well, life and death actually. My beloved Suki died the day after her 12th birthday. She's the black one above. We were blindsided. Chronologically she was 12, but mentally and physically she acted like a much younger dog. She still leaped face high when she saw you getting her leash, she still enjoyed everything (except vacuum cleaners and laundry baskets) and loved everybody. On her birthday she was to get a wonderful day out and one of those dinners that would make her turn her nose up at her kibble for days after. Instead she was lethargic and not interested in any food. We had always thought that we'd know the end was near when she wouldn't eat, but she had a period last year when she was reluctant to eat, but still full of life and love. Turned out to be a food aversion possibly tied to the antibiotics she had to take after a run-in with a foxtail. There's another thing she hated, she hated that camping trip where she picked up the foxtail. Anyway, the day after her birthday we all woke up and she was still not herself except that she asked to go out and lie in the sun. She was resting peacefully in the sunbeam when she passed on. After that we spent all our waking moments trying to do things that she never did with us, not at home seeing the empty spot on the couch, in her bed, on the deck. So that meant I was not near a computer to do my 23 things and now I'm I don't know how many things behind. Then when I was back at the computer I had a bunch of SCA (Society of California Archivists, not Society for Creative Anachronisms) things to do. But now I'm back to 23 things. I've got a few partially composed blog entries from before life changed, I'll start there and then try to catch up with you all.