Writing Tools: Zoho Writer

Did I just get transported back to Word 2003? Is this how MS really meant to upgrade Word? I wish. Honestly, how many users really like the Ribbon in Word 2007? Sure, part of the dissatisfaction is the change itself. When you get so accustomed to having tools you use everyday in a familiar place, it's disconcerting to "reach" for them and not find them. It's like my Dad and the tools on the pegboard above his workbench. If I used a tool and didn't put it back in the right place, he knew right away and became most upset. Another part of the problem, for me at least, is that I don't always understand the reasoning they used when assigning features to a particular group. I suppose their focus group liked it this way. I want a word processor (and spreadsheet and presentation program) that is totally customizable. Zoho Writer gives you the ability to show or hide groups of command icons and MS Word 2007 lets you customize the Quick Access Toolbar, but I want more control over my menu bars. Instead of a populated menu bar, I want a blank template and a group of command icons that I can drag and drop wherever they work best for me. Yes, sort of like the customizable command bar on a browser only with more tools and more flexibility. You should be able to not only locate the icons where you want them, but also change the size of ones you use most frequently - like the Shift and Enter keys on a keyboard.

Alright, enough ranting. Now I suppose someone will comment and tell me all of this is already available. But that's ok! At least my tirade will have lead to someone positive. Oh, and yes, I like Zoho Writer. I found it really easy to use and like how they made collaboration and sharing so simple. Also, I have never seen page margins expressed as percentages before, but I like the idea.

I wrote the above post using Zoho Writer and easily published it to my blog. I like that, too.

Web 2.0 Tools for All

I came upon the following post from David Pogue's blog that NLC Learning 2.0 participants might find interesting: Pogue's Posts March 27, 2008. Pogue is a technology columnist at the New York Times, and writes one of my favorite blogs (see sidebar). He explains in this post why learning about how to use Web 2.0 tools, as we are, would also be an important activity for many companies trying to connect with their customers.

FavoriteThings@NLC

Well, adding content and links to a PBwiki site couldn't be easier. Who invents these wonderful apps, anyway!? And what's next? Whatever it is, the U.S. is going to need a lot more bandwidth so we can all use these tools and gain access to the knowledge created as a result. It is disheartening to read that the big ISPs are beginning to ration bandwidth or switching to a pricing scheme that charges by the amount you download. You know, everyone should have fast, broadband access. And, it should be free! Yes, I've been accused of being an impatient idealist, but if we are moving toward a knowledge-based economy and becoming an information society, wouldn't it be a good idea to work on expanding the network we use to transfer and share our products? One of my fantasies is that when a child is born, she/he would get not only a Social Security number, but an IP address as well.

Anyway, I had fun adding content to the NLC Learning 2.0 Wiki Sandbox. No one had added favorites to the other areas, so I started by adding some restaurants that are my favorites. I hope to see more favorites entries soon.

Wiki Wonk

It's the collaborative part of wikis that I really like, although I can see how using a wiki to quickly create a website can be empowering to many. I loved the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. What a great way for librarians to share what works with each other. The link at Technology > Free/Open Source Software contains some really useful information about how libraries are using open source software for their OPAC, for public access computers, and for staff. I could have used a wiki when I was working in the technology side of libraries and trying to work with a committee that could never find a time when everyone could meet. Our mission was to create a new technology plan for the library and I can see how setting up a wiki would have been a terrific way to gather ideas from everyone and develop a product that everyone could support. I could also see the advantage in establishing a wiki to teach customers how to log in to a library's wifi network and then inviting successful users to post tips and warn of problems they encountered. It would be a way for the customers to help each other with their real world experiences. That would be much better than users calling and emailing the tech team every time they encountered a problem. At Lincoln City Libraries, the staff uses a wiki to keep their selected website directory up-to-date. This practice spreads out the responsibility for keeping the sources current, so that customers don't encounter dead links or outdated information. Yes, I think it would be easy to become a wiki wonk.

BTW, the picture is actually of a Tiki, not a Wiki.

Reintermediation 2.0

First, let's establish for purposes of this discussion that Library 2.0 is more than just using Web 2.0 technology in a library setting. It's also a term used to describe a customer-centered way of designing and delivering library service. Now, I can look at the Library 2.0 discussion from both sides. Yes, I agree that the basic principals of Library 2.0 aren't much different than what we were always supposed to be doing as librarians. But I also agree that it was a "whack on the side of the head" that was overdue in our profession.

Do you remember when you first heard the term, "disintermediation" in your library? It was probably around the time that you installed your first self-checkout machine. Since then libraries have also eliminated the middleman (staff) from customer services like placing interlibrary loan requests, renewing borrowed material, placing reserves on items, signing up for programs, reserving an Internet computer, even answering simple reference questions.

Every time one of these new self-service programs was initiated, the selling point was that we would gain time to devote to providing more one-on-one, in-depth service to our customers. But how often did this actually happen? How often did these innovations result instead in "cost-avoidance" by not hiring additional staff to respond to huge increases in demand? How often did we actually get closer to our customers because we automated a "routine" task? What is more likely is that we simply got farther and farther away from them.

So along comes Tim O'Reilly talking about Web 2.0 and, clever people that we are, librarians use these concepts to develop Library 2.0. We become aware of new ways to connect with our users. Librarians start blogging and inviting comments from customers, we set up Flickr accounts to show the public what we're doing, YA Librarians design Facebook or MySpace pages to communicate with customers, booktalks get recorded as podcasts to reach more people, and on and on. The result? We start getting back in touch with our users. Librarians start getting invited to community events because we have a new and broader presence. We get to know more people in the community and invite them to give us suggestions, to serve on committees with us, to help us select the next title for our "One Book, One Community" program. Library 2.0 became our, "Whack, I could have had a V8®" moment. It was both a new way of approaching customer interaction and a reminder to stay connected with our community.

Technorati Cognoscenti

Well, I'm certainly not one of the "Technorati Cognoscenti," although I have periodically browsed it and it does appear in my bookmarks. Until now I had only skimmed the surface, looking at the headlines occasionally. It was cool that when I searched for "Learning 2.0" under just the posts, I found one from Michael Stephens in which he congratulates Helene Blowers for being the winner of the 2008 LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. Then, when I searched under blogs, I found LibraryBytes, the blog Helene Blowers writes. I also found that Technorati is a good place to search for current information on computer motherboards. I have had trouble finding up-to-date sources on new motherboards, but with this tool, I found lots of them by searching in one place.

Tagging My Stuff

I already had a Del.icio.us account when I started this exercise, but I realized that I had never done anything with it. Doh! Well, at least now I have learned how it can help me in my research. I tried to make up for ignoring the power of this web app by importing all of my bookmarks from Firefox, which integrates so well with Del.icio.us. The neat thing about doing this is now I can see what lots of other people have found on a particular topic. It's almost like working collaboratively with a group of people who are also interested in some of my esoteric topics. I can see how using Del.icio.us could really improve the scope of some research projects. It also reminded of a shareware application I bought a few years ago that was a browser-independent bookmark tool. I had access to the same bookmarks whether I was using Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Opera. The problem was that the application had to reside on the computer I was using, so it was difficult to use it both at home and at work. Del.icio.us solves that problem nicely.

Thing Twelve: Rolling my Own

I always seem to be a week behind in these learning activities, but they're always interesting when I get to them. I had never heard of Rollyo until this exercise, but I can see that I'll be making frequent use of the Free Photos search roll to find images for this blog. I created a search roll comprised of web sites and blogs on the subject of modern prefabricated houses, because I'm trying to stay informed about new designs and projects in this area. My Modern Prefab Homes makes it easier to search for what's new in the development of designer houses that can be built without the enormous cost of a custom one-of-a-kind dwelling. I have this dream that one day I will be able to purchase and construct a well-designed, modern house on some farm property my wife and her siblings own. My daughter-in-law, who is an architect, wants to expand my dream house idea and make it a demonstration project for sustainable energy possibilities. She is talking about wind and solar power generation projects to make the house totally energy-independent. Now if we could just get my electrical engineer nephew into this project, we could make this idea fly. Stay tuned...

LibraryThing for the English Major

Well, this was a fun activity for a reader and lover of books. I enjoyed seeing how many other people had entered the same book in their LibraryThing account. And, I was surprised to discover that my book collection was much smaller than I had remembered. I only entered 20, but I thought I would be stumbling over books to add. The last time I moved, it seemed like I would never finish lugging heavy boxes of books from place to place. It turns out I have given away many of them and, since I worked in a public library for many years, I just stopped buying and borrowed instead. Lots of classics from English literature appeared, of course, because my wife and I were both English majors in college and just couldn't part with the remnants of our literature courses. In fact, we just recently decided to cull the many duplicates from our dusty stacks. I mean, really, who needs two copies of Middlemarch? See my LibraryThing entries at
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/NLCresearcher

Fun with Images: The Warholizer

I always did like Andy Warhol's pop images. I used to play around in the darkroom and put color sides in the enlarger, then expose them on black & white photo paper. That produced some interesting results, so then I tried exposing the slides on 4 x 5-inch sheets of high contrast lithographic film. That process reduced the color photo into a pure black & white negative with no gray scale. Printing that negative on black & white photo paper made some fascinating pictures that looked more like precise ink drawings than photographs. I will say that it is a whole lot easier playing around with these digital images and you can do it all with the lights on and your fingers out of smelly photographic chemicals. I used The Warholizer from FD Toys for this multiple posterization project.

Searching for Feeds

I played around with the blog search tools and found that the Google Blog Search worked the best for me. It was interesting just entering random topics to see what came up. I'm interested in green building techniques and found two blogs on the topic - MetaEfficient - The Optimal Green Guide (http://www.metaefficient.com/) and Jetson Green - Blogging the green building revolution (http://jetsongreen.typepad.com/). I also found this great blog that contains Minnesota-themed videos (http://www.mnstories.com/). It's like a YouTube for the 10,000 Lakes crowd of which I am an alumnus.

The feeds I had found before using the search tools came from stumbing on them while reading another blog or web site. In this way, for example, I found Electronista - gadgets for geeks (http://www.electronista.com/) and Criticize This! - a great review site (http://www.criticizethis.net/). This is not an efficient method for finding blog feeds, but I like the serendipity of it.

Thing Eight: RSS

Playing with bloglines reminded me of a period in the Web's history when someone first came up with this great idea called "Push," which meant that content would be sent to you instead of the user always "pulling" it in, or downloading. Corporate systems people hated the idea, because so many employees were subscribing to these streams that it choked the bandwidth for everyone. Now, it's commonplace and expected that everyone will have web feeds automatically sent to their computer.

Bloglines is easy to use, but I realized that I've been using RSS for quite some time without even thinking about it, as have many other Internet users. I use iGoogle as my home page and have customized it to subscribe to feeds from BBC News, Wired Magazine, NPR, the New York Times, and many others. You can do the same thing with PageFlakes, NetVibes, My Yahoo, and other sites. Here's a link that describes 14 of these personalized home page sites: http://mashable.com/2007/06/29/personalized-homepages/. The great thing about using these services is that not only is it easy to set up, it is just as easy to add and delete your choice of feeds and to design your page according to which information you want to see first. Every time I log on to the Web, I can quickly catch up with news that matters to me.

Tech the Hard Way

Thing 7: Blog about Technology
Since I have been involved with computer technology since the 1970s, I have seen a number of changes. The first computer I ever accessed was an IBM 370 that was located on a campus about 100 miles away. My project partner and I could only get time on the computer at 2:00 AM and then had to use a converted IBM Selectric typewriter as our input terminal. One little mistake in spelling or syntax in our computer program and we would be pulling another early morning shift in the basement trying to get it right. I have fond memories of this experience only because my project partner was an attractive coed named Ruth.

Now, however, I understand that getting my feet wet in the bad old days of “tired iron” mainframes and “mini” computers like the Honeywell DPS6 was not such a bad experience after all. For there is nothing like mounting 10-inch reels of computer tape onto a refrigerator-sized tape drive to make you appreciate a 4mm tape cartridge. Turning on your computer and seeing nothing on the green-on-black CRT but a blinking cursor waiting for your command is pretty intimidating compared to the friendly, colorful start-up screen of a Windows or Apple GUI. It all seems so much easier now, that it is hard to get discouraged when I have to learn a new program or an upgraded operating system. Now, it’s just fun.

StumptownTradingCard

StumptownTradingCard
Originally uploaded by citoyenfache

For Thing Six, I had great fun playing with the FD Toys applications, "Trading Card Maker" and "Badge Maker." Here's an example of a librarian trading card of my son, who is a library worker by day and a working artist whenever he isn't at his day job. He is a really innovative artist and loves to create, but I think he likes his library gig as well. When he sees this (really, I did ask him if it was ok to post this), he will probably want to make it more artistic. Actually, I hope he does want to add to it.

Generic Brand Librarian

Generic Brand Librarian
Originally uploaded by citoyenfache

Tired of being "The Adult Services Librarian" or "The Computer Guy," I have become the ultimate Generalist, as illustrated by my office name plate. Have MLS, will try anything.

Just don't call me Number 204 - Remember the British TV Show, "The Prisoner" with Patrick McGoohan? They always referred to him as Number 6. And, of course, this program was a spin off of "Secret Agent," also starring McGoohan. In the theme song, there was a line that went like this, "...They're giving you a number and takin' away your name." See, here's that analog hyperlink deal again - one fact leads to another, to another, and so on.

Seattle Central Library

Seattle Library
Originally uploaded by citoyenfache

I haven't visited this bold new library yet, but hope to someday, because I admire Deborah Jacobs's courage and the community's support for constructing such a stunning public building. I don't know how it actually works as a library, but whether you love it or hate it, it is certainly hard to miss.