Good tips for beginning bloggersblogging

by Meredith Farkas on 2/20/2005 with 1 comment

Starting a blog can be indimidating. I remember when I first started, I’d considered it more of an exercise in writing commentary than something I was writing for an audience. That was mostly because I never thought anyone would actually read my blog, and I had no idea how to get people to read my …

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Bill Maher and I are on the same wavelength!General

by Meredith Farkas on 2/19/2005 with Comments Off on Bill Maher and I are on the same wavelength!

In the LA Times yesterday, Bill Maher echoed the sentiments I expressed yesterday about what is going on in our country and how it is reflected in today’s high school students. Of course he’s way funnier than I am and somehow finds a way to make even serious concerns hilarious (and thus, more palatable). Take …

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WikiBibliographyour digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 2/18/2005 with Comments Off on WikiBibliography

The WikiBibliography pulls together articles and commentary on Wikis from a variety of areas. Most of the citations have links to the actual article, so it’s a great resource for those of you who are interested in what Wikis have to offer. It’s a really comprehensive webpage, and very useful if you can ignore the …

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Digitization 101our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 2/18/2005 with 1 comment

Thanks to digitizationblog, I just found an amazingly cool blog that I wanted to share with you. Digitization 101 is a blog created by Jill Hurst-Wahl for Hurst Associates. Hurst-Wahl writes some fantastic posts on just about every aspect of digitization (from the practical to the existential), including such topics as “finding digitization vendors”, “Digital …

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Questioning library terminologylibraries

by Meredith Farkas on 2/18/2005 with Comments Off on Questioning library terminology

I just found this very interesting website via TangognaT. John Kupersmith, a reference librarian at UC Berkeley has collected usability survey data from various libraries as well as the library terminology used on library websites to create Library Terms That Users Understand. In it, he suggests best practices for library website usability testing and the …

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Fabulous mapsblogging, reference

by Meredith Farkas on 2/16/2005 with 1 comment

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don’t know if packing, putting our junk into storage, and moving to the other side of the country is considered slacking, but I do feel badly about falling out of the loop and …

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Firefox is on fire!!!open source

by Meredith Farkas on 2/16/2005 with 3 comments

I was very excited to hear, via Research Buzz, that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times! That’s fabulous! Hopefully we’ll see it replacing Internet Explorer more and more in libraries. Most of the library bloggers I know seem to use Firefox (or Safari), but I really haven’t seen it on library public …

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The community in computingblogging, open source

by Meredith Farkas on 2/7/2005 with Comments Off on The community in computing

The Linux Librarian has a great post on why open source and blogging are so great: This is why open source works. From my comments, from yesterday, from James Robertson: Hi, I’m the main BottomFeeder developer. What system are you trying the app on? What specific version did you try? Thanks This is why open …

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Online Social Networks Conferenceblogging

by Meredith Farkas on 2/7/2005 with Comments Off on Online Social Networks Conference

Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (the Batman and Robin of the library blogging world) will be presenting The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy at the Online Social Networks Conference, which is an amazingly affordable and accessible conference for busy (or unemployed) people. According to Michael, they’ll be discussing “what libraries and librarians are doing …

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What is the sound of one hand clapping?blogging

by Meredith Farkas on 2/7/2005 with Comments Off on What is the sound of one hand clapping?

I know this article isn’t new, but it’s new to me and it may be new to you. Jon Udell wrote a concise and tremendously insightful article in InfoWorld entitled The network is the blog, in which he defines a blog in terms of the network it is connected to (the blogosphere). Like the “sound …

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RSS for lawyers (and us)RSS and Syndication

by Meredith Farkas on 2/7/2005 with Comments Off on RSS for lawyers (and us)

Feedmelegal is a blog all about RSS and blogging in the legal field. The author has a great list of links to tools for the growing world of RSS. Included are search feed creators, feed aggregators, feed creators for HTML sites, RSS to email tools, etc. All of this is meant to supplement his 16 …

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Darn that dreamjob search

by Meredith Farkas on 2/5/2005 with 4 comments

I’ve applied and interviewed for jobs that I have not gotten. I’ve gotten used to rejection letters and all that. Usually I don’t get my hopes up, so it’s not so bad when I don’t get it. But for the job I interviewed for in the Chicagoland area two weeks ago, I did get my …

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The cool yellow pagesreference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 2/2/2005 with Comments Off on The cool yellow pages

If you haven’t already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a “phone book”, A9 allows users to not only search the yellow pages but it lets you leave notes on the places they find, it shows you what else is in the neighborhood, and sometimes …

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Cool tool for bookmarklet multitaskingGeneral

by Meredith Farkas on 1/31/2005 with Comments Off on Cool tool for bookmarklet multitasking

Are you torn between using furl, del.icio.us, and the growing number of similar sites? Well worry no longer friends! Steven Cohen just posted about one of the cooler bookmarklet tools I’ve seen. Delicious Furled Tea Bookmarklet Maker allows users to post websites to several bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, furl, Connotea, etc.) at the same time. It …

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Tech support by the bookour digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 1/31/2005 with Comments Off on Tech support by the book

Right now, my hubby, Adam, and I live right near his parents and, like many people in our generation, Adam is their tech-support guy. Since we’re moving to Chicago in two weeks, we’ve both wondered how his parents would fare without his frequent support visits. When I saw a review of Surviving PC Disasters, Mishaps, …

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OSS Patent Searchopen source

by Meredith Farkas on 1/31/2005 with Comments Off on OSS Patent Search

For those interested in developing open source software based on the patents offered for free by IBM and others, PatentCafe has come out with OSS Patent Search Engine, a natural language patent search. It’s a new search engine and only has the 500 IBM patents in its database so far. It’s free to search the …

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