David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Gorman and Satire

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I like satire. I think it can be funny. VERY funny. However, when one claims to have written a satirical piece in one sentence, and in the very same sentence claims to be “no fan of blogs” … then that person’s satire changes, in my mind at least, to a belief they really hold.

Translation? An empty apology.

The best sentence in the apology? “Rest assure (sic) that my views on “blogs” have nothing to do with my activities as ALA president-elect or president.”

Those views have EVERYTHING to do with Gorman’s activities! He has just, in essence, claimed to be backwards-thinking, technology illiterate, and biased towards new ideas.

Gorman certainly has a right to his viewpoints. But he also has a responsibility to learn about and embrace new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new ways of serving libraries and their customers.

But all that aside – librarians, we can change this. Join ALA, serve on committees. Don’t just vote – make your voice heard! A backwards-thinking behemoth of an organization CAN change – but only if WE do our part towards creating that change.

Unique way to use flickr – as an online tutorial!

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Checkout this flickr collection: Upload Video. It’s a tutorial on uploading video to the Internet Archive, etc… but the cool thing is this: the tutorial is saved on flickr!

It looks like someone turned powerpoint slides/other graphic files into jpgs, and posted them in order in his flickr account – saved as a colleciton. From there, you can view the collection as a slideshow.

Try it out – what a great and unique way to use flickr!

More on Video Podcasting, or Videoblogging

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Another one from the comments –

Paul says: “Hi Dave, you might be interested in the links on this post: http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2005/02/digital_bicycle.html”

This post leads to some great websites that focus on videoblogging and aggregating those video feeds! The sites mentioned are:

  • Digital Bycycle – this is a “peercasting” community. Looks cool.
  • Freevlog – step-by-step instructions for setting up a free videoblog!
  • videoblogging.info – website for a group of people interested in videoblogging.

Also, Steven Cohen posted some links to video-related sites last week. Here they are, as well:

  • Boogieplay – a search engine (still in beta) for searching video, audio, and text blogs.
  • mefeedia – an RSS aggregator for videobloggers.

It’s exciting to see so much expansion and excitement about stuffing different types of content into RSS aggregators. So this is just a heads-up on yet more stuff to check out!

Jakob Neilsen isn’t a web designer

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From someone’s comments on a previous post –

From Anonymous:
I have found Nielsen to be the most overrated web site design “guru” out there. I read his book “Designing Web Usability” and found it to be pretty far from what I would consider good advice for a web designer, at least in the library world. Maybe if you’re designing a site for the movie “Troy” or some other site for entertainment, Nielsen is the one to turn to. I’m not pointing to specifics, admittedly, but as everybody seems to fawn over Nielsen, I needed to stand up and say that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Actually, I’d call it a case of trying to stuff the emperor into farmer’s clothing. Annonymous doesn’t like Neilsen’s ideas – that’s fine. No problem there. But from the comment, I’m not sure this person understands what Neilsen does. Neilsen doesn’t do Web Design – he does Usability. I find the two concepts to be very different:

  • Web design – making a nice-looking website, involving graphics, colors, content, css and other standards, etc.
  • Web usability – making sure that people can use the website.

Neilsen really focuses on usability. Even in his articles about web design mistakes, he mainly discusses usability issues. Now obviously, a usable website will probably be a well-designed website. But from the above comments about Neilsen’s web design book, it seemed to me that the concept of web design vs. the concept of usability could get sorta mangled – because Neilsen usually doesn’t talk about CSS positioning, Flash-enabled layouts, or drop-down menus. Instead, he focuses on making what you have placed on your website into a very usable website – so website visitors can find information quickly and painlessly, and get on with their lives.