May 24, 2010
I really like the creative way David Lee King‘s library looked at publishing their online annual report.
What could have been a boring link to a pdf document ended up being a pop-up interactive book – it still gives you all the fact you need, but in a really creative way.
Here’s the link to the full annual report.
May 21, 2010
Over at Free Technology for Teachers I stumbled upon the InfoGraphic below illustrating which generations (GenY, GenX, Baby Boomers, Silents) use social media most.
(Click on the image to enlarge or go to this link).
What I found interesting is the last comment made in the post:
This infographic confirms what many of us already know, kids are creating and consuming content online at a higher rate than their teachers and parents.
I found it interesting because at Tuesday’s conference Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of WorldWideWorx research, talked about what his company is calling the Digital Participation Curve.
The Digital Participation Curve argues that it takes people (on average) 5 years to get comfortable enough with internet technologies to start contributing content – whether it be on blogs, fb, social media sites etc.
So by this logic, the younger generation should be the ones to contribute more as they’ve had more constant experience with these technologies.
May 19, 2010
Facebook and privacy seems to be a topic that crops up now and then. Honestly I really don’t understand all the hoopla about it – it’s very easy to keep things private on fb: don’t post it!
So by posting things you should really know that chances are good other people might see/read/comment on it – so if this freaks you out, maybe the way to go is to take responsibility for your own privacy on the net, and not rely so heavily on systems to protect you.
In line with this Dave Lee King posted about fb and privacy and I complete agree with him. Here’s a little snippet:
First, there’s the “update me with your stuff” things, like status updates, new photos, and new videos:
- If you want those to be private, you shouldn’t post them. Period.
- Hello! Nothing’s private on the web. Even on Facebook.
- If you want to share a status update with just some people, you can do that. Which is more than Twitter gives you.
Basic info, like:
- Name: um … don’t open a Facebook account if you don’t want to share your name.
- Gender: That’s rather apparent, isn’t it? Is it bad that you know I’m a guy?
- Birthday: Hmm. I don’t really care. Should I?
- Relationship Status: OK – so I have a recently divorced friend, and it was rather painful to watch his relationship status go from married to single to it’s complicated … back to single, etc. Maybe a case of sharing too much info, rather than one of privacy. So if your life’s on a rollercoaster ride … don’t fill that one out.
- Current city: big whoop. Google already knows this.
- Hometown: That’s sort of important when connecting with past schoolmates.
Religious and Political views: I have em. So does everyone else.
The New York Times also posted an InfoGraphic on Facebook Privacy that’s quite interesting (It’s small, so click on the NY link for a bigger version):
And a cute cartoon:
May 13, 2010
Over at the Speak Quietly blogs there is a really useful post called Online Tools Your Library Needs Now & Why.
It talks about different technologies that libraries can use to connect better to their users and gives helpful stats and implementation examples. Some of the technologies may be “old” but they can still be useful and fun to try!
It’s a really useful and practical post.
March 25, 2010
Twitter reached it’s 10 billionth tweet the other day and Mashable designed a great infographic to show the evolution of the tweet.
February 26, 2010
By now you should have realised that I love visualisations and the Information is Beautiful blog – I find David’s visualisations beautiful and interesting. And his newest one does not disappoint it’s a generative data-visualisation of all the scientific evidence for popular health supplements by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.
They’ve made both an interactive and a static version – below is the static version, but do check out the interactive one.
February 18, 2010
Asterisq released Mentionmap a web app for exploring your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow.
It loads each user’s Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. The data is displayed using Constellation Framework, a graph visualization library for Actionscript.
In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.
Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter usernames into the search box.
This is what Mashable‘s twitter map looks like:
February 18, 2010
Royal Pingdom just released their study on the ages of social networkers and they looked at sites such as: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Tagged, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com, Bebo:
Here are some of the findings:
Thanks to the iLibrarian for posting about this!
February 10, 2010
I like this site – Go2Web2.0 – it’s a directory of Web 2.0 tools (and their logos for those of us who are visual learners) and if you hover your mouse over an application it tells you what you can use that application for.
It’s so simple and yet so brilliant!
February 9, 2010
Because of her newest post: 25 places to find instructional videos which does just that – gives you 25 top-notch places to get instructional videos.
Here is her list:
- 5min Life Videopedia – instructional and how-to videos
- Academic Earth – Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars
- blip.tv – next generation TV network
- Google Video – videos on all topics
- Graspr – The instructional video network
- Howcast – How-to videos
- iCue – A fun, innovative, learning environment built around video from the NBC News Archives
- Instructables – Make, HowTo and DIY
- iTunes U – Faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students, e.g Stangord, Trinity College Dublin, etc.
- John Locker – Documentaries and educational videos
- MindBites – Video instructional marketplace and publishing platform (Some free)
- MonkeySee – HowTo videos
- neoK12 – free educational videos and lessons for K-12 school kids
- Research Channel – 3,500 video titles available
- SchoolTube – provides students and educators with a safe, world class, video sharing webiste
- Sparkeo – a flexible video platform
- SuTree – learn virtually everything by watching how to videos from all over the web.
- TeacherTube – educational videos
- TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) – a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.
- TV Lesson – How to videos
- Ustream – watch live broadcasts, explore networks ranging from music, talk shows, sports and politics and/or review our past broadcasts.
- Video Jug – Life explained. On film.
- Vimeo – a thriving community of people who love to make and share videos
- YouTube – videos on everything under the sun
- YouTube EDU – aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US.
If you want to see some more cool links, go to Jane’s 101+ Free Websites to find out about Anything and Everything
Ramblings from Africa 