shinylib

Brainfire

I love the way I feel after a conference, like I have all of this brainfire motivating me and synapses pinging all over the place. This is a sharp contrast to how I feel at the end of the quarter, which is a lot more accurately described as brainfried. The challenge is to keep all of this fire going through the summer and into fall quarter. Hopefully having another conference in August will keep things rolling along.

I think it’s amazing that just a few weeks ago I was as skeptical of Twitter as many folks out there and now I think I’m a solid convert. Without Twitter I’d have spent much of ALA alone and hungry. I know there has to be some application for community college libraries– I just haven’t figured out what it is yet. I’ve heard my boss might have caught some serious brainfire at ALA as well, so I am looking forward to connecting with her and seeing what our collective imaginations can come up with.

As with every national conference I attend I am always struck by the numbers of librarians out there stagnating away in libraries with administrators who are afraid to do something different than they’ve always done. I feel like I need to keep pinching myself because I certainly don’t suffer under any stale conditions. How awesome to have a boss who wants you to dream big and figure out ways to apply those dreams in practical, user-centered ways. I swear I’m not sucking up, just reflecting.

If, like me, you are blessed with an environment in which you can dream big, I recommend a column in the current RUSQ, written by Michale Stephens. Taming technolust: Ten steps for planning in a 2.0 world offers concrete steps to take on your way to embracing the twopointopian mishegas while ensuring that you don’t go overboard with “flashy, sexy technology” that does nothing to further your end goals.

Flock

Although I have been really against trying Flock, for no reason at all, I finally gave in to some advertisement this morning and against my better judgment, I “clicked here” to download.

I am posting this with the WP function of the Flock browser. So far it is fairly easy. I click on the feather icon, which I have already figured out is the blog button, and a window pops up. Since I already found the setup function I should be autologged in… we’ll see.

Assuming everything posts according to plan, I am fairly pleased with the post features. There are nice WYSIWYG options for those who need them as well as “source” and “preview” options. I think source is like the raw edit view.

I am guessing there is drag and drop file activity, let’s find out. So I opened an explorer window and dragged in a photo file. Flock attempts to use a service it knows I am associated with and so offers to upload the file via Facebook. Since I don’t really want to upload the file through Facebook, I’m going to go back and try to configure flickr via Flock and see if that now becomes an upload option. As soon as I go to flickr a banner appears at the top of the Flock window letting me know that I can click remember account to add my flickr account to a Flock sidebar. Very cool. Now back to the drag and drop.

Sweet. I easily upload the file to flickr and tag it and set my privacy settings. The file appears right in the blog editing window and by right-clicking I get options for image placement, alt text, etc. Not too shabby.

In reading the Flock extensions page I see that many Firefox add-ons should work in Flock and they encourage you to test your favorites to find out. Apparently you will get a pop-up message letting you know if there is a compatibility issue with the add-on.

I’m not sure that I am ready to give up Firefox, personally, but I can really see how a lot of people may make the move to Flock. I think at the heart of it all, as I’ve said before, I’m no twopointopian. There are certain things I find useful about social networking and its software, but I don’t feel the need to be plugged in and visible all the time. I can live just fine without seeing my friends’ Facebook statuses at all times.

I don’t even want to get into what kind of commentary it is on my life that I have a web browser open at pretty much all times.

The kind of browser that would really appeal to me would revolve around research, not social networking.