Library & Literary Miscellany

I recently posted a bunch of resources pertaining to the development of information literacy in young children, but, truth is, information overload has threatened to make us all feel slightly less than completely on top of things (ok, completely illiterate and/or uninformed). In light of the information overload that approaches most of us like a threatening behemoth from time-to-time, I wanted to briefly highlight a couple of recent articles that discuss ways to cope with information.

First, the New York Times article Too Much Information: Ignore it suggests “selective ignorance” to be the most workable strategy (also known as “the low information diet”). The article discusses Timothy Ferriss’ philosophy that he prescribes in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (you could also visit Ferriss’ 4-hour workweek website for more information…aaah, the irony).

In Phil Bradley’s weblog, Bradley responds with his own suggestions and tips for keeping up. I may just take to heart some of his suggestions such as tip Number 6 (although minimizing my RSS packrat tendencies will be difficult): “Out of date is out of use. No point in keeping stuff that you’ve not looked at in your RSS readers. If you haven’t looked at it in a couple of days then you won’t. Just junk it.”

At any rate, both of these perspectives on methods of dealing with too much information are engaging, perhaps even enlightening, and worth a read (unless you’re on the low information diet, then just ignore both those articles and this post, of course).

Final Note: Small Fuel Marketing has posted an interesting compilation of productivity tools for helping to handle  information and job tasks: Productivity Toolbox: 37+ Tools for Taking Action and Getting Things Done

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We’re officially three days into the 2007 Children’s Book Week which runs from November 12-18, 2007. Begun in 1919, Children’s Book Week is the longest running literacy event in the country. This year’s theme is Rise Up Reading!

You can find more information and order promotional materials related to Children’s Book Week from the Children’s Book Council website. The Children’s Book Council affirms Children’s Book Week as follows:

A celebration of the written word, Children’s Book Week introduces young people to new authors and ideas in schools, libraries, homes, and bookstores. Through Children’s Book Week, the Children’s Book Council encourages young people and their care givers to discover the complexity of the world beyond their own experience through books.

Note: In 2008, Children’s Book week is moving from mid-November to May 12 - 18. With its new dates, Children’s Book Week will tie more fully in to the Children’s Book Council’s “Children’s Choices” lists.

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You may be familiar with the Clever Hippo application search from within Facebook. Now, Clever Hippo is expanding its girth in attempts to become the chosen search venue for applications and widgets across platforms.

At its launch, the Clever Hippo application search engine indexes over 30,000 applications for a variety of platforms (for Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial, iGoogle, iPhone, you name it). Also, the librarian in me admires Clever Hippo’s advanced searching and results sorting features. For instance:

• users have the option to search for applications specific to a particular platform (the default search is to search across all platforms)
• search results can be sorted by relevance, most recent, or popularity (popularity is based on Clever Hippo’s Clever rating system that operates by weighing user votes for their favorite applications)
• hovering over the Get Specific link that is to the left of the search box yields a pop-up box of techniques for performing advanced searches

The Clever Hippo mission is: “to make it easier to find apps and widgets for whatever you’re into. With the Clever Hippo application search you can search the thousands of applications that are available for your social network, mobile device, blog, home page, and desktop”.

Read/Write Web provides a nice write-up of the launch of Clever Hippo’s web-wide application search as does their sister site Alt Search Engines (as an aside, while I was over at Alt Search Engines I stumbled upon their posting for the latest and greatest (and only) in pizza-specific search engines. If you need to find all pizza making locales in your vicinity, try Pizza.net–the original pizza search engine).

So, wrapping up (and back on the original cleverness, application, and hippo-related subject), feel free to head on over to Clever Hippo and search for an application or a widget for your own utility purposes or for your own procrastination purposes.

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I just posted my first Jott (see the This is my test Jott post). To create this post, I called the Jott number (1-866-JOTT-123 (translation: 1-866-5688-123)) and left my message after the beep.

Why might you too want to Jott you say? For the purpose of reducing your chances of developing carpal tunnel syndrome and/or for the purpose of increasing your away-from-your-computer productivity. When you call Jott and leave a message, Jott transcribes the audio and then sends it back to you (to your email, blog, or other specified location) with both the original audio as well as the text of what you said into the phone. Jott works for sending yourself (or others) reminders via email or for posting messages to blogs and other services (for example, Twitter).

Jott works by enabling users to specify who receives the “jotted” message (individuals and/or groups must be pre-defined in the user’s Jott profile). The time allotted for each message is 30 seconds, so this service does allow for only shorter messages to be sent (particularly since if you try to speed up your speech, then the “jotted” message may get garbled, thus effectively negating the value of the service).

Jotting is easy. Don’t take my word for it, visit Jott’s lucid “how-to” section which provides visual and textual step-by-step instructions for all Jott-related activities: discover how-to jott to yourself, jott a reminder, jott to someone else, jott to a group, jott to a folder, or jott to a link.

In addition to Jott’s current utility, Jott continues to add new features such as Jott The Vote (Jott The Vote is the feature that allows you to send messages to the presidential candidate of your choice) and Jott Google Gadget (downloading Jott Google Gadget enables you to view your most recent Jotts on your personalized Google homepage.).

Jott’s service is currently free. According to Jott CEO and cofounder, John Pollard, Jott will likely operate according to the freemium business model–attaching ads to the basic free service and, eventually, adding a premium service for a monthly fee (from Pollard’s statements in a March 30, 2007 article in MIT’s Technology Review).

Services similar to Jott include:

• Braincast - a service enabling users to “store and organize audio notes from anywhere” Note: While, Braincast delivers the actual sound file recorded by the user, it does not actually transcribe the text.
• SpinVox - a service that “captures spoken words and feeds them into a Voice Message Conversion System, known as ‘D2’ (the Brain), and spits them out as text content”
• Pinger - a service that provides “text messaging for your voice” (RCR Wireless News provides a detailed comparison of Pinger and Jott)

Compared to other similar services, Jott has been lauded for its convenience. Other useful reviews of Jott’s service have been posted on VentureBeat (explains details of the transcription process) and TechCrunch (explains Jott’s history and inception).

And if you want the word on Jott, from Jott itself, here’s what the Jott website has to say:

Jott is…

Jott is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.

Stuck in traffic? Just speak your to-do list into Jott.

Want to eliminate repetitive calls? E-mail your team with a single Jott.

Forget something? Use your voice to create Jott reminders.

Jott is a safer, hands-free way to send text and e-mail messages on the go. And it’s free, so sign up today.

Think it. Jott it. Get it done.

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This is my test Jott. For transcribing any voice message into a blog post or an e-mail or text message, but this is a blog post. And not having much time, 30 seconds, I think I’ll tell one Thanksgiving joke. What do you get when you cross a turkey with an octopus? Enough drumsticks for Thanksgiving. And that’s probably all the time I have. Bye. listen

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