Library & Literary Miscellany

The Collaborative Summer Library Program (CSLP) chose Catch the Reading Bug (kids) and Metamorphosis@Your Library (teens) as the 2008 theme, and it’s now in full-swing (it almost being July after all). A couple of recent posts I particularly enjoyed relating to the CSLP are By the Cover: June Bugs at Proper Noun (which also links to a longer insects booklist at Mindy’s Book Lists wiki) and Speaking of Crafts and Bugs at Library Voice (includes multiple images of some really fun looking bug crafts and displays).

A few sites offering related resources include:

• A to Z Kids Stuff: Bugs–songs, crafts, snack ideas mainly for bees, ladybugs, and caterpillars/butterflies
• Librarian’s Internet Index–Insects and Arachnids links
• LibraryPalooza–this is the site that I was led to the link to download the 2008 theme song that you hear in the videos by Billy Gorilly
• NetState.com’s Official State Insects list
• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s 2008 SLP Training Workshop–includes display ideas , myriad downloadable breakout session handouts, and more

So you can see that there’s a plethora of buggy fun and/or information out there, but I thought I’d add a couple of 30 second promotional videos in case anyone needs any more ideas. I created them using Animoto just like my previous Mysteries at Your library video.

Animoto’s simple and it’s fun, although the Animoto shorts don’t allow for quite as many pictures as I’d like. But for the cost of free, it’s a great resource to spark creativity and create content for a variety of purposes.

Enjoy and feel free to remix, embed, or create your own (Video Production: Animoto; Songs: Billy Gorilly). Also feel free to leave comments if you have any feedback and/or resources to share relating to enticing people of all ages towards libraries and summer reading. Without further ado, here are the video shorts for kids and teens respectively (you’ll notice that I chose the instrumental version for the teens video : ))…

Catching the Reading Bug

Metamorphosis @ Your Library

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I finally got around to messing about with Yahoo Pipes (as opposed to messing about in boats; plug classic literature here: “`Nice? It’s the ONLY thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. `Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING–absolute nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily: `messing–about–in–boats; messing—-’” The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame).

So here’s the result (Note: the pipe output may take a moment to appear; I’ll also be posting a larger version on its own page under the Books Buzz tab for those miss out on this post; I decided not to post it on the main page as it increased page load time significantly):

My pipe is fairly rudimentary; I figure now that its created I can continue to revise. So feel free to comment if you have ideas regarding pipe alteration, for example, suggestions about feeds to add, filter additions/subtractions, or otherwise.

And now with the pipe created, I am heading to the great outdoors to take a walk. Using my own powers of ambulation is no boat ride, but still, it is outside activity and it is a beautiful day :).

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Need to remember something or just want to track your activities? Evernote is there (and we’re not talking paid insurance services of the State Farm variety here, although Evernote does offer insurance of sorts in the remembering things category). Evernote is there for you via its desktop (Windows and Mac), web, and mobile offerings.

Besides its mobility, a few other features to note about Evernote:

• Evernote plays well with other applications such as Jott and Skitch (and who can tell what the future holds?)
• Evernote has admirable text recognition of captured items (thus making the text searchable and the items findable)
• Evernote’s captured content can be of a wide variety (Evernote’s examples of “things to capture” being: Webpages, Wine labels, Whiteboards, Scribbles, To-dos, and Photos)
• Evernote notes can be entered multiple ways such as manually typing, captured images (webcam), clipping web pages or pictures, email, and/or voice.

From the Evernote Corporation Getting Started:

Evernote is a Web Service that helps users manage all the digital information most relevant to them. The Service can be accessed through free, user-friendly Evernote software running on a personal computer or mobile device, or any Web browser.

If you’re like many people in the world today who are trying to keep up with an ever increasing onslaught of information, whether personal or business, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the information that you care about - and to find it when and where you need it.

Evernote can help. Our services and software are so simple, easy to use, and valuable that you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them. You’ll always have access to your information, even as the devices and applications that you use to access them changes over time. Imagine, no more manually reentering or copying information, no more digging through pieces of paper and software applications to find photos, that favorite restaurant review, a research report, scanned documents, web clipping, and much more.

So if any of that sounds interesting, here’s how to proceed. First, request an invite. Then sit back and wait for your invite to arrive (it didn’t take me too long to get mine, and I don’t think it’s solely because I’m irresistible…). Perhaps you could sleep a little, enjoy a good meal, or read a good book (perhaps even try one I have reviewed ).

Also, in the meantime, you can get started watching these YouTube videos by Evernote Phil and reading other reviews of Evernote. My review wasn’t that extensive, because why reinvent the wheel when others have already provided such enlightening synopses, for example:

• The Apple Blog: Evernote=Ubiquitous Personal Memory by Bob Rudis (April 03, 2008)
• Ars Technica (the art of technology): A review of Evernote with invites, exclusive iPhone preview by David Chartier (April 29, 2008)
• Lifehacker: Jott Your Way to Evernote Bliss by Brad Isaac (March 30, 2008)
• MadPercolator: Evernote After the Initial Infatuation Wears Off (May 01, 2008)
• MakeUseOf.com: Become a Rockstar Note Taker with EverNote by Shankar Ganesh (April 22, 2008)
• Mashable: Evernote Public Bookmarks, and Invites for Mashable Readers by Kristen Nicole (April 29, 2008)
• O’Reilly Blog: Evernote: Notes Everywhere - Mac, Web, Phone by Todd Ogasawara (April 09, 2008)
• Salon: Software to Help you Remember Everything, Forever (at Machinist: inside tech, gizmo, and big ideas column by Farhad Manjoo posted April 16, 2008)
• TechCrunch: Extend Your Brain with Evernote (Private Beta Invites) by Erick Schonfeld (Februrary 21, 2008
• TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Blog): Evernote Universal Human Memory Extension by Brett Terpstra (March 20, 2008)
• Wikipedia: EverNote
• WIRED: Evernote is Noteworthy by Michael Calore (April 19, 2007)
• WIRED: Evernote A Database for your Life by Michael Calore (January 24, 2007)
• WIRED: Evernote Offers a Backup for Your Brain by Scott Gilbertson (March 14, 2008)
• ZDNet: First Thoughts on the Evernote Web Public Beta and the Incredible Search Technology (February 27, 2008)

You can also view Evernote’s What is Evernote or read the Evernote blog (or just request an invitation and play). On that note, enjoy (and have a great weekend)…

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It’s been awhile since I came across Erik Kastner’s Spell with Flickr, but it’s such a fun and user-friendly tool that I thought I’d highlight it.

Basically, you can just type in the letters, characters, words, and/or phrases that you’d like to have spelled into the Spell box and click spell. Almost immediately you’ll get your letters, characters, words, and/or phrases returned to you created out of fun images that are available on Flickr. You can then embed the code on your website or blog or you can be more creative.

Also, if your aesthetic sensibilities lead you to desire to replace a particular letter or character, then that’s as easy as clicking on that image. Spell with Flickr will replace that image with another. You can do this until you are satisfied with your results. My Spelling examples are below (first, displaying each letter as a separate image with the code directly from Spell with Flickr and then collapsed together into one image):

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In honor of the impending deadline for YALSA’s Create Your Own Avatar contest, I thought I’d create a couple of my own avatars and paste them here (click here to view the PDF description of the contest). Here goes, in no particular order (okay, alphabetical):

Doppel Me: Doppel Me labels itself as the free dynamic avatar maker with no need of Flash, Active X controls, downloads or toolbars

Gravatar- I uploaded my avatars created from other sites into Gravatar. Gravatar enables users to associate avatars with email addresses, thus simplifying the appearance of the avatar image on Gravatar-enabled blogs, forums, and websites.

Meez.com: Meez has many accoutrement options and allows for easy creation and export via download or embedding on multiple social networks and other platforms.

Reasonably Clever Minimizers: At Reasonably Clever, you can “picture yourself in plastic.” Loads of customization available. To export your image, you will need to capture the screenshot and then paste it into an editing program such as Paint or Photoshop in order to save your figure.

Tektek.org Dream Avatar: At Tektek, you can easily create your own dream avatar and easily download the image to place on other sites.

Yahoo: Create a Yahoo account and then create your Yahoo Avatar.

For more avatar fun, Mashable created a great list Avatars Everywhere: 27 of the best Avatar Makers. Most of these sites require account creation, but if you’re willing to do that, then it’s all downhill from there…

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Jacketflap is a community where children’s literature writers, illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, and publishers can gather and discuss myriad aspects/resources related to children’s literature. Jacketflap has some great offerings such as the searchable database and the members’ bookshelves (read more about Jacketflap’s resources on the About Us page).

More recently, Jacketflap has developed a couple of neat tools for kidlitosphere bloggers and blog readers (I first became familiar with these resources through the post at Book Bud (thanks much)). Since these are cool tools with high utility, I want to briefly highlight the blog portal and the Cybils widget…

About the Jacketflap megablog portal:

The Jacketflap megablog portal collocates the most recent posts from all the kidlitosphere blogs that are currently indexed by the Jacketflap Blog Reader (over 580 as of this posting). It’s a helpful resource for keeping up with keeping up (not to mention the entertainment factor). Jacketflap provides the following navigation tips:

Click the dates in the calendar on the left to view blog posts from a particular date. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. Click a tag in the right column to view posts about that topic. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a “More Posts from this Blog” link in any individual post.

About the customizable Cybils widget:

The Cybils Widget displays a different Cybils 2007 nominee every time it loads on your website. There are links where your site visitors can visit the Cybils website and to buy the nominated book on Amazon or a local bookstore (via Booksense).

I included the widget in this post, but I’ve also placed it on my blog’s right sidebar (at least for the time being).

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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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Sharing never used to be so much fun (if you don’t believe me, just ask the two-year-old nearest to you). But some of the new book exchange sites make sharing books a fun, social, tree-saving activity. A couple of my favorites are BookCrossing and BookMooch.

• BookCrossing: At BookCrossing, they recognize that “a book is a terrible thing to waste” and, for this reason, the site exists to “release books into the wild”. Users register any books that they have onto the site and then set the book free to travel the world and to encounter new readers. Books are to be left in public places where other readers will find them, pick them up, read them, and pass them on (site suggestions include park benches, coffee shops, hotels, but it really could be just about anywhere you can think of where someone else might want to pick it up (which pretty much excludes public restrooms)). One of the most fun aspects of BookCrossing is that a book’s journey across the world and across multiple readers can be tracked through the site by means of the BCID (Book Crossing ID) that has been assigned to the book.

• BookMooch operates on the mooch principle. Now “mooch” is not a word with overly positive connotations (witness WordNet: mooch (n)–someone who tries to get something free or mooch (v)–to be a parasite), but at BookMooch, mooching is a positive activity.I mooch a book from you, you mooch a book from me, and so on and so forth. Once you join BookMooch, you can list all of the books that you would be willing to trade. If one of the books that you listed is on another person’s mooch list, then they will be notified and they can request the book. The sender of the book earns credit for sending the book (credit that can be used in mooching other desired books that are listed by others) and the moocher gets the book. It’s a win-win situation. Through BookMooch, wishlists actually come true when users and books and credits match up.

A couple of other notable exchange sites (albeit, slightly less creative and fun, they are equally useful for exchange purposes):

• Bookins: The Bookins tagline is “Find your old books a new home” and “Swap books, we make it easy.” At Bookins, they call their members “budget conscious bibliophiles.” In other words, the idea is that instead of paying full retail price for the books that you want to read, you only pay for the shipping and handling that it costs to mail them to you. Members exchange books of equal value by using the Bookins system that automatically assigned point values (point values being based on aspects such as retail price, popularity). In this way, bibliophiles can help other bibliophiles and books get used instead of sitting on shelves getting dusty.

• Paperbackswap: PaperBackSwap is based on a similar principle to Bookins; as they say, “We are a group of readers who share books with each other (NOT just paperbacks) for nothing more than the cost of postage!”

With just those few sites, your library could become a continuously rotating, continuously evolving organism. And who knows what reading new books and ideas might do to your mind…

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A few days ago, Mashable published a 350+ Social Networking Sites encompassing the categories of Books, Business Networking & Professionals, Family, Friends, Hobbies & Interests, Language, Music, Media, Mobile, Shopping, Social Bookmarking, Students, and Travel & Locales.

The entire list offers myriad hours of fun investigation for the social-networked inclined. Given the nature of this blog, I’m just going to paste the books links here, and, in my next post, I’ll expand a bit on a couple of my favorite social book exchange sites. Mashable’s list of social book sites and their annotations:

Americabookshelf.com - One of the largest book exchange clubs across the US.

BooksConnect - A book sharing community site connecting readers, authors, publishers, librarians and booksellers.

BookCrossing.com - A community of users from over 130 countries who exchange books with each other at public places like cafes, parks etc.

Bookhopper.co.uk - Free community for UK residents to share used books with each other.

Bookins.com - Book sharing website that enables members to exchange used books with each other in real time.

BookMooch.com - An interesting concept where users can exchange books with others through points. Users gain points when they give books to others.

Booksalescout.com - Online community of users allowing them to sell books in the US.

Bookswim.com - Book borrowing service with free shipping for registered website.

ConnectViaBooks - A social networking site connecting book lovers and enabling them to discover other similar interests.

GoodReads - GoodReads is a book reader’s community enabling members to review, share books they have been reading.

PaperBackSwap.com - Users can share books amongst each other and only pay for the delivery charges.

Pazap.com - A book trade engine for students to buy and sell old books.

Read It Swap It - A free service that allows users to exchange books with others.

Revish - Revish is another community for book lovers, letting them review their favorite books, group up, or simply tell the world what they’re currently reading.

Shelfari - Shelfari is a popular social networking service for book lovers.

Socialbib - Book swapping network between students.

And not to be myopically centered just on books, here are just a few of my recommendations from the other categories (mainly focusing on more recently evolving sites, and assuming that you’ve already heard of old, quality standbys such as Flickr and Photobucket (photo sharing) and Digg and del.icio.us (social bookmarking)…and can anyone say YouTube):

Geni: Geni says “everyone’s related” and enables users to create a family tree and stay in touch

Flixster: Flixster is a community for movie lovers

Crowdstorm: Crowdstorm amalgamates the product talk out in the blogosphere to help users decide on purchases. Users can also add favorite products and edit ones already in the databases.

Productwiki.com: ProductWiki is a common place for users to share information about consumer products; as the tagline reads, it’s the place to find “unbiased product reviews and information”

Zoodango: Zoodango enables connecting with other professionals either online or face-to-face at local venues. You can also search for events taking place in your area.

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On the sidebar of this page, you can see my most recent del.icio.us bookmarks. While that’s all well and good, it may also seem a bit random, since the links are displayed without tags and without context. This randomness is solved somewhat by actually visiting my del.icio.us site and clicking a tag to view all of the sites that have been bookmarked as fitting under a particular category.

Well, that also is all well and good, but what if all of these bookmarked websites could be made searchable (for presumably, they were bookmarked in the first place due to their containing content of some value)? In other words, what do you get when you cross a social bookmarking tool with a custom search engine? Answer: deliGoo. With deliGoo (deliGoo being a mashup of del.icio.us and Google Custom Search), del.icio.us goes beyond simple tagging/categorizing.

deliGoo allows users to search for specific content within a specific user’s del.icio.us bookmarks or within a specific del.icio.us tag. Users can either search on deliGoo’s search site or install deliGoo as an add-on for Firefox 2.0+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. So how does this wonderful tool operate? Just enter a username, tag, and search term, then click Goo!.

In other (more-detailed) words, deliGoo works by dynamically building a Google Custom Search engine with the sites specified. Entering a username and tag to be searched is actually optional (but does save time). If you don’t enter a username, the search would proceed over all the sites tagged by selected tag. If you don’t enter a tag, the search would be proceed over all the bookmarks of selected user. If you find yourself getting too many results, then it may be time to narrow the search by entering a username or by choosing a narrower tag to search (that’s the librarian in me talking…don’t get me started on the merits of using search limits and Boolean operators ).

So the specification of the sites to be searched is the “deli” aspect, what of the “Goo”? Once you click Goo!, deliGoo analyzes the sites that have been specified and the “Goo” custom search aspect of deliGoo kicks into high (albeit somewhat slow-seeming) gear. The custom search engine searches the contents of every site for a match to your search query. Using deliGoo can be particularly handy if you are trying to find a web page that you remember bookmarking but you cannot remember what tags you used to bookmark it or how long ago you bookmarked it.

Due to its customized nature, deliGoo may take some time (particularly if you do not enter a username). In the time you wait for your results, you may choose to become annoyed or you may choose to be amazed at the way deliGoo is basically building a custom search engine from scratch. Possibly in the future, deliGoo might allow users to sign up and create custom searches that will be remembered. As it currently stands, deliGoo users must wait for Google to index the specified sites each time.

For now, deliGoo remains a useful way to find that website you bookmarked oh so long ago with those tags that are oh so far away from your memory bank. Where tags may fail, deliGoo does not (or at least that’s the intent).

So, in sum, you can use deliGoo either by installing the toolbar button so as to have it ever-present, ready, and waiting to be used at your leisure or by navigating to deliGoo’s own searching site (same end, just different means). Of course, you could always just bookmark deliGoo in your del.icio.us bookmarks !

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