internet

A couple of days ago, I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. I had started thinking about it a few weeks ago, when Bloglines was having some weird problems. Then they cleared up, and I stopped thinking about it. And then, of course, late last week there were more weird problems - every feed in my inbox was updating, in some cases showing me hundreds of old posts. This is not the point of an RSS aggregator. I gave up and exported my subscriptions from Bloglines and dumped them into a Google Reader account, and I’ve been using that since I think Thursday.

So far I like it. I like that you can toggle so easily between list view (headlines) and expanded view (stories). I prefer to go through my subscriptions feed by feed, so I tend to skip the homepage, where Reader mixes together all the updates from all your feeds. (I also feel like there is too much stuff on that page. There are three columns — the regular panel on the left with your updated feeds & navigation for Google Reader, the middle column with the stories themselves, and then a right column that has a box recommending new feeds and another box of ‘tips and tricks.’ It seems like I can’t get rid of the right panel. It’s not really busy, per se, but it still feels cramped.) The only ’save’ feature I was using within Bloglines was the ‘keep new’ checkbox, which Google Reader also has.

I can’t see any reason to go back to Bloglines (except to bookmark the few things marked ‘keep new’), which is a shame. It feels like the end of an era, especially since I taught so many of my GSLIS classmates about RSS by getting them started with Bloglines. I hope they haven’t been too frustrated with it, or if they have they’ve given another reader a try.

UPDATE 11/19: Jon points out the Better GReader Firefox addon, which is pretty slick. You can get rid of the nav at the top and also bypass the “add to iGoogle or Reader?” page when you add a new feed. Thanks!

Tagging as a Communication Device: Every Tag Cloud Has a Silver Lining (name changed)
Presenters: Heather D. Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, Mark R. Lindner, Margaret E. I. Kipp, David R. Millen

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Earlier this afternoon, I arrived in Columbus, OH for ASIS&T 2008. I am staying in the conference hotel (a Hyatt Regency) and feeling totally spoiled as I lean up against a huge stack of pillows on the bed. My flight was fine (love those 1 hour-ish flights) but I spent a lot of time at BWI before takeoff. As in, I arrived at BWI at 7:40am for a 10:25 flight. Not only did Super Shuttle insist on picking me up between 7:25 and 7:40 for the 30 minute drive to BWI (which I think was much quicker on a Sunday morning) but then they showed up 15 minutes early. I was not quite ready yet, but I don’t think I forgot anything too important. I did feel exceedingly vain putting on my makup in the airport ladies’ room, though.

Anyway, I’m going to try some conference blogging since Dr Bunsen Honeydew has much better battery life than Kermit the Gateway Laptop could ever dream of. That said, I didn’t have my computer with me for the plenary, so I’m working off of my notes for this post. And since I didn’t have a notebook and was taking notes on the back of some of the conference materials, that means these notes & thoughts are not necessarily in the order in which they were presented in the session. Anyway, my thoughts & comments are in brackets.

Plenary Session
Genevieve Bell on Transforming the Internet
Respondents: Howard Rheingold and Andrew Keen
(Bios)

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Abby is stuck shelf reading* at her library next week and wants some podcast recommendations. I feel like someone else was asking about this recently, and I have also started trying to find some new ones for the walk to work. Not Martha recently pointed to this Ask MetaFilter post with a bunch of recommendations, and I’ve downloaded a test episode of a few to see how they are. So apparently, podcasts are the new iPhone. Or something.

Recently I have been enjoying (links go to the iTunes store):

• Fresh Air
• On Point with Tom Ashbrook
• Wired’s Gadget Lab Podcast
• Book Review Update, from the editor of the NY Times Book Review
• New Yorker: Fiction

I also subscribe to GSLIScast, the podcast of events from my library school. I have grabbed a couple of video podcasts in advance of college hockey season: Boston University Athletics Video Podcast, BU Today Sports Highlights (which may or may not be significantly different) and the College Hockey podcast from CSTV. Not sure how well either of those will work out for me but we’ll see. (As a side note, it makes me sad that when I finally have the time and money, I am so far away that I won’t even be able to watch some of the games on TV, let alone go to any. I just don’t understand why there isn’t something like MLB.TV or Gameday Audio for college hockey. Alums would totally pay for that.)

The Book Review and Gadget Lab podcasts are usually about 15-20 minutes long. The New Yorker podcast can vary — authors are invited to pick a short story from the New Yorker’s archive, read it aloud, and then discuss it with the host. Fascinating. Fresh Air and On Point are generally about 45 minutes, and I pick and choose which ones I listen to based on the descriptions.

For a while in library school I was listening to This Week in Tech, but they go long — like an hour or more, sometimes. I got tired of not being able to finish listening to an entire episode on one leg of my commute to Simmons, which was anywhere from 45 - over an hour door-to-door, depending on the time of day. The Gadget Lab podcast is filling some of that gap, but I still would like to find something that would cover more of the tech news end of the spectrum.

Edited to add: The Simple Dollar posted a list of financial & economics news podcasts just a few days ago.

*Shelf reading is when you systematically go through the stacks to make sure the books are in the correct order. It is not an exciting task.

Spotted this on Consumerist recently and wanted to share. Should your GMail account get hacked and you would like to get it back, you may be up shit creek. There’s no real way for two people to prove which of them is the real account holder, and which isn’t. (Think back to how little account info Google collected from you when you signed up.) Cover yourself and add some alternate emails to your Google Account:

Associate other accounts with your primary GMail address. Do you have a work email? Tell Google. It will drastically improve your ability to verify your identity.

You can associate more than one alternate email address - I added my current work email address, as well as my old Hotmail, which is still kicking around and gathering spam (and emails from Travelocity since they don’t seem to believe in allowing you to unsubscribe, no matter how many times you try).

Some neat things I’ve found lately but can’t necessarily vouch for as I haven’t used all of them:

• Anyvite: Evite - required accounts for invitees (+ social/photosharing tech!). via Demo Girl.
• The Bicycle Tutor: Video tutorials for bike repair. Now if only I had the tools and the space . . . via Googling to learn more about shifting.
• Wirewize: Customized explanation of how to hook up YOUR A/V system. Someday when I have more than two components this might help. via Lifehacker.
• Bikely: User-submitted bike routes. Via Googling for (nonexistent?) Baltimore City bike map of marked routes.
• GMaps Pedometer: Not new, but I love this & Bikely made me think of it. Go against the flow of traffic! Cut across parks willy-nilly!
• GMail is apparently rolling out a new feature that will allow you to see if you are logged in somewhere else, and remotely disconnect. Helpful for those of us who bounce between computers. via Lifehacker. Also, did you know you can put filters on your outgoing GMail? Neat.

I swear I hit publish on this last week! Grumble grumble.

I’m changing back to a summary-only feed to see if this cuts down on the content scraped from here and dumped on one of several spam blogs (all hosted at the same IP) that seem to have found me. This is one of those things where a defensive posture is your best bet.

If you get annoyed by this — for example, if the site regularly loads slowly for you — please speak up. I’m open to changing to a lighter-weight theme. This one stopped working anyway*, so it’s no big loss.

* I think it’s probably a PHP problem since del.icio.us daily blog posting won’t work either, but I don’t quite know enough about what I’m doing to be able to fix it.

Have you seen Lifehacker’s Power User’s Guide? Go check it out, and you can set Gmail to be your default mail client (finally) and do other nifty things. Keep up with their posts on FF3 here.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 for a couple of days at work, and so far I like it. The default design looks a little different, which is always initially weird, but I’m used to it now and it’s grown on me. Luckily, almost all of my add-ons (at least at work, haven’t installed at home yet) are working. The one exception is Morning Coffee. I assume the guy who wrote it just didn’t start on the FF3 version early enough, so I’m just going to wait until it’s updated.

One new thing that I’m not sure I like is the “awesome bar,” which drops down from the address bar and suggests URLs for you to select as you type. Basically, the awesome bar will learn what sites you visit and how frequently, and will, for example, display “Google” as the first choice if you type a “g” in the address bar. It will also look at your bookmarks to pull potential selections, both based on the URLs and the tags you’ve associated with your bookmarks. (Sounds like you can type a tag in the address bar and the awesome bar will display all the bookmarks associated with that tag.)

I’m going to play around with this, but I’m not sure it’s for me. I’m at a point where most of my very-frequent bookmarks are in the bookmarks toolbar, and most of my other bookmarks are in del.icio.us. But, while mucking around catching up on some old feeds, I went to check out Demo Girl, and lo and behold she points to a video from CNET in which one of their editors tells you how to turn off the feature. (It’s a simple change in about:config.) So, if that’s bugging you, go ahead and disable the feature.

Speaking of Demo Girl, she’s posted a screencast tour of Firefox 3 that you can check out. She covers the new features, a lot of which seem to have to do with bookmarking. I picked up a couple of new keyboard shortcuts from her screencast (she said that some of the ones she covered were new to FF3, others were not, so this might be old news for some of you):

• ctrl-L to move your cursor to the address bar
• ctrl-K to move it to the search box
• I knew that ctrl-t will open a new tab, but not that ctrl-w would close it, and that ctrl-shift-t will reopen a closed tab.

This is something that I’ve observed with amusement in my short time as tech support/reference librarian: people who sit down at a computer to visit a specific website, and instead of typing in the easy URL (for example, www.simmons.edu) they do a search (”simmons boston”). And I always wonder — why? I regularly guess at URLs rather than search for a website, and more often than not (especially with large companies or well-known brands) I’m right. (Let’s not talk about how I can never remember how to spell . . . Amtrack? Amtrak?) Does this mean people just don’t understand what a URL is, and the component pieces? Or does it point more to the popularity of using bookmarks/favorites, and the fact that once you don’t have to remember something, you won’t remember it? It’s sort of like having a cell phone — there are very few people whose phone numbers I actually know offhand. Or is it just that I’m that much more comfortable on the Internet than a lot of folks?

When I started seeing commercials that instruct the viewer to “search Honda on Yahoo!” or whatever, I really started to wonder: does searching online really make more sense to people than remembering or jotting down an easy URL? According to a recent post on ReadWriteWeb:

. . . the answer appears to be a somewhat surprising “yes.” Of the 10 fastest rising search terms on Google last year, 7 were for searches where adding a “.com” would have brought the user to the correct site. These are called “navigational” searches — searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up — and they make up a surprising large number of total seaches.

I wait for the day when someone uses the Google seach box built into Firefox to get to Google and do a search.

In ever-so-slightly related news, a post in March caught my eye as well: “The Internet will end in 30 years!” This talks about a flaw in the way Unix-based systems store the time. The really interesting thing is that this flaw might affect things like traffic lights and gas pumps and other systems like that, which I think a lot of people don’t even really think about as having anything to do with “computers” in the general sense. The piece also mentions that “legacy systems” and “embedded systems” might also be affected — makes me wonder how many ILS’ will randomly stop working at 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. Will this force vendors to start afresh with new systems? Will there be an increase in libraries switching to new systems in 2023 and 2024? How many  years prior to 2038 will people start worrying about this in the library literature and in the biblioblogosphere? Anyway, just thought that was interesting and have been meaning to share it.