Panelists

Heather D. Pfeiffer, New Mexico State University
Emma Tonkin, UKOLN, University of Bath
Mark R. Lindner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David R. Millen, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Margaret E.I. Kipp, College of Information and Computer Science, Long Island University

Heather D. Pfeiffer - Tagging as Metadata

Heather talked about knowledge in language and how we understand syntax (symbols), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (context) in that language.  She mentioned the conceptualization of an ontology and how relationships can be drawn between concepts.  Which lead into concepts as tags.  There was an interesting comparison example between documents in the 1600s and in the 2000s.

In the 2000s the word "upon" is not used, King has been updated to President, and Crown appears in both.  In the 1600s Documents Crown refers to "Swedish money" and to government (in relationship to King), in the 2000s Documents Crown continues to refer to money but there is no longer a relationship to government because of the shift to President instead of King.

Emma Tonkin - Ten Minutes of Language Development

Emma started with a little exercise by naming places from "The Atlas of the True Names of Places", something she picked up in her travels.  Some of them were fun and interesting like "Empty Place", "Little Venice", "Land of People Who Are Their Own Masters", and "East of the River of Shellfish".  She mentioned a three-step ontology development plan which was to identify concepts, label concepts, and identify relations.  The assumption is that this is an easy process, but realistically identifying and discussing labels is hard.  She asked us to consider the following; 350 N High St is important to us now, because we are at this conference, but then also consider place vs space and position vs. location, labels like 'home' and 'office' mean things to us personally but meaningless to others.

I actually find this discussion interesting, but less so in the context of tagging and labeling and more so in social contexts of geo-location.  But I can see how these labeling concepts can apply in the tagging discussion.

She had some good examples in her presentation which are difficult to parse out here, but she presented us with a game board and how the labeling of things depend on a variety of variables, including location and context in language.  The example she gave was pharmacy (UK) and drugstore (US) and how this could be what she called a Deadlock Situation if there's an even representation of people using that language or labeling.  Whereas if you're in America this same label could turn into a Majority Voting situation if you say had more representation for drugstore than you do pharmacy.  What is the probability that we come to a consensus?  She mentioned that we actually don't want perfect accuracy.  What happens if we moved the drugstore location?  The labeling problem is that "if nothing ever changes, nothing interesting ever happens."  Which means this is a "living system."

David R. Millen - Patterns of Collaborative Tagging in a Large Organization

David started with some background about the project and how they went about studying tagging in the enterprise.  He also gave some background on Dogear, IBM's internal social bookmarking tool.  Their goal was to examine enterprise as a group, and IBM is a good company for this because it has the tools already in place plus they are very large, global, and multilingual.  The research group looked at three different core groups when they studied tag use; Development, Research, and Corporate.  They observed broadly, and within these groups, that there was more similarity than differences.  The number of unique posters is about 50% and relatively steady across the 3 groups.  They are looking at this number as a metric or a "return on contribution".  They want to know if that ratio stays the same across all 3 groups.

The research group studied tags per bookmark and also observed tagging on the internet versus the intranet.  What they found was that there were more tags on the intranet, which wasn't so much what they expected.  They think that this may be because of the homogeneity of the intranet, or similar kinds of resources.

They studied frequency of tags and classified these into categories of topic, content, and owner.  They found a lot of tag consistencies and within the 3 groups of study they found consistency to what they would expect the group to be interested in.

Then they also studied private bookmarks, what they found was that the amount of private bookmarks that are tagged is stable and low.  What they were able to determine from this, and he said this is "good news", was that people are sharing.

He summed up by stating that tags are good markers of organizational interest in a large group and he also mentioned that tagging in IBM is not isolated to Dogear, there is tagging going on in other social spaces withing the organization.

I found one of the more interesting areas of the presentation to be the "roles" of taggers in the organization.  He said they've determined 5 roles, but went through 3 in this session.

• Evangelist:  These taggers are trying to cultivate an audience on a term, they want people to find them so the tags are also self-serving.
  
• Publisher:  These taggers want to draw attention to the content and bring people to resources.
  
• Small Team Leader:  These are conventional tags used by small groups so they can easily find resources.  They have determined that these taggers are less active.

He also mentioned Wordle yea!  Here's mine:

Mark R. Linder - Integrating Tagging:  Tagging as Integration

I admit I didn't take much notes here, more on tagging in language, context, and use.  There's a couple of resources listed in the proceedings on information seeking, semantics and knowledge organization.

Margaret E. I. Kipp - Social Tagging Process

Margaret spoke on the process of tagging and trying to figure out what something is about.  The process of tagging seems simple on the surface, but figuring out what something is about can be a little more complicated.  Tagging looks like a classification index on the surface so it's natural to want to compare it to that.  When you look at a consensus graph on the Clary Shirky's article, Ontology is Overrated, you see that the most popular term is ontology.  The first 6 terms are subject related, followed by the name of the author, then followed by a tool.  Maragaret broke down different uses of classification:

• User Classification:  The author and user are placing different contexts on the article.
• Information Management:  The user may be tagging something to find again later.
  
• Communication:  This is where you see more non-subject terms like 'todo', 'toread', 'funny', and 'cool'.  Also tagging and for small groups appears, which may indicate a community.
• Discussion of Aboutness: There is a fair amount of agreement when put together with the whole group, but as you look at individual taggers you do see some disagreement.
• Expression of Interest:  Tagging in itself is an expression of interest, if you weren't interested you wouldn't tag it.  But tagging can also indicate a degree of interest, to read, or to buy later, for example.
• Review or Criticism:  Terms like boring, fun, or funny indicate some emotional reaction to an item.  This becomes and ultra condensed review and mixed with other terms might be useful to the somebody else.
• Projects and Groups:  Tags from CiteULike that indicate course numbers or groups for communicating resources are an example.
  
• Time Sensitive Classification:  The term 'toread' represents this, the meaning can change over time.  Once you read and item the tag becomes irrelevant, or maybe you never read, or you read and don't remove it later.

Technorati Tags: asist2008 tags tagging communication

Panelists

• Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
• Ann Prentice, University of Maryland

The basis for this presentation was generated by the Information Science Education Committee and some results published in a white paper on the committee's page on the ASIS&T Website.  As an IS student it was an interesting topic, and I really enjoyed listening to Clifford Lynch speak about the topic.

A large part of the discussion here are the different disciplines that Information Science touches, and how to find commonalities between them.  Clifford mostly spoke by way of experience but he had some interesting thoughts that I'll just summarize here.

• There are more people now interested in information science that are also narrowly interested in computer science.
• He thinks there should be undergraduate programs in IS because too many people don't hear about the field until they wonder what to do with themselves.
• IS isn't out there as a profession to a vast part of the population.
• Clifford is seeing a more systematic use of information in society including advertising, propaganda, and information literacy.  There's money being spent and commercial activity is being shaped, he believes this is sort of unclaimed and unexplained territory.
• He talked about a sort of "bag of skills" to Master's Students (not so much PhD students because he believes that they should be well set in what they are researching).  He says what they need to teach us is how to build prototypes and work under time pressures, what they don't teach us is how to live with the results of building prototypes under time pressures.  They're not teaching enough how to do analysis.
• We need to think deeply about how to address scale; social scale technology, how technology has an impact on information, ramifications of RFID, and understanding everything from impact to the analysis.
• He discussed some how it is difficult to do research in our field in an academic setting because of limitations we've set up, things like data analysis using human subjects, and access to research is locked up in vendor databases.  He mentioned that there is a lot of parallel research outside of the academic setting because they're not locked inside the same restraints.  Researchers at companies like Microsoft or Yahoo! often tell him that they can't do the research they're doing in a university.  He feels that we need to reach out to this other research and do large scale simulation.
• Clifford talked some about personal identity in Library & Information science, and how librarians have historically had a strong and proud professional identity.  They have always been strongly tied to a set of values that they defend, and librarians have historically been tied to libraries.
• During the 60s and 70s the profession became diffused with information science.  One question he pondered, but doesn't really know the answer is whether information professionals should have a strong professional identity or do they need to?  He's never had one himself, or rather doesn't get excited about having one... he started as a computer scientist though.
• I think one of my favorite points from his remarks was when he said, "Maybe we need people who are less worried and willing to roam widely."
• He finds the word "competence" scary, and worries that we try to design programs for Master's students that "teach you enough."  He noted that "we can't possibly teach you everything you need to know."  There's just not enough time, and my other favorite point he brought up was the best thing we can do (as LIS Students) is to leave with a professional mind set to continue learning.  He said the "key roles" is to get people to think like information professions; "you never know enough" and it is "necessary to keep learning."

I didn't take much notes on Ann's presentation, she talked a lot about some of the observations and results from the white paper, but there were some good things there too.  The white paper is available on the ASIS&T website, as I mentioned.

The last day of the conference, I did stick it out until the end.  Not too much to recap either.

I attended a panel called "Golbal Perspectives in Wikipedia Research" where I was introduced to one of the panelists during the session on Twitter (I put something on Twitter when she was speaking, and she added me as a friend as the next person was speaking).  I did walk up and say hi to her after it was done.

The Plenary Session with Connie Yowell called, "Digital Media and Learning" was really the highlight of the day on Wednesday.  Some good insights and I took some excellent notes.

I started in a panel called "Civic Engagement, Youth and Community:  The Role of Place, Education, Information and Technology in Shaping Civic and Political Discourse", but I wasn't feeling well toward the end so I left.  I almost considered leaving the conference then, but since there was only one more session after this I though I could stick it out just a few more hours... and I did start to feel a tiny bit better.

I also enjoyed the last session which was called, "Waddling Around the Digital Iceberg: Use of Virtual Spaces and Environments by children, Preteens and Teens". 

Now that I have my notes compiled I do intend on elaborating more on some of these sessions.  One session that I did want to see (I think Tuesday), but missed for no reason other than I think it got lost in my 40 page program somewhere and I was in la la land at the time, was on social networking at conferences (appropriately enough).  I found somebody's notes from that session through a technorati search though so maybe I can incorporate that into the recap of social networking at the conference I plan on writing.

Technorati Tags: asist2008

This was a lighter day for me, and that's probably ok because it seems that by Tuesday I start to significantly wear out and lose energy fast.

The first session I attended was an excellent panel on Digital Rights Management called "DRM:  Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management?"  There was a very well rounded set of presentations included in this panel.  I was sorry to see how this one ended though, by what seems like a true communications error, the panel went over time, and was rudely stopped.  The ending times for sessions were not included in the programs, and the sessions on the first two days of the conference were a full two hours, while the rest of the week were 1.5... so there was confusion as to how long they lasted.  The panel did go over, but the disappointment happened when a meeting organizer rudely stormed into the room and told everybody they had to get out so they could set up for the next session.  The rudeness continued, the organizer had an immense attitude problem, I'm sorry to see such a person representing ASIS&T in this capacity to the attendees, members, and guests.

I ducked into a poster session after this and talked to a few people doing some great research.

I talked to:

Frederic Stutzman, Experience and Privacy:  Exploring the Disclosure Behaviors of Established Facebook Users

• I co-wrote a paper on a similar topic with a classmate last Winter so this topic was especially interesting to me.

Lisa Kleinman, Technology Use in Meetings: Information Handling & Polychronicity

• I basically walked up to Lisa and said, "oh my gosh, this is me."  Very fascinating to me that somebody is doing research on this topic.

Joe Sanchez, The Educator's Coop:  A Virtual World Model for Real World Collaboration

• I first saw this poster on Flickr before the conference.  I enjoyed the opportunity I had to talk to Joe.  I think he's doing a lot of great work in Second Life!

Then I just looked at:

Jacob Kramer-Duffield and Carolyn Hank: Babies in Bathtubs: Public Views of Private Behaviors Represented in the Flickr Domain

Gary Geisler, Paul Stenis, Jesse Martinez and Allison King: Game Scholar: Do We Need a Reference Database

Then I had a great lunch with Keith Instone, Information Architect Lead for IBM.com.  I tried to pick his brain for ways to go with directive study and he gave me plenty of ideas!  He also did not try to sell me band fruit... it turns out Keith is a Band Booster at the same high school I went to, so I remember band fruit sales very "fondly".  Although, I'm happy to support the band, I just don't think I can eat that much citrus in order to do so!

Finally, I went to "Values and Information:  An Interdisciplinary Investigation".  It doesn't look like I took a lot of notes at this one though.  I thought it sounded relevant to some things we may be discussing in my Information Policy class, I'm not sure if it really was though.

The rest of the evening was relatively low key.  I spent some time talking to Jodi Schneider, somebody I became acquainted with on Twitter and met for the first time in person at the conference.  I think she mentioned finding me through Karen Schneider, which I think is funny because I met Karen for the first time at IA Summit and I previously knew her from Twitter as well... and they have the same last name!  Ok, maybe that's not that weird, but I really like meeting Twitter friends at conferences!  I also made a bunch of new Twitter friends, it was fun following everybody at the conference.  I will try to follow up with a blog post about how my social scouting went at ASIS&T, but I have a mess of session posts to write first.

I had every intention on going to SIG-CON later that evening, but I ended up skipping it yet again (I didn't go last year either).  I think by Tuesday evening I just get really worn out.  Maybe next year!

I'm fairly certain I took enough notes today to fill up 4 blog posts so I'm just going to do a recap of my day, and post some more detailed after the conference (I really promise).

The early morning session I attended was called "Whither LIS Education".  I was a little sleepy so I don't think I ever caught the name of the committee or the report that this panel was formed around, but the main speakers were Clifford Lynch and Ann Prentice.  I didn't have a real pull to this session other than I have a lot of respect for Clifford Lynch and what he has to say, and I really enjoyed his thoughts on LIS Education.  The panel was structured as some observations by Clifford, then Ann came in with some numbers and observations from the white paper... which she mentioned where somewhere on the ASIS&T website.  If anybody knows where, please let me know.  The hunting down process would be easier if I even had the name of the committee.  I sort of wish some of these things were published better, or made more readily available for us... as a side note, I can't even get into the proceedings section on the ASIS&T website either, so for all I know there's a gold mine of things there that I'm also missing.  But I also wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't too.

The second session I attended was "Tagging as a Communication Device:  Every Tag Cloud has a Silver Lining", with a panel of 5 different people; Heather D. Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, David R. Millen, Mark R. Lidner, and Margaret E. I. Kipp.  Some of the discussions echoed thoughts from a tagging session I saw last year at the annual meeting, but the highlight of this session for me was David R. Millen's talk on IBM's social bookmarking tool, Dogear, and how he's studied patterns in collaboration and tagging in the enterprise.  His contribution to this panel was also a breath of fresh air, without going on a large rant, I really wish there was more representation from practitioners at ASIS&T.  I do enjoy the contributions and the research from the academic institutions, but I would really enjoy a more balanced conference in this respect.  I've been lucky enough at this conference, this year, to find some people who aren't all in academia, or have their PhDs or working on their PhDs.  I've even discovered that there are Master's students like myself at this conference who have no intention of getting their PhDs, and I'm really working this out to be the theme of the conference for me this year.  Overall I do enjoy this conference, and I like the opportunity to meet people in many different areas, and I think I will continue to enjoy these opportunities in the future too.

I only had enough energy for three sessions today, the last was titled, "My So-called Life on the Web."  The panel was William Jones, Fred Stutzman, Catherine Marshall, Gary Marchioni, and Allison Brueckner.  Lots of really good topics here, unfortunately the presentations were rushed.  I was really disappointed that Catherine couldn't even get through hers.  What struck me most about this session was how different the tone was compared to the opening plenary.

After the sessions I stepped in and looked at a couple of the posters from today.  I didn't get a real chance to scope them out though.  Today I also met some new Twitter friends, was introduced to a Twitter friend I already had in person, and had a great conversation at the bar with another MLIS student for some time before the Alumni Reception.

I was tableless for the Alumni Reception, but I stopped in and talked to some of the Michigan people, and I even caught up with somebody who I met last year and finally saw for the first time this evening.  I spoke a couple of times with a former professor at Wayne State, Dr. Yunfei Du, and caught up with what he's up to now, and then headed out to dinner with the NOR-ASIS&T (Northern Ohio) Group. 

As sleepiness reigns, I'll have to save my wrapup of the individual sessions for another day.  And because I'm so sleepy I'm just going to post this into the wild without proof-reading (I'm so reckless)!  I'm certain tomorrow will be another day jam packed full of excitement, so it's probably best I get to bed soon.

Just a rough recap of my day, because I promised myself I would record of my this for public consumption. 

Plenary Session, "Transforming the Internet?"

Panelists

• Genevieve Bell, Intel Digital Home Group
• Howard Rheingold, UC Berkeley and Stanford
• Andrew Keen, author "Cult of the Amateur"

A very interesting talk, and I have to say I don't think I agree with a lot that was said during this talk.  I suppose I expected some of that going in though...

First off, Genevieve presented on the topic, "Transforming the Internet?", then Howard Rheingold and Andrew Keen gave a few different insights to what Genevieve presented.

My head hurts too much to really sum up everything mentioned in the presentation, but here's a few points that I did get down.

• There are many futures to the internet, it's about more than just the technology we use to connect.
• The internet is moving off of computers and to other devices; phones, televisions, and it is become more transitive.
• China has eclipsed the number of American users on the internet... how do we deal with people entering the internet where Enlgish is not their first, or even second language.
• Different types of infrastructures, "find the 'killer app' and it 'screws' it for everybody else"... she used BBC's iPlayer as an example.  The idea being that the popularity of something kills the infrastructure enough to disadvantage "normal" users.
• Internet regulations, especially in the way of the government as stakeholders.
• Socio-technological concerns like privacy, authenticity, reputation, and access.
• She summed up by talking about how to design for the web, and how there is the possibility of "many webs" and no fixed notion.  Information passes through devices in many ways.

I mentioned my head hurts, it was actually killing me through this session, I think it had much to do with the drive and not the actual presentation, it was hurting before I walked in the door... I really did try to concentrate, but I know I missed a lot.  Next up Howard Rheingold discussed his thoughts which focused a lot on literacies.  Then Andrew Keen... oh Andrew Keen, I am still not a fan...  No I haven't read the book, "Cult of the Amateur", yes I have always intended to, I don't like people who criticize what people say without reading the book, but his thoughts have never been popular with me based on a number of interviews I've seen him do now.

Andrew talked about his theory of the internet quite a bit, views on authenticity, the attractiveness of anonymity, the normal "fears" that people have.  He said that "the internet is not the real world, it is an idealized world".  He actually goes as far to say that most individuals are not ready for this technology and that what worries him is the "idealized" vision that people will have on the world because of the internet.

The most interesting comments came right before the question and answers though... my favorite:

Genevieve discussed how offline conversations can manifest themselves into online conversations, and vice versa.  Andrew's response somewhere in there, "How do "they" manifest disappointment? (meaning the people participating in the online environment) Genevieve's response was "How do they manifest disappointment now?" (meaning the people in an offline environment)

Which sort of hints why I'm not a fan of Andrew's thoughts... I felt he's too focused on the individual and does not give any credit to how communities form and operate online.  His "idealized internet" is too idealized, and he's creating fears out of situations that really aren't a big deal.  He says the internet is not reality, but I disagree... the internet is a part of a lot of people's reality, it is certainly a part of mine and I don't see anything wrong with that.

There was a lot that came out of this session, I know there was a lot I missed, and there was certainly a lot I disagreed with... even some of the less harsher views of the internet seemed harsh.  I'm not saying there are not issues with authority and privacy online, but I think there's a lot that is overexaggerated at times, and I don't see those issues any different than many of the issues cultures have dealt with without the internet... they're just presented in a very transparent way now.  It's kind of here to stay... or at least I hope so, I think I would be bored without the internet.

Poster Sessions

I visited poster sessions next, I found out last night that my advisor was presenting!  Here are the three I found most interesting:

• Bin Li: An Inside Look at Travelers’ Information Suitcase (my advisor at Wayne State, yea!)
• Elisabeth Jones, Harry Bruce, Predrag Klasnja and William Jones: I Give Up! Five Factors that Contribute to the Abandonment of Information Management Strategies
  • Personal information management has been a real interest of mine lately so I enjoyed this poster.  The main take away is that regardless of the tools that people use, there does seem to be a commonality to why people "quit" their systems.
• Paul Aumer-Ryan:  Interface Effects on Digital Library Credibility Judgments
  • Paul has been looking at "no results found" results from digital library search systems and how users may take that information to definitively mean no results, when the information could actually be there. 

After the poster session I went to the leadership program, there's not much to really say about this, I thought it was more interesting last year actually... this year it was more of a question and answers thing with the various leaders in ASIS&T.  I was mostly frustrated with lack of internet and phone signal by this point anyway.

Finally, I added some images to Flickr from the Welcome Reception and the dinner with SIG-Management.  I edited the photos, but I'm too tired for doing the full blown tagging tonight, but if others want to tag for me, have at it.  I think anybody else can tag...

 

At the dinner I passed my camera around the table and just let other people take the pictures, I liked this!  I got more pictures than what I normally would've taken myself and I got some interesting perspectives too, not to mention a couple pics of myself, one with closed eyes, one without... I definitely think I'll be trying this fun trick again.

I'll start off by saying, I'm bad at managing information from conferences.  I think I'm writing this as a way to start pondering how to be better at it.  I always go to conferences thinking, "this time I'll blog" or "I'll make sure I will get my pictures up right away", or even that I'll take notes and reflect on everything that I hear, but anybody who has been to conferences knows that this is so difficult.  Then you get home, you're so exhausted, and it hits you that you actually have another life that you've been neglecting!

This time I decided to blog before the conference... hopefully that counts...

So tomorrow I'll be on my way to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio (by the way, Go Bucks!)  I went to this conference last year as a student volunteer, this year I'm going as a student...

You learn what works from each conference you go to when it comes to managing information (there's just so much of it).  I think the key is really finding a way to aggregate everything to one place so you can find it later.  Is that a blog?  Is that something else?  I'm not sure yet.  Tags help, but it's difficult when there isn't a known tag before the conference starts, or there's a couple variations of tags.  It's good to find these things out beforehand.  Also, it's hard to blog from an event when there isn't internet... this is one of the main problems of the ASIS&T conference.  There's internet, but you have to pay for it, so most people don't bring their laptops, or they skip internet access for the event.  I also remember poor reception inside the meeting rooms last year.  I really am hoping the internet situation is better this year.

How do you keep up?

I don't have one method down yet, but I think I like to keep track of what's going on using the tools I already use.  This makes sense right?  There is a wiki for this event, there's a few things posted (but not much), I do think I pulled the tag 'asist2008' off of there, so that's what I'll try to use for the event.  I try to monitor Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious during and after events.  I don't regularly use Technorati (other than monitoring my own blog traffic), but I do throw that in for conferences to see if anybody's blogging.  That sounds like a lot, but if you can aggregate the feeds from the tools you most regularly use, you can either create 1. a decent journal of your own activity at the conference, or 2. a feed of all activity at the conference... depending on the participation level.

For IA Summit last spring I created a public Google Reader feed of these items, which was interesting for keeping up during the conference, I've already created one for ASIS&T 2008 to see how well this works again.  The Google Reader page is a nice format and not a bad way to catch up with things.  Of course all of these feeds are in one folder of my normal Google Reader, I like to make it public in case anybody else finds it useful.  Oh and it seems that Google has been changing their shared pages features and I think I'm stuck with the fish themed page, at least for now, the page where I was able to change the theme before has disappeared.

I wanted to create a FriendFeed room (well I did create one), but it turned out to be rather limiting for events like this.  I had difficulty adding anything more than Flickr photos, so I guess FriendFeed is better for individuals rather than groups or conferences.  All I ended up doing was add my public Google Reader feed, so it's just duplicating my other feed, but the FriendFeed room gives people the ability to comment on items.  Things can also be posted directly to the FriendFeed room too, but I'm not sure if that's a feature I would use at a conference.  I'm honestly not happy with the FriendFeed room right now so I don't know if that's something I'll keep messing with.

I recently discovered that Twitter Search (formerly Summize) is awesome for real time updates to what's going on with Twitter... I like to keep this open in a tab in my browser if I can (not sure on the number of Twitterers at this event though).  I think Hahlo on the iPhone has a Twitter search, not sure about tracking events on any of the other apps or how they work.  I tend to be more laptop centric at events.  I suppose if internet is flaky then I could use my iPhone more.

Flickr & Pics

I'm going to bring the Eye-Fi card, but I've never successfully got it to work on a wireless network other than my own.  To have pics automatically uploaded to my computer and to Flickr during a conference would be cool.  If I can get it to work then I'll probably let go of my perfectionist angst over pictures and use Picnik to edit them right away online.  If I can't get it to work, I'll probably make the effort to put them up right away from my computer, or later in the evening at the hotel.  I'm bad about pictures... mostly the perfectionist thing, I like to edit them all before I post them online, but then I never have time for this.  Sometimes I publish the photos real quick and edit them later to replace them on Flickr.  As I'm writing this I realized I never published my photos from ACPL Library Camp... this is why I need to do these things right away!

Liveblogging

I have mixed feelings about liveblogging.  On one hand I like the idea of just getting it all out there, because I know I won't sit down and form a well thought out blog post like I should.  On the other hand, I don't always like reading other people's notes as live blogs (twitter posts I don't mind so much though).  Maybe the best way to approach liveblogging is just to aggregate?  Or is it a wiki format?  I'm really just looking for a way to keep this information for myself.  An interesting liveblogging tool is ScribbleLive, which I discovered some time ago and looks pretty fun.  There's some cool embedding feature with ScribbleLive, and I think you can aggregate things like Twitter to it too, but the embed tools seem to only work with WordPress right now.

My dilemma is that I often take notes at conferences and then they never get published somewhere where they'd be of any use to anybody... including myself, they usually just get lost somewhere on my computer.  I guess it depends on what I get the most value out of during the talks.  I like links to resources, websites, and even the presentation itself so I can refer to it again later.  This is the sort of stuff I think I need to keep better track of during events.

I know a lot of people like using their mobile phone for conference blogging, but I really don't like typing out long things on my iPhone so I use that more to check in with Twitter friends and email.  I do like to take a few quick pics with my phone and upload them to my Tumblr though.

Another interesting thing is keeping track of all of the people you meeting, who are either on different social networks or no social networks.  I collect people on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and LinkedIn pretty regularly.  It would wonderful if there was an easier way to manage those connections in one place.

I am looking for new suggestions in this area.  I think I pick up new thoughts on this as I go to different events.  In summary it seems the best ways to approach this type of information management is to collect thoughts quickly (and clearly), in an aggregated sort of way, and to make sure you have the appropriate access to a network during the event.  Realistically, getting this stuff collected after an event seems pretty difficult to do anymore.  I'm curious how other people like to manage information from conferences and what they do with it once they have it.

My mode of operation seems to save knowledge of specific features, products, tools, whatever, in the back of my brain until the need for them surfaces.  I guess this is sort of what happened with Prism.  My knowledge of Prism really started with my decision to simply not download Google Chrome.  I'm not against the browser, I just feel I'm too invested in Firefox as my web browser, and as much as I would love to play around with the new browser, I simply don't have the time.  So I didn't download it.

But some of the features do intrigue me, which is why when I saw the article in Lifehacker about putting Chrome's best features into Firefox, I filed that in the back of my brain for when the need surfaced.  I've picked up a few good extensions out of this article, but the one that I didn't think I would really have a need for, turns out to be pretty cool, and that is the Prism for Firefox extension.

Prism is an extension that allows you to create stand alone applications from any website.  I'm really browser based, I admit it.  I don't mind having multiple tabs open and working out of the browser.  That's why I wasn't sure this application would be one I used often.  The feature in Chrome to allow tabs to run as separate processes seemed like a good and useful one though.  In a way, Prism sort of replaces that function in Firefox, but you have to choose which sites you want to be made into applications.

I don't usually try these things until a need comes up, and last week the need appeared out of frustration.  If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed I have absolutely no love for the course management tool, Blackboard.  We use it for all of our classes, and I think it fails on both functionality and usability.  Last week as I was trying to post a video link to a presentation to the discussion board of one of my classes, my browser crashed multiple times.  I also had tabs open that I didn't necessarily want to lose, but because my browser crashed with Blackboard open each time, each time I restored the session it would crash again.  The crash resulted in multiple postings on the discussion board even, which I found absolutely annoying.

It's not the first time I had browser crashes with Blackboard open in my browser.  It's just such a problematic site that I come to expect it to happen again.  That's when I remembered that extension, which I did download to my browser, but hadn't had an opportunity to try it out yet.  I decided to create a new application for Blackboard using Prism thinking that in the future if it decides to crash it won't take down my whole browser.

Not only has it not crashed, but it runs beautifully in the window!  I'm impressed, although don't think that leaves Blackboard off the hook, it should run with no problems in Firefox too.  I shouldn't have to use it in an outside environment to make it work!

Things I like about Prism:

• When I minimize, it can minimize to the system tray (yea, less task bar clutter!)
• I can create a desktop icon, start menu icon, or quick start icon (or all 3).  The nice thing about the start menu icon though is that I can now open directly using search in Windows Vista.  I do have a desktop icon created too.
  
• The window is uncluttered and simple, I see this coming in handy for doing things like screencasts!
• Links open in your browser, not your application window.

This could work for creating a desktop application for Gmail, or at work I decided to create a little application for our ILS, which is web based and normally I just open in a new tab.  It's really easy to use too, just visit the website, go to tools, convert website to application, check a few options... done.  It may not be a total replacement to Chrome's tab processing feature, but it works for what I need it to do.

Tonight (er, this morning) I'm working on a multimedia presentation for my Information Architecture class.  I really enjoy putting presentations together.  Last winter I did one using screencasting which I enjoyed, and this semester we're required to appear on video so I've been trying out different tools to accomplish this.

A few days ago I put a question out on Twitter asking if anybody knew a good tool for including video and PowerPoint together, Nick DeNardis responded back saying that SlideRocket "changed how he did presentations forever", so I decided to check it out.  Let me just say, wow!  I don't know why I haven't looked at this sooner.  The presentations look really simple, and they're completely editable in the web browser.  You can add video, audio, and/or images really easily, and presentations can be shared online through the web browser, or if you like an offline viewer can be downloaded.

As with any new thing there's been a bit of a learning curve for me though.  This is a group presentation for an online class so we have to collaborate completely online.  My classmates and I have to all appear on video at some point during the presentation too.  You can add video to PowerPoint I guess, but another group did this in what looked to be an attractively packaged presentation, but the video boxes included within the presentation did not play for myself or another group member.  I'm not sure why.  SlideRocket uses Flash video, is easy to learn, and the presentations really flow much better than anything I could ever create in a PowerPoint.

I was up for the challenge of combining all of these elements together, video, audio, basic PowerPoint slides (yes, you can import .ppt files!), into one presentation though.  I mentioned that SlideRocket uses Flash video, it does also accept .mov or .mp4 movie formats, but I opted for the flash, it seemed more native to what I was trying to do.  First I did raw editing of the camera .avi files in Windows Movie Maker, which is what I usually use.  It's easy for me to use, it's on my computer, it just works.  I exported those into .wmv files.  Exporting to .wmv always seem to work the best when I'm working in Windows Movie Maker.  Keeping them in the .avi format (which is actually the default) makes them huge and even distorted so I pick an appropriate sized .wmv setting to match the dimensions of the original .avi file.

I had to hunt around for a tool that does media conversion.  Luckily I didn't have to hunt too far as Lifehacker did a pick of top 5 media converters on Sunday!  I eventually went with SUPER, I'm not impressed with the interface or their website (both are difficult to navigate), but it had the most options and I wanted to do two different conversations with my .wmv files.  Despite the confusing interface, the converter works really well once you get it going!

I converted each file into a .flv and a .mp3, and now I'm in the process of uploading those to SlideRocket and incorporating them into my slides.  I wanted one of each so I could decide between a video or just an audio for slides, I didn't necessarily think that the video had to be on every slide, but the audio certainly does since this presentation will be delivered online.

It's a long process, but I have learned a few things along the way... although I'm hoping to get a few hours sleep tonight!

I love Twitter, and I was already fully aware of the usefulness of the microblogging service in a personal and professional setting, but just now, in a very serendipitous way, I discovered how a combination of Google, Blog Posts, and Twitter can get you exactly the information you need in school research too.  I'm very inspired by this.

I'm putting together one part of a presentation on Usability in Web Design for my Information Architecture class, my particular topic in this presentation is defining and describing what usability is, and I have reached the section where I wanted to talk about some considerations for usability in web design.  I have found some incredible resources, but I sort of got stuck with browser considerations, at least in a very general sort of way that I can sum up for my classmates, with maybe a few very general tools.  I'm talking real basic here... things that librarians can understand without overwhelming them.

Ugh! I know browser compatibility is needlessly complex (thanks to browsers being needlessly non-standards based), I've totally been there, but I didn't realize finding a general article, blog post, anything would be that difficult.  And to be honest with you, I can't even trace my path back to how I initially found this nugget by Jared Spool on UIE (I do know it started with Google and veered in some strange direction after that), but I'm thrilled that I did, and it was even posted yesterday!!

In sum, a client asked Jared if he could recommend an article on designing for specific browsers for one of his clients.  Jared admitted he didn't that he didn't know the answer, but thought somebody must know.  Since Twitter is awesome like this, Jared posed the question to his network and got some good responses from people he knew.  Then he posted the question and responses on his UIE blog in a simple sort of digest form, which I can now benefit from with my own research.

Thank you to Jared who thought to post these responses so that others may be able to enjoy!  I looked through a few of the suggested links and did find some resources closer to what I was initially hoping to find when I started on this web searching journey. 

More evidence that Twitter just rocks.

Just a little cross promotion on the blog.  I've been happy to attend a few meetings now with the group Refresh Detroit which is part of the Refreshing Cities initiative.  I've enjoyed attending these meetings because the group consists of a variety of web professionals (designers, developers, and information architects) who are committed to promoting usability, accessibility, and web standards in their work.  Normally the group meets in Ann Arbor, or thereabouts, and at a previous meeting it came up that the group has never actually met in Detroit (despite the name reference).  I offered, through the Wayne State Chapter of ASIS&T (which I've just started my service as President of the organization) to try to find a Detroit location for the group's October meeting.  Well, with the help of several individuals in the Wayne State Library & Information Science Program, we were able to get some space to host a Website Demo Night in Detroit with the group.

I'm looking forward to attending, especially since I work in the same library where the event is hosted and I only have to walk up one flight of stairs to get there. :)

If anybody is interested in attending or even demoing their work you can find more information on the Refresh Detroit website.