bibliotechy

Posts Tagged ‘socialnetworking’

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Jing – Do one thing and do it well!

In STT on April 10, 2009 at 9:00 am

To compliment upcoming workshops I’m teaching, here’s an updated re-post from last spring.

I’ve been Jing-ing like crazy lately prepping for a D-I-Y presentation at MLA 2009 in Springfield.  If you don’t know already Jing is a FREE program that can take screenshots or make “movies” of whatever is going on on your desktop.  It’s a great to show folks “How-To” use an online resource like say InfoTrac or OverDrive or EventKeeper.

Video is saved and presented in the Flash format and you can store your videos online at a realted site called Screencast.  Each of your videos has it’s own URL, or you can link or imbed them from your own website.

  • Click here for a collection of NMRLS “how-to” videos on Screencast.

Jing also takes single screen shots which you can store online for FREE at Flickr, here’s my collection of Jing tips on Flickr (also linked below).You can also annotate these images before you upload them to highlight or add notes.

Everything I mentioned above is FREE!
 Run, don’t walk, to your nearest internet and download Jing now!

OK, so there may some expenses involved …  you need a microphone unless you want all your videos to be silent movies.  Pretty much any mic will do and if you’re lucky you have a laptop or netbook with mic built-in.  NMRLS has USB mics to loan out to our member libraries, just contact Scott, click here to see all of the NMRLS loaner equipment & gadgets.

There is also a Pro version of Jing, it allows you to save video in either Flash or MPEG4 format as well as direct uploads to YouTube. It costs $14.95/year, not bad for a few more bells & whistles.  The nice thing about this version is you can edit the video afterward, add another voiceover or a backing music track (see my tips below for another way to do this), as well as link to it off you own server, you don’t need to use Screencast or YouTube.

Here are a few of my YouTube NMRLS How-To videos:

Here are my Jing videos on Screencast.com (via my delicious.com account):

It’s easy, it’s fun, it can be time-consuming …
But, it’s informative, it helps your users, and it’s easy and it’s fun!

Scotts Jing Tips

Scott's Jing Tips

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All a flutter about Twitter!

In STT on March 18, 2009 at 3:32 pm

So what’s up with this Twitter thing!?  Seems like it is suddenly all the media can talk about and attempt to explain.

It’s only taken me two years to catch on to it myself.  Like many librarians I know, I created a Twitter account in a Linda Braun workshop where she got us all excited about all these web 2.0 and social networking applications … and then I promptly forgot about it … until this past Fall when I got a few emails from member librarians requesting that they follow the NMRLS feed, which was, and is, currently dead … “hmmm NMRLS has a Twitter!? What was that again?”

But I decided to give it a try again after I heard an NPR Weekend Edition story on it (find here).  And because I realized that it didn’t sound as time-consuming (or as personal) as FaceBook. And I own an iPhone and you are morally obligated to have every cool social networking app on your iPhone or they take it away!

So for my personal / psuedo-professional life I created an account and I love it!  It can be as interactive or as passive as you want.  There are famous people on it like Linda Braun (on it 24/7), Shaq (basketball star), and Tina Fey (hardly posts, very busy).   And lots of great informative really useful post-ers too like: NASA (latest on space shuttle and Mars rovers); FDA recalls (kinda scary); Boston Red Sox (via Boston Globe);  News, News, News (NPR, NY Times, Starbucks, etc.) .  As well as library news:  Library of Congress; Library Journal; DC Public Library (interesting just to get an idea what a public library could do with it).

I was just at a conference, NERCOMP 2009, where they had volunteers tweeting in each workshop and it was a delight to check the Twitter feed on your phone and read what you were missing (or weren’t) in real-time!  And it also helped you decide whether you should you cut & run or stick with the presentation you’re in (I made both good and bad decisions based on this Twitter method). They had bloggers too, but who wants to read all that when Twitter is short (it can only be 14o character, counting spaces, after all), and you can read on a cell phone as well as on a laptop or PC.

Maybe it’s my choice of feeds, but there seems to be a lot less of the inane posts like “I just ate a grilled cheese sandwich …”  I see those kinds of earth-shattering missives on FaceBook all the time, so it is a welcome relief to read useful and humorous posts online whether on the web or a phone.  Plus nearly everyone posts links to all this interesting informative stuff they’re talking about via Tiny URL (because you only got those 140 characters!).

Find a nice video introduction/tips & tricks by one of my favorite C|Net reporters, Tom Merrit. He does a weekly program called Insider Secrets on C|Net TV, here’s the link his a recent episode on Twitter (time: 4:41).