The Unquiet Librarian

Hmmmm…I was lured away from Wordpress to Edublogs by the greater range of themes, but this might cause me to go back to Wordpress!  I still host my library blog at Wordpress, so I will definitely take advantage of this new feature as I use PollDaddy fairly regularly.

WordPress.com » Get a Free Blog Here via kwout

I have added some new posts tonight to my library blog, http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com, to promote some wonderful YA Lit 2.0 resources available to teen readers! Book publishers, authors, and organizations dedicated to promoting YA lit now have blogs, Twitter accounts, My Space pages, Facebook pages, and You Tube channels that provide interviews, book updates, podcasts, and videos to help teens communicate one on one with their favorite authors. Please take a peek at some of my favorite resources!

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/sarah-dessen-20/

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/harper-teen-books-check-out-this-web-20-presence/

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/calling-all-vampire-kisses-fans/

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/paula-yoo-readergirlz-september-author-of-the-month-on-youtube/

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/get-plugged-into-reading-the-plugged-into-reading-network/

We use our blog and our Twitter account, https://twitter.com/unquietlibrary , to alert our patrons to our latest blog posts. I hope you will enjoy some of the resources I have highlighted!

The Unquiet Library via kwout

I am not sure how I missed this ( I don’t remember an official announcement?), but you can now follow School Library Journal on Twitter!  Yeah!

http://twitter.com/sljournal

Twitter / sljournal via kwout

Georgia COMO 2008

Come join the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning!  What is the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning?  It is a social networking space where COMO attendees (as well as those who may not be able to attend in person but who want to get a taste of the conference happenings from afar!) can share ideas and network with other professionals and peers! 

In addition, we are inviting everyone who is presenting to jump into our “Session Discussions” forum!  This is a space where speakers and presenters can tell others about their presentations and embed content for their presentations.  As a member of our Georgia COMO 2008 Ning, you can embed content on “My Page” and share ideas with others.  Ning allows members to upload videos, photos, and other multimedia content—what a great Web 2.0 way to share the knowledge from our upcoming COMO 2008 conference!  In addition, members may create or join special interest groups where you can network with colleagues on a smaller scale.  You may also add a Georgia COMO 2008 Ning badge to your blog, wiki, or website!

To join our Ning, you must first register a free Ning account.  Click on this link to register for free! Once you have registered, you can then join our Ning going to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and click on the text link, “Sign Up”, on the left side of the page.

The Georgia COMO 2008 Ning is a terrific way for speakers and presenters to share information from their sessions.   Our network will allow attendees to get a taste of the sessions that they may not be able to get to; the Ning provides a means for those who cannot attend in person to experience the essence of the conference vicariously.  We have created in our Ning in the spirit of the NECC 2008 network, and we hope that our network will prove beneficial to you as a learning space. 

If you have any difficulties registering or navigating our Ning, please feel free to contact me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us .  The network is open for discussion and registration (free for everyone!), so surf on over to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and join today!

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com

I am normally not a numbers kind of girl, but I totally love the new tabular stats you can now view for your blog (or blogs!) in Wordpress.  You can read more at http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/tabular-stats/, but the highlights include stats in table form for:

• Months and Years
• Average per Day
•  Recent Weeks

In the past, we have been able to view blog stats, but these new tables give us all kinds of new data to contemplate and explore.  I especially love the comparative nature of the new tabular stats—for example, I now can easily see my blog stats for August 2008 compared to August 2007.  Be sure to check out this terrific new feature!

Although I do not live on the Georgia coast, I am keeping a cautious eye on Hurricane Hanna, a hurricane that may strike the Georgia coastline this Friday or Saturday.  While looking at the National Hurricane Center’s website this afternoon, I found you can subscribe to RSS feeds for each hurricane and tropical storm that is named in the Atlantic. 

You can go to the page and grab the RSS feed, or you can subscribe to the feed at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/nhc_at3.xml .

According to CNET, Google will be releasing its own browser, Google Chrome, tomorrow.  Here is the official scoop from the Google Blog:

09/01/2008 02:10:00 PM

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We’ll post an update here as soon as it’s ready.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

I am quite impressed with the Web 2.0 features that the New Orleans Times-Picayune and NOLA.com have incorporated into their website!  You can:

• Follow the hurricane blog at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/schleifstein_blog/ and subscribe to a RSS feed for the blog.
• Follow the newspaper’s latest headline updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NOLAnews
• Bookmark your favorite blog posts and articles to your social bookmarking service, such as del.icio.us.
• The use of Cover It Live on the blog at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/schleifstein_blog/
• Subscribe via RSS to the Hurricane Gustav photo gallery and view a cloud tag for the photos.

Photos from the Times-Picayune – nola.com: Photo Galleries

I don’t think they have a YouTube Channel for the hurricane or a Flickr account at this point, but that may change as this historic and menacing storm barrels toward the Gulf Coast.    Hopefully, these tools will help disseminate information in a timely and helpful manner.   I also discovered the National Hurricane Center is testing out Hurricane Gustav podcasts—these are brief updates on the storm.

NHC Experimental Podcasts

For now, my prayers and good thoughts for safety and comfort go out to anyone who may be in the path of this hurricane.

Check out the great new “image” feature of PollDaddy!  You can now incorporate images into your PollDaddy polls!  Here is an example:

[polldaddy poll="857359"]

I just read at Fox News this morning that Texas Rep.  John Culberson has been using Twitter to post updates and as a means of communicatoin with his constituents.  However, some members of Congress feel that “Twittering” violates house rules regarding communications outside of “official” websites.

However, Culberson has several counterarguments.  In the article, Culberson states:

By communicating on Twitter, Culberson said he can tell his constituents to watch a live video he’s about to broadcast on a site called Qik.com. By blasting an announcement that he’s going to hold a town hall meeting, Culberson said anyone with a mobile e-mail device, an Internet connection or a phone can tap into the discussion. Or if a vote on a confusing or quickly-moving bill is coming up he can shoot out marching orders as needed to his supporters.

“It’s a great way to instantaneously communicate with a large number of people,” Culberson said. 

We have already seen something similar to this happen in some school districts.    District leaders want official school content to stay on official school websites so that content will appear professional; I am also surmising that there may also be legal/liability issues behind those policies as well.  However, sometimes these policies inhibit educators from harnessing the power of these web 2.0 tools.

What do you think about this?  Should Culberson be allowed to Twitter from Capitol Hill?  Personally, I think it is great that an elected leader is trying to find other means to dialogue with his voters and to alert them to his official activities.  However, I’d love to hear your ideas!  What do you think?