Some initial thoughts: I am especially pleased that a major consortium with some really big library collections is looking closely at an open source solution. I like what I see so far in some of the searches that I’ve done in the system: the ability to tag, cite, utilize the Google Book Search API, add to favorites, etc. OpenURL linking is built in as well.

We had a really good time last week on Thursday through Saturday, going out to eat most of the time, watching a movie in the theater (such a rare occurrence), visiting the Field Museum, and buying some new pets to add to our already chaotic household. Yesterday we didn’t go anywhere or do anything; I think the highlight of the whole day was when I went to McDonald’s late in the evening to buy milkshakes for everyone!

I’m still trying out and getting used to the new stuff in WordPress 2.5. I love the new photo gallery functionality but find it very frustrating at this point because there is so little documentation on how best to make use of it. My plan is to redo all photos and host them here on this blog rather than on Flickr and/or Picasa, eventually.

I’m trying out the WordPress.com stats plugin and liking it so far. Also, I’ve added a sidebar widget for my Twitter posts using the great Twitter Tools plugin. Oddly enough, two different people have contacted me since I moved to a new host, asking me if I would allow them to advertise on this site. Weird. Also, I still have really messed up permalinks, unfortunately. And I am just about as confused as ever in terms of deciding on using categories vs. tags.

OK, now back to the real world.

This evening I checked summary statistics from Google Analytics for the past year. Here is what I found:

• There were 6,713 unique visitors to the site, which averages out to about 18.4 visitors per day
• Visitors tend to spend only about a minute on the site each visit
• The browser used by visitors breaks down as follows:
  • Internet Explorer - 46.51%
  • Firefox - 41.53%
  • Safari - 9.65%
  • Mozilla - 1.02%
  • Netscape - .48%
• Traffic sources include 38.36% of visitors who find FML via search engines; 31.68% who go directly to the site (in other words, the site is bookmarked or the URL is typed in directly); and 27.42% of traffic comes from referring sites. Of the 38.36% of visitors who find FML via a search engine, the vast majority of them uses Google (over 80%).
• The vast majority of visitors uses Windows as their operating system (80.45%). 17.93% use Mac OS X. 1.38% use Linux.

I am especially pleased at the good showing for non-IE browsers. Something else that is of interest is what keywords people use in a search engine that leads them to FML. Here are some of the top keywords, aside from the obvious ones such as “family man librarian”: “portable browsers”, “everyone has a double”, “library related wordpress theme” and “praise you in the storm.”

[tags]blog traffic, google analytics[/tags]

Oh, my. Thanks to Jay Datema for pointing out the above-mentioned blog posting from the Zotero wizards. Love it, love it, love it.

Ok, so back to reality, though. Fact #1: At my place of work, 99.9% of people are not allowed to have admin privileges on their PCs. (Fortunately I am, for now anyway, one of those lucky 0.1% who does have this ability.) Fact #2: The workplace standard browser is Internet Explorer.

Combine these two facts and what do you get? No way to benefit from this amazing tool, which is entirely based on Firefox.

How frustrating this is for me, because it is precisely this kind of tool that my library’s users would greatly benefit from.

The IT Nazis deeply frown on this (can we say, security hazard ten times in rapid succession with increasing volume?). I am so tired of — even though I do, I truly do understand why this attitude and caution are present — narrow-minded IT policies and practices that inhibit cost savings in so many ways. I’d better stop now before I say something I’ll really regret.

[tags]zotero, jay datema, firefox, internet explorer[/tags]

Yet I do have a reaction to the meeting to share, and it is based solely on Jay’s writeup (i.e. second hand at best). My reaction to the whole deal is, why oh why are we still debating and tossing around the same observations and identifying the same issues over and over again, and presenting them as if they are something new and revelatory?! For instance, Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting (whom I know from his days at YBP) gave a presentation that outlined challenges facing those who work in or management bibliographic control (i.e. cataloging) operations. Jay wrote that Rick’s presentation ended with him making the following summary:

1. How do we reduce our efforts and redirect our focus?
2. How can we redirect our expertise to new metadata schemes?
3. How can we open our systems and cultures to external support from authors, publishers, abstract and indexing (A&I) services, etc?

No offense meant to Rick, but none of this is new at all! This is something we’ve been talking about for well over 10 years.

Part of Jay’s writeup also included a summary of a presentation by Mechael Charbonneau of Indiana University in which (in Jay’s words) she “sees the need to optimize the allocation of staff in large research libraries and to free up catalogers to do new things, starting with user needs.” Hello? Why on earth are we not yet way past this stage?

Mark says he is mad; I’m just irked and discouraged by the lack of progress I see.

[tags]working group on the future of bibliographic control, rick lugg, l2 consulting, mark lindner, jay datema[/tags]

• COinS Generator - “This tool will take bibliographic metadata for a citation and produce a “COinS”, i.e. a snippet of HTML that can be placed on a webpage and processed by web tools.”
• Scopus - A multidisciplinary database of citations to articles in the life, health, physical, and social sciences.
• Bolinfest Changeblog » Your Page Here (an iGoogle gadget) - A nifty and easy-to-use way to incorporate other content as tabs into iGoogle. I’m experimenting with using this for Google Reader, Facebook, and Meebo.
• FML - A personal blog about family, libraries, and technology
• TagsAhoy: All your tags in one place - Love this idea; not sure, though if it’ll prove useful or not. Not because of the site’s functionality but because of my lackadaisical approach to tagging my own stuff.
• nuTsie - A cool new beta service allowing users to stream their iTunes libraries to their cell phones. I sure hope this works with Blackberry devices — I’m going to give it a try.

• Log in to WordPress admin and write a post there
• Use Flock’s built-in editor
• Windows Live Writer
• WordPress Dashboard widget (OS X)
• Blog by email

And this isn’t all. There are some more editors or methods I’ve used that I can’t recall right now. I’ve tried a whole bunch of different ones.

Bet you would never guess that I’d point to a Microsoft product as one I’m liking more and more: Windows Live Writer. (To paraphrase or misuse a well known Bible verse: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth Redmond?”)

Although it is still officially in beta, I am using ver. 1.0 and enjoying its features, including the fact that there is a small but growing set of third party plug-ins for things I might use. Among them are plug-ins for inserting Snagit screen captures, Technorati tags, Flickr images, Bible verses, maps, tables, videos, and more. It seems to format the output nicely and correctly (something that hasn’t been the case in the past for some Microsoft products), and offers one of the best preview options I’ve seen anywhere. I also like the fact that there are several good keystroke shortcuts built-in.

I am a pretty tech-savvy person.  I have probably wasted more time and money on techie things than is healthy for me (although, I would argue, the time and money weren’t all wasted).  I have had high speed Internet connectivity at home since 2001 and used dial up connectivity for at least ten years before that.  I have used a cell phone since the early 90s.  My work has centered on networked connectivity for at least that long, and I use a computer on average about eight hours a day and probably longer, not just at work but at home as well.  I haven’t had a print newspaper subscription since the early 90s, relying instead on the Internet to deliver the news and information I needed.

In spite of my techie orientation and experience, I, too, experience this technology gap at times.  For instance, when I first heard about Twitter from Steven Cohen several weeks ago, I was intrigued and signed up for the service just to dabble with it and understand what it can do.  But it really didn’t “click” with me much; I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was with it and why so many people were so enthusiastic about it.  That is, until I bought a Blackberry along with its QWERTY keyboard and constant wireless connectivity.  I used my Blackberry to post to Twitter quite a bit to report to friends and family about the trip to Mayo Clinic with my wife.  Twitter didn’t make much sense to me until I had the right equipment, something that I had at hand at all times, which I could pull out and quickly type in a brief statement here and there.  This may seem a minor example of a technological gap, and it is.  But my point is that even among the technorati, so much of what is gushed over and around which enthusiastic user communities are founded, is based on access to equipment (hardware, but software as well) that relatively few people, even today, can afford, or can use, e.g. because of lack of service, low bandwidth, or whatever.  The Pew report mentioned above highlights this reality.

I’m lucky.  I can usually afford technology.  I live in a high population area with a ton of service options that provide high performance and relatively low cost.  When we lived in rural east central Indiana for three years, however, it was a far different story.  I couldn’t get good cell reception so I stopped using a cell phone, for instance.  And although we had high speed cable Internet at home, it was pricey.  I mentioned that I now have a Blackberry.  I wouldn’t be able to afford that at all if it weren’t for the fact that I work for a large company and as a side benefit am able to receive significant discounts on cell phones and services.  Without those discounts, I would not have a Blackberry at all.

Another point about the “haves” vs. “have nots” when it comes to technology, is that not everything shiny and new is highly adoptable.  Take RSS vs. email as an example.  This blog was set up to mainly communicate with family and friends, and I estimate that only a very small percentage of that target audience a.) knows what on earth RSS is, and b.) cares to make use of it in any way.  Instead, anecdotal evidence has shown me that it is far more likely that family and friends will simply go to this website to check to see if I have written anything new.  A large portion of my target audience doesn’t even remember to do that.  By way of contrast, when I communicate with my target audience via email, it’s an entirely different story.  I am able to regularly communicate with family and friends via email, and that is much more accessible and usable to them, than RSS will likely ever be.  Another example of a technology gap is with the use of instant messaging services.  I love using IM and now I am logged on to at least four different services almost every day.  In spite of that, only a very tiny fraction of family and friends regularly uses IM, preferring email instead.  I’d love to use IM more regularly to keep in more constant communication with them, but hardly any of them uses it.

I’m certain that I haven’t made any revelatory points here but this issue is something I have been mulling over for a while.  Call it the frustration of a technogeek when the people with whom he most wants to communicate don’t use the tools he loves to use for that purpose :-)  Let’s not even talk about stuff like MySpace or even Second Life, which are really foreign planets.