Clear Blue Dei

Just for fun, I created an old-fashioned card catalog card for the book I had downloaded from baen.com/library using John Blyberg’s card catalog generator. You have to enter the data by hand (I copied the information from Amazon.com) but it makes a really fun graphic. With some programming, you can make a mashup that uses this. A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Sean Robinson (my husband and head of IT Technology at the ACPL) created this book wall called Books we added to the catalog yesterday combining the new material checked in each day at the ACPL (Allen County Public Library) with data from Amazon. It shows pictures of the actual book covers for each book and if you click on a book cover, it will show you an old-fashioned card catalog for that book and information on it from Amazon (if the book is brand new, it doesn’t necessarily have review info yet).

Then you can click on “Look this up in our catalog” to see the ACPL card catalog information on that book like how many copies there are and if they are available and where they are located and do all sorts of neat things like add it to your list or put it on hold. You can also find more books by that author, more books with those topics or browse nearby call numbers (books that would be on the library shelf with this book).

Go check it out and play around with it. It is a great example of how you can combine Web 2.0 tools to create something new and exciting and useful.

For this and more innovative ways the Allen County Public Library uses Web 2.0, visit their Library 2.0 site: ACPLib2.0. ACPL Rules!

~Susan Mellott

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Per the World Public Library website: “July 4th to August 4th Download Your Selections From 500,000+ eBooks for Free.”

According to their site: “Hosted in World Public Library’s multi-terabyte server network is the world’s largest digital archive of PDF ebooks and edocuments.  Our collection hosts more than 500,000+ PDF ebooks and edocuments.  As a member you will have complete access to the entire collection.  Our collection is constantly growing and our projection is to reach 600,000 by fall of 2008″

Here is a link to their Facts, Questions and Answers page. According to their price sheet, it is $8.95 per year to become a member, or $2/year per FTE institutional rate (for public librarie, priced per number of cardholders - which could possibly be adjusted).

I downloaded the Northwind Trilogy by David Drake and Bedlam Boyz by Ellen Guon to check it out.  It downloaded quickly and I was able to save it to my hard-drive to read.  I did go to the public access page to do a search and got an error message, but I could browse collections and download from home page without any problems.  And I just did a search using the member search on the home page and it worked for me (but I couldn’t download), although I couldn’t really find anything I was looking for .

Another thing of note is that on the Baen Books site, they have a free library also of a selection of their books you can download in several different formats for free.  Both Ellen Guon and David Drake have free downloads of several of their books as well as many other authors.  I downloaded Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro in a very nice html format.

And of course, a search for free ebooks through Google turns up several more sites that I didn’t check out.  You can though!

So go “check it out”!

~Susan Mellott

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I imagine most of you know who Wil Wheaton is. He is an actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, he has done a lot more than that, but that is mainly how I know of him.

But what makes him interesting is his love and knowledge of technology and his leading edge use of Web 2.0 tools. Here is the wikipedia entry that talks about him and what he has done.

From wikipedia: “After leaving Star Trek, Wheaton quit acting altogether. He moved to Topeka, Kansas to work as a programmer for Newtek, where he helped develop the Video Toaster 4000.” (I assume they meant he temporarily quit acting)

Wil was a very early adopter of blogging, creating his site wilwheaton.net (see the wikipedia article on his blog) which is currently being updated (since about last June) and is replaced for now by his blog WWdN: In Exile - Wil Wheaton’s not-so-temporary blog. Per the wikipedia article on his blog: “Rather than just a fan forum, it was a place where people could gather to talk about various subjects including movies, music, books, religion, politics, gaming, geocaching, and miscellaneous topics; the original emphasis was on topics of interest to Wil Wheaton and not the man himself.” He has entries on his blog dating back to July 2001.

Wil also has written 3 books, and most of the entries are extended versions of his online blog entries. (Take note, bloggers, this is not a bad idea if you have a following).

Also from wikipedia: “In late September of 2006, Wheaton began hosting a Revision3 syndicated video podcast called InDigital along with Jessica Corbin and veteran host Hahn Choi. ” Of note: Wil found an error on the wikipedia entry for himself and asked on slashdot for someone to correct it.

Wil also twitters regularly and has just recently twittered on the Comic-Con he attended. Interestingly, he is having a problem at the moment trying to remove people he no longer wishes to follow and is talking about it on twitter. Update: as of about 4 hours ago, he twittered that the problem was a bug in twitter and was fixed by Biz Stone.

Wil also uses flickr and has some very interesting photos. And something I found interesting too that Wil has been doing on buzznet is “What is Wil looking At?” which is sort of a cross between flickring and twittering (flittring?). It looks like he is taking pictures with his phone of whatever he is doing and uploading them. It’s a neat idea and I’m sure at some point, people will be doing that just like they twitter now.

And of course, he checks technorati for links to his blog and has a profile technorati for wilw. Here are some other things of his (from his blog):

 

• My Netscape Submissions (he’s a navigator at Netscape News)
• My delicious bookmarks
• Geek in Review
• blogging.la

And there are quite a few interesting videos of him talking about technology on YouTube. Here is one where Wil talks about Podcasting (answering fan’s question at reading of his book, Just a Geek)

And there is a lot more that he is or has been involved with. The wikipedia article and his blog has more information.

To be honest, although I knew who he was, I’m old enough that I watched the original Star Trek more than I watched The Next Generation. But I think he seems like an interesting person and certainly one who is Web 2.0.

~Susan Mellott

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