Clear Blue Dei

In my last post – “Google Blogger Tip: How to Backup Your Blogger Blog“, I talked about two ways I had found to backup a Google Blogger blog since it does not have a backup capability built in.

One involved using a WordPress blog to backup it up to since Wordpress will import almost everything (posts, comments, pictures) from many blog engines and export posts/comments to a file. That will only give you a full restore though, you can’t selectively restore posts. Another was to download a free program called Blogger Backup on CodePlex that gives you a basic backup of your posts and will allow you to backup and restore your posts, both to your original Blogger blog or to a new Blogger blog (but not your comments, pictures or categories)

But in looking around and reading other posts, I thought I had found an even better way to backup your Google Blogger Blog (or any other blog). PC World named it as one of the 25 Web Sites to Watch and several blog posts were written favorably about it such as this post from WebWare or this post from Download Squad.

What it is is an online site called BlogBackupOnline that allows you backup a variety of blog types and you can set it to do a full backup the first time and then daily backups. It also backs up images such as various picture formats that you have on that site and they plan to add support for videos as well. It also backs up and restores comments, although it puts the comments on the end of each post they belong to as part of the post. Still, that is better than Blogger Backup at this point. You can do a full restore or you can choose posts to restore.

BlogBackupOnline supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Space, Movable Type, Terapad, and Vox. And they will be adding support for more platforms soon. NOTE: I guess they mean to run a backup against since it only gives Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal or Windows Live Spaces as options to restore to.

You get 50meg of space free to backup your data. As an example of what that holds, I have backed up this blog up to this point using it and I had 80 posts, 41 comments and some number of images (they don’t report the number of images you have stored) and I used 989 kb which is approximately 1 meg.

It has a very good and complete help and here’s a link to small PDF file brochure for it. Everything about this program is very professional looking.

Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? That is what I thought and I tried it and was impressed with how easy it was and how nicely it was done. That is, until I really started looked at what happened with my backups and restores. Because they didn’t work right and that is really what it is all about, regardless of what bells and whistles something does or doesn’t have.

My backups and restores were so wonky that I thought I must have done something wrong. So I re-tried it, backing up a different blog and restoring it to a different blog engine and it still was all messed up. I honestly can’t figure out why it is so messed up. I keep wanting to blame myself because surely it can’t be that flakey. But even if I did something that caused it to flake out, I was being very careful and if it is that touchy (and on more than 1 occasion) then you still certainly can’t count on it.

Here’s what happened. The first time, I did a full backup on my WordPress blog clear.bluedei.com which had (according to blogbackuponline) 80 posts and 41 comments. Then I restored it in full to a Blogger blog (blog.bluedei.com). It restored only about 27 of my posts. The restored posts seemed random too, some from Sept, some from August and some from July.

I had used another blogger backup program and it said that there was a Blogger limit of 50 posts per day that could be put on blogger so I was wondering what BlogBackupOnline would do. I was surprised that it reported that my restore was successful and that nowhere did it say that not all my posts were restored, not even in the log which said ‘finished with no error’. And I thought that at least I would have 50 posts restored and was surprised at only 27ish and random at that. I didn’t even realize I didn’t get a full restore until I really looked, since it appeared to have backed up everything OK.

I wrote to the Techrigy support about this (and several other comments that I’ve posted at the end of this blog) and did not get much of a response (“Sorry you experienced these problems. We are looking at the issues and will let you when we figure out what caused the problems you encountered. Thanks for trying out BlogBackupOnline”). I had written a pretty detailed email and to be honest, this just sounded like a generic response that didn’t lead me to believe they had even read my email. Maybe I’m cynical, but that’s what I thought.

I thought I would try it again and backup my Along the Path to 2.0 Blogger blog and then restore it to my blog.bluedei.com Blogger blog and my testxx.wordpress.com Wordpress blog. I set up the testxx blog to use for testing this specifically and the blog.cleardei.com blog was used for testing the different blog engines in the post series I wrote.

I ran a full backup of Alongthepathto20 and it reported 84 blog entries (with 1 changed, not sure what that meant) and cut off before it said the number of comments (or maybe was saying there were none). Now this was more blog entries than I had so that seemed suspicious right off the bat. Then it shows that it ran another full backup right after this one (although I only ran 1) and all it said was the number of changed entries was 4 (whatever that meant, I wasn’t changing anything on that blog). Both reported they finished with no errors.

Then I went to the content page for this blog (you can see about the latest 10 posts it backed up) and there were duplicates for each post I could see. So I restored the full backup to my blogger blog.bluedei.com and my wordpress testxx.wordpress.com. Both reported Finished with No Error. They had no posts before I ran the restore. You can see the results of each restore and compare it to the originally backed up alongthepathto20.blogspot.com by looking at each blog.

As you can see, the blogger blog only restored a random part of the posts (and actually about 27 again). The wordpress blog restored everything it backed up (all 84) and the posts were duplicated back to the August 3rd post (literary insults) and then the posts appeared OK (just one of each).

So what in the heck is it doing? And would you trust this to backup and restore your data? It confused me so much that I was tempted to run another test to see if I could figure out what was going on. But I’ve spent hours on this already and really don’t have the time to keep repeating the tests. Especially since I don’t get paid to do it!

And I didn’t even do any testing of the daily backups that it runs after you’ve run a full backup.

These are some other comments I had written to techrigy about the product when I first looked at it. I could add more to the list now but I won’t. I’ve spent too much time on this already.

1. it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).
2. it says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how muchwill it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive
3. it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)
4. it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)
5. my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.
6. when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10
   posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier
   posts.
7. it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that Ineeded to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.
8. on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.
9. the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog
10. the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will Wordpress import it? and if so, why not the comments as comments?
11. Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

There you have it. That was the results of my basic testing of this product. You decide if you’d want to trust your backups and restores to it. I can definitely say that based on my testing, I wouldn’t.

UPDATE 10/4/2007: I have since gotten a very good and thorough reply from Techrigy and I feel that their product will be very good when finished. I was more upset about people writing as though their product was fully functional now, than about the quality of their product when finished. For their responses to all my questions and concerns, see this post update of mine dated 10/04/2007.

~Susan Mellott

Sean Robinson and Kay Gregg of the Allen County Public of Fort Wayne, Indiana, are starting a series of YouTube “Conversation” videos with important people in the Library field.

They are currently editing a set of YouTube videos interviewing Jeff Krull, the Director of the Allen County Public Library. In my post called “Conversation with Jeff Krull, Director of the Allen County Public Library” I blogged about the first video. They have just released Part II of Conversations with Jeff Krull.

In Part II, Jeff talks about books and authors that have left an impression on him. He talks about All Quiet on the Western Front, Autobiography of Ben Franklin and The Red Badge of Courage. He mentions authors like Mark Twain (Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer) and Hawthorne.

It is fascinating to hear his thoughts on influential books and authors and the impressions they made on him.

And Sean and Kay have done a beautiful and artistic job of filming and editing their Conversation YouTube videos. They are done in black and white and in letterbox.

They have also recorded an interview with Stephen Abrams and will be creating a set of Conversation with Stephen Abram next. And they have plans to interview and create YouTube Conversation videos with other people who are interesting and influential in the library field.

Here is Part II of Conversation with Jeff Krull, Director of the Allen County Public Library. Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

One big problem with Google Blogger is that it doesn’t have a mechanism to back up your blog. So if something happens to Blogger and you lose your data, you do not have a backup. Or for a more likely scenario, if you want to move some or all of your posts to another Blogger blog, you can’t do it.

When I reviewed the various blog engines, I noted this problem and came up with a “hack” to backup your data. You can create a blog on Wordpress.com and use it to create a backup of your posts and comments. In Wordpress, you can go to “manage” and then “import” and it will let you import your blog posts, comments and users (but not categories) from Blogger (or LiveJournal, MovableType/Typepad or a saved Wordpress file). Then you can choose “export” and export your blog to a file that you can store on your hard drive or where you want to save it.

That works and works pretty easily and well but requires 2 blogs and may not be right for you. Well, there is also another option that isn’t quite as full-featured yet, but is easy and does a good job of backing up posts (and comments, but doesn’t have the ability to restore the comments to the post they belong to yet, they restore as a separate post).

It is Blogger Backup on CodePlex.

*PLEASE NOTE: The Blogger Backup utility uses (and has always used) your Public Feed to backup your posts.

If your feeds are off, then nothing can be backed up.
If your feeds are set to Summary, then only those Summary feeds will be backed up.

Additionally, if you have your feed redirected, like to feedburner (look in your settings/site feed to check), you need to turn off the redirect while you are backing up your blog. You can also look here to make sure you have your “Allow Blog Feed” set to “Full”.

Blogger Backup is easy to install and easy to use. It uses windows installer to install and is pretty self-explanatory to use. It doesn’t have great help and it doesn’t have a readme.txt but there is information on CodePlex and forums where you can post issues and questions.

After you have installed it, you should go to Microsoft Windows Updates and verify that you have the latest version and patches for .NET framework. If you select the “custom” button, it will scan your computer for updates and then give you a list of updates. Then click on Software (optional) on the left and look for Microsoft .NET framework. If you find anything, install it.

One note about the Windows Updates site, you have to be in Internet Explorer to use it. If you (like me) use another browser, you’ll have to go to IE to run the updates.

Then open the Blogger Backup and it asks you for your blog, or easier, you can give it your Blogger name/id and password and it will search for all your Blogger blogs for you.

To run a backup, you can choose to create 1 file with all your posts, or to create separate files for each post and comment, which lets you pick which posts to restore. You can choose whether or not to back up comments (this is unchecked so be sure to check it if you want your comments) and you can pick all posts or a number of posts to save or only new posts since a certain date. Here is what it looks like after you have run a backup (backing up each post individually). Click on the picture for a bigger view.

It puts these in My Documents\Blogger Backup\”your blog name”. Here is what the list of post backup files looks like in that directory.

When you click on Restore, you see a screen that looks like this one below. It is blank until you add some posts (as I have). It shows you the window above so you can pick the post(s) you want to restore.

In the larger view (click on pic) you will notice that the second line in my list of posts to restore looks different. It is actually a comment. But it thinks it is a post. I’m sure they are planning to fix that so it will restore comments correctly instead of as a post.

Note that only 50 blog posts can be restored each day due to a limit in Blogger.

When you click on OK, it restores the selected posts.

NOTE: you can backup posts from one blog and restore it to another. I have 2 blogger blogs. I backed up both blogs. Then I did a restore on one of the blogs but chose the subdirectory containing the posts from my other blog. They restored fine to the new blog.

This is a handy little tool and will become handier as it is developed. It is considered to be beta, so they are still working on it and adding features and functionality.

It doesn’t backup/restore comments properly yet and it doesn’t backup/restore any videos or pictures or other unusual items in a post. It doesn’t backup/restore tags and I doubt that it restores links either. And you have to have your full feeds turned on. I’m not sure if this would work if you didn’t have them turned on before. It may only restore back to when the feed was turned on, although I am not sure.

But it is easy to use and allows selective restores and backups of your blog. If you use Google Blogger and don’t backup your blog, this is a good way to get a basic backup. If you ever want to move blogs or lose posts, you will be glad you used it.

UPDATE: Greg (the author of Blogger Backup) is currently working on many new enhancements. It is a labor of love for him and he is doing a great job.

In response to a comment I posted on CodePlex, he says: “I plan on adding both a “comment only” (restoring comments to an existing post and Post & Comment (the post and its commnets) restore capability in the future. And the feed redirect issue is fixed in the version I’m currently working on… ”

and I asked about possibly enhancing the help and he replied that it is changing so fast that it is hard to keep any help files up-to-date but said “What I’ll do is add a couple simple pages to this site, one for requirements & installation notes and one for basic usage. That will be pretty easy and a good starting point… I’ll hack those out this weekend or so (depends on work… I’m currently stuck in a work cycle from hell and haven’t had much “spare time” to work on “my” stuff)”

Thanks, Greg, you are doing great work and are really helping a lot of people with your program.

~Susan Mellott

I was browsing my Yahoo! News and found this great article from PC World called In Pictures: The Strangest Sights in Google Earth. Check these out!

This is from Alberta, Canada. Doesn’t it look like an American Indian wearing headphones?

View Larger Map

This is a man-made lake near Bauru, Brazil. I wonder who’s idea this was?

Why is that car parked on the side of the building?

Can you believe the detail in this herd of elephants captured by Google Earth in Africa? UPDATE: Well, although this came from the PC World article (go look for yourself) and says “Google’s satellites sometimes catch the Earth’s inhabitants on the move, like these ten African elephants (Google Earth coordinates 10.903497,19.93229)”, people have commented that this was taken by possibly a helicopter (which may be one of the methods Google Earth uses) and that this may be misleading so in any case, according to PC World this is from Google Earth.

Just one of many crop circles. Here is a link to the Google Earth Community Crop Circle Collection.

View Larger Map
Why is a fighter jet parked in a parking lot in a residential neighborhood near Paris?

One Google Earth Community has placemarks for more than 3300 planes in flight, including this World War II bomber, flying over Huntingdon, England.

I really enjoyed these and I hope you do too.

~Susan Mellott

I grew up without the internet. Heck, I grew up without computers. We were never even taught about computers in high school and I was just lucky that I took a temp job entering data into a database for a huge new system that a local company was in the process of creating which expanded into reviewing the parent-child design charts and then into being accepted into their programmer trainee program which truly changed/saved my life.

And I was a mainframe programmer for several years before DOS was created, which was a major first step for having a usable PC for business. When I first started programming PCs, we wrote each program to run on the PC, the TRS-80 and the Apple. And each program could only be 32k in size so we did a lot of calling a program that called another program, etc. We actually cared about every bit (literally) of memory we used. We finally had to require any agent who wanted to use our programs to have at least 256k memory. That’s k, not meg. And that was really expecting them to have a high-end system for the time.

So obviously we didn’t have internet access to speak of. We did have modems, big 300 baud cradles that you set the whole handset of the phone (back when they had 2 pieces) into this large rubber cradle. And we actually managed to communicate with each other via very slow text based interaction and ftp. I had online friends and belonged to forums and passed data back and forth even back then, but it was not an integral part of my life. Just getting a driver update or finding and getting a copy of a driver that I needed was quite a chore.

Now, I can’t imagine life without the internet. I spend probably 25% of my time online (maybe even more), doing business or looking something up or writing in my blog or shopping or surfing or playing or skyping or twittering or emailing or any number of other things.

Just this weekend on the internet I have:

• made airline reservations for a trip to visit my sister and mom and got the e-tickets for it
• looked up how to remove chapstick from clothes that were accidentally washed and dried with a chapstick in a pocket (which really messes up clothes, let me tell you!)
• searched for, compared the results and then ordered an oak shaker kitchen table and chairs (we couldn’t find anything in town)
• worked on my instantspot site to set up a website for our aikido dojo
• talked to Sean’s brother in London using Skype
• looked for good deals on Woot!, Steep and Cheap and Whiskey Militia (I pretty much keep these up all the time just to see what they have)
• played a lot of free Peggle online (darned game is addictive!)
• instant chatted with the web hosting company Blue Host at about 1am on Saturday just to see how their response time/quality was in case we want to change web hosts (they were very quick, knowledgeable and friendly)
• posted a request for beds/mattresses on the Fort Wayne Freecycle and Fort Wayne Free and Reasonable yahoo groups since we are having about a dozen family members coming to visit at Thanksgiving and we need some extra beds
• looked up local greyhound events for our greyhound, Colt
• checked the local weather report and read the news
• caught up with the email messages on the aikido-l and web4lib lists
• looked up several phone numbers/addresses on switchboard
• looked up the times for the local Bluffton Street Fair and the Parlor City Trot (a fun run held during the fair)
• looked up what was playing at the movie theaters and their times
• downloaded and installed some plugins for my blog
• downloaded and installed updates for my computer
• wrote in my blog and read other people’s blogs
• twittered and read other people’s twitters
• answered email
• and many other things that I can’t remember since it is just a normal part of my daily life to be on the internet

I shop online at Woot! and Steep and Cheap and Whiskey Militia. I shop at Overstock and Ebay and Amazon.

I use search engines constantly to find information, how-to questions, self-help, medical, research and more.

I use it for communications, using email, chat, IM, twitter, yahoo groups, email lists, Skype (online phone) and more.

We’ve visited online friends all over the world including Pauline in Amsterdam, Andy in Germany, Meng and Cindy in Singapore and Peter in Japan, where I got to do my very first Iaido training at a little dojo in a little town outside Osaka with a 7th dan and and an 8th dan.

Once upon a time, we shopped at our local stores and if they didn’t have what we wanted, we got what they had. And unless it was very common, you didn’t check for the best prices, you just looked for something like what you wanted. We used reference books, the Physician’s Desk Reference, encyclopedias and reference librarians to get information. We communicated via phone and letters. When was the last time you wrote a letter? I can say that for myself, I really can’t remember.

I didn’t miss it when I didn’t have it, but now, I can’t imagine living in such a small space again. The world is a bigger place now and there is no going back.

~Susan Mellott

A while back (Aug 1, 2007), I wrote a post called Library 1.0: Old School Libraries to Die For about a site called Hot Library Smut (smut for book nerds ) that showed pictures of some of the most beautiful libraries in the world, from a gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. But shortly after I wrote the post, the page became unavailable on that site. So I updated it and pointed to another site, but it was unwieldy to view.

Well, I was doing my usual web browsing and what did I find but another post called Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. They had visited the Strahov Monastery in Prague where they have one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. Here are a couple of pictures from that library:

And as a result of that visit, they compiled and posted a very large set of pictures of some of the most beautiful libraries in the world.

And you might be surprised to find some them nearer to you than you might expect!

Again, you can view them at Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. This is a good quote from their post about the book that many of these pictures came from and other resources including an online store to satisfy your library desires:

“If all this library leering has made you long to hold a book in your hands, then let us suggest “Libraries” by the outstanding photographer Candida Höfer. A number of the more beautiful pictures in this set are by Ms. Höfer. For those looking for a gorgeous library closer to home, look no farther then “Libraries We Love” a book and blog dedicated to wonderful libraries in the U.S. Also of interest is “The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World.” If even those can’t satisfy your desires try “The Renaissance Library Collection” which sells calenders, greeting cards, and posters of nothing but, yes, libraries. ”

For your viewing pleasure,

~Susan Mellott

I attended a speech at the Allen County Public Library yesterday by Stephen Abram, noted Library 2.0 speaker and Vice President of Innovation and Chief Strategist for SirsiDynix. It was about Library 2.0 and the role of libraries in the future. And it got me thinking about things I’d like to see in the future at libraries. I started jotting down ideas on the edges of the magazine I was reading and realized that I had quite a few ideas.

And a lot of these are ideas that libraries could implement now.

1. I had a library fine that I needed to pay while I was at the library, but I couldn’t find my library card since I don’t use it everyday. So my first idea was for libraries to give patrons not only a card, but one of those little tags you can put on your keyring. I have several of these already, from Blockbuster, my Kroger card, my CVS card and others. I don’t use these everyday, but when I need them, they are right there on my keys.

2. Along these same lines, I would especially like to be able to pay my library fine online so I didn’t have to go to the library just to pay a fine. Being able to pay by credit card would be good and for me especially, I’d like to also be able to pay via paypal. Since the libraries are now online, it seems a logical next step.

3. When I was young, our library had bookmobiles that drove around and had stops where we could go and checkout and return books to the bookmobile. I remember walking to the end of our street each week and visiting the bookmobile. It allowed many kids from my neighborhood to check out books that would not have otherwise been able to. We could reserve books and the bookmobile would bring them for us and they also had several of the more popular books in the bookmobile.

I would really like to see libraries bring back this practice. There are so many people who don’t have a car or kids whose parents don’t take them to the library and this is a great asset for them. Alternatively if this isn’t feasible, perhaps libraries could open sub-branches in several locations like stores that mostly just allow people to pickup books that they reserved and return books. They could only be open say once or twice a week for a couple of hours. I think the value of being able to walk to a library outlet is immense.

4. Stephen mentioned in his speech that even though many libraries have web access, students are frequently not near a computer but they always have a cell phone and are used to text messaging. Libraries should have a mechanism to allow people to text message them. And I think having live chat access is also something libraries should look at. A good example is the web hosting service BlueHost. On their home page they have a large button that says “Live Chat” and when clicked, takes you right to their chat window where you enter the department you want to contact, your name and your question.

Libraries could have a “need help?” button (or something like that) on their website that would allow people to access their FAQ, blogs, knowledgebase, write an email, IM the library, call the library, instant chat, text messaging information and all the different ways that people now use. And they should be able to receive the information back in a format of their choice.

5. Libraries could set up a video room for patrons where they could go in an create a video and put it on YouTube or other video sites if they want. This would promote creativity and allow people without access to the equipment to take and create videos. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, you can create a video with a QuickCam camera that hooks on a computer and a microphone and optionally, various types of software for creating, editing, manipulating and enhancing the videos. And this would also allow people without access to a camcorder to take videos of themselves or their kids. And there could be classes in how to use the equipment and a place where people could show off the videos they created. And the libraries could have themes for people to create a video for, like “This is my Family” or “What I like about my Library” (it’s been done, but is a great idea) or any number of things.

Even better, provide a whole television studio where patrons can produce and televise their own shows on cable television like the ACPL Access Fort Wayne.

6. Libraries could also have a large, nice community center area with senior activities like bridge or Wii bowling (my mom loves this), singles activities like euchre tournaments and speed dating, family activities like Wii/video games or karaoke, teen activities like gaming tournaments, children’s activities like storytime, etc.

7. Libraries could run volunteer outreach programs at places like nursing homes or hospitals where books could be checked out and returned and where people could go and read stories to the people there. The ACPL has outreach services.

8. Libraries could introduce tools and programs for people with disabilities. The ACPL has an extremely good program called NEIRRS (Northeast Indiana Radio Reading Service). Northeast Indiana Radio Reading Service (NEIRRS) is a FREE radio reading service for people who are blind or have a visual or reading/print impairment (What does print impaired mean? A print-impaired individual is any person who is unable to read conventional printed material. It may be a person who is blind or has low-vision, they may have a literacy issue, or a physical impairment which makes it difficult to hold a book or turn pages (stroke, Parkinson’s, arthritis). NEIRRS is staffed by volunteers and provides loans for receivers to pick up their broadcasts. NEIRRS volunteers read local news and features from a dozen area newspapers, plus magazines, books, grocery ads, obituaries and more.

Or if a library is small and doesn’t have the resources for this, they can provide podcasts online. NEIRRS also has started doing podcasts of things of interest in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette each day, such as obituaries and selected readings. This really is pretty easy and cheap to implement.

And there are many other things that libraries can look at. I know that my mom can’t read the print on the computers and I find that I am having a harder time with that myself. Providing some computers with extra-large text, screen readers, text enlargers and other features would help a lot of people, as would easy wheelchair access, etc.

9. Libraries could provide email newsletters about events and topics of interest, like a children’s, teens, families, etc events newsletter, reading programs, educational programs, new books or selected books, music/art/special events, branch information, etc.

10. There are many interesting ideas for new programs that libraries could introduce. Here are some things that the Allen County Public Library are doing and I’m sure libraries could come up with much more: Antiques Evaluation Day, Teen Sumo Robots tournaments, Llamas @ the Library, Paws to Read (one of my favorites), Miniature Mayhem, Teen Events grades 6-12, musical performances, Movie Night @ the Library (scroll down), art exhibits, genealogy and flickr pictures of other ACPL programs.

Well, these are a few of my ideas. What do you think?

~Susan Mellott

Thanks to Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines, I can find information on almost any topic I can think of. This has made a huge impact on just about everything I do.

I remember having a set of World Book encyclopedias when I was growing up and they were the be-all and end-all in just about everything I needed to research for school, for anything I was curious about and for anything my parents and I wanted or needed to know more about. Most good parents who could afford to all had a set of encyclopedias in their house. And they had at least a little bit about just about any topic you could think of, from Shakespeare’s plays, to how to do basic household repairs, to geography, history, politics, you name it. We also had World Books’ Childcraft, the how and why 15 volume encyclopedia which featured a classic blend of photos, illustrations, fiction, and nonfiction to capture and keep the interest of a young student.

I used to sit down and just read through each Childcraft book, they were so interesting. I did the same with the World Books but more flipping through and reading about things that caught my eye.

But although we didn’t realize it at the time, we were getting a very limited view of each subject. Sure, we learned the important basic data, but we only got one viewpoint and one interpretation, and it was the most generic view possible. Which in light of the fact that it was the only view we got, was a good thing, but still we ended up with the most generic, undisputed (at least at the time), mainstream view of everything.

And you would think this would have insured that at least what we learned was reliable. And to a large extent this is true, especially for the specific, concrete things like the birds of North America or the names and characteristics of dinosaurs. But how can you teach or explain or even say that someone “knows” about Picasso or the history of American Indians or even the culture of a country using just one reference that tries to be as non-confrontational as possible.

And even if you looked at more than one reference book or other “trusted” reference on a subject, you still most likely got a one-sided viewpoint, that of whatever was the most likely to be non-confrontational and non-controversial. And whatever was written by people in academia was highly regarded, even though much of it was recycled from what some other academic wrote, without any first hand knowledge of the subject. In other words, just like bloggers frequently do, they read a lot about something and then put it all together in “their own” paper or thesis or other scholarly work. But much of the time, their knowledge was assumed. They didn’t know from their own experiences, they knew because they had read or studied it from someone who had done the same thing, on and on. Who knows how far back you might have to go to actually get to someone who had actually experienced it rather than just “researched” it.

Now we have the opposite problem. We have at our fingertips vast amounts of information on just about any subject you can possibly imagine. Want to know reasons for taking a martial art? I got 2 million plus hits just in Yahoo. How about the Detroit Riots of 1967. Almost 300,000 hits. Information about being left-handed? Over 12 million hits, including stores that sell gadgets for left-handed people, reasons why people are left-handed and famous left-handers. And this was all one page 1 of my search.

But what of this vast bank of information is valid and what is something that sounds reasonable but has no basis in fact? I personally feel that a lot more of what I find doing searches on the internet is really pretty reasonably sound than a lot of people seem to think. I constantly hear about how untrustworthy the information is on the web and how you can’t trust it. And yet, most of what I find (granted, I avoid the sites with titles such as ‘Elvis’ Guide to Culture’ or ‘A Klingon’s Guide to Battle’) is reasonable (although from differing viewpoints) and is well thought out. And with some cross-referencing, most things can be reasonably well verified.

And people talk about how search engines, being entities that in the business of making money, skew the results towards sites that advertise with them or that have put a lot of thought into marketing themselves so they show up early in searches. And that of course has some bearing in fact. However, it also means that sites with more reliability frequently get presented first. On an aside, I’m surprised at how often a Wikipedia entry shows up for a topic on the first page of a search. This is a relatively recent development, I remember not too long ago when you almost never saw Wikipedia. I don’t know if it is because Wikipedia is increasing its entries or is doing better at search engine optimization or becoming more trusted or what, but I have definitely noticed it.

I just read in the paper about a new Wikipedia tool demo by the UCSC Wiki Lab that examines an entry’s contents to determine how reliable each piece is, mostly by examining the reputations of each contributor responsible for each line. It determines the degree in which each contributor’s work survives consequent edits by other people. This is an interesting way of looking at it and I can see how that sounds reasonable. However, many accurate contributions get overwritten, not because their contribution was inaccurate but just to expand what was written or in the case of controversial entries, to rewrite it to their own viewpoint.

It background color codes sections of entries in Wikipedia in various shades of orange to indicate that the section may not be reliable (the darker orange, the less reliable). Sections in white are deemed reliable. Here is the Wikimania 2007 talk on this.

Here is a link to a paper entitled “A Context-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia” that explains more about the algorithms used.

This is an interesting idea and many Web 2.0 sites are using some sort of method that helps determine the reliability of what they contain, such as the number of links to a post or blog (assuming that if it is linked to, it contains something that other people deemed valuable).

However, I was not very impressed with the Wikipedia Reliability demo. It uses a subset of a copy of Wikipedia from Feb 2007 (which is fine). But as I randomly went through the artlicles, I didn’t really find any that made much sense to me as to why they trusted or didn’t trust any given information. Whatever their algorithms may be, it doesn’t look to me like they work very well.

So what is the answer? Should we do as the doomsayers say and avoid anything we find on the web? Is the web the new encyclopedia? Or should we reach a happy medium, discarding the obviously doubtful, looking at several sources to get a general consensus, putting some thought into forming an opinion and when we make some decisions, trusting but verifying?

In other words, should we treat what we find on the web any different than anything we see on the news, read in the paper, watch on TV, read in a book or any other way that we get information.

I don’t think so and I think most of us are aware enough to practice this regularly anyway. Maybe it is a matter of some people learning that approaching information on the web is not so different from how we approach any other sources of information. And ultimately, it can give a much broader and thorough view of something than just reading about it in an encyclopedia.

~Susan Mellott

Sean Robinson and Kay Gregg of the Allen County Public of Fort Wayne, Indiana, are starting a series of YouTube “Conversations with” with important people in the Library field.

They are currently editing a set of 3 YouTube videos interviewing Jeff Krull, the Director of the Allen County Public Library. Jeff is a private and humble man and when I looked to get a bio on him from the internet, it was very hard to find a list of his accomplishments though they are many.

I found out that he has been the Library Director since 1986, he is on the board of the Indiana State Library and that the board of the ACPL honored him by naming the new ACPL gallery, the Jeffrey R. Krull Art Gallery.

But I really couldn’t find a lot about him, although I believe that is largely due to his quiet and unassuming way of accomplishing things. Some people put their accomplishments every and anywhere and there is no way you could miss every little thing they have done. But Jeff is not like that and this is a great chance to learn a little more about this interesting and influential man.

In this first video, Jeff talks about his young life, growing up in a small town. In a short clip from the “Conversation” series. Allen County Public Library Director, Jeff Krull talks about his early experiences with reading and books. The full interview will also be aired on our Public Television station.

There will be another one coming, continuing his life story and vision. Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

There is an excellent and very popular blog called Blog About Your Blog, that takes an in-depth look at all the ways to improve, promote and market your website. As an example, they look at thing like Why it is Important to Increase your StumbleUpon Network and other networking tools like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Plugim and the pros and cons of each.

Also, they look at ways to monitor your blog activity, how to increase it and how to improve it, market it and make money from it.

Here is a list of some of their most popular posts, that includes such things like Writing a Great Blog Title, 5 Must-have Comment Plug-ins for WordPress, Optimize Your Blog and many others.

Another very interesting idea that they have implemented is a “Comment Friday”, where they ask their readers to post ideas about whatever topic they have picked. They have asked about things like What You have Been Blogging About Recently, SuperBlogging Tips, What You Think About SEO (search engine optimization) and How You Implement It and many other topics.

They use a very interesting incentive to get many comments, which helps them promote their website and helps the readers get a lot of good ideas. Here is what they say about Comment Friday: “If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commentor that really stands out, and I will give a free link to them. Not only that, but they will get a one week free blogroll spot.”

This not only improves their standings by increasing their comments on their posts, but also provides exposure to the person who is selected each Friday.

Besides the good information in their posts and comments, you can also learn a lot about promoting your blog just by looking at theirs and seeing how they go about promoting their own blog.

An example is the current contest they are running to increase their technorati score through linkbacks. A person just mentions their blog in a post and they can win one of three prizes, including an MP3 player, banner on their sidebar or full site review by Adsense Tracker on their blog. The contest ends Sept. 19.
Since I had planned to write about this blog for a while, the contest gave me the incentive to sit down and do it. I like prizes!

Blog About Your Blog is filled with good ideas and advice and really is a must-read for anyone who is serious about their blogging.

~Susan Mellott