Audio formats tutorial from CNET

For those who would like a refresher on the formats of several popular audio files, CNET offers this slideshow and/or video.

What would life be like without CNET?

Techno-buzz

Two things I came across recently:

For the iPhone bandwagon folks, here are two apps that you may want to purchase for making your photos, well, worth looking at:

ToyCamera (simple photoshop-esque tools)

QuadCamera (the ability to take 4-8 frames in rapid succession)

Why do I share these apps? After all, I am an iPhone groupie and can't tell you from experience that these apps are worth your time. I'm waiting for Apple to give away an iPhone with the purchase of an iMac- if the economy gets bad enough it just might happen!

Investing in yourself

A few months ago I was skimming the 2008 financial self-help book called Killing Sacred Cows, and I came upon a few pages about Investing in Yourself. My mind wandered to examples of successful people and how they have invested in themselves.

I began thinking about Warren Buffet, and how over the course of his lifetime he has armed himself with information about all the companies he has invested in. Somewhere along the way someone encouraged Mr. Buffet to invest in himself.

I began thinking about Barack Obama, and how he has been able to work his way through Ivy League schools, through the politics of Chicago, and now he sits in the Oval Office. Somewhere along the way someone encouraged Mr. Obama to invest in himself.

I began to think of TED.com, and how they give out prizes each year to people/organizations with great ideas. Dave Eggers won a few years back for his concept of 826 Valencia ("the trick to happy communities is getting kids to do their homework..."). Somewhere along the way someone encouraged Mr. Eggers to invest in himself.

It's comforting to know that even through inevitable future budget cuts, we will have public service entities that will continue to set the standard for communities investing in themselves.

Have you encouraged someone today?

The only constant is change

I have been offered, and have accepted, a new position with the Tacoma Public Library (TPL) in Washington state. I will be ending my work here at Tulsa Community College (TCC) in a few weeks, and starting my new job in early April.

I will be the Manager for the Moore and Mottet branches of TPL.

Transitioning back to public library work from the community college setting will offer challenges and opportunities for me.

And regarding this blog, I endeavor to begin publishing at least twice a month when I get out to Tacoma and get settled.

.museum beat .library to the punch, by about eight years

ICANN is opening up generic Top Level Domains, and no one really knows if there will an Oklahoma-style land rush on names. I'm going to guess, though, that the high price for an entry ticket ($185,000) will keep the list of competitors short.

What could .library do for the library community? Would it usher in an era of unprecedented online use of library resources? Would we suddenly be swamped with IM reference questions, and would our site counters register huge jumps in visits? If the .museum is any indication, we may want to save our money. Back in September 2002 .museum was put into existence thanks to funds of the International Council of Museums and the J. Paul Getty Trust (not sure of the price tag, but I doubt it was $185,000!). I think the only way we could make the .library work for us would be tight controls on who gets in (think user-friendly and content-rich) and by hosting ads on the sites. There, I said it. Ads. Historically, however, neither of these ideas has been embraced by the library community.

Ouch. We innovators, we techiest of techies, we guardians of the printed word. We have been defeated for so long and have not even realized it. That's right. The museum folks beat us in the domain name race by over eight years. Eight...years.

Here's an idea: we could do our best to persuade Mr. Bill Gates to foot the bill. We would need a big backer, and Mr. Gates has been a supporter of libraries in the past (at least for Microsoft-related items). Think about it: Carnegie was the brick-and-mortar library champion of his day; Gates could be the URL-domain-name champion of this century.

To be sure, the registrations for a .lib or .library would have to be only for proven library institutions (as they are currently with .museum). And then comes an important question: To sustain themselves, would the subscribing libraries have to run ads? Oh, horror of horror, those ads.

The always reliable Information Today covered this a few months ago.

What are your thoughts?

Oklahoma Global Education Conference (OGEC)

I presented last week with Adam Brennan at the OGEC conference here in Tulsa.

We showcased free and proprietary online resources related to Global Education, and other than a very slow/prone-to-time-out network connection, we had a good session.

Some audience favorites that I had not included in my presentation were Merlot, China Daily, Al Jazeera, and procon.org.

Here are some of the highlights that I presented, in random order (links to these can be found at my delicious.com site):

Gutenberg- 25,000 free ebooks
BBC News In Pictures-daily and topical
Worldcat- 1.2 billion items in over 10,000 libraries worldwide (books, cds, etc)
Library of Congress and Flickr- two albums of 4,000 photos from 1910’s -1940’s
British Library Turning the Pages- high quality scans of historical and religious texts (not pdf’s!)
Skype- free online chat and audio/video calls
Social bookmarking on Delicious-save favorite websites, share, assign keywords/tags
Google Earth- 3-D views, sunrise function, navigate
Babelfish-translating text

Free software/online storage
· Ispring (turn ppt into flash)
· Adrive.com (50 gb free storage!!!)
· Audacity (free software to record audio mp3 files)
· Ning (create a social networking site)
· Airset (“your web computer”)

Cool Points
· Moodstream from Getty Images
· Pandora
· Worldle