Tag: Google

image: That’s not quite what I meant Google

SlideShare’s new Terms of Service [link is to email sent to subscribers, site has not been updated], clearly outlines that in the future,

Your LinkedIn account will power a richer experience on our service, and in the future may be prioritized over other sign-up or log-in options on SlideShare.

Like most, I was on LinkedIn. Then they got hacked and bumbled how they handled the hack. As I never used LinkedIn at all after the initial set up as I never found it useful or helpful, it seemed silly to keep a service that I barely used and had terrible security practices, so I dumped it.
As I was not aware that SlideShare was part of the LinkedIn “family” (why does marketing keep trying to push The Walton’s ideology of closeness and goody-too shoes on to everything? How many people will even get that reference?) and I would not have felt as irritated it were not for the line of “prioritized over other sign-up or log-in options” in their latest missive. I am not going to create an account with a shitty service who can’t keep their security audited to keep using a less than optimal service that I was not thrilled to use in the first place.
Fuck. That.
So I decided it was time to move my decks from SlideShare to something else, and I remembered there was a operator within Google that you can use to find similar products/pages/services. But as I couldn’t remember the operator, I started out with typing “better than” and got the following:

I made sure to capture the fact that I was logged into Google when I did the search, since Google relies on your search history when it comes back with recommendations. Now it really makes you wonder what the hell I’ve been looking for in the past to get such a bizarre assortment of recommendations.
And oh, the operator? It’s vs. Searching slideshare vs brought up a whole slew of alternatives to SlideShare and I’m porting everything over to Speaker Deck.
P.S. Yes, I’m aware the SSL on the site has expired. I have not had time to update the cert, which I will be doing sometime next few days.

Conference Summary: MLA Applied Technologies & Trends Workshop

On Friday, May 10, I had the pleasure of presenting at MLA Applied Technologies & Trends Workshop, If you caught my show before, at Library Tech Conference, you may notice some similarities. The presentation I gave at MLA is updated with a lot more content  and recent revisions as well as I even have a checklist put together that I PDFed for people to use that I promised to have for people back in March.
Since I was one of the last persons to present, below are my notes on the other presentations I attended along with links as appropriate.

Keynote: Good For Whom? 

By Matthew Reidsma / Grand Valley State University
Why are decisions made for design not carried over to digital tools? Meaning, why do we apply strict questions to physical items but not to digital ones.

  • Functional: How does it function?
  • Behavioral: How do behaviors change?
  • How to do it?
    • This is where most people stop.
    • These are internal questions, that we ask ourselves on everything.
  • “The library world has been fa too gullible, far too willing to regard any technical advance as a service advance.”  – Jonathan D. Lauer & Steve McKinzie
  • Human: How does this affect human experience?
    • Need to think more about the person who comes into our library, less about what we’re doing about them.
    • How do people FEEL?
      • How you treat people is more apt than what you did or will do. For example, if you treat a customer nicely, they will tell maybe 1 or 2 people. If you treat them badly, they will tell, on the average, nine people about their experience.
  • “User experience isn’t about expert intuition, it’s about expert listening.” – Whitney Hess
  • External questions: How to find how these technologies  are going to affect not just people, but work flows, and technologies themselves.
    • Adding the human element
  • A way forward: Ditching the label maker
    • Prioritize users over process
    • We could be reactionary (train industry of people to undo the work of crappy vendors) or say to the vendors, “Makes this easy to use.”  Demand it to be easy to use.
  • Prioritize users over processes

Resources/sites mentioned

Session: Cloud & Mobile Computing 4 Your LIbrary Resources & Services

By Michael Samson / Wayne State University

  • All the Google products, all the time
  • Chromebox / Chromebook instead of using vendor specific hardware
  • Hardware: Android (Nexus 4, 7, 10)
  • Tools / apps / gadgets
    • Creating custom search engine for faculty for their interests
    • Ability to share content via Google drive (presentations, documents)
    • Cloud is the new mainframe
  • Creating an entire workflow of tools in the Google cloud

Session: Sharing Technology Skills with Patrons and Colleagues

By Scott Skowronek / Lansing Community College

  • Uneven distribution of technology skills across staff and faculty
  • Creation of Tech Guides
    • 4 student staff per semester
    • Empowered to seek out and assist
    • Customer service focused
    • Roving support
    • Employee traits & Responsibilities
      • Keep the interactions time short (15 minutes) and then escalate
      • Know the GRCC core systems
      • Record each interaction (to identify peak times and keeps statics)
    • Training
      • Identify the “Big 3” technical problems and train the guides on these first. Example:
        • Blackboard problems
        • Forgotten passwords
        • Attaching files to emails
      • Find the technology pain points
        • Ex: Printer jams
      • Work with staff strengths
      • Collaborative training
        • Using iPads with Google docs to  train and track problems, seamless synching and updating
      • Encourage guides to Google for problems
    • Logistics
      • One tech guide on shift at a time
      • 3 hour shifts
      • Tech guide iPad
      • Peak hours
    • Pitfalls
      • Morale issues
      • Patron problems and problem patrons
      • Shift switching and absences
      • Staff technology ability
  • TechSnippets
    • Presentations that contain 10-15 minutes of content, open to faculty/staff
    • Maybe schedule 15 minutes  for discussion after
    • Schedule midday – more people on campus, this is when departments break for lunch, etc
    • Discuss single technology or a cluster of similar
      • Dropbox (Google Drive, iCloud)
    • Discuss singular concepts
    • Feed them!
      • Get a $100 convention oven, make cookies!
      • Use cookies to lure them into your lair
    • Marketing
      • Multiple channels
      • Multiple reminders
      • LibCal for sign-up and contact
      • Target a specific audience
  • Resources for ideas for Tech Snippets

Session: What to put on that new TV in the lobby

By David Hytien & Britain Woodman / University of Michigan

  • Content
    • Creative Commons content
      • Youtube. Vimeo, etc
      • From NASA, NOOA, White House, Internet Archive, Flickr
    • Content from various places like the above, plus student content, staff content, and public content available on campus, found content
    • RSS feeds
  • Logo
    • Recommend size is 1080×1920
    • Transparent
    • Should be png or gif as they are lossless
  • Videos
    • Create in iMovie, drop movies and logo just created
  • Resources

 
 

Google/Wikipedia: Re-inventing the damned wheel.

I’ll admit that I’m a Wikipedia/Google whore — I keep joking to a friend of mine who works for Google that when I’m done with my MLIS, I’m ready to sell out.
But joking aside, I was on Wikipedia today when I saw this advertised at the top of their donation page:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. – — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Yes motherfucker, it’s called a L.I.B.R.A.R.Y. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? You may have, gasp, been to one as a child? The arrogance kills me with that statement — Wikipedia, you did not infact, create the context of indexing human information for easy perusal — print encyclopaedias predate this by over a hundred years – AT LEAST. And the idea of indexing all the information of human kind AND having it available to all of human kind presumes that EVERY living human being has access to the Internet. According to this site, currently only 21% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. I’m betting and it’s just a hunch here, that there are more libraries available than Internet kiosks. Just a hunch.
I’m dropping this topic out there to be picked up later by myself — I’m also currently listening to The Google Story on my commutes, so I’m sure I”ll have more to say on this in a bit. For now, I slumber (wearing one of my Google t-shirt, of course).

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