lo-fi librarian

This Weeks Useful Tools

lo-fi — Sat, 17 May 2008 19:45:30 +0000

Creating your visual online identity - guide to creating avatars from Web Worker Daily.

Domain Finder - find fun del.icio.us style domain names.

Remime - email reminder service.

Anonymbox - disposable email addresses.

Add a Google Reader sidebar - Mozilla Links instructions for using the iPhone version of Google Reader as a sidebar in your browser.

ReadAir - AdobeAir app that turns your Google Reader into a OSX themed desktop app, so you can read your feeds without opening your browser.

Uploadjockey - upload files to multiple hosting services, supports rapidshare, badongo, sendspace, zshare, megaupload and depositfiles.

Opera Mini 4.1 - beta now available to download.

vidnik - record video with your iSight and upload straight to YouTube (Mac).

tinyalbum - photo sharing, unlimited uploads, option to make albums private.

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Twitter Apps - Live Twitting

lo-fi — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:51:09 +0000

One of the recent additions to the Twitter Apps blog is Live Twitting. I thought I’d highlight this one as you don’t need to be afflicted with Twitter OCD (I am undergoing treatment as we speak) to see that this might come in useful. Twittering from conferences is becoming standard practice and Live Twitting provides another option to present your conference Tweets in an easy to read and accessible format.

How to use Live Twitting:

First of you need a Twitter account (but of course) and you will need to follow @livetwitting, they will automatically follow you back. You activate and conduct your Live Twitting session using a series of commands:

d livetwitting ON Conf. Name # Session Title

To start livetwitting

d livetwitting SPEAKER Speaker’s Name

To mark a speaker (optional)

d livetwitting QA

To mark a Question & Answer segment (optional)

d livetwitting TOPIC Name of Topic

To mark a segment with a Topic name (optional)

d livetwitting PAUSE

To pause recording (i.e. to say hi to someone else)

d livetwitting RESUME

To resume recording (after a pause command)

d livetwitting OFF

To end livetwitting

It’s not as complicated as it appears, you do not have to use all of these commands (ON, OFF, PAUSE and RESUME are the most important).

Here’s an example of Live Twitting in action:

All your Tweets from your Live Twitting session are presented on a single page and RSS feed is available.

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Book Jetty

lo-fi — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:55:28 +0000

Bookjetty lets you manage and share your reading lists with others. There are a number of different strands to the service. Firstly you can keep track of what you are reading, planning on reading, etc. You can rate and review your books, adding notes as you see fit. There is also a social networking aspect (as with other services of this kind) so you can befriend other users or follow them and get recommendations. You can also get together with other folk to discuss books and authors. But my favourite feature (and perhaps the most useful) is the ability to check where books are held. Bookjetty links to over 300 libraries in 10 different countries and you can select libraries from this extensive list to add to your profile:

So when you add a books to your bookshelf you can automatically check to see where it is held. Call/shelf numbers are displayed and you can link straight through to the catalogue record.

Pretty useful if you have a reading list to wade through.

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This Week’s Useful Tools

lo-fi — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:29:36 +0000

No More Note Books - make wishlists, there is a bookmarklet for you to use which will extract information such as title, image, description and price. This works fine for big sites like Amazon, but for something a little less mainstream expect to have to input this info yourself. You can create multiple lists and make them public or private. Feed is available for your lists (perfect when dropping hints for Christmas pressies). Lots of other features including price comparisons. Worth checking out, for an example - see mine here.

Books I Am Reading - keep track of and share the books you want to read and those you have. Example page here.

filemail - email large files, up to 2GB and no need to register.

OpenOffice 3.0 beta - now with Mac support.

7 Killer Applications for the Blackberry - from Web Worker Daily.

6 Excellent Firefox Extensions Made to Save You Time - collection from Makeuseof.com.

Google Reader Note - another reason to use GReader, you can now add notes (via a handy bookmarklet) meaning you can save lots of other stuff and opt to add to your shared items.

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Delish - Yum Yum

lo-fi — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:13:41 +0000

Delish is a pretty neat Mac app if you’re into thumbnails. You sync it with your del.icio.us bookmarks and Delish displays them all as thumbnail images. You can navigate using your tags in the left hand pane:

and you can resize your thumbnails:

The sweetest thing though is the search function, which starts finding as soon as you start typing. Unfortunately you can’t save new bookmarks using Delish, so be sure to sync each time you open it.

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Legal Voices

lo-fi — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:08:01 +0000

Legal Voices is a very alpha Twitter experiment from Steve Matthews. It’s basically a feed or river of Tweets from people connected in some way to the legal industry. If you fit the bill then follow @legalvoices, once legalvoices follows you back your Tweets will start to appear here. It might not end up being a stream of constant legal news and commentary (though you probably will get a fair bit of that), but it is a window into Twitter and for those not already ‘on board’ it serves as a nice little introduction. I like the idea because I think Twitter is all about connections and Legal Voices provides a quick and convenient way for you to identify people in the legal community who are already using Twitter. Perhaps it could be developed so that people could opt to add a Tweet to the legalvoices stream by way of a hashtag(?), this might make it more of a collaborative microblog than an automated feed. Still, I am sure Steve has investigated this already (and knows a lot more about what is technically feasible than me). However it develops I think this is something well worth monitoring.

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Law Firm Blogs: What Works? What Doesn’t?

lo-fi — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:42:29 +0000

The LexBlog webinar on law firm blogs is now available as a screencast here. Kevin O’Keefe presents and coverage includes:

What are professional marketing blogs?
Advantages of blogs for law firms.
Challenges of blogs.
Alternatives for setting up and running a blog.
How much time it takes?
Legal liability and ethics issues.
Getting firm management buy in for blogs.
Which law firms are using marketing blogs

The webinar is 59 minutes long.

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This Week’s Useful Tools

lo-fi — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:31:09 +0000

Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict - nice collection from Read/Write Web, including scripts for Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook and Google Reader.

AppMenuBoy - download for Mac, lets you access all your applications via a single menu.

OPIE - Firefox extension that backs up your Firefox extensions, meaning you can export to other PCs/Macs.

Free Chapter of Google Apps Hacks by Phillipp Lenssen - PDF of Chapter 4 which is on Google Presentations.

iGoogle Artist Themes - lots more cool themes for your iGoogle homepage.

6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working With Video - from Web Worker Daily.

QuickShareIt - download for Mac. QuickShareIt sits in your dock, you can drag and drop files into it to upload and share. Maximum file size 100MB.

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Corruption 2.0

lo-fi — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:12:25 +0000

The Society of Computers & Law has just posted the audio of last night’s lecture by Professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig draws on arguments developed by Professor Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and how to stop it (which has just been published in the UK by Allen Lane and is free to download here). I was surprised that the lecture wasn’t completely sold out, but I’m not sure people realised that they could get hold of last minute tickets. I regret not having dragged along some more librarians to reprezent. Still, if you didn’t get a chance to go then praise SCL for making the lecture freely available so quickly after the event.

By the way Zittain is on Twitter!

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This Week’s Useful Tools

lo-fi — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:15:34 +0000

Solid .PDF Alternatives to Adobe - collection from Web Worker Daily.

Printable Paper - I have much love for graph paper, so I think this is a fab site. Lots of other templates available too.

ZombieURL - “the URL shortener for the undead”.

Share This on Flickr - Flickr have added a “Share This” button, making it easier to share pics with your Flickr contacts or by email.

Oosah - media manager that now lets you import/export photos between your different web accounts (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Facebook). 2GB storage for free.

gdocsuploadr - drag and drop your docs into the gdocsuploadr for speedy uploading to Google Docs (Mac).

quick.as - intended to be used as a start page, quick.as is a simple search box and a whole heap of commands. I quite like this one. It is similar to Firefox search add-ons in that you can easily switch between the sites you are searching. But instead of selecting from a drop down menu, you type commands: e.g. “ad romero” will search for “romero” in Amazon’s DVDs category. Or “gn olympics protest” will search Google News for stories on “olympics protest”. Register and add your own commands. A full list of commands can be found here.

Boolify - very simple graphical representations of Boolean searching.

bitRipper - convert DVDs to AVIs in one click.

Debut - video capture software (Windows only). Will record anything playing on your screen, including video from the web and webcam footage. Option to record in a variety of formats, including .avi, .wmv, .mpg, .3gp, .mp4, .mov. Lots more interesting features, including the ability to automatically upload to a web server of you choosing via FTP.

Update Scanner - Firefox extension that monitors webpages that don’t provide feed (via Makeuseof.com).

Mr Uptime - another Firefox extension, this one will alert you when a webpage you have unsuccessfully tried to access becomes available again (via Makeuseof.com).

QR-Code Generator - generate your own QR-Codes for URLs, text, phone numbers and SMS.

Piwik - “open source analytics”, intended as an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

And finally, even Heidi has heard that Facebook has rolled out its chat application. But you may not have seen this tip from Digital Inspiration on putting the chat into your Firefox sidebar, which should let you chat regardless of what web page you are visiting.

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