Tag Archives: Social Media

Twitter Cheat Sheet

13 Mar

Totally psyched to have my Twitter Cheat Sheet ready to go for next week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College! So psyched, in fact, that I’m making it available to you, right here, right now. (Just click here for the pdf.)

RACHEL’S TWITTER CHEAT SHEET

Basic grammar:

@username = reply / mention
“@bananasuit Nice bananasuit!”

d username = direct (private) tweet
“d bananasuit Want to meet up and go bananasuit shopping?”

RT @username = retweet what someone else said
“RT @bananasuit 5% of Americans now own bananasuits”

#keyword = hashtag
“I think I’m ready to take the plunge and get a #bananasuit”

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Library Technology Conference 2010

7 Mar

My colleague (& partner in crime) and I are currently putting the final touches on the workshop we’ve been preparing for the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, in little over a week.  We’re giving a 90 minute hands-on workshop called “Second Life and Twitter for Librarians: Virtual Tools for Building Local and Global Networks.” Angela will be speaking about Second Life,and I will be speaking about Twitter.

I’m excited, but also pretty nervous!

I’m really looking forward to visiting Macalester, which is where I earned my undergraduate degree.  Sad, though, that my most favorite professors have all already retired or moved on to other Universities.  It really wasn’t that long ago, guys!

Anyway, I will surely be posting more about the conference before, during and after the fact.  Next Wednesday March 10, SLIS is hosting a dry-run of our workshop at noon in the U of I Main Library Computer Lab 3092, with cookies!

(click here to see more links for LibTech 2010)

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Fabulous Ways for Librarians to Use Twitter

21 Jan

Twitter

Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine — one of my favorite techno-journalists — writes that tools like Twitter can help us develop a “sixth sense” about the people in our networks.  All those seemingly mundane facts like “having homemade bagel & lox for breakfast!” and “reading Vonnegut during flight delay…” can add up to give us a picture of what’s happening in the lives of those around us.  As librarians, we can use Twitter to help our communities develop a sixth sense about who we are and what we offer, and we can also use it to develop our own sixth sense that will help us tune into the wants and needs of our communities, too.  For instance, if you see a lot of chatter in your network about the recent PBS documentary Copyright Criminals, you can schedule a showing at your library and then send a tweet about the event to all your Twitter followers!

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“The Asteroid That Hit the Industrial Age”; ILA Annual Conference 2009

27 Oct

Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, was the phenomenally brilliant opening speaker at the 2009 Iowa Library Association Annual Conference.   With a conference theme like “Deciphering Our Future: Transforming Iowa Libraries,” Rainie’s talk about his research on American internet usage kicked everything off on just the right note.  He gave the same talk in Wisconsin later that week, and those slides are available here (via slideshare):

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The ACLU Brings It On, Facebook!

16 Sep

I don’t think it’s any secret that I love Facebook, and lots of other social networking sites where you reveal highly personal information about yourself to complete strangers (goodreads, twitter, flickr, delicious, the last fm, etc. . .)

OK, but that being said. . . there are SERIOUSLY some online privacy questions that we’ve never had to grapple with before, and hey — I’m up for some grappling!

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which I also love, is taking on Facebook in a huge campaign to raise awareness about their sketchy privacy practices. Check out the ACLU’s awesome fb quiz to learn more!

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Life After 2.0; ALA Annual Conference 2009

15 Jul

(presented by PLA)

Lori Bell, Director of Innovation at Alliance Library System in East Peoria, IL, came to this session to demonstrate her library’s amazing Second Life virtual library project, “Info Island Archipelago.”  Second Life libraries are great meeting places for people who want to use avatars to meet from a distance.  Virtual libraries don’t even have to look like buildings — they can look however we want them to look.  They don’t have to be constrained by walls, and the weather can be perfect every day.  And, just like the Info Island Archipelago, your reference librarian can be. . . Yoda.

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When You Need More Than Facebook

2 Jun

I love Facebook. I joined way back in it’s infancy in 2003 (after a failed stint on Friendster — does anyone still use that site?), and its been wild to watch Facebook evolve into the social media sharing utility that it is today.

But Facebook doesn’t ALWAYS cut it for me. Some cool stuff that I’m interested in inevitably ends up being buried underneath someone’s 10 million quiz results re: “What would be your favorite ice cream flavor if you were a Marxist philosopher stranded on a desert island after your hot air balloon crashed?” I just can’t get my fill of music videos, book reviews, newspaper articles and photos that my friends are trying to share with me, because these updates get lost in the black hole of the feed.

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