Braun and Apple

When I visited Braun in Frankfurt last year, they had an exhibition showcasing the last 25 years of their designs. Most notable, and even acknowledged by Apple, was a comparison of Dieter Rams designs for Braun in the 1960s and Apple's contemporary product designs. I took a photo of Rams T3 pocket radio beside 2 generations of the iPod. It isn't the only thing to be ripped off, er, I mean *influenced from Braun.

Searching Flickr, I found that stumrob had uploaded an image of the Braun Loudspeaker Model No. LE1 and iMac G5 2004 Model side by side. These I had seen in the same exhibition in Frankfurt only my photos of them were a bit crap. I don't think the images belong to stumrob, but other photos of both products were easily found because of the name and tags the user had attached to each photo, here is the speaker again taken by An Unseen Ruler, and the iMac 2007 Model taken by Robert Scoble. In a historical sense, photo sharing sites like Flickr are a great way of documenting and archiving events and objects, and even people, making available images that you would be unable to access otherwise.

It can be used to for navigational purposes, to compliment the functions of Google maps as you can get often get better views of a destination by searching image sharing databases like Flickr. If you want a view of Kastanienallee in winter, chances are someone has gone to Berlin in winter and walked down that street and taken photos of it, and if they are caring, they will be sharing it on something like Flickr. 

Like many social sites, if you decide to have a Flickr account, granted you need a Yahoo ID to join, you can tag your photos for better cataloging, and searching. I came across this rare photo of the interior of the Nagakin Capsule Tower, which they say will be torn down pretty soon. It's such a shame because it's a real beauty.

Before you get too trigger happy with tagging, there's an obvious flaw in all this. Upside is it's handy, and connects you to similar or same information easily. Downside, you are the authority, the tags are subjected to you, and you are at the mercy of the tagger. If you tag a photo of your dog as 'Major Bleed', it may not be a very helpful tag. Should we be the authority? If I tag this blog as 'the most awesome-adrenaline-inducing-punch-in-your-face blog ever', is that wrong?

Some Awesome Infographics

Some very nice infographics aired on Hungry Beast, ABC TV on 3 March 2010. Which a friend sent on via his Tweetdeck on Facebook, that I saw while getting my daily fix of the Sartorialist and at the same time giving in to a guilty pleasure of getting a top weekly score on frikkin' Bejewelled - the bane of my existence, that I got hooked on when I played it on my sister's iPhone 3 weeks ago while we were looking for directions via Google maps for a place to eat, which we used to access Wikipedia over dinner to find the name of the man who wrote for the sitcom 'Alf' who was played in a movie by Ben Stiller. His name was Jerry Stahl, and I stuck it in my Facebook status and in reply, someone uploaded a photo of Jerry on my wall, which they found via Google image search. By this point in time I was trying to figure out the theme song to Full House without resorting to Youtube because, you know, that's just cheating.

I thought this video oddly appropriate.

Social Bookmarking & Tagging

I had a look at Delicious and Diigo, and settled on the latter only because it gave me the option of running an applet instead of installing stuff into my browser, and didn't require me to have a yahoo account.

Diigo is very handy, it allows you to take your bookmarks with you to pretty much anywhere you can get a computer with internet access. The tagging helps to organise all your bookmarks, a lot like subject headings in cataloging. You can further order the pages into lists. I haven't accumulated enough for lists yet but have been making a conscious effort to mark interesting pages I visit a lot, so the list feature is nice. Diigo lets you highlight portions of pages and bookmark only that, which is handy especially if it is a text heavy page. It won't bookmark a highlighted image or table and translate as it is formatted, and it won't bookmark some images, e.g. if i find an image through google image search it doesn't bookmark the image itself but will bookmark the page it is from. I'm not sure how this can help in terms of bibliographic software like End Note as I've never used it before, but I'll see how it goes when I do eventually use it.

Now LibraryThing is a great excuse to unleash my bad taste on everyone via the widget I added on the side. LibraryThing itself is fantastic, it's great for reader advisory. I've been using it to get recommended reads, and it's handy to see all the tags associated with the books and authors you like, you can add your own and catalog your own library that way. Socially, it connects you to people that read the same things you read, and it opens up a world where you can create discussion boards and chat to groups of like-minded people. In a lot of ways it works like Fiction Connection or NoveList, but free, without being joined to a library that has bought access to these databases.

GuruLib is okay, I guess. Navigation-wise it's atrocious, it is not user friendly at all and the display is so PC, the layout is not user friendly and is kinda ugly to look at. Oh, who am I kidding? I really don't think it's okay. The purpose of the site is what I'm guessing to be similar to LibraryThing, only navigating it is really hard because so many things are just not very intuitive. I would click to a point where I couldn't find my way back to my library only to realise it was my usename up at the top, in really small writing. Aside from the fact that you can add other mediums to your library like movies and music, it's just such a pain the ass to add stuff and go back and change its settings. The widget is a standard one but unless you can adjust the HTML, you really can't custom it much from the site. You know what GuruLib reminds me of? See if you can navigate website for the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Might make you want to gouge your eyes out... Thank god they have a new site (under development).

Microblogging, it's Twitterrific!

I'm not sure I like Twitter. It is information O-VER-LOAD, like someone shoving pavlova into my mouth, my eyes and my ears, while speaking to me in reverse to the beat of a Toto song. It's not in big readable chunks but a lot of snippets, some hard to see in context without previous tweets, and the language of Twitter takes some getting used to.

It's a great marketing tool for getting information out quick. I'm following my favourite bands at the moment and one has tweeted information about canceled shows and additional shows they've added on last minute. Melbourne Open House tweeted previously about their open days for 2010. Organisations that need to relay information fast can use Twitter for such a purpose, but the tweets are limited in word space, so if the message is short and sweet it is ideal, and with the use of shortened links, more information is being squeezed into 140 characters.

The big down side: I made the mistake of following too many people. There was just too much going on from Neil Gaiman's trip in NZ to Neil Patrick Harris sitting in Singapore Airport. When Twitter is like reality TV in the palm of your hand, it's not really useful unless you want to stalk them. This bombardment of information is like static, where maybe 1% of tweets have information I want to read. It's like someone giving you just 140 characters of their state right now, or now, or wait a minute... now. It's either too much or not enough. Following friends is great too, but following too long is like overstaying your welcome. I like my friends but I don't want an update about their life every minute of everyday.

I'll see how I feel about it in a few weeks. I wish I could just channel that bit of Gen Y and say I hate it and quit it, but here is my Twitter Page, which you can follow. I'm not sure if what I tweet will be very poignant but I promise I won't regale you with a blow by blow post vindaloo episode.

I'll save that for my facebook.

RSS, Wikis & Collaborative Content

I have a Bloglines account so that I can keep up to date with my favourite blogs, some I've added to my blog roll to the left. It's really helpful to have them all in one spot, like having all your magazines delivered to you at your house instead of driving to 6 different bookstores or newsagencies.
Something that satisfies my obsessive compulsive tendencies is the editable wiki on the NLA Australian Newspaper website. The website allows you to search for an article of interest and edit its digital contents, while displaying the original scanned article of the newspaper. Editing is open to pretty much anyone who has time as there are over 15 million articles you can search. You can check out the one I edited here. The articles are being integrated into the Library's Trove search engine, which is fantastic, and through a collaborative process, more Australian newspapers are being digitalised everyday. You could have a field day...

Pam!

My mum turned to me and said 'I'm taking Pam to Vietnam.'

Me: Wha... who the hell is Pam??

Mum: Pam, you know, Paamm.

Me: What the? Why would you take a stranger with you?

Mum: No, you know, Paam!

As she's packing her luggage she pulls out a can and shakes it at me.

Me: Oooh, SPAAMM...

This is what it's like when I come across something I have no idea about, then clarity strikes and I don't feel so dumb. The blog is my journal of learning, or as the subtitle suggests, it's a documentation of me meeting challenges of Web 2.0. and other weird stuff that I have no idea about. It's gonna be awesome.

Anyway I looked at the Annoyed Librarian blog, it's pretty funny, there's an entry titled "Is Marketing Really So Easy Even Librarians Can Do It?", where the question of librarians taking the role of marketing and business in libraries is poo-pooed. She is saying it is a bad idea for a library to be run like a business instead of a library.

It's a pretty purist way of looking at libraries. Libraries should be run like a library but need a department that does the business side of things run by people who know what the hell they're doing.

From a personal point of view, our publications at work used to be done individually. BAD. Most of them were epic FAILS that made me want to gouge my eyes out. I persuade them to give them to me to be laid out in InDesign. GOOD. Then they would edit the file themselves. BAD. I have a humble BA in Design and makes me cry when they use Comic Sans or some other hideous typeface.

A library is an organisation like any other, if there is no corporate identity how do people associate with it? If marketing is needed then it should be done by professionals. People spend years perfecting their skills in business and marketing to get it right, that's how Google got so big. You can even look at countries as a brand. China has a reputation of being of poor quality but cheap. Germany is efficient and good quality. The same can be said of libraries, so the marketing should reflect the amazing things about a library. What is the point of great things happening in libraries if it is poorly communicated and no one knows about them?

Do the National Gallery of Victoria do their own graphic designs? Most of the time, no, it goes out to a proper design studio. On occasion they might get an in-house designer to do it but it is an in-house graphic DESIGNER, not curator or artist or exhibition designer. If it's to be done properly, leave it to the professionals. You never see clip art on the flags up around the CBD of Melbourne for any NGV advertising. EVER.

There. I had my little vent. I feel better.