Potluck #57: Texting

Cell phones have been shrinking in size over time, but I guess there is a practical limit to that unless an alternative to texting by keypad is developed.

Have you ever sent a text message?

I avoided owning a cell phone because I did not want to be "trackable" by anyone, at any time, at any place. But during Hurricane Ike, my husband's cell phone became invaluable. I learned to text, as for weeks it was often the only way to communicate with family, friends, and co-workers. It wasn't pretty to watch, as I learned everything the hard way (no YouTube available at the time!). I kept grabbing people and asking questions like "How do I type a number? Get a capital? Correct [MANY] mistakes?" I am a little better now, but still not very fast.
Now, I find it is often the only good way to get my son's attention. E-mail is too "old-fashioned" for him. He seems to think that if he can't get it in seconds over his phone, it is not worth reading. I still don't have my own cell phone, but I am precariously leaning in that direction.

I appreciated learning about the http://www.txt2day.com/ website that I can use to send text messages from my computer. I used to be able to do this through the website of my son's cell phone provider, but they removed this service a while ago. I tested http://www.txt2day.com/ just now, and got a reply back within a minute.

Do you use text lingo? Did Lingo 2 Word help?

Text lingo is about the same as the shorthand that developed earlier for Instant Messaging. Recently I enjoyed reading the book "TTYL" by Lauren Myracle that chronicles, in IM format, the day-to-day experiences of three girlfriends as they begin tenth grade. The Lingo2Word site would have helped me decipher many of the phrases like OMG, WTF, TTFN that I found in that book.

I enjoyed playing the 60-Second Challenge in Lingo2Word to see if I could translate five text messages in less than a minute. The most I ever got was 2 out of 5. I learned a lot by playing, though! The challenge also includes some "real language" shorthand (TGIF) and some of the "pre-text" computer shorthand (GIGO). Those I knew! The Lingo2Word site could come in handy in the future. I think it would be especially helpful for anyone who texts with young people. Kind of a "teenspeak" translator.

Finally, what are your thoughts on the texting and driving after reading the New York Times article?

Listen to yo' mama: Don't even THINK about texting and driving! Talking on the cell phone is almost as bad, but at least your eyes can be on the road, even if your brain is not fully engaged.

Potluck #56: To Tweet or Not To Tweet...Twitter

I learned about Twitter as part of the committee for the original iHCPL. Together with a couple of other folks, I captured some of the more quotable quotes from iHCPL participants in a Twitter feed on the blog. For this exercise, I logged in and added a few new ones. It's amazing how time flies. The last time I did an entry was 202 days ago!!

Exercise 1) Browse a couple of different Twitter profiles.

I looked at a few of the celebrity profiles and could find none that I cared to follow. TMI.

I think I will stick to reading the status updates of people I know in Facebook, rather than opening a personal Twitter account.

Exercise 2) Use the search feature to find tweets about a topic.

I searched for the "Barbara Bush Library" and found this tweet:
"Sadly my TV watching is on pause while I visit the infamous Barbara Bush Library (right down the street) for tax help."

Also found a tweet that one of the staff must have entered:
"Knowledge Exchange @ Barbara Bush Library 2day @ 2:30p. Call 281-376-4610 for info. BYO project or conversation!"

These verify what the Forbes article said: "Most important, Twitter can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction."

I used Twellow to find some Tweets on raw foods, organic foods, and vegetarianism. I think tweets are better thought of as a path to information, rather than as a place for the information itself.


Exercise 3) Post your thoughts about Twitter to your blog.

The Twitter site boasts that it is "a modern antidote to information overload." I think I agree more with Entertainment Weekly that described it as "a time-stamped list resembling a short-attention-span blog."

I think that Twitter is just a passing fad, even though I currently hear EVERYONE talking about it. It was mentioned in an article I read this morning in the "Conde Nast Portfolio", and as I am writing this post, Meghan McCain is on the Larry King Show talking about how Twitter is her favorite thing. I heard Stephen Colbert talking about it last night, and it was a topic on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" this morning. I think Twitter will be around for a while, but will lose its glamor and probably will be usurped by other sites (e.g. the status updates of Facebook)and become less important as a stand-alone network.

Pot Luck: #55 Getting the Most Out of Facebook

I have had a Facebook account since the Social Networks section of the original iHCPL 23 Things (Thing 18). I currently have 51 friends and 14 applications. As a result of this exercise, I just added a Friends Wheel and some pieces of flair.

Facebook is fascinating, and as a result, an incredible sink hole for time. I never fail to learn something new about my friends, and am often tempted by new apps. I suppose if you had a business or service to promote it could be a productive use of time. As it is for me, it seems more like interactive TV -- sometimes educational, but more often just lost hours.

I appreciated the 10 suggestions about protecting privacy, and implemented one of them right away. I intend to work more with creating groups, to try to make the flow of information more manageable.

I like following Friend Suggestions, Are You Related?, reading comments on the wall, and birthday reminders. Its hard to believe there are 26 million users every month!

Books, Readers and Beyond: #54 Social Networking Through Books

Exercise 1: Membership in Book Clubs

I joined my first book club in the late 70's when I lived in Illinois. Those were the years when I was working for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and I met a bunch of terrific like-minded people. Some of us formed a feminist book club, named the Gutsy Women. This was a wonderful bonding among friends, and as I think about it now, it may have influenced my decision to become a librarian later. I had been on a science track before this, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Entomology. All I read was serious non-fiction, and I thought of reading as hard work. The Gutsy Women showed me that reading fiction was an acceptable pastime for intelligent people, and that reading could be fun. I was hooked.

Today I facilitate two books clubs, one at the Barbara Bush Library, and one at my church, Hosanna Lutheran. They are quite different from each other, but both are enjoyable. I would love to start more book clubs, but I am a sadly slow reader, and two required books a month is about all I can handle in addition to my personal reading.

I love the fast-paced face-to-face unpredictable interaction between readers discussing a good book, and I would never consider joining an online book club (unless perhaps I was homebound and couldn't get out).

Exercise 2: Implementing Book Clubs

I am helping to implement book clubs today by doing training for book club discussion leaders. This is offered as part of the "Big Read" grant happening from mid-April through May. The training session open to the public is on Friday, April 24, from 10 am to noon at the Barbara Bush Library. Any staff member who would like to offer this training at their own branch can contact me. I can do the training, help you do the training, or provide the materials for you to do the training yourself. The "Big Read" training will be focused on the classic book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, but this training could be done at any time of the year, using any book.

The library book club that I host reads a wide variety of materials, from various fiction genres to non-fiction selections. The suggestions come from the participants. You can see what we have read by visiting our Library Thing site. Log in as "bushbookclub", password "barbara". By clicking on the tab for "Your Library", you can see the books this group has read and discussed over the last six years.

Books on Social Networking Sites

I searched again for "The Guide" by R.K. Narayan, as discussed in my first post for this exercise, with these results:

GoodReads: a rating of 3.9 out of 5.0, based on 282 ratings.

Shelfari: a rating of 4.0 out of 5.0, including 21 reviews

Library Thing: a rating of 3.61 out of 5.0, based on 343 entries; no reviews.

Books on Facebook: I had trouble finding this group on Facebook. The first one I found had comments all in Italian. The second was a controlled membership group that you had to be invited to join. All in all, this was not a user-friendly experience.

The sites where I found ratings were quite similar. It sounds like "The Guide" is a "pretty good" book, and one that I will want to read in-between book club selections!

Books, Readers and Beyond: #53 Finding Books Online [Exercise 3: Downloading an e-Book]

In 2008, I taught an adult Sunday School series on the book "Real Faith for Real Life" by Michael Foss. I bought the book from Amazon, and had the option to buy the e-book version at the same time for just $.99 extra. It was a good thing that I exercised that option, because I ended up giving the print version away to a student in the class, and had to depend on the e-book to prepare my notes.

With Amazon, you don't really "download" the e-book into your computer. Instead, you view it online through your Amazon account. This was one disadvantage --I had to be at my computer and online in order to read the book.

For the first few chapters, I was able to copy and paste lines into my teaching outline. This was great and a real time-saver. However, I soon hit the copyright "wall" and couldn't do this any longer. This meant that I had to flip back and forth between the book and my Word screen in order to make notes. This was NOT fun.

If you are just reading and not trying to make notes, an advantage is that you can highlight sections of the book, write online annotations, and bookmark special areas. To review what you have read later, you can choose to see just these sections.

I have to admit that I an really tempted by the Kindle 2. You can select from 230,000 titles, most costing only $9.99, and have them downloaded anywhere in 60 seconds. You can carry up to 1500 books with you at a weight of about 10 ounces. For someone who had to carry two or three volumes of the LC Catalog around during library school, that alone sounds pretty fantastic. The screen is supposed to provide an improved reading surface, and the battery is supposed to last 25% longer than the initial version of the Kindle. This sounds like a potentially BIG threat to print libraries as we know them.

Books, Readers and Beyond: #53 Finding Books Online [Exercise 2: Searching for a Book]

Exercise 2: Comparison Shopping for a Title

In the previous post, I decided that I might like to read "The Guide" by R.K. Narayan. Let's do a little shopping to see how I could get it.

Barnes and Noble online: $14.00 / $12.60 member price. I was not able to tell if I could get it locally. I was told to "call the store." There were also used booksellers listed on this site, offering prices from $7.00 to $13.30 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Amazon.com: $10.20 new. The used books were priced from $7.00 to $28.99 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Swap Tree Four swappers had this book available. It was recommended that I post ten books I have to swap in order to use the site. It would cost me only postage.

Book Mooch One swapper in Sweden has this book available. You have to post ten books to swap in order to use the site. It would cost me international postage in this case.

Books, Readers and Beyond: #53 Finding Books Online [Exercise 1: Nearby Bookstores]

The listing of books stores on Houston.com now includes one more -- I added a free listing for the Barbara Bush Library Friends Used Book Store in Spring. The only danger of the free listing is that anyone can edit it. I did notice that a listing for the branch library itself was full of errors and had been co-opted by an outsider! I tried to make corrections, but was unable to do so.

It's ironic that the iHCPL-suggested Google search for book stores includes near the top of the second page of results a link to the iHCPL blog entry suggesting the search. It's a new type of circular reasoning.

Exercise 1: Nearby bookstores
Barnes & Noble, Champions Village location -- This store has been a good partner for us. We have an institutional buying card there, and get a 20% discount on all purchases. They let us do a book fair there periodically, and we earned an $895 gift card there from the last one. They also let us wrap gifts for tips at Christmas, which has been good PR as well as earning a little cash. They do have an online store that is easy to use, and great for building Wish Lists that I take to my local store.

Half-Price Books, FM 1960 and Stuebner-Airline -- This is a good place to buy new cookbooks, gardening books, pet books, etc. for the library using gift funds. It is also a fun place to buy interesting used items for personal use. It has an online website, but the inventory of the stores is not online and is continually changing. This is a place where you can sell your used books, although you are unlikely to get rich doing it.

Bookland, on Louetta and Stuebner-Airline in Spring.
Bookland is a used book store with a good selection of paperbacks. It does not have an online component. Neal, the owner, has been in business a long time, and has helped out with the Friends' annual used book sales in the past.

Cush City, has a retail store in Houston, Texas, located at 13533 Bammel N. Houston Rd., Houston, TX. It also has an online site at cushcity.com. Cush City has the world's largest selection of African-American items. The owner is the organizer of the National Black Book Festival happening at the George R. Brown Convention Center on May 16 and 17 this year.