Vote411

Vote411

social network interfaces

I've recently caved in and joined Facebook and Linkedin. They both seem pretty intuitive and I am returning to them fairly regularly. But I still cannot seem to get the hang of MySpace. I cannot even figure out how to add a friend. Is it age? Is it brains? I'm thinking that what is intuitive may vary with generation or maybe learning style. Whatever it is, MySpace is still a foreign country.

civic engagement deliberation guides

Everyday-Democracy has an Issue Guide Exchange for folks who write deliberation guides. There is also a forum for discussion. And there is an online tool to walk you through creating a guide.

And while I'm on the topic, ALA has a blog on Civic Engagement and a listserv called Deliberate and a Member Interest Group.

I highly recommend this community engagement role for libraries. I think I can guarantee no Google will come along to bump us out of it. Moreover, by nurturing the civic capacity of our communities, we create a better climate for support of libraries and understanding or their value.

Testing a new gadget

Nicole alerted me that Blogger offers a voting gadget so I've added it. Please vote so I can see how this works! Also, Google Gadgets offers a polling gadget, but it is many screens in so use search to find it.

still here, with new goodies

I have found some fine new toys: Many Eyes and Wordle. Many Eyes offers ways to visualize data sets. Some of the graphs would probably strike Edward Tufte as having too much ink, but they are a definite step above the hideous 3-D bar graphs that come out of Microsoft products. Wordle is a word or tag cloud maker and it can be used on Many Eyes. And Many Eyes is definitely a social network for people who like to look for patterns in numbers.

thanks, David!

Flickr refinished

I had to get a Yahoo account for something else entirely, so it seemed foolish not to set up a Flickr account too. Have a look at my photos. Here's a place I'd like to be right now: