This week’s 4cast:
1. Okay Librarians… What Now?
Several recent library blog posts have generated a lot of online discussion about the future of libraries and library services.
- what are the most important things on which libraries should be working? (walking paper)
- Three big things (See Also…)
- We Know What Library 2.0 Is and Is Not (LibraryCrunch)
- Starting Conversations about Library Futures (Stephen’s Lighthouse)
2. Spamfari
Many social networking sites ask new members if they want to automatically “invite” contacts from their online address books to also join the network. This practice has been getting negative attention lately, as e-mail boxes nationwide fill up with more of these types of invites (often sent by users who didn’t really mean to, and with whom the recipients are only barely acquainted). Shelfari, the popular social network for book lovers, is currently being lambasted for this practice, especially by LibraryThing, their chief competitor.
- Shelfari: When Usability and Ethics Collide (Gadgetopia)
- Shelfari spam: ‘basically social networking rapists” (Thingology Blog)
- Shelfari – Maybe Evil? (LISNews)
- Invitation design (Shelfari)
3. You Can’t Judge a Book by its Encoding
John Miedema (slowreading.net) recently wrote a four-part series on audiobooks, illustrating some of the problems he finds with the format and how they relate to libraries.
- Audio books: The series (slowreading.net)
- artificial scarcity of audiobooks (librarian.net)
- Resources of the Week: Audio Books for Free (ResourceShelf)
- LibriVox reaches 1,000! (LibriVox)
4. Do It All from Anywhere
We last touched on the topic of portable apps a while back (see 4cast #9), but if you’re interested in carrying around all of your necessary computer programs and files on a USB memory stick, check out these links.
- Carry Your Desktop Anywhere with Portable Apps (Wired How To Wiki)
- Geek to Live: Carry your life on a thumb drive (or iPod) (Lifehacker)
- List of portable software (Wikipedia)
