I did a demonstration similar to this at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference in May.   It’s just a neat little trick to demonstrate why “Doing the Math” is important when you are measuring success.

I love online flash games.    The last time I owned a gaming console was back in the early 80s with Atari.   Seriously (though I would occasionally rent Supernintendo in the late 80s).

Finally, I am going to share the sites I know and love:

Kongregate

Maybe not always appropriate for small children (the chat has some potty-mouthing by 13 year olds, and some of the games are a tad violent), Kongregate is a standard site where budding and professional flash gamers strut their stuff.   As a bonus, the site offers “achievements” that you can perform (eg. get a certain score, pass a certain level or defeat a certain boss) to earn points that increase your “level” which in turn gives you additional street cred.

Games I like:  Music Catch ,  Gemcraft Level 0, Morningstar

Miniclip Games

Definitely more kid-friendly than kongregate, although I find some of the games a little bit too “advertisey” – meaning that they appear to have a specific commercial interest in mind.   There also seems to be a trend toward sprite-style games with neo-16 bit graphics.   Still, it is a standard and a good number of my favorite games are here.

Games I like:  Raft Wars, Bloxorz, Extreme Pamploma

Popcap

Popcap is unique in that they offer downloadable versions of their games – trial versions for free and then full versions for sale.   You can also just play their games online.    In general the focus seems to be around puzzle-style games, but they are very well designed and fun for just about everyone.

Games I like:  Bookworm

Newgrounds

This site is definitely not for small children without parental supervision, but it has definitely been one of my favorites for a long time.   Tom Fulp started the site with some rather riske flash animations and games (the site was very popular for a game that was a parody of the Columbine shootings), and grew up into a portal for Flash Games and movies showcasing the amazing creativity of internet users.     Make no mistake, many of the entries to the Flash portal still keep the spirit of Tom’s old site (parody, violence etc), but there are also ratings to help make sure you know when the offensive material is going to appear.

Games I like:  Portal Defenders (Ages 17+), Little Wheel (all ages), Exmortis 2 (Horror Game 17+)

What gaming sites do you like?

A long time ago, I used to be a Tutorial Assistant for a Listening to Music course put on by Adrian Hoffman.   Usually at the time when we discussed the “Classical Era” (ie. Mozart, Haydn, early Beethoven) there was a lecture on form.   Often, form was expressed as a tool for absolute music (ie. how to give a song a structured feel to it).    I always itched at doing a lecture on how form can impact program music (music that tells a story or paints a picture) – and especially I wanted to do this lecture using a piece of popular music.

So I did an explanation of form using “The Clash City Rockers” by The Clash.   I should note that I believe that the brief samples I use here qualify under fair use policies, in particular because I am using them in a tutorial about music, adding considerable amount of my own knowledge and material in the process.    Got any other good examples of how the form of a rock song really suits the lyrics/content well?

UPDATE:

You can go through all the verses of the song and perform the same exercise, actually.     Third verse has “everybody gone dry” on the “down” section” and “plug into the aerials that poke in the sky” in the “up” section (sky/up works really well, don’t it?).    Then, the suburbs are down, and the “you won’t succeed unless you try” get the up.   Very simple “up-down” technique that does alot to help the song makes sense.   I’m always impressed when I see this amount of craft put into a song.

UPDATE July 5, 2009

Just watched this with my wife and must admit that the front needs considerable editing.   (yeah, I’m babbling alot about whatever and whatnot – I think I couldn’t decide whether this was a video blog post or a tutorial on music).

Skip to about 1:30 to get to the fun part (where I use the “W” to show how the song is well-formed).   I’m going to spend some time editing this down shortly and I’ll repost it.

Inspired by Joel Kelly’s first experiment with Videoblogging, I grabbed a flip and made my first attempt at video blogging.     In the aftermath, Joel noticed that people wanted to talk about his vacation beard more than what he was actually saying.

On the whole, the advantage to video is that you have appearance and sound to add to your blogging palette.   We shouldn’t be surprised that people comment on such things, even if it seems inane at times.

I love the man’s music. I have deepest sympathies for the family, especially his kids. But that’s where it ends for me. Michael Jackson’s death is a personal matter for those close to him. I really wish the media and all his so-called ‘fans’ would butt out – like one of the characters in Gates of Heaven (one of my favorite movies) says, “Death is for the Living.”

People appear to want to draw attention to so many things that I believe should be low on the totem pole of attention.   We have such short lives, why is it that we want to spend large quantities of it worrying about what Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears are wearing (or not wearing)?   It all makes me want to be more concious about what matters and in turn, to be concious about what does not matter.   Here is my list of things I am conciously deciding not to worry about.

Domestic Poverty

Domestic poverty is off my list for two reasons:   1)  I’d rather focus my attention on World Poverty and 2) Domestic Poverty is really a symptom of other equity issues such as support for mental health, access to child care, and equity, especially for those with disabilities.   In my view, Canada is a country with tonnes of opportunity, and sufficient infrastructure to ensure that a population will not starve.   This does not mean I will not donate to organizations like Feed Nova Scotia, but it does mean that my ears will shut off if you are trying to lobby on a platform of poverty.

Preserving Heritage

The key to this statement is preserving heritage.   I think heritage is important, but because it represents a living, breathing entity – not because it is old and needs to be protected.    What I value about my elders is not that they old, but that they have a story to tell.   Some things are historically valuable and need to be preserved, sure – but certainly not everything, and absolutely not everything at the expense of a living, breathing city environment.   Librarians know all too well that an old rusty copy of War and Peace will do nothing to protect the value of Leo Tolstoy’s work.    A new, fresh, exciting-looking copy will have people reading and re-reading the book —  that’s the way you protect heritage, by helping people re-live the past.    That means you weed the old and replace it with new.

Privacy

Don’t get me wrong.  I would never spy or harrass others or want to be spied or harrassed.   Nor would I ever breach a confidentiality policy of any employer I may work for past, present or future.   But, I feel that the wholesale protection of privacy is costing us immensely in terms of service, and therefore I am just not going to pay much attention to this issue.   The lack of progress in a wide range of services in the name of privacy is astounding, and I’m sure that an audit of government would show a huge amount of time and money wasted to prevent that one case where someone discovers prematurely that their wife or husband wants a divorce, or that their young daughter or son is using birth control.   So much of this information is already available on the web if someone wants to look for it anyway – I do not think we can pretend we have private lives for much longer.

Funding for Elite Sports

OMG!   Another country might have more medals than us at the olympics!  How will the next Sydney Crosby thrive if we do not put ourselves into massive debt to provide special facilities for sports?   “Who cares?” is what I say.

What I see in a good amount of even semi-elite sports is not pretty.   The level of single-minded “win at all costs and blame the ref when you don’t” attitude in many sports is astounding.   The things that mattered to the originators of the Olympic Games concept have been pushed aside.   Remember words and phrases like “sportsmanship?” “sound mind, sound body?” and how sports was tied to education?   That seems all out the window in favor of money-making.   I don’t believe in sports anymore.  It used to be an opportunity to think about myself as a better person, now it is a crass illusion that parallels rather than promotes “success.”    There are exceptions, where sports figures are respected for both mind and body (Steve Nash comes to mind), but that’s the exception and not the rule in my view.

“We Need More Funding For. . .”

Just the general premise that we will only solve problem x if our governments make problem x a priority and provide it with funds is just not going to resonate strongly for me.   I believe in some of the work that John McKnight has done around asset-based community development, and agree with the general position that professionals invent problems and issues inside communities that they can solve and then use the community’s funds to solve those problems when the community had the ability to cope with those issues all along.

Here is a librarian example.  A librarian does a study on university students searching only to discover what is the most obvious thing:  university students are not the same as librarians!   That is, students do not automatically use boolean operators or advanced searches to find materials for their research.   Said librarian then uses this information to justify training sessions (ie. hire more librarians) so university students can become more like librarians.   The thing the librarian does not ponder is whether university students need to behave like librarians to be successful at their research; nor does he/she consider the impact of increase education costs (caused in part through funds spent on librarians) on that student’s capacity to learn how to research more effectively.

In short, I really dislike any movement  that blindly asks governments to give organizations more money.   I do not think professionals do it on purpose, but it is a really bad habit that I see over and over again.      Communities need resourcefulness from their not-for-profits, not funding.    And most importantly, communities need not-for-profits that shine the light on what communities already do well, so they can encourage these behaviors.

Well, that’s my list of things I am going to conciously not spend anymore attention on.     What is your list of non-issues in your view?    Am I unfairly representing any of these issues?

I love Twitter.    It has taken over my passion for blogging (sorry people).    Our library has used it to promote Podcamps, Reading, The June 8th 9th Nova Scotia Election, and that’s just a start.   I also notice a wide range of people trying Twitter once or twice only to reject it because they do not understand it, it doesn’t work for their needs or they just do not want their persona “out there” into the public.

One important way to understand Twitter is that it is just a way to leverage a computer and/or the Internet for social interaction.   That’s right – Twitter is the “tool” and the World Wide Web or your computer is the actual service being offered.   Maybe an analogy will help?   A pot is for cooking, right?   Do you absolutely need a pot to cook?   No – you can cook in a variety of ways – microwave, open flame, barbeque etc etc etc.   The pot merely structures the cooking experience in such as way so that you can use a stove, a ladel, an open fire or whatnot for cooking in a certain (ultimately pleasing) fashion.   The point is that a pot is a tool, and it can work with a wide range of other tools to enhance the cooking experience even further.   The World Wide Web, then is the kitchen where 1) the cooking happens and 2) the wide range of tools are handy to make different kinds of cooking happen.

Twitter then, is only one utensil in a kitchen full of great cooking tools.   You ought to combine these tools to improve the way you diseminate and retrieve information.   Here are five things I like to combine with Twitter to help me do what I need to do effectively.

Bit.ly

• Bit.ly – Bit.ly is a link shortener, but with an added twist.  Take any bit.ly url and add a “+” to it and you can get stats on how many times the link you used were clicked.  For instance, I used the link ‘bit.ly/vmQHJ‘ to tell my Twitter stream about Andrew Baron (owner of Rocketboom)’s course that is happening at Humber College in Toronto.   Just add a + to that link and you get a nice page full of yummy statistics about how people received your Tweet.   Lovely and very very useful!

Tweetdeck

• Tweetdeck is a way to get all of your tweets to your desktop, organized according to your preferences.   Twitter searches can be called, groups of people can be queried, you can even filter out groups of people.   As someone with over 1500 followers, many of whom I follow back, Tweetdeck is a total lifesaver.

Friendfeed

• If you use Twitter, you might as well use friendfeed as well.   Friendfeed will pull in your Twitter statuses and let people comment, like, or otherwise continue the discussion about them.   The only caveat here is that if you only feed your twitter statuses to friendfeed, you are likely to get ignored after a while.

Twitter Search

• Twitter Search is an amazing tool, and deserves to be mentioned outside of the normal Twitter site.    When I use the advanced search feature, I can get a look at what people are saying about libraries within a 50 mile radius of my locale.    That is powerful data and a great way to learn more about your organization as well as have a speaking point for engaging customers about what services work for them or don’t.

Twitter Sheep

• Twitter Sheep is just another fun way to look at Twitter because it will take a Twitter search or the followers for a Twitter account and create a nice tag cloud from it.   For example, here is what Twitter thinks about the word “library” today.

There are countless tools that can leverage Twitter to make the World Wide Web a constantly cooler place to be.   What are your favorite uses for Twitter peripherals?

Thanks azrainman!

Today’s local paper had a toilet bowl on the cover.    A toilet bowl.    Yes, I know the article was about how the new Sewage Treatment plant in Halifax is done broke and won’t be fixed for a while.   But guess what?   We didn’t have a Sewage Treatment plant attached to the harbour a few years ago.   Neither did we have one in Dartmouth nor Herring Cove but we do now.    In short, this story is not about poop as the paper seems to want to frame that story, but about tax payers dollars and accountability.   The toilet bowl is just a ridiculous ploy to get my eyeballs on their front page.  (Aside:  the director of this project’s name is Brad Anguish, a name that must speak to the way he must feel over the way the media is treating this story.)   It also does not surprise me that the toilet graphic appears nowhere online.   Why?   because the Halifax blogger world would be screaming “lame” so fast it would create a repeat of the Juan Hurricane disaster in under 30 seconds.

Print media in general is in a sad state overall.   I don’t mean to pick on the Herald over this.   To be fair, sensationalism has been selling print since paper was invented.   The Metro , the replacement for the now defunct Daily News, is little more than a National Enquirer with a Sports page. The Coast has long since hosted Dan Savage’s column, Savage Love, to draw people to their often myopic and peninsula-centric left-wing biased content.   The Herald, though, is the Halifax news paper though.  I criticize them the most because this incidence of lameness hurts the most.   The toilet bowl picture is yet another step away from real news and two steps toward becoming a silly gossip rag.

It all makes me feel as if the print news industry that I loved so dearly has become likened to Cher, refusing to accept it’s age and slowly applying make-up, then cosmetic surgery, then outrageous outfits and barely-legal boyfriends to keep the public’s attention just that one decade longer.   Compare to the more classy Meryl Streep that just keeps using talent, grace to entertain and amaze her audiences.   Actually, this situation is worse, because it’s almost as if Meryl Streep in a moment of sad desperation decided that being Cher was the best way to carry her career into the future.   

In the end, this is not a Chronicle Herald problem, or even a print media problem – it’s a community news problem.   People who do not have regular access to computers should not be fed this tripe, while those with computers and social media savvy end up being the ones who get the real news – from blogs, from Twitter, on Facebook, from news sources that understand the Internet and syndicated through RSS services like Google Reader or Bloglines.   A world where most of the world is mired in Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears and Fox News, while some of the world is mired in Rocketboom, and localized Twitter searches is not one that I would like to live in.   

What are the solutions?    Here’s what I have to offer, some library-related, some just people related:

• The world needs more podcamps that think outside the fishbowl.    Podcamps are about social media folk being understood, but it’s also about regular community understanding.    One of the most significant things I took away from Andrew Baron’s keynote last January was that people need opportunities to engage online communities in meaningful ways, instead of just looking at it through a window in their own room.   The analogy that Andrew used was that if I was in North Korea, I would only truly be able to say I understood the people of that country if I was able to have conversations, eat their food, play their games etc.    It would be folly to try and understand them from my hotel room looking outside the window.
• Newspapers need to find effective ways to get their archives out to the public (even for pay), so they can understand paper/print’s role in preserving history.    All these Web 2.0 services can offer no guarantee that what we write today will be around 10 years from now.    Just think about how you’d feel right now if you had put all your video content on Google Video which will not be operating for much longer.
• Good writing is no longer enough.   Technology makes all media (print, images, sound, video/animation) fairly easy to create and distribute.   Good journalism in the 21st century is multidisciplinary.   More than that, journalists cannot get away with writing news that shows zero understanding of online culture, norms etc.    Good journalistic instinct requires a great understanding of online culture.
• For libraries, the literacy divide and the digital divide are interconnected.   You cannot promote basic literacy if you cannot promote the benefits of basic computing.   They go hand-in-hand.
• Libraries cannot do this alone.    Like the way libraries encourage parents to read to children, libraries ought to be promoting why sons, daughters and friends should be helping their parents/friends get an email account, set up RSS feeds, do conference calls with Skype, and navigate their way through Facebook’s privacy settings.    Online communication is now a family and friends thing.
• Businesses, Governments and Non-profits need to think about the parameters through which they will encourage their staff to blog, engage social networks and the like.   IBM’s social computing guidelines lead the way in my view, but each organization has different needs and concerns regarding how social media impacts productivity, privacy, marketing strategy, branding, and customer service (etc etc etc).

The bottom line is that the public both wants and deserves excellent journalism; they do not care what package the information comes in.    If the ROI of doing print media means that we are going to have toilet bowl news in our face, then the world needs to re-think what print media means for us.

Presentations are not easy to do well even if you are a designer or professional speaker.   Understanding your audience, having a catchy topic, being loud enough to be heard are all things that require practice.    Designers and professional speakers have the bonus of experience (and pre-set slides) on their side – you probably do not have any of the above.

After the Computers in Libraries conference, I got to see all kinds of styles of presentation.   There is one style that always stands out, no matter what.   I like to call it the “Scatter-Drone.”   That is the presentation that has 50 bullet points scattered on every slide with a long-winded drone of a voice wavering in the air saying something, but nobody really knows what because catatonia has already taken over.

There are simple things you can do to prevent being a total bomb in your presentation, though.   Here is one step-by-step process you can use to create a half-decent 15 minute presentation out of your typical Scatter-Drone.

What Do You Have to Say?

1. Create 12 blank slides using your favorite presentation software.   
2. The last slide should say “questions” or have a nice question mark graphic on it.
3. The second slide should provide an agenda consisting of three sections.   Nice if you can offer a “promise” – something that you can assure will be worth taking away from your presentation.
4. The third slide will offer three “big picture” points — you will repeat these things three times throughout your presentation.
5. Fill in the rest of the slides with as many bullet points as you want.

How Will Your Audience Understand You?

1. Print off your presentation as is.   Yes, it does stink right now – now you must fix it for your audience.
2. Think of a single word or phrase that describes each slide (remember, each probably has 5-6 bullet points).   Go to Flickr’s Creative Commons and use that word or phrase to find a picture that will suit the bullet points you have on your slide.   Replace the bullet points with your nice picture.   As you put your pictures onto the slides, take a look at how other people do their presentations and adapt accordingly.   I appreciate that you are not a designer – but grab some ideas from people who are.
3. Use the original presentation print-off (the one with all the bullet points) as your notes and the slide show with the pictures is what your audience will see.   Now you can just “read your slides” without anyone ever knowing that that’s what you are doing.

Feeling Confident and Prepared

1. Start by acquainting yourself with the audience somehow.   Poll them.   Ask them what they expect from you.   Crack a joke to test their level of seriousness.   Maybe even throw them a bit, by offering an alternative presentation style.
2. Give yourself an idea of where you are going to repeat your three key messages.    You should do this somewhere in the middle (slide 7 or and again near the end (10 or 11).

That’s it.   A generic procedure for creating a half-decent presenation if you are not a designer or professional speaker.    It’s not too difficult to get a passing grade from your audience.   Remember, the audience *wants* you to present well and share your ideas in a meaningful way.   It just takes a bit of preparation, and some way of getting feedback from your audience.

Over the next few months, I will be doing a little bit of presenting at various conferences and events.   Here is the list:

Wednesday April 1st, at Computers in Libraries Conference, Washington D.C.:   CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba

Alongside one of my library heroes, John Blyberg, I will be presenting on ideas and features around CMSs in the world.    I will be talking about why we originally chose Joomla as our content management system and then switched to ModX, while John will be showing off Drupal.     I only have a small amount of time, so I’ll highlight my favorite feature of ModX (template variables) and just provide broad stroke overviews of the advantages.   The bigger context is what should you be thinking about when choosing a content management system for your web presence or intranet.

Monday April 6 at the Halifax Infirmary Boardroom ( it’s sold out!):  Why Online Community-Building Matters to Health Care and Capital Health

This is a discussion about the current and potential uses of social media in Healthcare, especially in Halifax.   Dave Emmett, the guy who did the “What is Social Media?” presentation at Podcamp Halifax, is teaming up with me to show how people in Halifax are using neat tools like Twitter to engage community and what is being done pertaining to Community Healthcare as well.    Watch this space, because we might see if we can invite people in on the presentation virtually.

Monday May 25 at the CALL/ACBD Conference Westin Hotel, Halifax NS:  Making Some Room: Strategies that Turn New Staff into New Leadership

Using some skills I developed by engaging with folks from Envision Halifax, The Hub Halifax, Podcamp Halifax and others, I am going to facilitate a discussion about leadership in a world where a new generation is about to take over.   How can I speak to leadership and strategy without being Anthony Robbins?   Easy – I’m going to get the audience to do it for me by using an innovative methodology called “The Fishbowl Conversation.”   I will start off by laying down a few principles though – things like “Theory U” and the change process, but in the end, the solutions will come from the audience.

That’s my story these days.   Anyone going to be at any of the conferences?    Be sure to say “hello” if you are!

The Reader Website -- www.thereader.ca

A few colleagues of mine have released a blog for MPOW about reading called The Reader.

Kudos to David, Kristina, Maureen and Laurel for what looks like a fairly impressive blog so far (my name is up there only to put in a few bits of CSS here and there).