I love ThinkGeek.com. It’s chock-full of great tee shirts, gadgets, toys and electronics that are sure to fill your geek heart with lust and envy. They seem to have first dibs on some great new technologies and they put them out there for the rest of us to buy. Reasonably priced, too.
This caught my eye today:
Who wouldn’t want a plant to post its status to Twitter so you know when to water it?
I know this sounds like a fun toy, but keep your eyes open. We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. Getting status updates delivered to our inboxes and cell phones in real time will be commonplace before long. So go ahead - be the first one at your office with a twittering plant! : )
Interested in a guided tour of Second Life? If you’ve never been in-world and want to see what it’s all about, or if you’re a seasoned pro and just want to see some new sights, join me tonight at the Fairport Public Library for a presentation on Second Life. We will tour some non-commercial areas including science, art and music as well as libraries, museums and universities.
Second Life is a free, online world created entirely by its inhabitants. Come explore this world and see how it is being used to create an interactive, 3D interface to the web.
Find out how easy it tis to join millions of people worldwide interacting, in real time, in this virtual space.
** You must register for this program by calling the library at 585-223-9091 or on the library website.
This free event takes place at the real (brick and mortar) Fairport Library on Wednesday, October 8 at 7 pm.
Location:
Fairport Public Library
1 Village Landing
Fairport, NY 14450
Linden Labs announced today the new Direct Slurl. This is fantastic news for people who are trying to encourage people to try Second Life and to help newbies have a pleasant experience so they come back.
Direct Slurl enables a location-based url that allows a newbie to teleport directly to a Second Life space without having to go to Help Island first. Help Island has been a turn-off for quite a while. There are less-than-polite avatars hanging around and harassing people in these newbie areas. Not a way to make a good impression. People were turned-off before they had a chance to see the vast world that Second Life has to offer.
Direct Slurl will still take a new user through the process of setting up an account, but now they can be immediately directed to someplace useful, like the Alliance Virtual Library archipelago where they will find friendly, helpful library staff to ensure their first trip into Second Life is not their last.
Here’s the Slurl for Info Island International, the main hub of the library region:
I caught this on Webmonkey yesterday and was blown away by this video production that Michael Wesch presented to the Library of Congress on June 23, 2008. Dr. Michael Wesch is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and is doing some very interesting work in the field of digital ethnography.
This was posted to Facebook recently by John McMullen. Here’s what caught my eye: “There are more than 300 million registered participants in non-game Social Virtual Worlds.” The quote comes from K Zero - a virtual worlds consultancy.
This YouTube has great video clips of a number of virtual worlds interspersed with fantastic quotes. Take seven minutes and check it out.
We continue to blur lines between real and not real, as well as human and non-human. Once we get people thinking of robots as people, will this make exploration of Mars as exciting as humans on the moon? How long before they make these things look like R2D2 and C3PO so we can actually care about them as we do people?
I think we’re going to see a lot more of this humanization of objects, along with the use of Second Life as a “You are There” type of platform. Once we have online social relationships with NASA’s equipment, along with it’s employees, it seems like the next logical step will be increased interest and funding. The fact that NASA is early with the use of this stuff - Second Life, social networking, creating relationships - makes me wonder about some things:
Are they just quick to jump on the opportunity?
Does NASA have a marketing team? Or just smart, fun employees?
Is this stuff working for them because deep down we still have romantic dreams of space?
Why aren’t other scientific organizations building friendships on social networking sites? (I haven’t found any on FB, although there are tons in SL.)
I blogged about LibraryThing a couple of years ago as a great tool for readers. But it’s also a great tool for libraries.
One of the very popular programs presented at the library where I work is a series called Brown Bag Book Reviews. Staff members review some of their latest finds while the audience snacks on cookies or eats their lunch. It’s a great way for patrons to pick up some new titles and authors, and they love to hear the reviews.
In our last web incarnation, I had put the lists of the books reviewed on our site - basically, a separate list for each date we did the reviews. Books were listed alphabetically by author - not an easy way to find something you’re looking for, but better than nothing as I worked on building a searchable database. The idea was to come up with a way for patrons who, for example, loved everything reviewed by Carol, to easily find all Carol’s titles. Or if they missed last January’s review program, they could sort the data to find everything reviewed that date.
It occurred to me recently that everything I was trying to put into the database (title, author, reviewer’s name, review date) was able to be done easily on LibraryThing, with no need for me to try to become a master at MySQL or PHP. I had one of those “D’oh!” moments.
I brought this up at a meeting and one of our new librarians enthusiastically jumped at the chance to create our Brown Bag LibraryThing catalog, and tagged the items for easy sorting.
Take a look at our catalog and see what we’ve all been reading. If your library maintains lists of titles for various things, this is a great way to put it out there for the public.
Why can’t buying everything be this easy? (Click on image to see detail more clearly.)
I went shopping for a holodeck today and the clarity of this product promotional sign made my job SO easy. The Holodeck Superstore on Kenora (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kenora/61/183/23) has taken the basic reference question and put it to use to assist their customers. Great demos, too!
