Library Voice

Had a great ride with @cguder today. We got started at 6:30 this morning. We had originally planned to just ride the bike path, but we were feeling energetic and decided to mix it up a bit. This was the first time I have climbed up 682. It wasn’t a bad climb at all, and since it was so early in the morning, the traffic was minimal. We had most of the roads to ourselves, which was a real treat. The climb out of the bike path up Currier and Second Street was a pretty good climb, and got us both breathing pretty hard. Total mileage according to my bike computer was 17 miles, and the total ride time was 1 hour 15 minutes.

How to Follow The Tour De France Online from the Wired How-To Wiki.

The 2009 edition of the Tour de France — the premiere event on the pro cycling calendar and the oldest of the three grand tours — kicks off Saturday, July 4 with a short time trial in Monaco. If you’re lucky enough to live in France, Italy or Monaco, you can follow the three-week race from town to town in person. The rest of Europe can enjoy live coverage on the Eurosport network, and North Americans can watch daily reports on the cable network Versus.

American Lance Armstrong is racing again in 2009 after three years in retirement, so most everyone in the world can count on a nonstop barrage of Lance-related coverage from all the major news outlets.

But the Tour is about a whole lot more than Lance. Luckily, your best friend the internet has dozens of ways you can keep up with all the sprints, climbs, crashes and breakaways in the Grande Boucle without having to dig too deep.

Over the past couple of months I have received numerous calls about the Biz Wiki.  The callers,  emailers, and IMers all have something in common:  they all own a business or work at a business whose name or contact information is incorrect on the Biz Wiki.  I even got a call recently from some lady in Mississippi who kept getting calls at her home  because people thought she was in the recycling business.  All of these people said they got their information from the Biz Wiki.  Actually, the did get their information from a biz wiki, but it was not The Biz Wiki.  I don’t have information about individual companies in the Biz Wiki, as it is a site meant to promote useful business research sources.  The other wiki is a collection of company names, addresses, and other information.   (I’m not going to link to the other wiki here out of spite, as I don’t want to increase it’s page rankings.   Google it if you want to see it. The address has something like bizwiki and .com in it.   )  While the idea of using a wiki as a company directory is a good one, it’s not so good if a lot of the content is just plain wrong.  Wrong information is irritating, as are the frequent phone calls requesting that I fix the inaccuracies.   Folks are even more irritated when I very politely tell them they’ve got the wrong wiki, but a little visual literacy could have saved them a phone call.

If we compare the two sites, they are not very similar at all, save for the words “biz” and “wiki.” I seriously wish I had trademarked the name.

The cheap Biz Wiki knockoff

The original Biz Wiki

Folks are likely finding me by searching for Biz Wiki, and then they see a guy named “Chad” with lots of different ways to contact him.  They’re good at Googling, or so they think, and they think they’ve found the root of all the misinformation about their company.  Unfortunately, their sleuthing isn’t good enough, as somehow they can’t figure out that the two sites (see screenshots above) are not similar at all.  A quick look at the two sites ought to alert them that something is different with my contact information page and the other web site.  A simple look at the address bar would tell folks that the sites are in two different locations, but perhaps they don’t know to look in the address bar.    The people are kind of miffed when I p0litely tell them that I’m not the guy responsible for that site and I cannot correct the information there.  Many of them ask who I should contact, but the contact information of the other site is very sparse (a email form with no contact info whatsoever).

These are basic skills that librarians teach in information literacy and library instruction sessions.  We teach our students how to look for authority in a website, how to look at the address (edu, gov, org, com, etc.) , look for the author information, and even to look at the design.  Hopefully the things we’re teaching them are sticking, so they’ll be a bit more saavy consumers of web information.  While the phone calls and email about the other biz wiki are a bit annoying,  they do lend evidence to the fact that librarians are still important in the education process.  My theory is that the folks who called me never had a library instruction class in college, or perhaps they’re the one’s who didn’t listen very well.  I know I’ll be a bit more deliberate in my libray instruction sessions from now on, and hopefully I’ll save some poor chap some phone calls down the road.

It’s no secret that Lance Armstrong is riding the Tour de France this year. He’s been all over the media and the web. He’s got a huge following on Twitter, and he is getting tons of comments on his TDF training videos and training blog. So what’s the big deal about using video and twitter and other social tools? Well, if you’ve ever heard anything about the Tour de France, or pro cycling in general, you probably know that the support is not without controversy. Every year, riders are disqualified for blood doping or using banned substances. The race officials have started really cracking down in recent years, yet there are riders (or teams) who choose to cheat. I’ve been a follower of Lance on Twitter for quite some time, and I believe that he is using it, and other social tools, to be more transparent about his training, his life, his Livestrong organization, and his life in general. Below are a couple of really cool videos from his website which show the human side of Lance. In both cases, we have a world famous athlete talking with everyday folks while riding his bike. It’s often hard to think of athletes or celebrities as real, approachable people, but I think the videos below show the Lance is a person on a bike, not a machine.

I’ve written recently about the importance of putting pictures of staff on librarywebsites. I really think that social tools like online video can help to personalize the library website and make it more approachable. Video and pictures from staff members can make the library more welcoming by breaking down the barriers and fears that users may have of the organization. By showing the people behind the institution, libraries can make their sites, buildings, and services more accessible.

Take a look at the videos below.

A video of Lance riding a TDF training route with an 8 year old boy

A video of Lance talking with a lady from Ohio on the TDF route

Image from Athens Cycle Path website http://www.athenscyclepath.com/LocalplacestorideCABLE.html

This past Saturday morning I got out very early on my bike for a nice 26 mile ride with 1882 feet of climbing. I climbed one of the toughest hills in town, and I lived to tell about it.  If you’re interested in more about the ride, take a look at the most recent post from my bike blog.

Nielsen has recently published a report on How Teens Use Media.  From the executive summary, the report summarizes that teenagers are not as alien as many think they are.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around teenagers. The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false. To develop the best strategy around teens and media, start by challenging popular assumptions about teens. Don’t focus on the outliers, but on the macrolevel trends of media and preferences for the segment. The averages will show you that teens can often be reached by the same means as their parents. In this report, “How Teens Use Media,” we debunk the myths and give you the hard facts.

The report can be found in PDF here.

My mugshot on the Biz Wiki

I’ve always believed that librarians need to have their faces and names plastered all over library websites.  Having a face on the website gives patrons someone to recognize in the library, which in turn can help make the library more personal and less institutional.  Putting your face out there can also make for some interesting conversations.

Just yesterday I got an email from a faculty member who was needing some help locating some industry analyst reports. This particular faculty member was from another department that is outside of my business/economics subject area, so I didn’t know him at all.  I got the email late in the day, so I didn’t have time to finish the response to him.  However  I didn’t even need to send the email after all.

After work I took my boys to our church’s Vacation Bible School.  A little bit into the activities, a man walked up to me and said, “Hey, you’re Chad Boeninger (mispronounced, as usual), right?”.  It turns out that the man was the same faculty member who sent me the email three hours earlier.  I had recognized his name from somewhere, but could not place from where. The faculty member said he recognized me from my picture on the Biz Wiki.  We spent a few minutes talking about his research needs, and being able to talk face-to-face was a lot easier than exchanging emails.  I enjoyed my conversation with him, and when I see him at church or around campus, I’ll be sure to say “hi.”

The point here is obvious. Without my picture, this faculty member would not have known who I was.  My picture on the web enabled him to ID me in a lineup and he was able to initiate conversation. Athens is a pretty small town, and this sort of thing happens quite a bit.  Small town or not, your picture on your website can make you (and your site) a bit more approachable.

I love it when library school students stop by and chat. They usually reach me via the chat widget on the Business  Blog or via the chat widget on the Biz Wiki. The students usually have a few questions about using Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, or screencasts. Occasionally students will blog an analysis for some of the tools I’ve used, and it often gives me some good feedback on what I’m trying to do with the Business Blog and with the Biz Wiki. Library school affords you the opportunity to take a more scientific (and perhaps new) look at how things are done, so I appreciate the outsider looking in perspective.

In a recent post, Claudia analyzed the Business Blog and offered quite a few good comments. I thought I would take a few minutes to address a few of her comments at this time.  For my comments on Claudia’s awesome analysis, please see the post on my Business Blog.

Upon upgrading to WordPress 2.8, everything looked like it ran okay.  When I tried to log in, I had got an error the prohibited me from entering my WordPress Dashbord.  The error I got was:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in <path to my blog>/wp-includes/theme.php on line 387

I tried quite a few different things to get this fixed, such as disabling the plugins in PHPMyAdmin and even renaming the plugins directory itself.  I then got a wild idea to rename the themes directory to something like “themes_old”.  Upon doing that, my blog didn’t display (since there wasn’t a theme to display it) but I was able to access my Dashboard by typing in the URL.  I then created a new themese directory and uploaded a theme to try and everything worked.  My un-scientific conclusion from this is that the theme I was using , Connections Reloaded, was having some sort of issue with WordPress 2.8.  Everything seems to be working as it should now, although I now have to look for a new theme.