New Favorite Thing: WhenIsGood

If you haven't discovered this handy-dandy tool yet, you must try it out. I discovered whenisgood thanks to Jay, our IT person at Great River.

Here's the scoop:

Instead of sending out an e-mail to all your committee members saying: we-need-to-meet-when- are-you-available-in-the-next-month you go to WhenIsGood ~ no password or signup needed! ~ and highlight on a calendar when you are available to meet. Then you use WIG's handy send feature to add in however many e-mail addresses you need to send out. 

Ta-da... each committee member receives a little calendar that they can highlight with their availability. You then can go in and check the calendar to see the best possible time to meet.

Slick!

In the event that you're working with a big enough group that no time will be good for everyone, WIG's calendar shows you how many people voted down specific time slots, and who voted them down. So then you can prioritize and pick the least bad time for your meeting.

And you can get all this accomplished in just a couple of e-mails instead of a blizzard of them.

SO COOL.

Thing 13.5: Survey Monkey to the Rescue!

Okay, where's Survey Monkey in the listing of 23 Things?

Surveymonkey.com is the coolest, most useful, fantabulous Internet tool. I might even like it better than google docs.

A couple of us are using SMky to do a follow up survey with branch managers about how we move new items in the collection. SMky provides lots of options for how to set up the survey, then does all the tabulating for you. It's so cool! And it is a huge time saver. Last year we surveyed branch managers, and it took two of us several hours to compile all the surveys and pretty it up so that it was presentable at a committee meeting. SMky does that for us. All we had to do was come up with the questions then enter them.

Easy-peasy!!

(Image found on Flickr, by floridapfe )

Things 13 - Online "Productivity" Tools

I sort of yawned through most of these tools. I am a list-maker, but I make my lists on little scraps of paper or on the backs of obsolete library-hour cards. Then I leave them scattered all over the house and later wonder where they are or, more likely, why whatever it was was important enough to write into a list. It's sort of messy but it works for me.

I've been using "my yahoo" for quite a while, and like the "everything on one page page" idea. I did like iGoogle, and since I've become so enamored with google-docs lately (I'm telling everyone), perhaps I'll look at changing to that.

One thing about Remember the Milk -- did you know that there's also a dontforgetthemilk.com. And I know this because I misplaced the scrap of paper with notes about Thing 13 and then attempted to rely on my memory. Dontforgetthemilk is not nearly so pretty as Rememberthemilk.com.

I looked at the calendars as well, but they didn't rock my world either. I adjusted my lifestyle several years ago so that I don't need a fancy, thorough, detailed calendar. I like my life that way, thank you very much. The freebie purse calendar that came in the mail is plenty for me.

I think one thing that comes across to me with the calendar, sticky notes, lists etc. is the overwhelming notion that I don't want to be that attached to a computer. Scraps of paper lists are messy and sometimes do get lost, and that does occasionally result in embarrassing moments of double-scheduling, but I'd rather have that than feel like I was one-limb short if I didn't have a computer and Internet access with me at the moment that I have a burst of inspiration.

So, thanks for introducing me to these lovelies. Glad they're cool and useful to some folks, but they don't do much for me.

Thing 11 -- Delicious

Onto another thing which, like so many other things, has led me on to so many other things that I could easily fiddle my day away at the keyboard and accomplish not one single thing on my list of many things to do on this absurdly cold Friday.

Okay, is anyone else out there COMPLETELY SICK OF WINTER YET? It is March 6, and this morning IT WAS 18 DEGREES BELOW ZERO... STANDING TEMPERATURE.

Sorry. Please forgive the shrieking. I'm just do damn sick of winter I can hardly focus on anything else. At the library we put up tropical decorations to try to take our minds off of the weather. Patrons get a laugh out of it, in between grumbles. We did this a couple of weeks ago, thinking it would be warmer by now. Now, we're cold and starting to get weary of the hula-skirt look. These things shouldn't happen.

So, anyway, back to Delicious. I like the idea of it, and am eager to spend more time getting comfortable with it. There have been many times that I've been either at home or work and wanted to get to a page that I had bookmarked on my computer at the other place. Delicious can help with that.

While putzing around Delicous I found a blog called "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," by Charlene Li and Jeff Bernoff. Their post for the day is called, "The Future of Social Networks: Social Networks will be like air." In other words, ubiquitous, and if we find ourselves without them for any amount of time we'll start gasping and feeling freakishly anxious. (Okay, I'm paraphrasing.)

Although I haven't a clue who Charlene Li is or whether she is someone I ought to be paying attention to, it does seem like a noteworthy article on a few points. Li suggests that five to ten years from now, "[W]e will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social'."

Fortunately, Li does point out that the technology needs to be ubiquitous. Like phone service, Internet service must be available everywhere. However, when will Internet access be as easily affordable as a telephone? I've yet to find an article that addresses this. Yes, just about anyone can purchase a phone, thanks to Walmartization (don't get me started). How long will it take for that to be translated to the Internet?

This also makes me think of an article I read a couple of weeks ago from Multi Channel news. The article, "Cable 3.0 Is Aiming to Co-Opt Web 2.0," speaks to emerging cable technologies that will bring social networking to our television sets. In this future, "a 'My TV' personalized screen... [will] combine a list of someone's favorite movies and TV channels with recommendations on videos to watch from friends and Internet content-like video blogs."

And right below this article, another one titled "Advanced Ads on Tap," telling us that "Google wants to take the ad-targeting capability that powers Internet ads and marry it with the 'emotion' provided by television advertising." It's coming soon, as some companies are "already selling interactive overlay ads to let viewers request more information from a sponsor."

Oh brave new world...

Thing 9 - Online Documents

Ooh. Now this is a Cool Thing.

My mind is just a-spinning with the possibilities on this one, for work and volunteer duties. I can easily think of dozens of applications for Google Docs. In fact, if I were working on this from work instead of home I'd be uploading a current project and inviting two other staff people to work on it with me. We've been doing the e-mail attachment thing. That suddenly feels so 15 minutes ago!

I didn't go into Zoho much beyond the intro "this is what we can do for you" pages. Google docs felt comfortable and intuitive.

I have to admit that one reason I didn't go into Zoho is that I simply don't want to have to keep track of another user name and password. It just gets ridiculous how many of these a person needs to come up with and remember in order to do anything.

Some of these productivity tools are really cool. Half the battle, I think, is just re-training ourselves to think that we might use an online tool. In April I and another staff person need to do a follow up survey to branch managers about a collection issue. Last year we sent out an e-mail and asked everyone to respond, then scribbled and tallied the results. This year, thanks to the 23 Things program, I had the craziest idea... ooh, maybe there's an on-line tool for this... ooh, there IS. It's called surveymonkey.com. I don't even know if survey monkey is mentioned in the 23 Things program, but it's cool and we're planning to use it. And let it tell us how many people answered in which ways.

And I can see Google Docs providing a similar -- and similarly time-saving -- service.

Thanks!

Thing 7 -- and that's it for the day.

I have successfully putzed away the better part of the day by looking at the Thing 7 tools. Now I'm supposed to take this information overload, sift, shuffle, collate, and bring forth something that sounds moderately intelligent? Ah, well, crazier things have happened.

Let's take it step by step.

E-mail. Where would we be without e-mail? It's brilliantly useful for communicating some things, but not nuance. I learned early on to never use an e-mail to communicate information that could be misinterpreted (of course, having learned this doesn't mean that I always remember). Person-to-person or phone will always be best for that.

And IM'ing, which I've done a few times, is even worse for losing contextual niceties. I would love to see GRRL offer some kind of IM reference. In that context, I think it's an amazingly good idea. However, I worry about branches being called upon to provide similar service. At our little branch we have only two staff people - myself and my very part time branch assistant - who answer patron questions. We're one of the slower branches in the system, but I still can't imagine doing any kind of competent job if I were asked to provide IM responses to patrons. First and foremost, we need to be getting out from behind our desk as often as possible. We need to be engaging the people who are in the library and finding out if they need reader's advisory suggestions, if they're finding what they need. We need to be building relationships and creating connections.

I did go onto the Google 23 Things group and post a reply to someone's comment about the 7th Thing. It was easy, but I don't know that I would be going back to check for new postings on that group if I was not knee-deep in the 23 Things project.

Text messaging... FWIW, and I readily admit that IANAE, but I find it obtuse, obscure and just plain ridiculous. IYKWIMAITYD (Lost? Try www.netlingo.com.) Are there ways that libraries could use it, such as holds and overdue notifications? Sure, that's a possibility, I suppose. But I really, really hate Text Messaging. IMHO.

Thing 3 and counting

Okay, bloglines has the potential to be very cool. Very user-friendly and easy to figure out, and that's a plus right away. Google left me perplexed (as it often does).

Again, I am dumbstruck by just how much is "out there" on the web. I can so easily see how a person could spend their life not having one... just peering squinty eyed at the screen and having a meltdown every time the power burps. I'm amazed by the sheer volume of creativity, rant and spectacle out there. And, I have to say, after having dosed myself with it, what I really want to do is go outside and get some fresh air.