Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Stating the obvious about Twitter

In a few hours this morning, Twitter has once again demonstrated why it has become almost invaluable to my daily working life.

Thanks Twitter!

Mapping Newspapers

Two useful tools mashing maps and newspapers have filtered across my screen this morning.

newspaper map
Via the always excellent, always entertaining Very Short List email comes newspaper map. In the words of VSL:
The Newspaper Map does exactly what it promises to do: It maps 10,000-plus newspapers all over the world and lets you browse through, and read, every one of them.

Newserve
For a more local (Australian) view on mapped news, try Newserve - one of the entries in Libraryhack 2011. The link is to a video demo. This link to the live version isn't working for me, but you might have better luck.

Newserve provides an easy-to-use search interface, interlacing the results on the map and a timeline. The ultimate goal of Newserve is to provide a single point of access to all newspaper resources in libraries of Australia - whether it be just catalogue information of the newspapers stored in the libraries of Australia or be the digitised newspaper collections. So far Newserve uses newspaper catalogue data of State Library of New South Wales and Trove digitised newspaper collection.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Ideas for 'blogging' every day of June

If you follow any blogs by Australian library workers you may have noticed this little activity - Blog Everyday of June.

I was kind of inspired to try it out, but didn't really feel like committing to it until I read Mal Booth's idea to share content each day, over a variety of online platforms. Now that interests me.

There are quite a few online places where I hang out, mostly watching and reading with not much participation and sharing. My aim for June is to change that around and create / share something for each day of June. Oh, and that's the other small distinction - I aim to create 30 days worth of content, not necessarily new content each day.

All of this coincides with another project - 30 Days of Creativity, a project being supported by ABC Pool.
From the 30 Days website:

30 Days of Creativity is a social initiative encouraging people to create stuff (anything) every day for 30 days in June.
Your brain is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it gets stronger.

So some of my so-called "blogging" aka content creation may be something physical and tangible, but I'll still try to share it somehow online.

Here goes!

(will edit/update this blog post to keep track)