Monthly Archives: March 2010

Google’s Social Circle & Social Search May Not Violate Any Privacy Laws But It Gives Me The Creeps

March 30, 2010
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Google’s Social Circle & Social Search May Not Violate Any Privacy Laws But It Gives Me The Creeps

Yesterday I noticed something new in my google search Results from people in your social circle for google social search. It looked like this When I clicked on the link that said Results from people in your social circle for google social search it took me to a page that was just content from my Social Circle. I was a little disturbed by this. First I do not want search results from my Social Circle, whatever that means, I want it from everybody. Secondly, where are they getting this information? How did Google know who is in my Social Circle? So like a good little librarian I started digging. I went back to the page initial page and clicked on the link for My social circle. This took me too a page with a list of names that make up my Social Circle . There were a LOT of names on that list.  But how did they get there? There doesn’t seem to be a way to simply add or remove a person either. Google seems to know everywhere I’m connected to these people. Even places I didn’t know or remember I was connected with them. Frankly I’m creeped out. I do

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Stop Wasting Your Failures! Plan for Intelligent Failure

March 29, 2010
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It’s all fine and good to say learn from your failures, but how?  First you need to acknowledge that they will happen.  Especially right now in the current economy.  Rita McGrath notes: Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations. Then you plan for failure. Sim Sitkin talks about intelligent failure in his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses.” Intelligent failure? Yep.  Essentially planning your projects to be certain that you will learn something from them succeed or fail.  What do intelligent failures look like? They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business. McGrath adds two more in her article Are You Squandering

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Top Ten Links Week 12

March 28, 2010
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My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 3/19/2010 thru 3/25/2010 1. Youth in Nigeria leverage social media to organize and document massive rally against government via @dmlcentral: Twitter users Gbengasesan and Bubusn posted pictures of the march, and live footage of the event was available at ustream. The demonstration had an online presence unprecedented in the history of Nigerian protest: Facebook, Twitter, and Nigeria’s extensive blogging networks were all mobilized in support of the event (of particular note were the Facebook group Save Nigeriaand the demonstration organizers’ website Where is Yar’Adua?).Nigerian Curiosity even reported that the hashtag#enoughisenough was the number three trending topic on Twitter (though she pointed out that not all the tweets referred specifically to the demonstration in Abuja). Many in the online community expressed their support for the marchers. 2. Overdrive’s New Program for Visually Impaired Readers – the first thing I did after reading this is email my Overdrive rep and tell him we want to sign up! LEAP allows your library patrons to access and use Bookshare.org, a service limited to students.  The partnership between Overdrive and Bookshare will extend Bookshare services to patrons of libraries who provide Overdrive service to their patrons.  There is

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There is No Excuse for Bullies at Work (or Anywhere Else)

March 23, 2010
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There is No Excuse for Bullies at Work (or Anywhere Else)

Times are hard, we are all stressed out, the last thing we need to do is take it out on each other. Don’t worry I am not going to ask you to hold hands and sing kumbaya. I just want you to take a couple of minutes and think about how you treat others, and how others treat you.  Take some time to read this great Code of Conduct for Staff & Supervisors, every library should have one. If you are a manager it is your responsibility to prevent workplace bullying. If you are a recipient of bullying, you are not alone, take action.  If you are a witness to workplace bullying, you can do something about it. I know many people would say right now you should just be happy if you have a job.  But bullying is never ok.  Unfortunately bullies often get away with their behavior because it doesn’t qualify as a hostile work environment. According to Create a Bully-Free Workplace from on Harvard Business Review: A startling 37% of American workers — roughly 54 million people — have been bullied at work according to a 2007 survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute. The consequences of such bullying spreading to the targets’

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Top Ten Links Week 11

March 21, 2010
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Top Ten Links Week 11

My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 3/12/2010 thru 3/18/2010 1. Media Skills Integrated into Core Standards #transliteracy – A draft of K-12 standards put forth by the National Governor’s Association, as part of theCommon Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), integrates media skills as a key design consideration of these standards. 2. love this picture of the social media bandwagon - from @jimmy1712‘s blog.via @theREALwikimanv- even better it has a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license! 3. Excellent primer on covering FCC broadband plan and why it matters via @knightfdn @ibarguen: This is an issue that will touch just about every reader, viewer, listener and online user. After all, 35 percent of Americans (about 100 million people) do not have broadband access 4. FCC Proposes Digital Literacy Corps from the Libraries and Transliteracy blog For millions of Americans, libraries and other public computing centers are important venues for free Internet access. Libraries are established institutions where non-adopters know they can access the Internet, but community centers, employment offices, churches and other social service offices play increasingly important roles. Low-income Americans and racial and ethnic minorities, in particular, rely on public institutions and community access centers for Internet access. Over

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photo by Beth Tribe

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