books that make you dumb?

Virgil Griffith, Caltech student and creator of Wikiscanner, has released a new web report, "Booksthatmakeyoudumb." He correlated the average SAT/ACT scores of more than 1300 US colleges and universities with the 10 most popular books listed on their Facebook pages. Fun to look at and see where your favorites lie.

Several books scored way higher than I would have expected. (Reminds me of the "WTF?" group on Shelfari.) Enjoy! [Found at lisnews and librarian.net]

aesthetically pleasing web stats

or should I say "web analytics"? I've blogged about these before, but thanks to infodoodads, I've found a newer, prettier, more comprehensive, one-stop (and still free!) service in Clicky. (Okay, so it's from a not-so-up-to-the-moment post, but I was waiting for Clicky to roll out their latest version over the weekend.) infodoodads does a nice job of describing Clicky's features, so I won't repeat it here.

Suffice it to say that Clicky has a clean, intuitive interface, and stats enough to satisfy inner librarians, tech geeks, web marketers and narcissist bloggers alike.

customizing Snap Shots

I've been playing around with Snap Shots for a few days, and I finally think I have it customized to my liking.

Snap Shots plugs in automatically to Blogger, so it truly is a "snap" to use, but it was adding Snap Shots to my del.icio.us cloud, my post footers, and everything, ad infinitum. It was not pretty. And, as a newbie to all of this, it took me some time on their site to find and decipher their FAQ.

Anyway, here's the q&d of how I customized Snap Shots for this blog:

1. Create an account and install on your site. (These directions were relatively straightforward - especially for Blogger, where everything was automated.)

2. Under advanced options, only check the boxes for:

• "Show Snap Shots Link Icon" (I have no problem with supporting their branding.)
• "Trigger Snap Shots on Link Icon Only" (That way your readers can choose whether to view the Snap Shot. Otherwise, if you have lots of links, it can be annoying. Sorry.)

3. Do NOT check the box for "Enable Snap Shots for External Links"

4. When you post and want to include a Snap Shot for a link, edit the html by inserting "class="snap_shots" between the "a" and the "href", like so:
a class="snap_shots" href="http://www.snap.com"

Voila!

Something (new?) for the toolkit

I was updating the RASL blog today and wanted to add RSS buttons. Found this cool button generator from TopRank Online Marketing. Just be careful which ones you choose - feedlounge, for one, appears to be obsolete. Also, the Google Reader button doesn't seem to be working from that site, but you can generate one quickly at Google here.

traffic stats and teachable moments

Okay, so you know how giddy I am over the traffic stats for my site? I now have hits from all over the globe, including somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa. lol

Anyway, my kids are getting a kick out of it, too. Statcounter includes a visitor map, which puts little clickable pushpins all over a map of the world with info on folks who visit your website. (Statcounter even includes a little image of the country's flag.) Last night, we saw that I had a hit in Kyrgyzstan. We then looked for it on our globe, and Googled it to find the correct pronunciation. (Turns out not too many folks agree on how to pronounce Krgyzstan.)

This would be great in the classroom. You'd need to do some viral marketing to get hits - ask people to email the link to their farthest friends/relatives, get people to include your link on their blog, etc. Great for teaching about social studies, geography, politics (which countries restrict online information and access), the spread of information (and potential misinformation) online, marketing, language, connectedness, ... and I'm sure there is more you can think of.

social cataloging

Someone from class just recommended GoodReads and invited others to join and share reading lists over this (rapidly-expiring) winter break. As much as I'd like to join in the fun, I've already taken my sister up on her invitation to join Shelfari - in spite of the fact that I was psyching myself up to LibraryThing.

How to choose?

By friends? Ideally, my online "book circle" would include my sister and my classmates and expand from there. Is there a solution to the conflicting sites that I don't know about? Blogging seems to transcend this obstacle, but not other social networking apps. I know people who have multiple, topic-specific blogs, or pages on both MySpace and Facebook, for example. But multiple bookshelves would be way too much work.

By features? I couldn't find a good, recent article comparing features. The best I could do was this 2006 blog article comparing Shelfari, LibraryThing and Gurulib (oh, great, there's another one to consider). And what about aNobii? Saw that one mentioned on Wikipedia under social cataloging.

By popularity? Is there a front runner among social cataloging sites? Shelfari and LibraryThing seem to stand out in my awareness.

By reputation? Is membership in one of these sites more becoming of a future librarian than the others? Is one more literary? (Or less so, if, say, one wanted to share a secret passion for romance paperbacks or cozies?) Or is one more hip, as in a Mac vs PC, "us and them" sort of thing?

Which site do you use? Why?

toolkit: how to use the web for research

http://www.internettutorials.net/

Extremely useful and usable info on web-based research. Credit: "All tutorials are maintained by Laura Cohen, Web Support Librarian, University at Albany, SUNY."

I especially like the page on choosing a search engine/directory: http://www.internettutorials.net/choose.html

Found at Gen Y Librarian's blog.

tools for the inner librarian - website management

Yesterday, I wondered aloud, how can i find out who links to my site? Not surprisingly, I found my answer in Google's Webmaster Tools. I found lots of cool links to my site - even in Dutch, Italian, and Chinese(?). (Sorry, I'm still amazed that anyone has seen my site outside of my professor and classmates.)

So far, my online toolkit is fairly limited:

• Google's Webmaster Tools
• StatCounter

I'm using the free/online versions of each. Neat stuff. And very cool that it is free for novices like me to play with.

What other tools are out there? I went back to PLCMC's 23 Things, and was surprised that website management tools were not included in their list for librarians to explore. Actually, web development is not included in the list at all. Some might not be surprised by this, but this inner librarian--having just completed a killer course in multimedia web development as part of my online MLIS program--was more than mildly surprised. Most libraries are on the web. Do they track their statistics? What software do they use? Is it included in their OPAC subscription? But what about their home page? Blog? Calendar? Do they know who is using their site and how they are using it? How many libraries take this information seriously and how do they make use of it?

So, now I'm curious... and, apparently spending my afternoon online. ;-)

how cool is this?

The website I did for my multimedia production class logged some online mileage. :-D

http://www.librarycrunch.com/ (scroll down to 12/17)

http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2007/12/index.html (scroll down to 12/21)

http://tldlblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/your-inner-librarian/

http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2007/12/explore_your_in.html

http://tametheweb.com/2007/12/explore_your_inner_librarian.htmlhttp://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2007/12/unleash-your-in.html

A little late, but I just put StatCounter on the site, to see if I get any traffic. I don't see a way to find out who links to my site on StatCounter. Am I missing it? Or is there another tool I need to use?