Greetings from Seattle

Hey! I got to play dance dance revolution and Guitar hero! Jenny Levine had the games set up at the ALA techsource booth. I went back more than once. As it turned out my old library school pal Mike Porter stopped by and we had a little mini reunion. on top of that I met Karen Schneider and David Lee King. All of them had just come from speaking engagements. I spent most of yesterday and today proselytizing to vendors about Video Round Table, our pre-conference (User Rights at Risk in Video and Film: Issues for Media Librarians) and our gala in Washington D.C. next June. Last night VRT sponsored a great program along with the Seattle public library and WETA-TV. We screened excerpts from a new documentary _Through Deaf Eyes_ which will premiere on public television March 21st. It was a great night. Not only were the excerpts really interesting, but it was the first time I had ever been in a room in which I was the minority hearing person!

ALA Midwinter

As I get ready to go to Seattle for the Midwinter meeting of ALA, I find that several librarian friends and colleagues have posted information about there whereabouts and schedules all over social networking sites. I have written a few of them but I have no idea whether they will check the messages within their different myspace, friendster, facebook accounts. I know that I will be too busy to check anything but my email. So, do you need to monitor all your contacts across all your profiles?

Flickr as a teaching tool

Buley Library Home Page
Originally uploaded by rch.

great idea!

openserving???

This comes via the Baby Boomer librarian blog written by Bill Drew. Tech Crunch reports that Wikia.com will host free wikis, storage space, server space, bandwidth, applications and computing power "Wikia Announces Free Wiki Hosting."
This free model for one or two Web services has so far proven to be sustainable, but I am skeptical about so many Web services that are potentially beyond the scope of adwords or banner ads being able to generate a profit. If hosting and bandwidth are free, and the user has control over the markup and scripts run in their site, how will the host be able to ensure that its users display advertising. Presumably advertising is the driver for revenue in this model. The article stats that the Wiki Developer only need link back to the Wikia home page and otherwise can control all ad inventory.