Facebook

Interesting to read about the lawyers who managed to get an ACT court to agree to let them serve papers via Facebook. Apparently this is the first time as far as anyone knows and the story has had press coverage internationally as well as in Australia.

Australian court serves documents via Facebook

“Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook” Sydney Morning Herald 12th December 2008

Roll up mouse pad

What a great idea - found on PopGadget

Gift list for librarians

Gift Guide for Library and Book Lovers An Internet Hotlist on Gift Guide created by Library Advocate.

My favourites:

Book shelves
Books in Art
Bookmarks
Purses
and of course lots of lovely items on Etsy

My Dewey Decimal section

joanna's Dewey Decimal Section:

492 Afro-Asiatic languages; Semitic languages

joanna = 051441 = 051+441 = 492


Class:
400 Language


Contains:
Linguistics and language books.



What it says about you:
You value communication, even with people who are different from you. You like trying new things don't mind being exposed to unfamiliar territory. You get bored with routines that never change.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

I remember doing something like this at school to work out if I was compatible with particular boys.... Anyway have a go - it's fun and oddly true!!

Power to the people?

Evidently there are high hopes for social networking in the future. I have recently come across two blogs discussing whether social networking may replace (respectively) lawyers and 'some government functions'.

1. This topic has also been raised by the Gartner group, releasing a press release stating, Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions.

From eGov

2. Legal futurist Richard Susskind's sequel to his 1996 best-seller The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology (Oxford UP) will be published in December. The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford UP, December 2008) continues the author's focus on the effect of advances in information technology upon the law and legal practice, providing fresh perspectives and analysis of anticipated developments in the decade to come. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.

Among Suskind's predictions: (1) legal advice will be recycled by clients in social networking communities just like knowledge management recycles attorney work product internally and (2) client communities will push law firms to come together and form their own social networks to hold down costs by not reinventing the wheel.

From Law Librarian Blog

Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I just came across this post on Libraries Interact by Neerav. Great idea!
Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I was wondering if I could use Twitter for something useful.... I have also been reading about a debate happening in the US among Lawyers on the value of blogging and twittering, from the Legal Blog Watch

Research is changing.....

I am currently studying for a Certificate in Criminal Intelligence and this semester am doing a subject called Strategic Intelligence Practice. I was reading my study materials last night and was amazed at the all too familiar issues raised by the authors in regards to intelligence analysts. They are facing a challenge to retain their place in organisations due to access to the internet and open source intelligence materials. Educators are impressing on analysts the importance of adding value to their products by including recommendations in their assessments. There are several reasons why they have been reluctant to do this in the past and due to the increase in freely available material, policy makers and managers have started doing their own research and bypassing intelligence analysts.

They face the same dilemma as librarians, is it our job to answer client questions or provide access to sources only. Analysts know that forecasting is difficult to guarantee and so may prefer to provide facts and conclusions and stop short at supplying recommendations. We are often faced with a similar problem with clients asking a research query (often one they don't fully understand) and hoping we'll provide an answer rather than advise them on sources to consult.

It seems that intelligence analysts are striving to gain recognition as a profession, such as librarians (yes, we got a mention), lawyers and doctors have. Much of what they do is very similar to our research function. They liaise with clients within an organisation, gather information, data and intelligence (all of the usual problems with definitions apply) and organise that material into a strategic intelligence assessment or some other type of product or report. The tools, raw data and methods they work with may differ from ours but the imperitive to market themselves, increase their skills and gain recognition are very similar to ours.

MindMeister

I have been using Mindmeister to create diagrams (Futures Wheels to be exact) for my uni assignment and it is so easy and quite fun. I wonder if I could use it to make sense of all of the 'things', plans, to do lists and projects floating around in my head? I can't wait till I have finished studying this semester so I can play around with web 2.0 tools without feeling like I am wasting precious study time. It'll be great to get back to blogging, flickr etc

Roll on November and spring!!!

Tangler

I joined Tangler at Bibliothekia's suggestion and read the posts on the Library 2.0 Forum. I can see heaps of potential in this technology at home and at work. Again it depends on the uptake of library colleagues, friends and clients for its success.

I found a good one! eBookee It has lists of eBooks by subject, including law and even some tax texts. Lots of computer books - no suprise there!! The site links out to eBook sites like iFree

ATOLearning exercise:

1. Go to www.ebookee.com
2. Have a look at the ebooks that are available on the site (encyclopedias, classics)
3. Check out the 'free magazine subscriptions'
4. Read about Amazon's Kindle

Enjoy!!

Thing #47: New Web 2.0 site

I don't know if this classifies as web 2.0 but it is neat anyway and is designed to look like a lot of the sites that we have discovered through Learning 2.0/2.1. Service Central is a site where you log a job that you need a trades person, professional or provider for and they arrange for several services who are able to do the work in your area to contact you. It is a great time saver if it works, as you are not calling hundreds of numbers to find a company that does your size job, covers your area and has the time to do it. As far as I can see it covers Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney at least. It also has an option for sharing your experience and feedback with others so it fulfills that social networking criteria at least. I can see more and more services like this popping up as the MySpace generation grows up expecting better online access to everything. Now I know this isn't really work related so I will try to come up with something else with exercises that can be followed :-)

Thing #46: Review Things 11 - 14

Thing #11. LibraryThing. I still like this site and have my books displayed on my blog but haven't added to it for ages.

Thing #12. Rollyo. I don't remember this from the first time around and can't see much of a use for it at work. I have signed up though and will have a play around at home when I get a chance, just in case I am missing something!

Thing #13. Del.icio.us. I have added heaps of sites to my del.icio.us account and have started suggesting sites for the LIS account so that I can add a 'search bookmarks' button on my wiki pages. It is a pretty useful tool, especially with the options that tagging provides.

Thing #14. Technorati. I thought I had signed up for this but couldn't find any records for a password or logon so signed up again. Have yet to investigate it's potential but it may be easier to use for finding and receiving RSS Feeds hopefully.

Thing #46: Review Things 1 - 10

I think the zoho page with the review of 23 things is quite old and we started the 'things' after these 'updates' were written. So the changes to the services are not too relevant but it is useful to review all of the technologies we learnt and think about which ones I have used and which ones I had forgotten about.

Thing #3: Blogger. I am still blogging happily away and hope to soon be using it more often at work with the introduction of the ATO's eLibraryBlog.

Thing #5: Flickr. I was using flickr already and continue to use it to share photos with my friends, family and contacts. I am about to start a photography course so anticipate that it'll get a lot more use soon!

Thing #8: Blogglines. I set up a bloglines ages ago with RSS Feeds from friends blogs and library and art sites. To be honest I haven't looked at it for months. I think I had just too much stuff saved and also have similar services in iGoogle and Pageflakes.

Thing #9: Finding RSS. I checked Technorati today looking for Australian Law blogs to add to the LSB Blog blogroll. I will make a note to check out the others mentioned also to see if they find different content. I am going to try out Google Reader also as it is useful to have all of the tools under one umbrella to cut down on logins and passwords.

Thing #10: Generators.

Thing #45: Flowcharts & mindmaps

Had a play with the four different tools and settled on bubbl.us and gliffy. I think the flow chart site (gliffy.com) will be very useful at work and for Uni too. The mindmap application (bubbl.us.com) probably could have work uses but I am going to use it at home, as a way of brainstorming ideas and plans.

Thing #44: Nag yourself jott.com

I don't really see any benefit in this service. It is just yet another way of capturing info or appointments that adds more pressure on us to manage. I am going through the process of refining the systems, formats and places I store and keep my information and 'stuff' at the moment. It is going to make my life easier apparently :-)

Thing #42: Google Groups / Usenet

I finally got onto the library group Society.libraries.talk and have subscribed to receive e-mail alerts. I may sign up for others (if I find any useful photography or scooter groups) from home. I think I can link google groups to my iGoogle account somehow, so will try to do that from home too.

Thing # 39 Animoto - Videos

I have an account and have uploaded photos and one of their songs - couldn't listen to it so have no idea what it was. I will put one of my own songs on it later from my Mac. I saved my video to the side bar on my blog but I don't think it has worked, or maybe just takes a while to download?

Again lots of fun but takes a while and not sure of the benefits. A great tool for budding film makers!!

Thing #35 Mini or micro blogging

Have joined Twitter and posted an update. I am not sure that I will use it as it seems the type of thing only the y gen would use. I don't think any of my friends know about it or would be interested. I guess it could be useful to 'talk' at work as a national group, especially if we had a national reference desk.

Thing #32 Online file storage

I have gone into a queue to get access to Omnidrive but have registered for box.net. I uploaded my uni assignments and some pics of Vietnam. I can think of heaps of ways of using this at work!!

Thing #31 Plaxo

This appears to be similar to Facebook and MySpace but could be more useful for sharing articles, links and calenders with workmates. I like the look of it better than Facebook too! I'll have more fun with it later.....

Thing #29 Scrapblog

I LOVE it! Hours of fun. I could see some application for this at work for sharing photos on a blog for example. We have just received lots of photos of last week's ATO Litigation Forum and it would be fun to put them into a scrap blog with comments regarding speakers etc.

It is very time consuming and I couldn't do it from work as it wouldn't speak to my Flickr account etc.

Thing #27 - Photobucket

So far I still prefer Flickr, that may just be because I am more familiar with it and Photobucket is slow on our system..... It is good that you can add moving pictures, although I think Flickr is considering doing that too (to much opposition).

I tried to create a link to my photos but it doesn't appear to work...

Thing #26 Widgets

I have widgets at home on my Mac and also use iGoogle so am aware of the wonders of widgets. A lot of it becomes useless clutter but you end up keeping what you need and sometimes can find a gem. I thought this quote one was cute, but it remains to be seen what type of quotes they are ......

It would be great if we could create library widgets for staff to drag onto their desktops (catalogue, eLibrary etc)!

I searched for an AFL widget on yourminis and there is only US football :-(

Thing #25: Letterpop - newsletters

This looks fun for creating personal newsletters and would be great in some organisations. Letterpop

With our style guide and templates I don't suppose we could use it for work, outside the library anyway. It may have some application for eAlerts and SDI's but would probably be too difficult to maintain a list of subscribers.

Bibliophile newsletter

Thing #24 - Zamzar

We are able to access this site at work - after some work arounds! I have converted a word doc to pdf but the link they send you with the converted doc only lasts 1 day, not good if it's sent late on a Friday. Anyway, seems like a great way of converting files without messing around with software. One issue I have is that often the files I need to convert are marked 'in confidence' and it may not be appropriate to upload them to an external site.

I am very attached to the little chameleon/iguana's too Zamzar :-)

Learning 2.1

Thing 24: Zamzar - where do they get these names?? File conversion, sounds very useful.....

Can't open this one from work, I'll check it out on the weekend. Good to be back blogging though!

The next step

It looks like we will be starting Learning 2.1 soon so I thought I'd get back to blogging.

Wondering what's next..... It is good to see the Wiki and RSS feeds being used at work so successfully.