It Was 20 Years Ago Today ...

No, wait. It was only about four years ago and it was 20 things, or something.  I've been noodling on the interweb now since 1995 (remember Mirsky's Worst of the Web?), reading articles in PC magazines, trying to find relevant sites.  I was navigating Yahoo! on a dumb terminal with ascii characters.  But I was determined!  I signed up for listservs, bulletin boards, you name it.  So, when our whole library attended that Drag You Kicking and Screaming Into Web 2.0 seminar (and, seeing the size of the conference room, headed right for the front and center table), I was all excited.  We were lucky (and still are) to have a director who encouraged us to do the 23 thangs that this blog was originally set up to chronicle.

And I may have gone a bit farther.  There was nothing on that list about Second Life, but I was so excited to see there was a library there (Thank a lot, Michael Stephens, for introducing me to that time-sucker) and, possibly, librarians, that I logged on 15 September of 2006.

Things are different now.  I'm still spread as thin as a 'possum on I-95, but slowly some of my regular sites have dried up.  Just recently Ning, where I hosted a ... ning on library programs for children went for the monetized model on me.  This was at a time when I no longer had the disposable income to support it as I did when I had to go pay on Flickr to support my burgeoning screen-shot habit.  And, besides, that pissed me off.  Then Vox collapsed - but offered to transfer hosting to TypePad.  Right after that, I received the message that Bloglines was quitting.

Bloglines was a mainstay of my Web 2.0 experience.  My daily cartoons were there, and all my blog subscriptions.  Bloglines was my Daily.  I am very, very sorry to see it close, but I guess "free" is a business model a tad ahead of its time. 

I am curious that this is happening at this particular point in time.  It's as if some loans have come due at about the same time and Ning opted to try to stay afloat while Vox and Bloglines threw in the towel. Vox was apparently under pressure from WordPress and Bloglines was done in by the ubiquitous and evil Google with the Google Reader.  I hate Google Reader.  Yes, Bloglines was often down, but I went there so often that I'd catch everything eventually.  And it was familiar, like a comfy old shoe.  That needed to be thrown away.  Oh well.

This is the End of an Era - and who will be next? Hmmmm?

Go Lijit!

Aside from blogging about the BlogHer conference, I decided to take a babystep toward giving a higher profile to my blogs. I can tweet about it, plurk about it, pownce on it ... and another idea that was given, was to link up with lijit.com and get an idea of how many people visit my blog and what they are actually reading. As far as I know, Julie (Hi, Julie!) is the only person (she's not, Hi, Tammy!) who reads this blog and she even leaves a comment now and then. This inclines me to read hers. But I'd really like to know, in a general sense, if there are any other people reading my blog, etc., but just not leaving comments.
I have information like this on Flickr, and I found it fascinating. I check it every morning. What photos were looked yesterday? How many times? Were they direct traffic? Did someone post my photo on their site? Dead useful info!
So I signed up for this lijit thing. Wheee! Take a look below!These are my ligit stats.
Ooo, a pie chart! Doncha just love those? There's a graph showing the number of hits my sites (the ones I've included) get every day (oooo!), the pie chart breaking it down into sources (how many googled? how many direct?), a list of the locations in the world that accessed my sites, and a handy map showing the viral spread of the marfnet! See the little dot off the coast of China? Who could that be? (Hi, Marleeeeeene!)
There is also a widget, the lijit "wijit," that will search a list of your included sites. No one has used that yet. I might at some point, when I've lost track of what I'm writing about where. This is embedded in my blogs.
Another really useful statistic is a list of popular search terms. What were they looking for when they found your site? Information like this will help me pander to the lowest common denominator - mwah-ha-haaaa! - and tailor future blogs to lure in the unsuspecting, people who really are looking for someone named Richard Hertz (Dr. Dick to the rest of us).
I really enjoy this tool! (Hee! I said "tool"!)

Pants On Fire

Live video feed in Second Life from the BlogHer '08 Conference in San Francisco. By the second day, the feed from the conference was much better and the closing session was only interrupted once. They promise to do even better next year

"But you promised, you say. You swore you were moving all this icky Second Life crap to another blog and we wouldn't have to see it anymore!"

Calm down, calm down - this isn't about SL (well, it is; but in for a penny, in for a pound). This is a report on the conference I attended which just happened to have herniated into SL. It was the BlogHer '08 conference for women bloggers. I have a blog (okay, I lie again, I've got about five ... or so ... I've lost track), I'm a woman (or perhaps I just play one in SL), SL attendance was FREE (and we know how I love that word) and I thought "what the hey!"

Panelists for the Blogging SL session and some of the attendees (note wheelchair accessibility).

In the beginning, we had some technical problems. The feed from the live conference ("live"? what's that?) in San Francisco kept cutting in and out. After the intro and keynote came the break-out sessions and there were some specially devised for SL. Over the course of two days I attended the Blogging and Second Life, Second Life and Security, and Using Second Life for Good (not Evil) sessions. Just like any other session in Real Life (tm) there is a panel that discusses their experiences and then the attendees were allowed to make comments and ask questions. In most cases, the panel operated in voice chat (except when their transmission was icky and then they did text chat). To keep things reasonably organized, the attendees used text chat. In one of the sessions, someone transcribed the voice chat for the technologically impaired. I wish someone had done that at one of the Info Island conferences when I didn't have voice chat when I was unable to hear anything. I was working directing people to the correct sessions and had hoped to be able to attend sessions, but that was verklapft. Now my system can handle voice chat. Whee!

While Lludmila is all dressed up and professional-looking, her typist is in sweatpants, unwashed hair, and probably picking her nose.

While at the conference, I mini-blogged the experience on Twitter, annoying all the people who follow my tweets, no doubt. I noticed Lexi did this all the time and it annoyed me until I saw how useful it was. Yes, I could take notes and I could probably share them, but I was able to share bites immediately with my "posse" and get comments back from some of them, one who had already tried an internet tool I mentioned in a tweet.

This is a wonderful tool that our State Library should employ so that more librarians can attend conferences and workshops. There is no driving time or distance involved, a much smaller carbon footprint, no parking, no overnight stays, no per diem. Of course it is always better to be there live, but this not only saves time and money, it's just dead cool.

I will add more info on the conference on my SL blog so that those who are interested (ha!) can read it there and the rest of y'all are off the hook.