Ubiquity in Name and Practice

Mozilla announced yesterday a very exciting new project called Ubiquity. It's in it's first public beta release and is available as a Firefox add-in.

Ubiquity allows you to interface with multiple web sites and applications without ever leaving the Firefox window where you're working. It has some of the functionality of Flock, but it seems much more usable and practical. Using keyboard shortcuts, you launch the interface and type commands like "map disneyland" or "define ostracize" and, using tools you've pre-configured (e.g., Mapquest and Dictionary.com), returns a result to inform you or to copy and paste into your work. There's a short video demo at the link above - check it out! It's mind bending!

Matt - Multiple Account Twitter Tweeting

If you use Twitter and have multiple accounts, such as, one for your departmental unit and one for your committee, etc., you can use "Matt" to post to more than one with a single tweet rather than logging into each one separately. You can find it at:

http://www.themattinator.com/

I spend time every day gleaning info about new technologies and tools that might be useful for our work and our users.  I'm going to start highlighting these on this blog.  Please feel free to contact me for additional info.  I will attempt to screen out scams, but, please don't take my referral as a recommendation.  I'm just sharing!

Today, I learned about bluraymods.com, who are offering a modification kit to turn a Panasonic multi-region DVD player into a multi-region Blu-ray and standard DVD player.  This is the first multi-region Blu-ray player available, as far as I know.  (source:  GeekBriefTV)

MacCloud is a print-on-demand service for DIY journal publishers.  It's currently in private beta, but, if it survives to general release, it could be useful for small-scale scholarly communication.  Not sure if such tools exist already for that purpose.  (source:  GeekBriefTV)

Privacy Issues

I think it would be interesting to explore options to some of the "free" tools we're testing.  For example, this blogging service is extremely useful in enhancing our discussion and analysis, and a tool like Pownce, which allows you to easily share files with selected groups of "friends," could be useful in sharing information or when collaborating on projects/documents.  However, we should be aware of the user profiling these sites are doing and the sale of the data they collect.  Maybe I'm feeling like it's becoming more important to behave like a willing consumer than like a good citizen (or have they become the same?), but I'd feel a lot more comfortable using these tools if they were running on our own servers or if we could find alternatives (at a cost, no doubt) that wouldn't lurk over our discussions.  (Thanks to Ziba Zehdar for prompting this thought)

Today's 10 Things Discussion

I wanted to pass along another 10 Things experience that's less bibliocentric but still worth sharing.  

After I joined Facebook and added a number of current ILC student staff as friends, their networks included recently graduated ILC student staff who ended up "friending" me, and then their networks included more former ILC students who had graduated in the past, and they "friended" me, and before long, my group extended to students who had left more 6-8 years ago.  One who had graduated about 5 years ago used the connection to ask me for a letter of reference.  

I thought this was pretty cool.  I've had phone requests from former students in the past on rare occasion, but I can't help thinking this one wouldn't have happened if not for Facebook.   

Second, during the meeting, I mentioned that there are often options for some of these technologies and I used the example of iGoogle v Flock.  Both allow you to aggregate social networking sites into one window.  Carol asked about the difference between them, and, since I haven't compared them seriously, I said, "I don't know."  I can say, however, point out a few obvious differences (I'm really good at pointing out the obvious).  

Flock, a browser, is tied to the computer you're using.  If you move to another computer and want to use Flock, you will have to reconfigure it and possibly even install it if that's possible.  With iGoogle, a web site, you can connect and use it from almost any computer with an Internet connection.  Bob Johnson was able to jump up and show his iGoogle page on the computer in the room today, but he wouldn't have been able to show you his Flock configuration since it's not his computer (plus, it doesn't have Flock installed in the first place).

Also, there is one big difference between the two in security.  With Flock, you are logging into each social networking site yourself (or via locally-stored cookies) and any cross-site data transfer (like, dropping a photo from Flickr into a friend's Facebook) whereas with iGoogle, you are handing all your account access info to Google, and all your inter-site transfers go through Google.  

If I learn of more differences, I'll post them.

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