Bobbie Newman tagged me for this meme, and since it involves the pretty word clouds of Wordle, why would I not take the challenge? So, I wandered over to Project Gutenberg, took the text from one of my all-time favorite novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, plugged it into Wordle, and voila!
However, I’m going to be a stump and not tag anyone for this meme. Basically, if you feel like doing it, and it harms no one, go for it.
After playing with it a bit, I’ve decided Wordle is just plain neat. Being a fan of words and visual poetry, I love that you can create some really interesting visuals with words. Here’s the first one I created by importing my del.icio.us tags:
And here’s one I created using the entire text of this blog:
You can change the color scheme, the font, the way the word cloud lays out, and more. The only downsides: you need to have the latest version of Java (OK, so that’s not really that big a deal), and as far as I can tell, the only way to save the images to your computer so far is by doing a screen capture. Still, this could be awfully addictive!
ALA Annual is going on in Anaheim, CA, and while I’m not there, I’m enjoying all the Twittering, Flickring and blogging. The coolest thing? Seeing this:
Somebody gave happy mutant author and blogger Cory Doctorow a Library Society of the World ribbon to wear! How wicked is that! (I devoured his most recent novel, Little Brother, in two days. I couldn’t put it down. Loved it.)
Also, the Library Society of the World team won the California Dreaming contest at ALA. Congratulations to my LSW friends who participated in the contest. I have a big ol’ grin on my face because of you guys!
(This post is very, very similar to a post by my pal Steve Lawson. I make no excuses or apologies for that.)
Two people have told me that my last couple of posts have come through Google Reader with spam links cluttering the post. I have no idea why this would happen or what to do about it. If anyone else is seeing this, please let me know. And if you know how to solve the problem, please let me know that, too. (I use Bloglines, and my feeds have come through fine for me.)
Update: The spam didn’t show up in Bloglines, but it was there in the posts. Not this post, but the two previous. I could see the spam when I viewed the page source. I deleted it from both posts. How did it get there? I don’t know. How do I keep it from happening again? No clue.
Royce Kitts, the mad scientist of Kansas libraries, has started a new blog for the Kansas Library Association, and he’s looking for contributors. I’ve signed up (although I’m not a KLA member…for now), and if you’re a Kansas librarian, I encourage you to get in touch with Royce and get signed up to blog. Get on the bus!
It’s been almost a month since I last posted here (and I said I intended to post more, ha ha!), but the fact is, I’ve been feeling…well, bored with Libraryland. I still love libraries, I still love being a librarian, but I don’t have anything to say about libraries or librarians.
So, don’t expect to see much posting until I get all fired up about something. In the meantime, if you’d care to, leave me a comment telling me what’s getting you all excited or angry or ecstatic about libraries. Or, hell, leave a comment about what’s getting you all excited or angry or ecstatic about anything.
I haven’t posted here in a while. Computers in Libraries and KLA really got me fired up, but I’ve since been very busy with work and my personal life. I’m hoping that despite any continuing business, I’ll be posting more from now on.
One of the things I’ve been busy with is preparing for a presentation I gave this morning on Web 2.0 for the Mid-America chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. (Thanks to David Lee King for recommending me for this gig.) I spoke to around 20 people for about 45 minutes (leaving time at the end for questions) on a basic look at what Web 2.0 is, why using Web 2.0 tools might be a good idea, what some cheap or free and relatively easy to use Web2.0 tools are, and some possible issues with Web 2.0. I think the presentation went well. It wasn’t my usual audience (I’m used to babbling at librarians), but I felt comfortable, people laughed at the appropriate times, and nobody threw fruit or bagels at me.
I uploaded the Powerpoint to Slideshare, in case anyone wants to see what I showed while I rambled on.
At our Kansas Library Association conference presentation, an attendee asked a very good question: with all of this social networking on the internet, where the personal and the professional often blurs, what happens if a potential employer does an internet search on you and finds things that could be taken badly out of context or just outright makes them not want to hire you?
This has actually happened, hasn’t it? A potential employer finds your Facebook or MySpace page, or old blog posts, or Flickr photos, or what have you, and discovers that you’re a recovering alcoholic or a Fundamentalist Christian or a homosexual or an enthusiastic Doctor Who fan or a swinger or…well, pick something that’s perfectly legal but potentially off-putting or downright offensive to someone somewhere. And this hypothetical employer decides not to hire hypothetical you on the basis of this dug-up information. Should you do everything you can to make your online persona as professionally inoffensive as possible, to make sure this doesn’t happen? Should you lock anything potentially iffy away behind secure, friends-only barriers?
I really don’t have the right answer for you. I have what I think is the right answer for me.
So, I’ll come clean and out myself to the world. On something of a dare, I casually threw the phrase “hookers and blow” into our presentation at Computers in Libraries. And if you listen carefully during the video of the Computers in Libraries Pecha Kucha session, you can hear me yell it out from the audience. It also shows up in the caption of a picture taken of me at the conference. The phrase came from a joke I’d started in Twitter a few days before the conference, although it actually started as a joke between my wife and me. At any rate, by the end of the conference, I was joking that my professional career was over, thanks to my liberal use of the phrase at inappropriate times.
But here’s the thing: if a potential employer does an internet search and finds my professional name associated with the phrase “hookers and blow” and doesn’t bother to find out more of the context…I don’t want to work for them. If a potential employer does know the context and still doesn’t find it the least bit amusing…we won’t work well together, and it’s probably for the best if you don’t hire me.
In my life, I’ve done things I’m not proud of, things I’d do differently if I could. But I’m not going to hide who I am, I’m not going to censor my online expression, just to make sure I don’t put off any and all potential employers. There are people in this world I wouldn’t want to work with or associate with, and I’m not going to waste my time worrying about what they could find out about me that they wouldn’t like. I’ve got bigger yaks to fry.
I’ve just created a Library Society of the World page on Facebook. We’re everywhere!
Thanks to my conference sister Rikhei Harris, the Library Society of the World now has a group on LibraryThing. w00t!
