New RSS Feed, New Blog, New Domain: davidleeking.com

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update: Looking for me? Go to http://www.davidleeking.com

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I have an assignment for all you readers: PLEASE go to your feed reader RIGHT NOW, and switch to my new feed: http://www.davidleeking.com/feed/

Why? I now have a new website: http://www.davidleeking.com/

Some of you will remember that I promised to do this ... well, I finally did. Yippie!

I will blog about all the same stuff I always blog about - just under my own domain name rather than Blogger's. So - stop what you're doing right now ... come on ... drop my feed into your aggregator, feed reader, etc...

Also - to everyone using the Feedburner feed - I'll switch that later today, so you shouldn't have to do anything on your end.

Thanks for reading!

The Future of Tag Clouds

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update: Looking for me? Go to http://www.davidleeking.com

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This is an interesting article about the future of tag clouds (written by Joe Lamantia). Here's how Joe sees tag clouds developing over the next 18 months:

1. More people will recognize them and understand what they do (ok, that one's a no-brainer)
   
2. more support for "cloud consumers" to meet context needs (interesting...)
3. attached controls or features and functionality that allow cloud consumers to directly change the context, content, and presentation of clouds. (wow)

That third point is pretty interesting. Right now, tag clouds are basicallly a visual way to search for a tag - and to see what tags are either popular or heavily used at a site. But the idea of being able to manipulate the content and the presentation of a tag cloud? I can see some pretty useful stuff coming out of that.

Reading on... Joe says "In the future, expect to see specialized tag cloud implementations
emerge for a tremendous variety of semantic fields and focuses:
celebrities, cars, properties or homes for sale, hotels and travel
destinations, products, sports teams, media of all types, political
campaigns, financial markets, brands, etc."

OK - I look at Realtor.com alot (actually, my wife does more...). It has a normal, "traditional" search interface - you know - click a city, click the number of bedrooms, etc, etc. Integrating a tag coud-like search feature would be so much cooler, and probably more usable, too. For example - realtor.com allows you to "expand the search" for a house in a particular area by providing surrounding suburbs/towns to include. But if you're not familiar with that area, you don't really know what to choose. If you created a tag cloud feature to that search, you'd be able to see what most other people chose (assuming the tag cloud is based on popularity). Most likely, that popular choice is also a better area of town.

Now - think what you could do to our library services using tag clouds. Especially in our library catalogs! And not just on the end-user side, either. I'm thinking of a collection development librarian wondering which subject areas are the most popular. Instead of having to run a report and crunch some numbers, all the librarian would have to do is take a glance at the visually larger tags - then get more info if he/she needed it.

Hmm... I wonder what else would/could be useful in a tag cloud arrangement?

PDAs in the Classroom

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update: Looking for me? Go to http://www.davidleeking.com

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I saw this article a few days ago, and thought I'd share... Basically, the article discusses a Kansas City-area middle school that is experimenting with PDAs - as in, 600 PDAs (the school district spent about $180,000).

Their goal? To prepare their students for the 21st century! The article actually says this: "Many educators think that preparing students for the 21st century goes beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic - students must be technologically literate."

How cool is that? A public school actually teaching kids skills that they'll need TOMORROW - rather than skills they'd need today, or yesterday. I applaud them!

Congrats, Michael!

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update: Looking for me? Go to http://www.davidleeking.com

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Michael Stephens rocks. Now he's going to teach others to rock, too.

WordPress Installation on a local computer

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update: Looking for me? Go to http://www.davidleeking.com

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UrbanGiraffe rocks! I just installed WordPress on my laptop (took me MUCH longer than five minutes, but what the hey - I haven't a clue as to what I'm doing).

My ultimate goal is to figure out how to create my own WordPress theme - and installing WordPress was an amazing good way to start. Now I can hack away knowing I'm not really going to break anything.

So if you want to play around with WordPress or with themes, check this guy's tutorials out.

Notes from the "Designing Library Experiences for Users" Webcast

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I just finished listening to the Blended Librarian Live Webcast: Designing Library Experiences For Users. Aradhana Goel, Senior Information Designer at Maya Design, gave the webcast. It was good! I'd recommend y'all to listen to one sometime - they do a good job.

I took some notes during the webcast - here they are:

Wow - over 90 people/sites logged in - that's a large webcast!

Talking about the library's bookdrop - "The bookdrop is hidden/not prominent at all - this is pretty much the state of this library. Everything was a mystery at first and it begins to make sense after about 1 hr."

thought... what's hidden or a mystery about your technology? Your website, your public PCs? What can you make clearer to your users? />
Described a catalog search and explained how difficult it was to use.

"library jargon had permeated the space"

digital is part of the experience - there's also physical experience, interaction experience (both digital and physical interactions), etc.

Four components of the library experience:
1. users
2. organizers
3. materials/activities
4. Use/Participate

They focused on 9 core personas 9 (ie., non-user, searcher, active learner, teen, etc... ) and worked through "Use Scenarios," or user experience timelines, for each persona. It was sort of a "day in the life of a user."

Then they looked at breakpoints (bad stuff that happened)
during each Use Scenario to find patterns... things like like disorientation, catalog confusion, jargon, next steps,
etc. Then they figured out solutions to those problems.

"An experience really starts when the scenario persona gets up in the morning and decides they want to read..."

Other interesting points/quotes:

• "The user's journey does not end at finding material..."
• "the end of every customer journey should be the beginning of a new one..."
• classification scheme includes action oriented signage - one physical sign changed from Reference Desk to Ask a Librarian
• The sign also included "what I can do for you" types of snippets, like Find Information, Borrow Books, etc...
• Emphasized having consistent language in both the physical and the digital space

That's all - hope you find it useful!