Catching up

Today has been a day for catching up. Not that I'm caught up on all my reading (ha ha ha, does that ever happen?), but at least I've plowed through my inbox.

Speaking of plowing, while I was in sunny CA accompanying a conference attendee (AGU is the ALA of geologists and oceanographers), visiting friends and going to yummy restaurants, we had two feet of snow. That's right. 2 FEET. But I missed most of it, as a lot had melted by the time I (finally) got home.

We met one of the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful airline representative on Christmas Eve Eve when we were socked in with snow at O'Hare. He was incredibly helpful when our late evening American Airlines flight from Chicago to Boston was cancelled. Have you had weather delays, in your holiday travel? Or wishing you could travel, instead of having to work the Reference Desk over the holidays?

Well to cheer you up, no matter what your fate..here are a few tasty, no-calorie morsels that have crossed my desk recently (in no particular order):

• Museums on Us. Free admission to selected museums, if you have a Bank of America card/account. I love this idea!! (Of course, free admission is admittedly less of a draw when you're already usually free.) But the main point is--someone in the museum community has partnered with a bank to give the consumer a great experience. It made me contemplate opening an account with them, just to get the free museum days.
• DIY PS3 supercomputer. Andy tells me you can build one for around US$ 4,000. Here's the recipe.
• smashLAB White Paper on Social Media. A nice guide for social media from the marketing perspective. It's from March 2008, so a bit dated but offers a solid-but-quick overview if you want the basics.

Hope you've been enjoying your snowy or sunny holidays.

Who's on twitter? Are you?

Last week Lorcan pointed to an interesting article [Even Gen X is aTwitter] with data about who’s using twitter. In addition to 57% being from California (really?) and 63% being male “…the age demographics of Twitterers show a dramatic shift. When the site became popular in early 2007, the majority of its visitors were 18-to-24-year-olds. Today the site's largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds.”

David Lee King recently posted on his blog about how many patrons are already using twitter and other social media tools. “Yes, people in your community are already connecting and engaging with others via social media tools,” says David, “Are you?”

Over the last several weeks at WebJunction we received a number of support requests about user inability to view some of our videos about the new platform (here's an example with others linked here). In exploring the reasons why, we realized that some of our users in libraries still work in libraries that block access to youtube, blip.tv and the like. Reasons cited include bandwidth for networks that are already stretched. What should we say about our own Internet use and access to our IT admins? Our security and privacy colleagues? Our funding councils and governments?

Very simply, we must continue to articulate our need for access to both social media and social tools in terms of relevance to our patrons and our community. Without our knowledge of and participation in the social spheres where our patrons engage with each other, where new content is published and knowledge emerges, we can't stay relevant. And without relevance, we won't be around.

Update: let me just add that I don't care about twitter in particular. It's just a tool and one of many examples of things we should be exploring.