ShareThis

Here's a really neat free tool that works in conjunction with your browser to enable you to share on lots of different forums really easily.

ShareThis adds an icon, like the RSS feed icon, right in the address box of your browser. Clicking on it opens a list of various social networking links such at Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Delicious, etc. In just couple clicks you can share stuff in a variety of ways.

Social Media Revolution?

An interesting video referred on LM_NET by Lizanel Boman from Ryan Seacrest's page(!?).



Get on board or get off the track!

Eight Tips for Super Searching

Interesting article from PC Magazine, Eight Tips for Super Searching. I'm always looking for new search techniques and sharing them with kids and teachers as appropriate.
In other news, Microsoft has released it's new search engine, Bing. It's got some new features and a neat home page effect (could be distracting?).
I notice that in the above article they still refer to MS Live Search but the link is re-directed to Bing.

Shared via AddThis

Print Can Be Wrong Too!

Great little article on the SpeEdChange blog discusses how print media can be wrong too.

Britannica Widgets

Encyclopaedia Britannica has recently made a series of widgets available which can be embedded into a blog or website. They come in a variety of "flavors," e.g. U.S. Presidents, brain, dogs, philosophy, with more to come.

The widgets are dynamic and show a snippet of information about one of several topics under that particular heading. There is also a link to the article in Britannica itself. One caveat is that the version of Britannica used is the commercial version which is different from the version many schools and colleges use. But it's still a pretty nifty little series of tools.

I've embedded several into the library web pages. See, for example, the page on U.S. history which uses the U.S. Presidents widget.

For more info on the widgets and to watch a video about how easy it is to embed them in your site go to Brtiannica's Assets & Widgets page.

Try Bit.ly

Bit.ly is becoming the new standard for link shortening.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting posting about it here. "A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."

This is Bit.ly's link to the California School Libraries Work! wiki .

Embedding Video in a Blog

Well, I finally embedded a video in the library news blog, Library Leaves.

I took a one-minute clip at the Mock Senate yesterday with my little Panasonic library camera. It shows a student, Ian Kaufman, speaking about lowering the drinking age.

I use Picasa at home to manage my pictures and was able to save it there and then insert it using the video insertion tool on Blogger. It worked just fine.

Take a look. Now that I've done it once I may just do it again!