10 SKills for Software Developers of the Future

Justin James submitted a post about possible preferred skills software developers will need in the next few years. It isn’t a far leap to realize that many of these skills will be necessary for librarians dealing with web and application design.

A Community Shyft?

A post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus section highlighted a new trend in online feed reading. Author Hurley Goodall raised the question as to whether new web services such as Shyfter, Twitter, Slashdot, or FriendFeed would ultimately lead to the demise of individually created blogs.

In the words of Stowe Boyd,

conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Where I would agree that for a certain segment of the online population, the “forum” format is a more immediate and comfortable way to communicate, but there is a bit of difference in an informational blog post and a conversational forum post. In truth I could easily see the channel working both ways as I may post forum conversations on my blog and my blog posts on a forum. The real key is keeping the pathways to the original author clear and easily traveled.

Eavesdropping on a sorely missed conference (CIL2008)

Being the tech-junkie I am, I was pleased to find some fellow library bloggers talking about the presentations they were attending at the Computers in Libraries 2008 conference. Though being there to hear with my own ears would be preferred, hearing the opinions of my colleagues is nearly as good.

Librarian in Black

• Computers in Libraries 2008: Widgets, Tools, & Doodads for Library Webmasters
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Technology Training for Library Staff: Creativity Works!
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Fast & Easy Site Tune-Ups
• Computers in Libraries 2008: User-Generated Content
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Web 2.0 Services for Small and Underfunded Libraries
• Computers in Libraries 2008: Lee Raine’s Opening Keynote

David Lee King

• All his posts so far from CIL2008

Tame The Web’s listing of CIL2008 posts

David Rothman’s One stop RSS feed list for CIL2008

LibraryWebHead’s Report on Day one

As I find more I will keep updating the post.

Free Web Conferencing Tool

Those who know me will attest that technology evangelism is something I tend to do without noticing anymore. This has bled into my personal life as I have found myself suggesting web tools to family members over Christmas dinner. (Ouch) But back in the professional realm I wanted to highlight a new development in some free, up to a point, communication tools.

In the past I may have mentioned Yugma, which is a free online web conferencing tool. Within a shared space users can chat, share documents, brainstorm, and even give control of their computer to a presenter. The only limitation was the somewhat clunky phone conferencing feature, which made setting up the voice chat often more time consuming than the meeting. The free version also only supported 10 users at a time, so the meetings needed to be small.

To solve some of the phone conferencing issues, Yugma is now a featured Skype Extra, on the free web application known as Skype. If you haven’t tried Skype, and you spend more time online than off, you may want to give it a go. This tool provides free online calling and a reasonable rate for calls to land lines. The Yugma addition sets up the possibility for a model featuring both services working in unison. This partnership could then help make meetings a bit easier when individuals must collaborate over large distances.

To me this seems like an easy solution for libraries with multiple branches, international campuses, or those who just work remotely. In a way, this model could also be used for many green initiatives as it cuts down on travel time, especially for meetings that require driving between locations. True it isn’t a substitute for a face to face meeting, but sometimes you have to make do with what you have.

Flickr takes a Picnik

From ETC. blog:

Flickr to partner with Picnik to provide more robust photo editing capabilities.  This sounds like a win/win endeavor to me.

If you haven’t heard of Picnik check out one of my earlier blog postings on just that topic.