Rich's Random Thoughts

Prezi.com is a web application that allows you to create a map of your presentation in a mind map like style, and then when you present, you zoom around the map with ease.  For those who do not like the linear strait jacket that Power Point forces their presentation into, Prezi will be a breath of fresh air.

Converting an existing presentation, or creating a new one from scratch is not difficult after watching Prezi’s tutorial for new users.  I ended up converting a presentation I am giving next week on “Backing Up for Disaster” from PowerPoint to Prezi, and the results I think are impressive.

Not only is the navigation engaging, but it also allows the presenter to give the audience a better overview of the presentation up front (if he or she wants to), and allows the presenter to skip to different parts of the presentation with ease.  No more paging between slides to find the right one, you just have to zoom out, find the area you want to speak to, and then zoom in to it.

Here is a Google Apps version of my “Backup” presentation, and here is the Prezi version.  You be the judge of which one you’d rather sit through.

I spoke to a local Rotary club recently on topic of - Google vs. the Library: Research & Collaboration in the 21st Century. The group wanted to know if Google and the Internet would be putting our libraries out of business.  My answer?  Yes and No (see the link above for more details).

Yes, Google and the internet (specifically Wikipedia) have already put libraries out of the business of providing basic reference material.

No, Google and the internet will not put libraries out of the business of lending books in the short run.  More importantly, Libraries for the foreseeable future will the the primary conduit for most people to access high quality and expensive research databases like Pub Med and other walled off online journals.

One interesting factoid from the presentation: The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles and costs over $1,000 for a set of books. Wikipedia has over 3,000,000 articles and is completely free.  Wikipedia is 30 times larger than Britannica, and is widening it’s lead on a daily basis.

For now the Goliath vs. David battle is a draw

The British Museum and the BBC have teamed up to create a website that presents the world’s history via objects (in digital form of course) contained in the British Museum.  The site is called: A History of the World.  BBC Raido will be broadcasting shows that discuss items on the website and point people to the site in case they would like to explore further.  There will also be a CBBC 13 part series that will looks at relics that are part of the collection.

I’ve always thought that a big part of the future of both libraries and museums will be in digitizing the unique portions of their collections and then make those digital object available to the world.  What the BBC and the British museum have done, is create an excellent interface for people to browse their collection online, which make it much more accessible than it could ever be in a brick and mortar building.

I should probably get more involved in the digitization projects going on at the University of Victoria Libraries where I work!

What follows is an email I sent to a friend hopefully helping him to better understand how Google’s Page Rank system works, and how he can get his website on the first page of Google search resluts:

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

• The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
• The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
• The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

• Update you  website with current relevant content.
• Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  http://gmail.com
• You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
• Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!

If anyone is interested in doing some screen casting, but do not like the free web based program Screencast-o-matic, Techsmith is now giving away an older version of Camtasia Studio (it is one of the better screen cast programs around, with plenty of bells and whistles). For the download links and information, please go to the Downloadsquad website. It’s fun to play with and they say you can upgrade to the latest version for half price.

Below is the text of a letter that I emailed and mailed (first time I’ve sent anything other than cheques by regular mail in a long time), to Jim Prentice, Gary Lunn (my member of Parliament), and Prime Minister Harper. I was inspired by a BoingBoing post I read this morning.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
e-mail: HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

December, 8, 2007

Prime Minister Harper,

I have voted for the Conservative party my whole adult life, so I hope the rumours that my party is about to introduce a version of the DMCA in Canada is not true. I work in at the University of Victoria Library, so I know how important fair use is for creativity to flourish.

DRM systems do little to protect intellectual property right holders works, and criminalize fair use behavior that most people would consider reasonable. Most people are honest, and want to pay for the digital content they use. DRM makes those digital harder to transfer between devices, and encourages people to look for non illegal non DRM sources for digital content.

Thank-you for your time.

Rich McCue
1813 Penshurst Rd.
Victoria, BC
V8N 2N6

I saw a post on TechCrunch last week about this software, and I’ve finally got around to testing Screencast-o-matic, and I’m glad I did. Not only is the software free to use, but it is very easy and intuitive to use. In fact it is so easy that I’ve used the software to create a screen cast (or visual tutorial) to show you how it works.

As a systems administrator who also supports a number of end users on PC’s, I see how a tool like Screencast-o-matic could make my life easier by allowing me to quickly create a tutorial (like how to add a new printer). I can then post it on Google video, and the next time someone asks me how to add a printer, I simply send them a link to the video. You also have the option of hosting the screen cast on the Screencast-o-matic web site if you sign up for an account (no account is necessary to do screen casts though).

You also have the option of recording audio with your screen casts (or not). This can make the process of creating a screen cast much quicker, which is what is probably the most important feature for me. For people looking for full featured screen cast software, you’ll probably want to keep looking. Here are some of the things that Screencast-o-matic cannot currently do:

• Add labels to the screen cast.
• Visibly indicate when a button has been pressed.
• Bookmark different points in the screencast for fast forwarding

While not for everyone, Screencast-o-matic is great for people who want to try out screen casting. Commercial screen cast software pricing starts at about $400, so you can’t beat the price / performance ratio of Screencast-o-matic. The software is also cross platform, and will run on all Windows, Mac and Linux computers that have Java (or JVM) installed. One other good opensource option is CamStudio, but unfortunately it is windows only software.

It’s not just people who steal software who have to worry – when you buy a Microsoft product, you’re buying a lifetime of fear of audit and legal persecution. So says the new recruitment campaign by OpenOffice.org, "Get Legal – Get OpenOffice.org", launched today. Why pay $150 if you are a student, or $400 for everyone else for a word processor and spread sheet program? OpenOffice is free, and works just as well for 99% of the population!

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I saw this great article on Writing for Busy People by Ben Googer .  Here are the highlights:

Well, I can tell you that’s sage advice. It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people. Here are some examples:

• Making important points up front
• Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
• Writing clearly and succinctly
• No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
• Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
• Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

These days, I find I don’t have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there’s relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it’d be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".

Before you post, stop and think if you’ve written something in a way that’ll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.