If you’ve been reading this weblog for any amount of time at all, you know I tend to ramble on and on. I’ve semi-recently started using Twitter and I find it very interesting (because I’m limited to 140 characters — it’s not so easy for me to confine myself to that amount of space, but I find it works well for some topics (more newsy)).

The 12 second videos seem to be the video equivalent of a tweet. It’s an interesting space. I don’t know if anyone else is doing it (most of the stuff on YouTube is longer (and not that interesting to me)). I know Flickr has recently introduced short videos, but I’m not sure they’re tackling the same space. It seems like 12 Seconds is much more intentionally trying to be a video Twitter, whereas Flickr is just adding short videos as a (cool) afterthought.

I have to admit I’m more of a printed text boy. I don’t follow podcasts and I don’t look at YouTube very often. Yes, I listen to music, but when I want to digest something in a form other than music, I prefer to read about it. Tweets work well for me for this reason, but I’m not sure 12 second videos would. Still, there is something about it that interests me. I’ve signed up to get an invite (I have no idea how long this will take).

I don’t know what I’d be able to do with 12 seconds since I’m a rather slow thinker, but it might be fun to try. If I do give it a shot, I’ll post something here with a link. Perhaps I’m interested, in part, because of the strict time limitation. It seems like a spontaneous haiku… a stream of consciousness haiku? I guess it would be possible to give a great deal of thought to your 12 seconds and to produce a very polished video (some folks on the site seem to be doing this). I don’t think that’s how I’d use it though.

Though I’m not really that interested in video blogging, I might give it a try if/when I get an invite. Unrelated, I find the whole “invite” thing interesting (psychologically speaking), but that’s probably fodder for another post.

I’m not a huge fan of credit cards, but I like this level of customization. I’d like it even more if my bank card did this. Maybe, though, with a picture of my kids on my credit card, I’ll be less likely to use it (reminded I should be saving for college or something else less frivolous than most of my credit card expenditures).

I’m testing out this service at the moment and it seems to be struggling to get some of my Flickr images. Since the email just arrived perhaps they’re experiencing a lot of traffic at the moment. For those interested in experimenting (I don’t think you already need to have a card to see one of your Flickr images transposed), you might want to wait a bit.

I have been to a few interesting conferences (DLF Fall Forum in Charlottesville, VA and Access 2005 in Edmonton, Canada (and the METS day there)), but I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm (or is it time?) to write about them (though there were very interesting presentations at each — METS profiles, in particular, have been on my mind).

I don’t have a lot to say here now either… just one observation. Many bloggers write short snippets where they make a quick observation or point people to an interesting resource they’ve found on the web. I realized today, as I was unalogging something of interest, that Unalog really is a part of my worklog. Rather than writing brief entries here, I log them in Unalog (and, if I think about it like that, I’ve been blogging a lot (though I don’t often put ephemeral personal notes in my Unalog comments)).

Strangely (since I’ve written here before about how much I like Unalog), I haven’t made any attempt to integrate my link trail into this weblog. Many others have done it with their weblogs and Unalog (and|or) Del.icio.us links… but I haven’t. I haven’t, I think, because I have a reluctance to completely connect the dots (with this whole social software thing — I realize “connecting the dots” is what the whole social software thing is all about… everything being interconnected and interacting and all that).

Part of my reluctance to completely connect the dots is a desire to have a distinct personal and professional life. Ironically, I also have strong desire to “break down” my professional life and to be more informal in that context… but, there is still a line for me (which, for those who keep reading, I am about to cross (if I haven’t already)). Why I am still talking about this? I think this invisible line must have something to do with personality types. I’m a bit schizophrenic on this front (confessional to the point of absurdity, yet still fiercely private — recognizing this contradiction, my personal weblog has the subtitle: “Where the alter-ego of an introvert confronts the Yawning Void”).

Okay, so this has turned into another long rambling post where I do too much navel gazing (just the sort of thing I’ve tried to keep out of my worklog). This time, though, I’m going to let it through (at least temporarily until I get uber self-conscious about it and secretly delete it in the darkness of night — just kidding, uh-huh). Anyway, where is all this going and why is it in my worklog? It is not about programming, cataloging, digital libraries, or XML. It is about software, though, and how people use it (and how different people use it differently).

Now that I’ve taken this whole journey, I think a part of my retreat from this weblog has been related to my discussions lately about RDF and TMs (on this weblog and various mailing lists). There is a season for outward reaching and a time for inward reflection. I’ve found my own patterns are cyclical: expand and contract. I pushed out with some opinionated thoughts on those two topics and now have pulled inward to reflect a little about what I’ve said. Well, that and what I originally said about being busy with more sys admin’y things.

I’ll be back in a bit.

One of his links, O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0″, is the first piece I’ve read on “the Web 2.0″ that actually explains in plain text what that phrase might really mean (I’ve read many interpretations). There are two main points of interest to me: 1) that added value (a large part of what libraries do) is only as good as our ability to use it, and 2) that people are as important as ’smarter’ algorithms in going forward with Web development.

On a related note… I recently attended the NISO OpenURL/MXG workshop (I’m still trying to write up a summary… I’ve been a bit under the weather) and was very impressed with what David Walker at Cal State San Marcos has been doing (unfortunately, his web page doesn’t link to what he demoed (yet)). He is a great example of a library programmer working to address the issues raised by Dempsey and others. It is great (and inspiring) to see.

In the process, I discovered a link to an old Slashdot story on A9. What was more interesting than the A9 story itself, though, was a simple Firefox trick (mentioned in the /. comments) that I’d been unaware of up until now (or, if I ever was aware of it, I didn’t recognize its usefulness). It seems that by assigning a keyword to your Firefox bookmarks you can provide a quick and easy way to search sites on the web (well, sites that take a simple HTTP GET as their search initiator).

So, for instance, if you want to add a shortcut to search Google from your location bar, create a bookmark named Google Search with the URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s Next assign that bookmark the keyword ‘g’. This way you can type “g unalog” (without the quotes) in the location bar and Firefox will send that search to Google, returning to you the results of that search.

How very convenient. What I think is neater though is that I can search Unalog in the same way. Unalog takes a search in the form of: http://unalog.com/search?q= If you bookmark that, add a %s to the end of that URL, and assign the keyword ‘u’ to the Firefox bookmark, then you can search Unalog directly from within Firefox by typing “u google” into the location bar — this will search for links related to Google in the Unalog database.

Up until now I’ve been going to the Unalog site first and then searching. This saves me a big (unnecessary) step. What is also nice about Unalog (since I’m on the topic) is that I can do fast fielded searches as well. For example: “user:ksclarke AND (Gnome OR tag:swt)” returns a nice set of resources — I can limit by date, by bookmarker, by tag or title (see search hints for more options). Hooray for Unalog; hooray for Firefox!