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slideshare and my presentation

Last Thursday I gave a presentation during the Aerospace & Defence Librarians Group seminar organised by Ben Chan at the Cilip HQ

The title of the day was the Library Information Survival Guide and there were some interesting sessions.

I was starting to panic the day before as half of my PowerPoint slides seem to have got damaged between home and work. So as well as using multiple memory sticks I also posted a copy of the presentation onto slideshare. This free service is like YouTube for presentations and includes my least favourite word of the Web 2.0 era ‘favorited’. The currently most favorited presentation on the site has had over 800,000 views which is impressive by any standards.

However what I liked about the service is that you can not only download presentations from the site as well as view them in medium size on the web, you can also run them in full screen mode. So all you need is a decent internet connection to provide a backup to the presenters worst nightmare of their memory stick failing.

Here is the link to my presentation about the Business & IP Centre.

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How flaky are your pages?

According to Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte, the gurus of all things web related via their net@nite show, the next big thing in social networking is sharing your home page.

Google already allows you to create a personalised home page using iGoogle which allows you to “Add stuff to your homepage”. These little windows of information are often referred to as widgets, and I have been using them for a while.

 

However Pageflakes goes one stage further and allows you to share and rate sets of ‘home pages’. I have already imported a brilliant page called Gadgets & Gizmos created by jennyzuko.

iGoogle

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The monkey cult destroying the temple of knowledge

I should point out that the title above is not my own work, but the subtitle what is likely to be the most controversial book on the Web 2.0 phenomena this year.

The book titled The Cult of the Amateur is by failed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen (who ironically has his own blog). In it he attacks the amateur nature of Web 2.0 developments such as blogs. According to Lawrence Lessig a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School who is one of the targets of the book, Keen;

“spends 200 pages attacking the rise of the “amateur” and the harm — economic, social, cultural and political — these amateurs will cause. Without “standards,” without “taste,” without “institutions” to “filter” good from bad, true from false, the Internet, Keen argues, is destined to destroy us.
…
But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.”

Lessig has gone as far as to create a Wiki, TheKeenReader in order to help readers detail the books errors.