I’ve had the opportunity to do a few presentations on Web 2.0 and social media tools for libraries, and as always happens after presentations like these, people come up to me and ask me for recommendations for tools that I actually use. So without further delay, here’s a brief list of some web applications that I use — and like — in no particular order.

Remember the Milk – fiendishly simple to do and task management from a two-person team in Australia. You can enter tasks in plain English (i.e., “Meet Tris for Coffee on Friday at 2pm”), or use their new SmartAdd syntax that makes it easy to enter all your task details on one line. Have reminders sent to email, or to your mobile device, use the map to see where your tasks are located, and integrate RTM with Gmail or your Google Calendar.

How I use it: RTM helps me keep my life in order. I create tasks using SmartAdd syntax in the web app, sync the data with the RTM iPhone application, and using the Google Labs RTM feature, all my RTM tasks with due dates appear in my Google Calendar.

Posterous – what’s not to love about an application that makes email relevant again? Email anything – videos, photos, or audio files – to post@posterous.com, and Posterous makes a new website for you immediately. You don’t even need to create a log in if you don’t want to; as long as you send messages from the same address, Posterous will know where to store your content. Creating photo galleries is a snap with Posterous, and is in my opinion their best feature. If you attach multiple photos to a message, Posterous creates an attractive, clickable image gallery within your post (you can also choose to have images display inline instead of as a gallery).

How I use it: I send iPhone photos while I’m out and about, and Posterous, thanks to the ‘Autopost Anywhere’ feature, sends my photos to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed for me. What’s even more amazing is Posterous is smart enough to know that text-only posts shouldn’t be sent to Flickr.

CoTweet – CoTweet is a web platform that helps companies manage customer relations through Twitter. Yuu can manage up to six twitter accounts through a single login, easily monitor keywords and trending topics, and assign messages to colleagues within your organization.

How I use it: – I set up on duty notifications in CoTweet so that if someone sends a reply or direct message to the library’s Twitter account, I receive an instant email notification. This way I don’t have to devote hours to monitoring the library’s twitter feed, which makes it easier for me to complete other daily tasks. I haven’t been successful at getting the rest of the library’s Twitter team to use the platform, but I’m not giving up yet.

Jumpchart – Jumpchart is an online collaboration tool that provides simple website planning and wireframing. I love information architecture (nerd), but sometimes I find I can get easily lost when trying to visualize a complex page hierarchy or navigation scheme. I recently worked on a ‘brochureware’ site that had ballooned from a simple 5-page site to one that was nearing 50 pages. Thanks to Jumpchart, I was able to build a website preview that helped me visualize the content organization in such a way that I was quickly able to reduce the number of pages by half. If you have trouble grasping abstract navigation schemes, or if you have a client who just doesn’t get wireframes, try Jumpchart for your next project.

How I use it: When creating complex IA, I quickly build the skeleton of a site in Jumpchart, and use its drag and drop feature to reorganize content hierarchies.

What are some tools you’ve discovered lately that you just can’t do without?

Lovesong: Becoming a Jew by Julius Lester

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Purple prose takes away from what could be a unique conversion story. The part I was most interested in – Lester’s decision to convert, and the conversion process, only covered approximately a scant third of the book. Instead, Lester dedicated far too many pages on how he always felt like an outsider, how his estrangement from the Black community affected his world view, and and on life experiences that, while may have greatly informed his ultimate decision to convert, didn’t advance the narrative at all.



I’m hoping to discover other narratives by African American converts, because Lester’s work left me with more questions than answers.


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This isn’t my favorite Gaiman book. I’d even venture to say that it isn’t one of the better books Gaiman’s ever written (as much as it pains me to sasy so). Still, the book deserves a decent rating because of the wit, humanity, and ever so slightly askew view of the world that Gaiman manages to inject into the work.
The Graveyard Book was a slow starter; in fact, the action didn’t fully pick up until the last 40 pages of the novel, but it was well worth the wait. What seemed like mere foreshadowing and exposition in the ealier stories is revealed as crucial to the character’s development by book’s end.
I’d highly recommend this novel to anyone, but the book will be most appreciated by young adults between the ages of 12-17.
Rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Oddly prescient novel about a not-too distant future where an unlikely political candidate is elected President of the United States, and a young gay man’s political awakening. If you’re an Obama supporter (or even if you aren’t) this story about ordinary people who organized and mobilized around a central idea will inspire you. As the title suggests, we need to remain Wide Awake this November, and we must be prepared to live our convictions.
One of the most moving, enjoyable, and well written young-adult novels I’ve read since John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines (which should be the standard against which all YA novels are measured).
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

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This book suffers because of the amount of time that passed between the last volume in the Life Brother’s saga (2001′s The Living Blood) and the publication of this volume. 7 years is a long time to try to carry the threads of a story forward, and Due has aged the central character at least 10 years. A great deal of Fana’s development is glossed over and treated as little more than a convenient plot device. I also found the speed with I discovered Fana’s true adversary disappointing. Once I solved that mystery, I lost interest in the novel. I knew I would finish it, but I wasn’t excited about it any more.

Due is a good novelist; her “Joplin’s Ghost” is one of the most imaginative books I’ve read in recent memory, but Blood Colony falls flat. I hope it doesn’t take another 7 years for the next volume, and I hope the next novel rekindles the interest I’ve had and the relationships I’ve built with these characters across three novels.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

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Few things are as perfect as Kid A, but this comes awful close.