My last post about those billboards reminded me about the difference between a library’s normal forms of content (books, DVDs, music CDs, etc) and social media.

What’s that difference?

• Content – a book, a video, etc – is something you DO. You read a book, you watch a movie.
• Social Media is a place you visit in order to DO. You visit Facebook in order to share something with your mom.

Think of social media as a crowded room in a pretty social setting. A bar, a party, hanging out with friends, etc. You go there to talk, to share, to listen. It’s a place you visit so that you can do something.

There are a couple of cool intersections though. Things like this:

• Go to Twitter (a place) to talk (something to do) about a book that everyone’s reading (content).
• Visiting the library (a place) to use the computer to access Facebook to reconnect with a friend (something to do).

So librarians … use your mad powers of social media to connect with your customers to talk about your content. Then see what happens.

image by Bigstock

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Did you catch this article last week on CNN? Digital Music tops Physical Music Sales. Here’s a couple of quotes from the article:

“According to a Nielsen and Billboard report, digital music purchases accounted for 50.3% of music sales in 2011. Digital sales were up 8.4% from the previous year, while physical album sales declined 5%.”

“While services like Napster blazed the trail for online music consumption, offerings like Apple’s 99-cents-a-song iTunes catalog as well as those from a host of startups have broken down traditional music-purchasing barriers. Most customers now prefer shopping online to buying in a store.”

For that matter, you don’t even have to buy music to enjoy it anymore. We finally took down our Christmas decorations last weekend. While doing that, we listened to some classic jazz via Pandora. Obviously, a radio would work here too … but not for the type of music I was listening to!

So … libraries and music. My public library has a pretty large CD collection. We also subscribe to Freegal (a library-oriented service that basically gives patrons 3 free music downloads a week). We have also seen a demo for the library version of Rdio (not impressed yet).

In five year’s time, what will we be doing? How will we be collecting music? Will music still be listed for checkout in our library catalogs? Or will we point patrons to Spotify/Pandora/Rdio/etc?

I’m not sure … what do you think?

guitar pic by Bigstock

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I recently purchased some iPhone photo/video lenses from Photojojo, and wanted to show you what they do to iPhone video.

I bought the 3 lens bundle, which includes a wide angle/macro lens, a telephoto lens, and a fisheye lens. They actually work pretty well. Watch my video to see the three lenses in action (along with my trusty iMicrophone).

Do you use your smart phone to take videos or photos? Check the lenses out.

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Skokie Public Library's Digital Media Lab

I’ve been thinking about content creation and libraries lately. Right now, we collect content – hence our shelves of stuff. Yes, we do many other things too. But if you look at our buildings, they have been, by and large, designed for collections of stuff – for collecting content.

Some libraries are changing that focus (or at least adding on to it) by enabling customers to create their own content in a variety of ways … and it’s pretty interesting stuff!

I’ll lump what I’m seeing into three loose categories:

• Digital Media Labs
• Hackerspaces
• Coworking spaces

Digital Media Labs: These spaces have content creation tools that allow customers to create and share video, music, photography, and design projects. Customers have access to computers with editing software, cameras, camcorders, microphones, and musical keyboards.

The best examples I’ve seen of this so far are Skokie Public Library’s Digital Media Lab and Chicago Public Library’s YouMedia project. Skokie’s lab has a greenscreen wall for video projects; Youmedia includes a small recording studio space.

Hackerspaces: ”A hackerspace … is a location where people with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, or digital or electronic art (but also in many other realms) can meet, socialise and/or collaborate … hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things” (from Wikipedia).

Basically, hackerspaces tend to be public spaces with tools – 3D printers, drill presses, etc. And people make stuff there. Who’s doing this? Well, Allen County Public Library and Fayetteville Free Library are, for starters.

Coworking Spaces: Coworking is a pretty simple concept. Independent workers, freelancers, small business owners, etc. gather in a shared space to share ideas, team up on projects, and get some work done in a more social setting. It’s an alternative to meeting at home or a local coffee shop.

Libraries have unofficially done this for years (how many of you have heard of a patron who runs his/her business from the library? I’ll bet some of you have). But some libraries are going a step or two further by embedding librarians in these spaces, or even offering coworking spaces as part of their services. Meg Knodl, a librarian at Hennepin County Library, is doing this – here’s an article on what Meg is doing. Helsinki City Library has created some coworking spaces – read more about it here.

For more info, check out these articles:

• Are Libraries the Hackerspaces of the Future?
• Is It Time to Rebuild & Retool Public Libraries and Make “TechShops”?
• Hackerspaces and the Evolution of the Public Library
• The Public Library, Completely Reimagined
• Library Builds a Hackerspace

Question – is your library doing something like this? If so, let me know in the comments!

Photo by Skokie Public Library

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Just testing out Twitter’s new “Embed this Tweet” feature. It lets me embed a tweet within my blog post. Here’s my example:

Just testing out embeddable tweets – this will be posted to my blog tomorrow. Let’s see what happens with it!

— David Lee King (@davidleeking) December8, 2011

Interesting. It lets you:

• See my Tweet in a more “twitter-like” format
• follow me
• reply, retweet, favorite

It’s sorta like you are on Twitter … outside of Twitter. Even cooler is this: since it’s not a screenshot, viewers/readers can actually click and follow/respond. It’s a simple way to prompt Twitter users to do that next step. Nice!

So – what do you think of Twitter’s new Embed this Tweet feature? Will you find ways to use it?

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If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been writing and thinking about Youtube for awhile. Here’s a list of my recent Youtube posts:

• Poking Around in Youtube Insights
• Video, Youtube, and my Library
• Youtube – the first 15 seconds
• Youtube – Calls to Action
• Youtube & Metadata – Use it!
• Focus on Youtube – Use Annotations!
• … and this post

Why have I been focused on Youtube? Well, a couple of reasons. One, I really needed to re-focus on Youtube a bit at work. Writing and thinking about this stuff really helps me figure out what I need to do next for my library’s Youtube account.

One more reason – Youtube is a social network, with subscribers, friends, content creators, comments, likes, and favorites. If you want friends, subscribers, comments … and more importantly, video viewers, you need to be there. You need to watch videos, leave comments, likes, favorites, share videos, etc. That gets you noticed by others in the Youtube community (and your local customers who use Youtube).

Try out some of my suggestions, and see if you can increase engagement in Youtube in 2012!

Community pic by Bigstock

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Youtube Annotations are cool. They’re an easy way to add in messages and links to a Youtube video without having to mess with fancy coding or weird additions within the video itself.

What are annotations? They are notes that can be placed within a video on Youtube. Annotations can contain links to other Youtube pages/videos/features or text.

Here’s a video I recently created (non-library video – it’s me telling the story of cracking my ankle. Pretty much all better now!). In the video, I use two annotations – check them out:

For libraries and other organizations, I can see three types of annotations being really useful:

1. subscribe button – ask people to subscribe to your Youtube channel
2. next/previous video – link to another video of yours – this keeps people watching your channel
3. Text annotation – use it to ask people to like the video, leave a comment, or subscribe…

Why do this? Easy. It’s an easy thing to add in to a video, and has the potential to be another way to help you connect to your customers. Ask customers to take a simple specific action (remember those calls to action mentioned in a previous post?) like subscribe to your youtube channel, like your video, or leave a comment. Doing this helps you increase viewership, engagement, and subscribers to your Youtube channel … and therefore to the cool stuff your organization does, too.

video camera pic from Bigstock

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A day or so ago, Google Plus finally opened up organizational Google Plus “Pages” to everyone. These are similar in concept to Facebook Pages: a Google Plus Page is for brands, organizations, and businesses, and a Google Plus Profile is for individuals.

I just set up my library’s Google Plus Page, and it was really easy to do. Here’s what I did:

1. First, you need a personal Google Plus Profile. Just like Facebook, Google wants you to be a real person (here’s a link to mine if you’re curious).
2. Go here -https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/create - to set up the Page
3. Choose a category for your library. I chose “Company, Institution or Organization” for ours.
4. Fill in your Institution’s name and URL. I chose to put in our full name (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library) rather than the shortened “topekelibrary” that we often use for social media sites, because our full name shows up on the account.
5. Select a Category – really, a subcategory of the “Company, Institution or Organization” thing you picked up in #3 above. This gives you a lot of suggestions … none of which are Libraries. I ended up choosing Institution (though Government Agency, Education, or Other would have worked ok too).
6. Click Create.
7. Then, you’re given the option to Share your new Google Plus Page with all your Google Plus friends (I did that, but you don’t have to).

After that, I fleshed out our account info a little bit by doing these things:

• Added a photo for the G+ icon (our library’s logo for now)
• Asked our Marketing dept for some pictures to add on the Photos tab
• Created some Circles – I kept the Following circle for random follows, then created these additional Circles: Customers (for library patrons), Staff (for library staff), and Librarians (for librarians who don’t work at my library but want to follow)
• Added links to our Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr accounts
• Finally, I sent out our first status update message – “Just setting up Topeka Library’s dandy new Google Plus Page for organizations. Let’s explore it together!”

That’s pretty much it. What will we do with it? For starters, I’ll probably post a couple things a week there, to see if other people in our service area are interested in using Google Plus to connect with the library. After that (I’ll give it 6 months or so) we’ll see.

A couple other examples of Google Plus Library Pages:

• Skokie Public Library
• Falvey Memorial Library
• Springfield City Library
• Garaget (a cool-sounding library in Sweden)
• Cedar Rapids Public Library

update – Joe Murphy has a great post on Google Plus Pages for Libraries. Check it out!

Cool! Now the question is … what will your library DO with a Google Plus Page, now that they are available?

image by Bruce Clay

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My library has been podcasting for awhile, and we have been using blip.tv as our mp3 podcast hosting service. That has worked great … until now.

Blip.tv is a really cool video service. They have always focused on original web shows (think Epic Fu or Ask a Ninja), but historically they were also really friendly towards random, “share the stuff in your head” videobloggers and audio-only podcasters. So they were a great free alternative for a podcast hosting service.

Lately, Blip seems to be narrowing their focus to original web shows. Nothing wrong with that – businesses grow and change. But how does that affect us? Well – for me, though I have quite a few videos uploaded to Blip, you can’t find them in blip’s search engine anymore. They’re still hosted, and you can get to them on my videoblog – just not through Blip’s search engine.

And my library’s audio-only podcast? Blip is turning off the ability to upload all audio-only formats (that includes our mp3 files) starting December 13.

Bummer for us.

For my videos, no sweat – that’s easy. I’ll still upload them to Youtube (I’m already there anyway).

But finding a new podcast hosting service isn’t nearly as easy. For the most part, podcast hosting services actually cost money these days. Here are some of the more popular choices these days:

The big three – these are considered professional podcast hosting and distribution platforms:

• Libsyn - plans start at $5 a month
• podbean – they start out free, but add in monthly charges for added features and more storage space
• blubrry - plans start at $12 a month

Free alternatives (your mileage will definitely vary with these):

• archive.org
• ourmedia (which uses archive.org)

A couple other alternatives:

• hipcast – plans start at $4.95 a month
• talkshoe – free, but it’s really more a live call-in show service that can be recorded and archived.

We ended up choosing Libsyn. Rob Walch, VP of Podcaster Relations at Wizzard Media (they own Libsyn) and host of the Podcast411 podcast, has spoken at two of the three Podcamp Topeka unconferences my library has hosted, and really knows his stuff. So we figured why not try them out?

So for now, we went with Libsyn’s $20 a month plan. It includes advanced statistics, a smartphone app, and more monthly storage. Since we plan on expanding our mobile multimedia offerings (i.e.., more audio and video stuff), paying for those features made a lot of sense to us. It’s still relatively cheap (compared to other stuff we buy or subscribe to, $240 a year is definitely cheap), and we get a dedicated podcasting platform and some really great statistics. Nothing wrong with that!

So – fingers crossed!

photo by skippyjon

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