The Distant Librarian

ChatGPTLibrarian is still finding his (its?) voice

One of my alerts just tripped over a new blog called ChatGPTLibrarian. The site was launched in March 2023 by librarian Victor Santiago, and I think he's still trying to decide if he's going to write as him, or as an AI-assisted author. The header of each page reads,

Welcome to ChatGPTLibrarian, a blog dedicated to exploring the possibilities of using artificial intelligence and chatbots in the field of librarianship. Our articles delve into the innovative ways ChatGPT can assist with research, reference services, and information retrieval. Join us as we explore the intersection of technology and librarianship.

and many of the posts seem like throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, or may be ChatGPT outputs to specific prompts, but there are a few posts with some good ideas and tips and tricks, including,

• Dealing with ambiguous ChatGPT answers
• Citing ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Guide to Proper Attribution (no attribution though on where this advice was found)
• Free ChatGPT and AI Search Engines Sites for Librarians

Anyhoo, if you're trying to pay attention to the use of chatbots in libraries, this is probably worth keeping an eye on. Oh, it's entirely possible Victor's just running this site hoping to generate some ad revenue! I first visited with an ad-blocker running, but after turning it off I see there are a LOT of ads, so be warned! :-)

Here's how to monitor for disappearing or changing news online

Over the weekend Ed Summers released a tool called diffengine that monitors an RSS feed and then posts captures of any changed text to Twitter. It's meant for monitoring news sites, but could be used for anything that has an RSS feed. Useful for monitoring your news site of choice for disappearing news, but also reports that change on the fly, here's what it looks like in action, from a CBC article:

Wood believed mall owner would fix multiple leaks, court hears - Sudbury - CBC News https://t.co/ZtTe8d6nWt ➜ https://t.co/3A0ZOGM3w7 pic.twitter.com/xJBsfoVqfM

— cbc_diff (@cbc_diff) January 16, 2017

Probably a really neat tool for journalism students too! Right now there are a handful of mainstream or influential sites publicly posted, such as The Washington Post, Breitbart and the Toronto Star. Not sure if there will be a logical directory of these things once people start running their own instances?

Typepad FINALLY has a responsive design template!

One of the few hassles of using a hosted service for this blog is that, especially unless I want to pay for the top-tier of services, most of which I don't need, I'm mostly at the whim of Typepad for styles and overall themes. A couple of years ago I asked about a mobile-friendly theme, and finally, finally today they announced a responsive design theme! 

Heck, I still view almost all my blog content via RSS, but on those occasions I click through I sure do appreciate a site that recognizes I'm on a smart phone. And now my site finally does too. Happy reading!

 

Introducing the Top Ten Most Influential Bloggers | E-Learning Council

via www.elearningcouncil.com

I actually don't follow any of these folks, but if you're looking to pick up some new feeds, this might be a good place to start! (none of them appear to be librarians)

Oh, and I'm trying to close browser tabs by the end of the year, so a few more posts to follow!

New (DE) Kid on the Block

When I first started this blog (7 years ago!) it was in part to fill a perceived gap in the blogosphere on the topic of library service to distance students. Since then I've broadened the scope of The Distant Librarian to library tech in general, and there have been a fair number of other blogs to cover the topic of Distance Education.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to introduce you to the latest, The Off Campus Librarian, written by Debbie Bezanson, Off Campus/Distance Education Librarian at the George Washington University Libraries. It's brand-new, but looks solid already. Debbie says she'll be sure to keep up the quality posts as long as people are reading, so go check it out!

...my goal for this website is to have pages that serve as a resource for beginning off campus/distance education librarians, and to have blog posts which will reflect things that come up on a day to day basis that affect all of us who serve online learners and off campus students and faculty as we try to deliver quality services to them.

Welcome to the blogosphere Debbie!

 

Distant Librarian's top 10 posts from 2009

I was poking around Google Analytics for work yesterday and thought it would also be fun to peek at the top ten posts for my blog for 2009.  Here they are, without comment:

1. Crappy Experience at the Apple Store
2. A little more info on the Harvard linking BS
3. Jing Pro and Jing Free
4. Is 2009 the year of the m-library?
5. DC Public Library launches iPhone app for their catalog
6. EBSCO fires a shot across the bow
7. SerialsSolutions Summon
8. 3 services to monitor website changes w/o RSS
9. PubMed on the iPhone
10. Harvard Business School Publishing not allowing UK libraries to build PURLs in EBSCO - are we next?

Feed2JS moving to Google Code

Alan Levine posts that he's moving the source code for the most excellent Feed2JS tool to Google Code.  If you haven't played with it before, Feed2JS was one of the first and best tools to take RSS feeds and provide you with javascript that allows you to embed those feeds within a standard web page.  An oldie, but still goodie.

Feed2js

New Mobile Libraries blog

Gerry McKiernan has started another blog, this one called Mobile Libraries. 

"Mobile Libraries Is Devoted To Documenting Any and All Topics Relating To Services Provided By Libraries To Patrons Within Mobile Environments. Library Mobile Services Are Defined As Any And All Library Services That Are Provided Via Mobile Technologies."

Subscribed.

New media into old

I just finished listening to episode 64 of CBC's Spark, and it began with a couple of really interesting interviews with people who are turning new media into old (ie. newspapers or magazines). 

Ben Terret and his friend Russell collected their favourite blog posts from 2008 and arranged to have them printed on actual newsprint in a project called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008.  But what struck me was his idea of how this could be personalized.  Imagine tagging blog posts during the week or month and saving them to delicious.  On Sunday morning, delivered to your house would be a newspaper containing the text of all those blog posts.  I would pay good money for something like that!  There are a bunch of bloggers who write lengthy posts that I don't give enough time to fully digest.  The screen is bite-sized media - I always have to move on to something else.  But if I had something printed, laid out by a graphic designer, I think I would spend a lot more time on these thoughtful posts.  Actually, there must be some utility that will do something similar to this and allow me to print on my home printer - anyone?  Oh wait, read on...

The second interview was with Dan Pacheco, who has a similar idea in a website / service called Printcasting.  This time the print format is a newspaper, magazine or newsletter, but locally targeted.  It will be supported by local advertising, and "they'll only pay for the ads that run in Printcasts that we know are delivered."  Here's the full FAQ on the service, which is scheduled to launch in Bakersfield, CA in March.  Looks like they'll take some time before it's available worldwide - guess they're really sticking with that local angle.  Oooh, but at the very end of the FAQ they mention that "Printcasting will be developed as an open source product, meaning anyone will be able to download and use the software for free."  Cool.

Read my feed for free (on the Kindle)

And more Kindle news.  Earlier this month I found out my blog was available for purchase via the Kindle store.  MakeUseOf.com has a post about how you can subscribe to RSS feeds on the Kindle for free using Kindlefeeder.com.

Act fast though, as the following notice appears on the kindlefeeder home page:

Someone has brought it to my attention that scheduling feed delivery on kindlefeeder.com may violate the Amazon Kindle's terms of service. Please read this blog post on TeleRead for details.

I've written Amazon's legal department for clarification. Until I receive a response, kindlefeeder.com's automated delivery feature will remain available.

Hot or Not Librarians

Ha!  My Google rank's going to go up with a headline like that!  Dave Pattern of the University of Huddersfield recently launched a new library blog-monitoring tool called HotStuff 2.0.  HotStuff 2.0 monitors the RSS feeds of over 800 library related blogs, and analyzes the content

in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics...  a daily blog post is generated using a single word that has seen a marked increase in usage over the last few days. A “Word Wheel” image shows the strength of the links between that word and other words that have also recently seen an increase in usage. This can sometimes help to put to the words into context, but mostly it’s just an excuse for some eye candy!

Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity. You can see the current scores on the Hot or Not page!

Some fun and interesting stuff to be found by poking around.  Today's word of the day is "stewardship":

I'm # 51,008 in the Kindle Store!

You may recall that last year I discussed some options I was considering for commercialization of this blog.  I have gotten one $25 payment from Newstex in the last year, so my content's obviously trickling out there somehow.  Just got a notice that I'm now available in the Amazon Kindle store, where you can now subscribe to me for $.99 per month!  I didn't set the price, and obviously I don't suggest you pay to receive my content when you can get it here for free.  But I guess if you live and die by your Kindle you now have the option. :-)

SendMeRSS / Rmail bites the dust

I missed this when it was first "announced", but apparently the first RSS to email utility that I fell in love with is no more.  About a year and a half ago, NBC purchased Rmail and rebranded it as SendMeRSS.  Apparently NBC just stopped supporting it; the SendMeRSS website is down, and Randy Charles Morin, the original developer of Rmail, is reporting that NBC is threatening legal action against him for pointing out the fact that they're no longer supporting SendMeRSS.  Seems a little heavy-handed, eh?  Interestingly, in his post from August 24, 2008 Randy points to a library blog that detailed some of the problems being experienced with the now defunct product.  Scarily, that blog no longer exists, though of course you can still read about the problems (and here) on Google's cache.  Pittland simply ceased to exist after the last August 1, 2008 post.  Wonder if I'll be next?  ;-)

Since it was one of the first RSS to email options I offered on this site I suspect there may be a few folks either receiving (or not) content from me via that channel.  I'd be really interested to hear whether you're still getting stuff from me, or NBC, or ?  I know it's a long shot, kinda like "raise your hand if you're not here", but it's worth a shot :-)

AideRSS - Great idea, but...

Saw a mention of AideRSS go by on Twitter the other day, and just tried it out.  The idea is great - give AideRSS a blog URL and it purports to sift through all the posts and then offer separate feeds to you so you can subscribe to only the "best post" the "great", "good" or all the posts (the naked feed, if you will).  Supposedly it's a way to deal with overload, by only getting the best of the posts from the bloggers you want to follow.  Sounds great, right?

Maybe, but IMHO they've got some work to do on their algorithms.  With someting like this I like to compare myself to someone I know is a "better" blogger.  In this case I picked Meredith at Information Wants to be Free.  Yeah, we blog differently, but AideRSS appears to place a lot of weight on how many links and how much of a conversation a given blog post has.  In that case Meredith definitely blows me away.  And yet, here are the screenshots of her blog and mine.  Take a look at the highlighted sections.  Any rhyme or reason there?  Look how many posts, saves and comments her posts have, and she doesn't even get a "best posts" category!  Maybe they're placing way more weight on # of recent posts than they should? (click for bigger versions)

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By all means go give it a try - maybe it'll be useful to you.

2008 State of the Blogosphere Report

The timing couldn't be better as I'm updating a presentation on Blogs and RSS.  Technorati has posted the 2008 State of the Blogosphere report.  While changing it up each year is interesting (this year they're kinda focusing on blogger demographics and blogging for profit), I wish they'd keep the basic stats going consistently from year to year :-/  Near as I can tell Technorati claims we're up to 133,000,000 blogs indexed by them.  In the 2007 report that number was only 70,000,000.  I sure would've like to include an updated graph showing the continuing rising curve like the one shown in 2007.  I'm not gonna make one myself!