Week 9, Part 2 - Fun with Language redux

I hope that everyone has been discovering new fun phrases to use [or that may make you cringe, depending]. We've got a good number of comments to the initial posting, so it's about time to post the translations or expansions of the acronyms for those who decided not to search all of them out -

Let's see if we were right about the familiar ones, and learn some new ones!
jjs

Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs

Week 8 – Time to Chat, part 1

Well, we’ve made it to week 8, having been through a lot of different tools and ideas so far, so here is another weekly post. Chat programs have been around for years now, and there are different tools and different interfaces that we can choose from. The one that we’re going to work with is, not surprisingly GTalk from Google. I chose this one for two primary reasons. First, we all have Google addresses from the Blogger/Gmail trials we have already done. Second, and probably more important, we’re probably going to be moving the Chat Reference service over to GTalk in the near future, so if we’re going to take a look at one of these tools, and spend some time getting used to it, it’s probably the best solution.

There are two primary uses for a chat program in our Library. One of them is for external communication, like the Chat Reference that we’re already doing. The main benefit of GTalk in this area is that we can create a direct chat function on the web page that doesn’t require the student to have to download software or even a Google account in order to chat with us. That’s a project that we’ve been looking into.

The other primary use is for internal communications. I’ve been in libraries where everyone was logged into a chat program for most of the day, just marking themselves away when they left their desk, or turning the program off when they needed to really concentrate on something without any interruption. While we already have a lot of possible tools for internal communication, from phones to email to walking, chat is another possible tool, and so we’ll take a shot to see how useful it might be for us. If you think of it as a sort of email lite, you may get an idea of how it might be useful.

If all else fails, it will give us a chance to practice with the idea of using a tool to chat, among ourselves, and will also allow us to prepare for using GTalk as a tool to talk to the outside world. That does bring up one of the downfalls of chat-based program use in a work setting, though, and that probably should be mentioned here. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where chat extends beyond the work place, and begins to consume more time than any of us would want. I hope that we can avoid that particular issue, but we do have to be aware of it.

More follows on Friday, about how we’ll want to proceed with this test, and the different ways that we can move forward with the Week 8 trials!
jjs

Week 7 – myEBSCO and alerts, RSS feeds, etc.

Is it really week 7 already?
That seems impossible!

Last week, we looked at MyEBSCO, and this week, we’ll take it one step further. Within the customization settings, there are a few interesting things that you can do to automate your searching. If you have a favorite author, perhaps, and would like to be automatically reminded whenever something by or about them shows up in an EBSCO database, you can create an RSS feed that automatically shows up in either Google Reader or Bloglines [remember those? Week 3.] You can also use this process to create an automatic piece of email as a reminder, too.
To do this relatively simple operation, perform a search in a EBSCO database that actually retrieves results. I did a simple keyword search for: Ondaatje, Michael

Once the results come up, look for Search History/Alerts, immediately below the search fields. Click on that to expand it and you’ll get a series of options. The options will vary depending on the search you performed. In my case, I was given a choice of a straight keyword search, a SU or subject search or an AU or author search. I’m going to choose the straight keyword search [mostly because the last name is odd enough it’s not going to give me a bunch of false positives…]
To actually create a link for my search, I’m going to choose the little orange icon [which is the standard icon for an RSS feed]. When I do that, a window pops up giving me some options. I can enable an email alert by choosing “Edit Alert” and adjust the settings there, if I wish. Since I am a regular user of Google Reader, though, I prefer to incorporate my EBSCO feeds into that platform. To do this, all I have to do is to copy the “Syndication Feed” link by right clicking on it and choosing “copy link location”. Then I can go to Google Reader and paste it in as a new feed. Alternatively, you can just click on the “Syndication Feed” link, and it’ll take you to a page that gives you directions on how to do this simply.

Once you get a feel for this, you can begin to be pretty creative with it. If you have a favorite magazine or journal that is in EBSCO, you can set up an alert that let’s you know whenever a new issue has been published – you can set up an alert that gives you tables of contents [for many publications], and all sorts of other ideas. Want to get really creative? Set up a search that looks for recipes containing an unusual ingredient and every time one is indexed in an EBSCO title… you get the idea, right?

So, this week, give this a try, and see what you think about it. If you choose your alerts carefully, they’ll be very interesting. If you build them too broadly, you’ll get 50 chocolate cake recipes every day [which may, or may not, be a bad thing…]

Use your blog to give us an idea of how this process went for you, and if you find it to be interesting or useful. Did you decide on an email alert, or an RSS feed? Also, if you come up with a creative use for this, by all means let us know about it!

Next Week – It’s time to Chat.
Happy Halloween,

jjs