Del.ic.io.us to Suffer the Fate of Bloglines?

There have been rumors running around for the past few days about Yahoo shutting Delicious down.  According the TechCrunch post, the rumors started with layoffs at Yahoo and a leaked internal slide showing Delicious (along with MyBlogLog, Yahoo Picks, Alta Vista, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz) planned to go into the “sunset.”

The same TechCrunch post has been recently updated with information from the Delicious blog stating that Delicious will not be shut down but will be available to other companies. 

 “No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

So it looks like the demise of Delicious is similar to Bloglines.  Now Bloglines has been picked up by Merchant Circle, but the relaunch of that platform seems to have some problems as one librarian noted.  We will have to see how Delicious fares.  It is interesting to see how social networking has evolved and changed and some of the beginning social systems like Bloglines and Delicious are no longer as relevant as they once were, Twitter and Facebook now rule the roost.  It may sound odd but it reminds me a bit of the gas guzzling SUV days smacking head on to high gas prices.  In 1992 the Hummer was hot, before he was the Governator, Arnold drove one around in the stop and go traffic of California.  About 15 years later the once popular car line couldn’t even be sold to a Chinese automaker.

Let’s hope Delicious and Bloglines do not go the way of the Hummer, however it doesn’t look good for either product.  My guess is that they will eventually die or somebody will pick them up and figure out how to morph them into some new social product that we all have to use.  Don’t be shocked if someday 10-15 years from now even Twitter and Facebook face the same fate as Delicious and Bloglines. 

I was an avid Bloglines user, but now days I am Netvibes person who happens to rely more on Twitter for information gathering and Facebook for inforamtion distribution.  I admit I never quite got the hang of Delicious.  I am not sure why, organizing my online life would seem to fall right in line with my librarian state of mind.

For those of you who are huge Delicious people who are taking this news hard or are freaking out over all of your tags, never fear the tech people online are already listing the “best” Delicious alternatives.

Here are links to some:

2011/2012 MLA Election Results

Thank you to all the members who ran and made it a very strong ballot and to those members who took an active interest in the future and direction of the association and voted in the election.  Without you MLA wouldn’t be what it is today.  I want to congratulate the new President Elect, Board Members and the Nomination Committee.  

President-elect
Jane L. Blumenthal, AHIP, Director, Taubman Health Sciences Libraries, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

Board of Directors (2011–2014)

  • Michelle Kraft, AHIP, Senior Medical Librarian, Alumni Library, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH
  • Gabe R. Rios, Deputy Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama–Birmingham
  • Joy Summers-Ables, AHIP, Associate Director and Head of Library Computing and Information Services, Robert M. Bird Health Sciences Library, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center–Oklahoma City

Nominating Committee

  • Margaret (Peg) Allen, AHIP, FMLA
  • Janet L. Cowen, AHIP
  • Melissa De Santis, AHIP
  • Rosalind F. Dudden, AHIP, FMLA
  • Patricia C. Higginbottom, AHIP
  • Joanne Gard Marshall, AHIP, FMLA
  • Mary Fran Prottsman, AHIP
  • Melissa Rethlefsen, AHIP
  • Patricia L. Thibodeau, AHIP, FMLA

Congratulations, I look forward to working with all of you and seeing you at the next meeting or sooner.

Non-English Guides for PubMed

Those of you in other parts of the world or who work with a lot of international medical professionals who might prefer to learn PubMed in their native language you might be interested to know that the National Library of Medicine has several PubMed guides in other languages other than English.

Information is available in:

  • Chinese / 中文
  • French / Français
  • German / Deutsch
  • Italian / Italiano
  • Japanese / 日本語
  • Norwegian / Norsk
  • Portuguese / Português
  • Russian / Русский
  • Spanish / Español
  • Vietnamese / Tiếng Việt

    • Go to http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/intlpubmedlinks.html

    When Your iPhone Dies

    Almost 2 years ago I bought an iPhone and after reading and hearing stories about how fragile the little suckers were I decided to purchase insurance for my phone.  I am not cell phone abuser, I have only killed 1 1/2 phones since I have started carrying them.  I say 1 1/2 because my clamshell flip phone fell down a flight of stairs and it broke into two parts resulting in a definite cell phone death, while the “half” dead phone was the result of a spilled drink.  The drowned cell phone actually worked fine, the screen was just messed up and you couldn’t see who was calling.  But I still used it until my plan renewed.

    Recently I began having difficulties with my iPhone.  The external speaker stopped working, thus no ring tone when somebody called and the alarm clock (which I used in hotels) was silent.  I could hear things when I had earphones in but that was about it.  Then the battery life on my phone went from typical smartphone paltry to downright nothing.  I would only get about 20 minutes of talk time out of it and maybe an 1 hour standby.  This was the death blow for me.  I cannot have a phone that I must leave plugged in constantly to receive calls. 

    Thankfully I bought Square Trade insurance for the expensive little beast.  Why did I go with Square Trade over Apple Care?  Simple… Remember I told you I had one phone that broke in half and another drown?  Apple Care does not insure your phone against user inflicted damage (drops, water damage, etc.) but Square Trade does.  So logged on to Square Trade and filed a claim to replace my dying iPhone. 

    The process was very simple (I had scanned in the original purchase receipt when I bought the insurance), I filled out the online form stating my problem and verified my address.  They sent out a replacement phone within 2 business days.  I received it and began charging it while I worked on syncing and getting all my stuff off of my old iPhone.  The transfer from old phone to new phone was a little clunky, but I blame iTunes primarily not the phones.  iTunes still can’t find my music but that happened with the old phone as well.  I then sent back my old phone in a prepaid UPS box.  It only took me a couple of days to do all of this.  It would have been quicker if Thanksgiving, kids, painting a house, work, etc. weren’t all demanding my attention. 

    A few important things to note:

    • You must return your old iPhone within 15 days or they will charge you $500 for sending the replacement phone. 
    • If they determine the reason your iPhone is dead/dying is due to an accident such as dropping or liquid then you are charged a $50 deductible.  This is actually spelled out in the insurance contract prior to buying insurance. 
    • I had an iPhone 3G.  I would venture to say there are very few if any new 3G phones still waiting to be sold.  There might be a few 3GS phones hanging around but really the iPhone 4 is what is out there.  They try to replace like phone with like. So I did not get an iPhone 4, I got a refurbed 3G.  While I do wish I had a new phone (I am always worried about refurbs) my phone was 2 years old and dying fast, the refurb HAD to be better than it. 

    Would I insure my iPhone again with Square Trade.  Yes!  I basically paid $80 for a two year plan and go a replacement phone.  If I didn’t have the insurance I would be without a phone (fairly soon given its battery life span) and I would have had to plunk down $400 for a new one while in the middle of my plan. 

    The real question now is whether I stick with my iPhone.  I really like it but I have two major gripes about it.

    • No Flash. Sorry all you Apple fans and Steve Jobs but the Internet has a ton of stuff on Flash and if I want to watch a video that is Flash I want to watch it, I don’t want to hope that it is also on YouTube.  Who knows maybe this is problem is moot when HTML 5 becomes more prevalent. 
    • AT&T is EXPENSIVE!  3 years ago it cost me about $80 for three cell phones (mine, my husband’s and mother-in-law’s phones). Now I look at $170/month for three phones (and no, mother-in-law is not racking up the bill).  That is double. 

    What am I going to do?  The Flash thing is tricky, I might not have as much control over that as I would like given the types of phones out there and carriers.  If I leave my iPhone I am leaving AT&T and looking at an Android.  I am seriously considering Virgin Mobile which $40 for all you can eat data, texting, and 1200/month/phone.  I would have to buy the Android outright and not have it subsidized by a contract but that is still a savings in the end. 

    If I move from the iPhone I will still write about medical and library applications for it, but I will probably write more on what is out there for Androids as well.  We will see where things take me in the smartphone world.

    Using Facebook for Professional Reasons

    Facebook can be a useful tool or a fun way to waste some time.  Really the same can be said about a lot of tools we use in the work place.  Email, we can’t live without it now (ok I can’t live without it, I don’t know about the rest of you all) but how many of us use our work email to email friends and family?  The same can be said about the phone too, although I have to say I use the phone less than I use email.  So it isn’t surprising that Facebook can serve two purposes for some people.

    I have two Facebook accounts.  A public one, The Krafty Librarian, and a personal one. I use the public one specifically to speak about library issues and things of interest to medical librarians, basically it is an extension of my blog.  My personal Facebook site is set up really to just chat with friends and family and do typical Facebook-ish type things like post family pictures and talk about personal things like painting my house.

    Most people don’t want or need a public Facebook page, and for those that don’t have one it is important to look at the Facebook settings for a personal account and think about whether putting “friends” in categories.  I have three main friend categories on my personal Facebook page, family, friends, and librarians.  There is some cross over, for example I have some good friends who are librarians so those people are in both lists.  Not only does this allow me to restrict access to certain things like family photos to certain groups of people but equally important it allows me to selectively post things to my wall.  I can post an library related article and have it only be visible to librarians.  Like wise I can post an link to my new favorite TV series The Walking Dead that is only visible to my friends.  That way my friends aren’t inundated with library stuff and librarians aren’t inundated with zombie stories. 

    Having a public site and having my personal site’s friend list subdivided has been very helpful for communicating news, stories, and chatting.  But what has been the most helpful is using Facebook’s messaging feature.  When I am out of the office on work trips the best way to stay connected to work email is using my laptop.  That can get quickly tiresome.  So if possible I try and leave my laptop at home for smaller trips.  That means my iPhone is the only way I can get email.  Since I work in a hospital, I cannot sync my iPhone with my work email.  However I can access work’s web mail through it.  This is not the most ideal method for viewing and responding to email.  Most of the time I use it just to respond to time sensitive emails.  Unless I know a person’s email address by heart it is difficult to access my work email’s address book to compose anything. 

    Monday night I was in Seattle for a site visit for the 2012 annual meeting.  Since I live on East coat time and I was visiting West coast time, I was up bright and early at 4:00am with thoughts about speakers and other questions.  Despite my best efforts my brain would not turn off and let me go to sleep, it thought it was 7:00am and it wanted me to do something about what was bouncing around in my brain.  I decided I would email various people to try and get some answers and ideas to things dancing in my head.  I realized most of the librarians I needed to email were already friends on my Facebook account.  So instead of logging onto web mail, I launched the Facebook app and messaged the librarians.

    Not only can Facebook be a good way to share news and information through a Wall post, but it can also provide an alternative method of personal communication when you can’t access your traditional email system.

    Planning the National Meeting part 2

    In May at the DC meeting I wrote a post about what it was like serving as one of the co-chairs of the NPC and planning the Seattle meeting.  Through out this year we have been working (primarily online using Google Docs) on the meeting.  On Monday and Tuesday I was in Seattle with my fellow co-chair Teresa Knott meeting with the MLA folks, LAC, and the meeting planners. 

    During this year we have been working choosing the theme, logo, speaker, and creating committees.  As I mentioned most of the work we have been doing has been online through Google Docs where we post documents discussing those things for the rest of the committee to look at, edit, vote on, and discuss.  I am happy to report we have our theme and our logo and we are actively in the process of finding a speaker and forming other committees. 

    While we were in Seattle we stayed in the conference hotel and toured the convention center (which is right across the street).  The hotel is very nice and located near lots of shopping and restaurants and is short walk to the Pike Place Market (see map to view places around the hotel). 

    We have a lot of things still left to do, but we are working on them.  We have already chosen our them and our logo which will debut at the 2011 meeting.  As our meeting date gets closer and we finalize more items I will report on them.  In the mean time don’t forget about Minneapolis where I will see you in the 2012 booth.

    Video of the New Bloglines

    Thanks to Valerie’s Comment I have learned that the folks over at MerchantCircle blog have just posted a video featuring the “new” Bloglines. 

    The video is hosted on YouTube and the direct link is:
    http://blog.merchantcircle.com/2010/11/sneak-peak-into-new-bloglines.html

    I tried viewing the video on my iPhone and the writing is so small that I can’t read anything about it, so it is best viewed on a regular computer screen.

    As far as I can tell from the MerchantCircle blog most of the features they mention seem to pretty standard and were already a part of Bloglines (at least I think they were).  The feature that I definitely know is new is they have integrated Facebook and Twitter sharing so it looks like Valerie’s opinion that the “new design looks like the Netvibes reader with a different skin to it,” is pretty accurate.

    Adding the Facebook and Twitter component was/is crucial to me, I have really grown to love that feature in Netvibes and I think that makes sharing stories between the three systems (Facebook, blogs, Twitter) that much easier and cohesive.  Now that I know the new Bloglines will have this feature, it definitely makes it worth it to me to look at moving back. We will see.

    The MerchantCircle blog

    Librarians Needed to Participate in Study

    Librarians, are you conducting any literature searches supporting systematic reviews or plan to conduct one in the near future?  If so the reference librarians at the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System need your help and would like for you volunteer to participate in their study. 

    Their study is to “identify trends in conducting literature searches to support systematic reviews. Results will help systematic reviewers and information professionals to better plan resources to search and allow a more accurate estimation of time and effort required for the literature search portion of a systematic review.”

    If you are interested in participating in the study and helping out your fellow librarians as they conduct research, the results of which they hope to present at a meeting or publish in a peer reviewed journal, then please go to http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/services/reference/study for their contact information.

    Bloglines Saved from the Chopping Blog

    After to coming to terms with the need to move my monster list of feeds from Bloglines, evaluating Google Reader, NetVibes and various other feed readers, weeding dead or no longer relevant feeds (really needed to be done even if I didn’t move feed readers), and finally getting used and somewhat enjoying NetVibes, I got an email from MerchantCircle informing me that Bloglines will not die. 

    The email came November 30th but MerchantCircle’s press release is dated November 4th.  According to the press release MerchantCircle will assume management of Bloglines and beginning December 1st (today) will offer “richer, more local Bloglines experience for existing and future users.”  Of course it also says on December 1st go to www.bloglines.com for more information.   However, people who do that are just redirected to MerchantCircle which repeats a lot of the same information and links to the MerchantCircle blog post telling people that “beginning around December 1st, when you log in to your Bloglines account (using your same id and password), you’ll be transitioned to the NEW Bloglines experience.”

    I logged in and I guess they will be going with the “around” December 1st date because to me it looks like the same old Bloglines. 

    By now I am guessing many avid Bloglines users have already moved their feeds to another reader.  I am interested to see what the new Bloglines will be and what enhancements will be made, however I have to say that I really like NetVibes social monitoring interactive features that Bloglines just didn’t have.  I am also a little concerned about the lack of coordination with the press releases, email notice, the jumping from site to site to read “more” about it, and the nebulous launch date of the new version. MerchantCircle hasn’t  mentioned any specific feature updates, so it will be interesting if their new version will be able to woo many departed users who found replacement readers back to the Bloglines product.

    50 Years of MeSH

    Several librarians at my institution were interested in seeing/listening to the MeSH at 50 – 50th Anniversary of Medical Subject Headings by Robert Braude at NLM a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately at the time, we couldn’t get it to work correctly for some reason. 

    Good news, the program is now available under Past Events on the NIH’s videocast site.  One of the librarians here has already viewed it and said that much of the talk is about “what was (and wasn’t) available/used BEFORE MeSH, and about the initial development of MeSH itself.”  The program lasts about an hour and according the one viewer, there aren’t a lot of “visuals” so it is easy to listen to while multi-tasking at your desk.