A few weeks ago, Jenny Levine at the Shifted Librarian pointed to a new service from Google that allows you to search via text message on your phone. She linked to it again yesterday, and I finally tried it out. Very, very cool. Text in “08822 pizza” and in a couple seconds I get a call listing the two pizza places downtown.

Text in “define egalitarian” and the definition comes to me. Oy…the possibilities. As Jenny says:

This is huge. It’s one of my new themes I’ve been highlighting over the past few months in my presentations. Libraries are ignoring instant messaging at our peril, and our vendors don’t understand the power of IM and SMS as interfaces to services. That’s why when I visited with vendors on the ILA exhibit floor last week, my handout for them included screenshots of Leland Johnson’s AIM catalog search.

Here’s the important quote that really brings home why this is so important (bolded for extra emphasis): “Google’s SMS service is interesting for a couple of reasons. Texting is the world’s most popular computer user interface. It’s how most of the world communicates, too.”

So is your library ready to communicate with your users this way?

How long until I get to be a digital native???

Oh and by the way…CNet reports “In a sign texting has gone mass market, in June 2004, there were 2.8 billion messages sent from U.S. cell phones, compared with the 2.8 million sent in June 2003.” Sheesh…
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It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m finally starting to “get” the hype about flickr. Tim and Alan have been pushing my brain already, doing some neat stuff with creating learning objects with photos. And Steve Burt (who really needs to get blogging) is a phone to flickr to Weblog expert. But up until now, I haven’t really gotten the social aspect of the tool…I mean who wants to scroll through random pictures of random people doing random things randomly? Sure, I guess you could make family flickr pages and so on, but I can do that in a blog.

Today, however, Brian Lamb posted this really beautiful picture of the eclipse over Vancouver, and when I clicked on it, it took me to 214 other pictures of the eclipse that random people had posted. I clicked on the slide show link, and sat back, fascinated, catching some great views of an event I had missed.

Just like I had missed the point of the flickr tags that put all of those pictures together. Alan had written about it a month ago:

I’ve only explored a bit with flickr’s tags, but it is promising a great example of taking a large pool of assets from combines sources (everyone who published public photos on flickr) and then provide a way to easily mix and recombine them into new “super” collections based on the keyword “tags” people apply to their photos- like mine should end up in the grandcanyon collection, or my desert flower photos in the flower collection. Or now, I have the sole image in the flinstones tag set. Woohoo!

It would be cool to be able to combine tags?? Anyhow, can you see it is not a far stretch to exchange “photos” for “learning objects”, and have a simple way to pull up everything tagged as for “mid level organic chemistry”? Maybe not feasible, but an interesting model for Rip Mix and _________.

Doh! I get it. Have kids upload pictures they take to flickr, tag them, add titles, descriptions and hot spots with mouseovers, look at other similarly tagged photos from classmates or students far and abroad, comment back to the creators…and then blog about the whole experience. Construct. Collaborate. Communicate.

So, you can find out all sorts of interesting things about my office by clicking on the photo above. And, if you’re so inclined, you can also see 637 other pictures of random offices from random people…