My presentation, Using the Web, that I gave at ‘The Research Practitioner - Skills Day’ in London on April 23rd and 24th 2008 is now available. It covers search tips and some web 2.0 applications, with the emphasis on searching for people.

It is available on my web site as a PowerPoint (3.3 MB), Slideshare and authorSTREAM

The Web 2.0 presentation that I gave to BBOD on March 4th is now available on the BBOD web site at http://www.cilip.org.uk/branches/byregion/southeast/sub/bbod/events and on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/reality-of-web-20. As usual, many of the slides will only make sense if you attended the event.

I shall be giving a presentation for the Berks, Bucks and Oxon District of CILIP next week on the “The Reality of Web 2.0″.  The date and time is Tuesday 4th March 18.00 for 18.30 and the venue Great Expectations, 33 London Street, Reading, Berkshire  RG1 4PS www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=471801&y=173139&z=0&ar=Y. BBOD meetings are free and open to all with a professional interest in the topic. Refreshments provided afterwards.

The name of the venue is  appropriate given the topic! I shall be looking at how far, or even if, the technologies have  actually delivered in terms of improved productivity and usefulness. The publicity blurb is as follows:

“Now that the hype of Web 2.0 ’stuff’ has died down, how useful has it turned out to be in practice and what impact has it had on the way we work? Karen Blakeman reviews the successes and failures and will look at applications such as Facebook, Second Life, start pages, social bookmarking, Twitter and Slideshare. Where do they fit on the Gartner hype cycle: are we down in the trough of disillusionment, or slowly making our way up the slope of enlightenment to the plateau of productivity? “

The event is free but please inform Norman Briggs, BBOD Events Co-ordinator  nwbriggs@cix.co.uk
or Chrissy Alcott, BBOD Chair Chrissy.Allott@berkshire.nhs.uk if you plan to attend.

Speakers and presenters - are you fed up with conference organisers hassling you for your PowerPoint slides weeks in advance? Feel threatened by final demands for the text of your presentation? Then try ConfTalk 2.0! All you need is your brain, your list of links - on a Web 2.0 service of course - and an Internet connection*. Phil Bradley and I will be demonstrating the ConfTalk 2.0 [pat. pending] technique at the Library 2.0 Forum at the NEC, Birmingham on April 18th

We are doing a double act on ‘Web 2.0 for libraries - de-mystifying the technologies’ and have agreed that anything we commit to .ppt or .doc will be old hat, defunct, or superceded by 5.0 as soon as we board the train for Birmingham. As the official conference blurb says “This session will take the form of a discussion and demonstration of a number of different Web 2.0 based products in order to give delegates a much clearer idea of exactly what Web 2.0 is, and how it can be used with a library/information centre environment.”

Further information and programme of the event.

*No Internet connection provided by the organisers? No problem. Any self respecting ConfTalk 2.0 speaker will have a laptop armed with WiFi, LAN connectivity, landline dial up, 3G and GPRS as backup. (May not help, though, if the conference is held in an underground, secure bunker but, thankfully, few are.)

I am doing a repeat of my Basingstoke RSS, Blogs and Wikis presentation at Woking Library on Tuesday, 20th February. It is being organised by the Surrey Library & Information Group and kicks off at 6 pm. All those who work or have worked in Library and Information services in Surrey and the surrounding areas are welcome.

If you are interested in attending please contact Hilary Ely, Surrey County Council Libraries & Culture, East Area Office, Omnibus, Lesbourne Road, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7JA by Wednesday 14th February 2007, e-mail: h.ely@surreycc.gov.uk Tel: 01737 737687 Fax: 01737 737649.

As an aside, I am delighted to see that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight sub-branch of CILIP’s South East Branch, and who invited me to give the talk at Basingstoke library, now have a blog at http://hiow.blogspot.com/

Copies of my RSS, Blogs and Wikis Powerpoint presentation, and additional support materials, are now available on my
selected presentations page.

The Powerpoint of my presentation, given at the Libraries@cambridge 2006 conference on December 13th, together with the list of resources and further reading is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/cam2006/

The topic was RSS, Blogs and Wikis: New Essential Tools for Communication and Collaboration.

I am at this moment at the University College & Research Group’s workshop on using RSS, blogs and wikis to communicate with your users, being held at Birmingham University in the UK. There are about 50 of us here and we are all having great fun playing with ePop. Poor ‘Trevor’ who is at the end of a video link is being bombarded with questions from us in the training suite. He can show us presentations, answer questions and take over our computers to help us find things (scary!). And he is on a completely different part of the campus - now we are sharing whiteboards. Brilliant session from Debbie Carter of the Univeristy of Birmingham.

The earlier part of the day was taken up with RSS, blogs and wikis. I kicked off with a general introduction to the subject and Alan Cooper from CILIP’s web team talked about how Web 2.0 is being used at CILIP. Rupert Mann from Oxford University Press looked at the technology from the publisher’s, and user’s, point of view and had some pretty scathing things to say about other publishers’s approach and attitude to RSS and blogs in particular. A memorable comment on one US university’s attempt at RSS was “No fun at Harvard any more”.

Jane Somerwell, University of Worcester, talked about blogging in her organisation and then we had the first of the practical sessions. I am pleased to report that we have significantly increased the membership of the blogosphere with at least a dozen having been set up in the last hour, and the number of RSSaholics in this room is beginning to reach alarming levels. “Stop reading your feeds and pay attention!!”

A fantastic day, great fun, and every one of us learned a lot.

Must stop… time to comment to some of the new blogs

I am now back from a very busy week at the annual Online Information exhibition and conference in London. As well as chairing a conference session and being ‘on duty’ on the UKeiG stand, I gave two free exhibition seminars on search: ‘Top tips and tricks for better web search’ and ‘What’s new in search’. These are now available as Powerpoint files.

Please note that they are just Powerpoint slides and are not annotated. So unless you were present at the seminars, the significance of some of the screen shots may not be immediately obvious - in fact they may be downright obscure. Also, she compiled these using the latest Microsoft Office 2007 suite and in the conversion to the more commonly used versions of Office some of the slides may have lost something in the translation.

I shall be presenting a keynote at an event organised by UC&R in Birmingham on December 6th. Details are as follows:

New Ways to Communicate: A Practical Approach. Using RSS, Blogs and Wikis to Communicate with your Users.

Venue: Learning Centre, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus
Date: Wednesday 6th December 2006, 10am - 4pm

As the Internet has developed, so has the potential for reaching information service users. This event will consider how information professionals can best use modern tools such as RSS feeds, weblogs and wikis tools to communicate with users and colleagues, and to develop and promote their services.

Speakers include:
Keynote: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services and UKeiG
Alan Cooper, CILIP Web Team

Cost: £35 for CILIP members, £50 for non-members (inclusive of VAT)
A limited number of free places are available for students currently studying for a degree in library and information science. Lunch is included in the fee.

Further event details may be obtained from:

Clare Langman, UC&R Group West Midlands Chair and Co-Events Secretary,
Information Specialist (Engineering and Life Sciences),
Library and Information Services, Aston University,
Birmingham B4 7ET
Tel: 0121 204 4513
Email: c.langman@aston.ac.uk