Web 2.0
Common Craft has a 3-minute video explaining “Cloud Computing in Plain English“.

UCTV hosts podcasts and videocasts for staff and departments at UC. Users can subscribe by RSS feed to individual “channels” to keep updated.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries and Brown University Library provide a “dashboard” of widgets on their websites displaying current statistics about library usage.

Roy Tennant suggests not making any more mobile websites as research suggests more people (in the US) are getting smartphones that can support anything a normal web-browser can support. (Though I don’t know of any smartphone that supports a 1024×768 screensize…) Smartphone applications seem to be trending instead. The iLibrarian rounds up her Top 30 Library iPhone Apps (part 2 and part 3). Why an application when you’ve already got a website? Phil Windley points out that “If my bank can get me to download an app, then they have a permanent space on my app list.” The trade-off is that whereas a website should work on any browser, smartphone apps often need to be in proprietary formats (the Librarian in Black particularly complains about Apple’s iPhone in this respect).

View from the top 🙂
The University Librarian at McMaster University Library blogs results from their laptop survey. Apparently laptop circulation now accounts for about a third of their total circulation stats; their survey looks into how students are using the laptops.

The Director of Librarys at the State University of New York at Potsdam blogs about “What I’ve Learned” in the first 10 months of her job there.

Scandal of the week…
Barbara Fister summarises recent discussion about EBSCO as the “New Evil Empire” in her Library Journal article “Big vendor frustrations, disempowered librarians, and the ends of empire“. The discussion was kicked off when Meredith Farkas blogged about losing access to a key journal because of EBSCO gaining exclusive access to it. For her library to keep access to the journal, they’d have to subscribe to two databases at a total cost of US$7000.

Fun
Alice for the iPad – one of the ways technology can enhance the book.

Deborah