Wishing you all very happy holidays!  I don’t plan to post much in the next few weeks as I spend some vacation time with my family.  I’ll see you in the new year.

HubSpot has released their State of the Twittersphere report.  It has a lot of fascinating facts to tempt you to read it:

70% of Twitter users joined in 2008

5,000-10,000 accounts are opened each day

35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers

9% of Twitter users follow no one at all

There is a strong correlation between number of followers and number of people you follow.

Great items for a class on Twitter, because they take the pressure off of creating a huge number of followers.  The report has some great graphs that illustrate the boom in usage very well.

I am always on the lookout for new websites to search for photos, clip art and images to use on our website and blogs.  This site is amazingly large with over 24,000 public domain images.  The images are saved in PNG format, but the site’s interface makes conversion to jpg a breeze.

Click on browse and you will see a long list of categories to look through.  Browse will also offer you a place to search the site using Google.  Amazing collection with enough simple, plain clip art to be really helpful and enough strange or interesting items to be addictive.

A couple websites that I use all of the time have added features that feel a lot like Christmas presents.

First is Gmail, which added a neat new feature that allows you to take any email you received via Gmail and turn it into a Google Doc.  I already had several long lists of book titles that I had gotten in email that I had been putting off cutting and pasting into a document.  Success! 

The instructions to turn on the feature are on the Gmail Blog.

Then last week, SlideShare announced their new add-on for PowerPoint that will allow you to upload your slides to Slideshare from within PowerPoint.  Do you hear the trumpets play?  I did.  It’s called the SlideShare ribbon and is definitely worth looking at if you use SlideShare.

Mashable has created another one of their fabulous collections of links.  This time their focus was job or employment sites.  They list over 100 great sites and what better thing to share with our patrons, many of whom are looking for exactly that sort of information.

Because I’ve been doing a couple of programs on Twitter, I’ve collected some cool Twitter tools.  I’ll share some with you and will probably have enough to do another batch later.

TwitterLocal is a cool tool that lets you find others in your area that are using Twitter.  You enter your zip code and can find others in the region who tweet.  I also love it that it doesn’t try to place my location for me and then argue when I want to change it.  This lets me investigate people tweeting in areas I want to travel to and would be helpful if I was moving to a new area.

Looking for new people to follow on Twitter?  Well Twitterholic has a list of the top 100 people on Twitter based on the number of followers they have. 

Twilert is another way to make Twitter work for you.  They email alerts to you based on keywords you enter.  You can do vanity searches to follow your name, see what people are saying about your library or community, or you can have an alert for terms of general interest to you.  Even better – you can have all of the above!

I had the fun of presenting a program on Libraries and Technology to the Fox Valley Library Council.  It was wonderful having a room full of people who nodded along when I said wiki and smiled at RSS feeds.  What a joy.

It was also a treat to talk about technology in general.  The toughest part was figuring out how to narrow it down to something interesting for a group of librarians who already do a lot of this stuff.

I am sharing my slides on SlideShare for a couple of reasons. 

My copier was possessed and would not print so I couldn’t share any handouts.

There was no Internet access, so all of the links were tantalizingly underlined but we were not able to visit.  Yes, a technology program with no Internet.  Amazingly, my slide presentation worked even without the flashy site visits:

Tomorrow I give a speech about Libraries and Technology.  I’m afraid that I have far too much to put into just one hour.  But I also figure that part of libraries and technology is the bounty and feast of choices that are put before us now.  Better to have too many to share than too few. 

My slides feature things like striking a balance in our services for techies and non-techies, defining what technology DOES for us, open source options, social networking, Twitter, pimping your browser ride, collaboration, virtual desktops, and the semantic web.

I will also be setting up a Wii for people to play over the lunch that follows the presentation.  I have Guitar Hero for them to play and also Mario Cart if people are feeling a little more sedate. 

It should be great fun.  I’m keeping the presentation less nuts and bolts and more about how technology is changing libraries and how libraries are using technology.  More of a feel-good buffet of great stuff than a lecture on the seriousness of technology applications in libraries.

Cookstr is unique among recipe sites.  Rather than being a social site where people vote or a place filled to the rafters with recipes of varying quality, Cookstr is working with the best chefs and cookbook authors to offer great recipes online.  Yes, there are hopes that you will purchase their cookbooks, but just looking at the list of chefs associated with the site is enough to get my mouth watering! 

You will find Mario Batali, Jacques Torres, Nick Malgieri, Lidia Bastianich and many many more.  They all share recipes, offer information on their cookbooks, link to their restaurants, and provide insight into their approach to food.  The site’s design is open, full of images, and inviting. 

I have tried plenty of to-do list sites and reminder sites, but this one looks like it just might beat the rest.  Set yourself a reminder to do something on a specific date at a specific time.  Then tell Remindr how you want to receive your reminder.  You have several options: Twitter, email, jabber or even your phone.

And that’s all there is to it.  No account to register for.  No username and password to forget.  Just a little form to fill out and a reminder will be headed your way using the technology you want it to.

Sweet.