fflick is a website that compiles what people are saying on Twitter about movies.  On their site, movies are shown with the total number of tweets and then the percentage of people who liked the film.  The site uses what they are calling a “Sentiment Engine” where reactions about films are analyzed and aggregated. 

Click on any movie and then you get information on what your own Twitter friends are saying, some of the interesting responses, the latest posts about the film, and the positive and negative comments broken into two categories.  Nicely, you will also get some added content like any trailers that are out, a brief blurb about the film, the rating, director, stars and genre.  You can also vote your own opinion of the film in.

This is a very appealing and friendly website without being overwhelming.  The movies are nicely presented and users can happily type in any film they are interested in.  I think it makes an ideal companion for Rotten Tomatoes.  It will certainly be one that I check when ordering DVDs for the library.

Related articles by Zemanta

Fur.ly is a site that allows you to shorten multiple URLs and then offer a single URL to people who are able to tour through the sites you have collected.  I can see this being really useful when working on projects with others.  A great way to share a collection of sites without sending a list of URLs, plus it is much more dynamic and inviting than a Delicious link to a list of URLs. 

Once you click on a site, you can a bar across the top of the page that allows you to move from one URL to the next. 

It also lets you see the number of sites in the collection and view the whole list with the pulldown menu.  Very easy to use when setting it up and intuitive to use as someone who gets the URL sent to them.

I’m considering using this for the next presentation I do that features a collection of websites.  It would also make moving from one site to the next easier on the presenter.

Thanks to Download Squad for the link.

I am rather fascinated by real-time searching.  With the rise of Twitter and Facebook and their immediacy, search engines must begin to start pulling in that content.  Collecta does just that in a very friendly and customizable way.

The site offers the hot topics directly on the start page, allowing you to scan them quickly and access them right from there.  Depending on where you click, you can read the story they are citing or you can start a new search on the topic.  That new search offers you plenty of options.

Those same options are available when you start your own search too.  You can toggle on and off stories like blog posts and articles, comments, updates on services like Twitter and Jaiku, photos from Flickr and TwitPic, and videos from YouTube and UStream.  So your results are the ones you want.  You can eliminate Twitter if you don’t like that source, or limit it just to Twitter if it’s the place you want to look.  Additionally, you can share your search results on social networking sites.  That same option is available for the individual results too.

Very personalized, fast and in real-time, this site is slick!  They also have a mobile version so you can use it on the go.

This site could be seen as quite similar to the last site I posted about, paper.li, but they are actually quite different and I find myself using both of them.

The Twitter Tim.es offers a collection of already built newspapers in addition to your own.  You can view the most tweeted news items from major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Guardian and USA Today.  Nicely, they are in separate sections so you can view the news outlets you are most interested in.

Additionally, the site offers themed newspapers created by some of the top tweeters in those fields.  So you really get the top tweets on subjects like technology, art, economics, finance, politics, and health.  My favorite section is Thought Leaders because you get an intriguing mix of tweets from smart people to get you thinking.

I really appreciate these pre-built papers for the days when I am in a rush and just want to quickly glance for the best.  The focus of them is appealing compared to the unfocused nature of my own feeds.  Still, I use paper.li to build my own focused tweet newspapers based on hashtags.  So there is a place for both services for sure.

Enormous opportunity in libraries
Must evolve first & adapt to environment

Find is not the problem that needs to be solved
Indexes not databases – databases suck at search

Go beyond find and help patrons use and evaluate content
More full-text content – open source and licensed
Collect online free resources like free classic books and blogs- bring in locally
Analyze them, add value
Enable people to do things against the text – Digital Humanities Computing

Must visualize content – word clouds

Phase 1: The Bandaid
Force brand onto the site
Provide consistent navigation
Identify duplicated content
Think of selves as one
Gateway page
Standard navigation toolbar on every library page

Lots of user surveys and studies; focus groups & advisory groups
One question survey – why did you come here today?
Focus on users not staff opinions

What users said:
Wanted toe told what was important – offer guidance
Did not want have to know where to start
Single interface and design
No lists of links

Searching and browsing: Find Bar

Design Principles
Ubiquitous and persistent find function
Clear visual hierarchy
Hip, clean, contemporary look
Show off our treasures
Tell our news
Reveal things that aren’t known about us

Large spotlight section

No software coats, but hardware like servers was purchased

Did not use SOPAC

Open source – preference for building over buying
Still live in vendor- driven environment

Reacting to feedback
Conducting usability work
Added quick links to the site
Adding mobile interface
Formed new User Experience Dept

Participatory design
Printout of gateway page – offer likes, dislikes and additions

Ladder of social cataloging

1. Personal cataloging

2. Sharing – library, opinions, data

3. Implicit social cataloging
65 million tags!
Tagging is making sense for yourself – magical when large groups do it
5 recommendation algorithms

4. Social networking
Connection news
Librarians who LibraryThing – largest group

5. Explicit social cataloging
No authority file

6. Collaborative cataloging
200 Collections of Presidential book collections and others – way cool

Not about features or central control

Traditional cataloging has physical basis – size of catalog cards
Millions of tags wash out the impact of bad tagging

This is about giving things to people – not user generated content!

Embrace radical openness

Library catalogs stuck in 2001
No permanent linking to bib records
Go with the grain of Internet
Trust people
Let others in
Be on the web

LibraryThing for Libraries
Reviews
Different editions pulled together
Similar reads
Tag cloud
Virtual shelf browser – adds browsability

Paper.li is a very interesting way to access your Twitter account.  It creates a newspaper page that presents your Twitter content in a very easy to read format.  You can create multiple newspapers based on any Twitter user (it doesn’t have to be yourself), any list, and any hashtag. 

This is ideal for those who want to check in on their Twitter account quickly without trying to read each and every item.  You can also read other people’s newspapers.  Check out mine here and head to the bottom of the main page to browse the featured list.

To create your own newspaper, click on Create a Newspaper at the top of the screen.  It will need to attach itself to your Twitter account to create newspapers.  If that makes you uncomfortable, you can also just read the ones that others have created.  Then all you need to do is enter a Twitter username, enter a #tag or enter an @list.  Click Create and off you go.  Your newspaper only needs to be created once and then it will have its own URL for you to reference.

I regularly try out this sort of site and this is one of the best I have found.  The simplicity of the design helps a lot as well as the ability to approach the newspaper creation from a variety of points of view. 

So just select your country, and the audience you want to learn about and with a click you can see their social media profile and what motivates them to use social media.  A great way to figure out the differences in audiences and their reasons for following libraries via social media, allowing you to better reach people.