I really like this concept design.  I’m a sucker for bold colors and clean lines.

Real or fake?  Either way, Roger’s got skills!

This is a very interesting idea offered up by Tales of Things.  They say ‘Video Memories’, but to me it seems more like ‘Digital Memories’.  We’ve been throwing around the idea of using QR codes in our Strategic Planning meetings.  To be honest, I wasn’t really sure how we would effectively use them.  To be honest again, I’m not sure how many patrons we have with devices to make use of them.  It would still take a bit of work on our part to get something like this going, but it gives validity to using this type of service.

I setup a free account for the library and I’m going to give it a try.  Easy online collaboration seems like a no-brainer, but for some reason it’s something we just can’t get off the ground.  I like that Flowr sort of has a familiar Twitter|Facebook feel.  Hopefully this type of design could help turn us in the right direction.

Via Guy Kawasaki:

Information wants to be free, and I just freed some. I got the rights back for my first book, The Macintosh Way, and I’ve made it available for free. Hope that you find it useful.

Oh I will!

Toodledo is a powerful native task manager, for the iPhone and iPad. It will help organize your to-do list and notes so that you can be more productive. You can use it as a standalone application, or you can have it seamlessly synchronize with Toodledo.com, so you will always have access to your important tasks, even when you don’t have an internet connection.

I’ve used Toodledo on and off over the last year via the web browser.  I’m looking forward to having in on my iPhone and Pad now and syncing everything together.

Star Wars Celebration V has been dropping some very cool goodies this year.  For all the Fan Boys & Girls out there (myself included), this is like Christmas in July…err August.

1st – George Lucas announced today that all six Star Wars films will make their HD home theater debut on Blu-ray disc in fall 2011. The box set will include the Special Edition remastered version of the original trilogy.

2nd – In Geoff Boucher’s article in the Los Angeles Times, Gary Kurtz talks a bit about an earlier version of Return of the Jedi:

“We had an outline and George changed everything in it,” Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”

The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.

He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. “So we agreed that I should probably leave.”

3rd – George Lucas showed the legendary deleted opening scene to Return of the Jedi.  In it, you can see Vader reaching out to Luke via the Force while Luke finishes constructing his new lightsaber in a cave on Tatooine.

Farhad Manjoo from Slate.com:

I rarely make predictions about the tech business, but here goes: Before the holidays, Amazon will cut the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle to $99, and the 3G version will go for $150 or less.

A $99 price tag will make the Kindle the hottest gift of the season—much cheaper than the $499 iPad, more useful than an Xbox Kinect, and a lot more fun than a cable-knit sweater.

I’d have to say that a Kindle under the $100 price point is going to make me give it a serious look.  I know that Kindles are not yet prevalent in our community, but if prices continue to decline we’re going to have to start seriously looking into servicing more ebooks and readers to our patrons.  I know that Libraries usually tend to be behind the times in Technology, but this time it would be nice to at least be with the curve.  I’m tired of the old “better late than never” mentality.

I can has Real Estate on LOL Cats island! This always gives me the option of shooting through the Strait of Rick Roll to do some vacationing in YouTube.

Lately, it seems like learning to correctly use social media as a PR tool for your library has become a hot topic.  Within the past couple of weeks I’ve attended OhioNet’s Workshop: Social Media for the Social Good and an online ALA TechSource Webinar: Organization 2.0: Building the Participatory Library.  Both of these workshops were great experiences, but it’s almost as if someone thought I needed further real-world proof of social media’s far reaching power.  This twitter exchange happened last week when I happened to have lunch at Cheeseburger In Paradise.

When I arrived at Cheeseburger In Paradise, I used Foursquare to check-in from my iPhone.  Nothing over the top, not even a comment to go along with the check-in.

The next day, I received this tweet from Cheeseburger In Paradises’ Twitter account ComeToParadise:

To be honest, when I first saw the @reply, I thought it was some kind of spam.  I clicked on the account link and was surprised to see it was actually Cheeseburger In Paradise asking me how my lunch went.  It really caught me by surprise.  I was impressed they took the time to do a twitter search looking for people dining at their restaurant and then went the extra mile by sending those people a tweet.  This simple exchange impressed me and has obviously left an impression.

Hopefully this can be used as an example of what we should be doing at the library to better engage with our community.  As a patron, it makes you feel important, that your opinions matter and that someone may be listening to you.