Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

I suspect I already have enough social media in my life, but having seen a significant number of librarian bloggers* mentioning FriendFeed, I thought I’d give it a try.First impression: cool, it lets me import my Facebook and Gmail friends.Second impression: hmmm,  a total of one of my friends is using FriendFeed. Third: cool, something that combines your basic social networks into one place, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm, blogs, Facebook, Library Thing, and a whole lot more sites that I’ve either never heard of or have forgotten about. And it’s opt-in (there was a service about a year ago that would let you follow anyone in your email contacts list, without their permission. I was able to track people that I’d emailed to sell something via TradeMe or eBay; random acquaintances; ex-girlfriends. It was not a good service, and I’m glad I’ve even forgotten the name). Fourth: it lets you create profiles. This is a major bugbear of mine with regard to social media. In life, we all play multiple roles. I’m an employee, a co-worker, a teacher, a son, brother, friend, acquaintance, etc. I want to expose different parts of my life to different people. Most social media makes that difficult, unless you create multiple accounts. For example, I have 30 followers on Twitter. 28 of them are from an online community – I’ve met about 10 of them, but I’m comfortable talking about a wide range of things with them. The other two are librarians, one of whom I’ve met, the other found me somehow. The presence of those two people changes some of the things I might say in discussion with the others. This would be even more extreme if current workmates or prospective employers were following me. So anything that lets me segment my posting is welcome.This was something that bothered me about Facebook, where my friends list is very heterogenous (OK, no more than anyone else’s I guess): real-world library colleagues, (1) other library blogger, former workmates (now my former boss), online friends, old classmates who I haven’t seen in years and probably wouldn’t recognise in the street, and “real” friends (OK, that’s arbitary, but you know what I mean, right?). I only recently found out that Facebook will let you group your friends, so that’s something I’ll be looking in to. Anyway, I’m pleased to see that FriendFeed makes it easy to split people into different groups, and presumably post material that’s appropriate for those groups.That’s enough for now, will play around and see how it works out. Not completely related, but similar: Jessamyn West and Phil Bradley have commented on their guidelines for deciding who to follow on Twitter. Jessamyn comments that her followers come from very different groups: Metafilter members, librarians, and real-life friends/family, meaning she follows far fewer people than follow her.*Jenny Levine and Walt Crawford, to name two. 

findanyfilm.com is a neat site for those of us in the UK that does exactly what it says – lets you search for any film that is available in the UK. Most interestingly, it lets you search for films that are in cinemas, or available on DVD or Blu-Ray or on TV, or even for download or to watch online. You can set your location, so that it will find films near you, and lets you set up alerts so you are notified when the film becomes available in any format. The interface is clean and easy to use, and I probably prefer it to something like Time Out’s film search function. There are a few limits – it seems to skew towards commercial publishers (iTunes) when considering whether a film is available for download, ignoring films that are available on the Internet Archive. While there’s a lot to commend in FindAnyFilm’s statement that “Film downloads should be problem free and the highest quality, which is why FindAnyFilm.com only finds film downloads that are guaranteed to be legal, virus-free, first-generation releases”, I think the Internet Archive has enough credibility to be considered as a source.

Via Phil Bradley.  

I’m back to reasonably regular posting. My apologies to the two people who left comments on my last post; I had over 10K spam comments, I was trying to delete those and approve the good ones, but somehow deleted the good ones as well. I’ve turned comments off temporarily, until I can install anti-spam plugins. Right now I’m just clearing up some items that I’ve got saved in my Google Reader. Seeing  as I’m in one of the live music capitals of the world, I thought I’d start off with a roundup of some music-related posts from the past few weeks/months. This Unshelved strip made me smile, and will be appreciated by any fans of the Wellington (or Great Britain) Ukulele Orchestras.Techdirt notes that CD sales are down 14%.And points out the flaws in EMI’s lawsuit against MP3Tunes. (wherein MP3Tunes is being sued for linking to MP3s online; but EMI is posting many of those same MP3s itself, for free). More Techdirt: this time news from back home that New Zealand musicians are opposing a law that makes ISP’s responsible for policing piracy, and assumes that if someone is accused of file-sharing, they are guilty.  Although looking at the source site, I can’t see any musicians involved, so I’m not sure where Techdirt got that from.Techdirt also reports on the MPAA supporting the idea of ISP’s kicking off users who are accused of file-sharing. From ReadWriteWeb: the best selling album on Amazon last year was available as a free download. (technically, all albums on Amazon are available somewhere as free downloads; I suspect they mean ‘free and legal’ ). Via RWW again, HypeMachine has the music blog zeitgeist for 2008 - the top 50 albums (aggregated from music blogs), available to download as radio shows featuring songs from the albums and interviews with bloggers, or play the full album in your browser. It looks good, but judging by the top 50 I’d say there aren’t too many black music blogs/bloggers: Kanye and Lil Wayne is about your limit if you’re looking for something that isn’t white rock/dance.Audiolizer lets you take your iTunes with you, writes RWW, who also suggest other streaming music sites. And recommend Mufin for better music recommendations in iTunes. Phil Bradley recommends Songza.Warner Music wants more money for having songs on YouTube, and musicians aren’t happy (Techdirt).