One of my Facebook Friends is Jim Milles of the SUNY Buffalo law school. This week, he's attending a conference on computer-assisted legal instruction. Jim is using Twitter during the conference sessions, so I'm receiving a steady stream of interesting observations and ideas.

Here's an example:

"#calicon08: FSU survey: 82% of students use Facebook at least once a week: only 8% had used Second Life at all."

It's really great for me to have Jim "gleaning" for me. Yay, Twitter! Go, Jim!

Let's have a look at this little nugget.

I assume he's talking about law students at Florida State University. So, the survey subjects are mostly in their early- to mid-twenties, and they fall into a small slice of the population of the "real world." But, Florida State's law librarians now have some important data that will help them decide where to locate their online presence.

Remember how fast IM melted away when teens started texting instead? Has anyone in Idaho done a quick-and-dirty--or elegant--survey recently? If you have, please share!

I'm already sitting here trying to figure out how to get a quick survey incorporated into this year's UI law school orientation week ...

I just learned that there are at least two academic libraries that have set up their library guides and catalog search engines as Facebook apps. One of them is a Voyager library--UCLA. The other library uses Innovative Interfaces--Ryerson University.

It makes sense for libraries to be out there in the parts of cyberspace where our students spend their time. And it's not hard to do, technically. But, will anyone USE these apps? Stay tuned ...

See for yourself, at:

UCLA Library has a Voyager catalog search app in Facebook

http://apps.facebook.com/uclacatalog/

Ryerson University's library guide can be found at:
http://www.ryerson.ca/library/iii/facebook.html

Thanks to Glenna for providing us this link to "What's Next in Media." According to Glenna, you can easily substitute "media" for "library" and you'll see how closely these issues are related.

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Or at least, pretty darn near. We're talking about the super zoom capabilities of Google's "Street View" choice available in Google maps for some cities.  Boise, by the way, has been mapped with Street View technology and now you can literally drive around Boise and grab, rotate, and move the map window along the same pathway the car/van that Google employed to snap pictures to get around the city.

What's even cooler is that you can embed your particular street view map, with grab, zoom, and moves right into your blog (well, not WordPress ones). Simply find a street-view enabled map in Google Maps, click on the "Link to this page" and you'll get the code to embed it anywhere you please, thusly (this is the north side of the Albertsons Library):

View Larger Map

If you drag it to your left, you can see me waving (kidding!).

Hi everyone,

Thought you guys might like to see some SPLAT-themed photos from our May 2nd, 2008 meeting at the Collister branch in Boise.  Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/splatidaho/: