The Distant Librarian – Thoughts on technology and libraries

8/19/2016

Two web-based communication tools

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried either of these, but have heard the results of the first one, and the second one is such a good review it must be worth a look, right? 🙂 First up, a web-based podcast-recording studio called Cast. Awful name, IMHO, as it's hard to find amongst all the ChromeCast results
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Posted Under: Random Tech Tips, Social Networks, Web/Tech
7/28/2016

Anatomy of an Information Trap, Part II: Setting Up and Sharing Google Alerts

Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz has posted part 2 of her 3 part series on creating and working with information traps, Setting up and sharing Google alerts. In this post I learned how to automatically create and populate columns in a Google Sheet using IFTTT. Off the top of my head I can think of at
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Posted Under: Scholarship, Service, Social Networks, Tutorials, Web/Tech
6/24/2016

Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML

Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the JSON feed of the Govt. of Canada Open Data releases, so I get something that looks great in my Feedly list: But when I click through I get the JSON data instead of the actual HTML descriptive page with pretty separate download the CSV etc buttons. Too
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Posted Under: Discovery, Linking, Web/Tech
6/20/2016

Thoughts on Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government

Last week the Government of Canada released the latest draft of the new plan on Open Government, and I thought it was pretty good reading! Here are some of the things I learned, or highlighted as particularly interesting: Canada was recently ranked 4th out of 92 countries by the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer which
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Posted Under: Miscellaneous, Service, Web/Tech
6/10/2016

How many US senators follow Edward Snowden on Twitter?

TLDR: 0 Last week I was intrigued when this paper came out: Trust, tribalism and tweets: has political polarization made science a “wedge issue”?. In it, "Helmuth and his Northeastern colleagues analyzed the Twitter accounts of U.S. senators to see which legislators followed research-oriented science organizations, including those covering global warming. Democrats, they found, were
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Posted Under: Data, Ideas, Social Networks

Home

Two web-based communication tools

Anatomy of an Information Trap, Part II: Setting Up and Sharing Google Alerts

Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML

Thoughts on Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government

How many US senators follow Edward Snowden on Twitter?