Visit to Sunshine Books

Yesterday I joined authors Barbara Clark and Janet Quinn for a signing at Sunshine Books, a new and used bookstore in Southern California. Sunshine Books in Cypress, Calif. has been a mainstay of local authors and readers for twenty-eight years. It's great to find an independent bookstore these days that is friendly to both romance and small press books. Nancy, the current owner, and her staff are great to work with and we all had a wonderful time.

Here's a photo of the three authors with two of our readers. From left to right: Aleane, Janet Quinn, Linda McLaughlin / Lyndi Lamont, Barbara Clark / April Reid, and Pam. My thanks to Nancy for taking the picture.

Linda

Web 2.0 Goes To The Dogs... Literally

Last night, ABC News did a piece on the ultimate in social networking: Dogbook and Catbook.

That's right, FaceBook has two animal networking sites for pets, well, really for their owners. Fluffy and Fido still have trouble using the keyboard, I expect. Sam Harris did the report and it showed him using the computer with his two cats, Ruby and Zoe. I kid you not.

Apparently in less than three months, with no ads, Dogbook and Catbook grew to 600,000 members. Lest you think I'm making this up, here's a link to the story at ABC News.

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3512985

Are Mulder and Sherlock next? Only Melinda knows for sure!

Linda

Taking advantage of Web 2.0

Since I'm part-time and pretty much out of the loop, it's hard for me to speculate on how the library can best take advantage of Web 2.0. I do think del.icio.us has some possibilities, esp. when for the reference librarians. Sometimes we manage to find a needed piece of information on the internet, but then are unable to duplicate the search later. Using del.icio.us might be of some help in avoiding that dilemma.

Linda

Metacafe better than YouTube?

Earlier we tried to embed videos into our blogs with no success using YouTube's code. I recently came across Metacafe, which is on the list of Web 2.0 awards. Metacafe claims to be able to embed video in blogs, so I'm giving it a try here. If this works, it's another Conan the Librarian video. I love this video! ;-)



Conan the Librarian-Return your books on time - Funny bloopers R us

Hoping this works,

Linda

Google Docs

Today I saved a Word file to Google documents so I could edit it here at the library. I learned that there's no way to put tabs into this kind of document (at least not that I could find easily) so I'd have been better off cutting and pasting the document into Word before doing my editing. This is HTML, after all, not word processing. Pretty handy, though, if you're away from home and don't have access to MS Word or whatever program you regularly use.

I'm going to try cutting and pasting this into my blog as Ed suggested to see what happens. I suppose I should try to make it more interesting, but I'm really not inclined to do so.

I just opened Blogger and didn't expect to have to log in again, since I already had Google Docs open, but I did.

That's all for now.

Linda

PS: It worked, but left three lines between paragraphs instead of just one.

L.