Notes from a Wired Magazine

This is more of an observe than an analyze post...

I'd like to able to say that I get all the information I need to be a good digital librarian from the professional sources. And I do get a fair amount, especially the tech as relates to library policy, or the research into user behavior. However, I love Wired for the trends and new commercial resources.

Here's one: Please Press 1. currently a UK based site, but there's to be a US based one. It gives you a visual of the phone tree of customer service lines so you don't waste time sitting and listening. Wonder of wonders; you'd think that the individual companies could post on their websites the phone tree like a site map.

Fits.me is a web service that has dress form dummies made out of robots. You enter your personal dimensions and the robot morphs into the appropriate shape. THEN the cool thing, you can overlay any clothes you're shopping for and see what it would like on your shape. Great for clothing designers end producers too b/c they'll build a database of body types and then see which sizes are trending in aggregate and be able to sew clothes appropriately for those types. One of my co-workers says that it'll never work b/c she doesn't want to see what clothes look like on her, it's depressing enough to wear clothes, much less look at a representation of her body type in the clothes.

There was a question about whether a person has the right to delete offensive posts/comments/replies on their social media accounts. I liked the response:"If someone spray-painted a nasty comment on your house, you would get rid of it. Our virtual space may just be rentals, but that doesn't mean what happens there doesn't matter." Sort of a you are free to speak as you like, and I am free not to listen to it.

Notes from a review of Google plus's photo organizing service vs. the awesome settings one gets on an Apple camera: Google+ has excellent photo organization, but the quality of Android cameras is poor in comparison to Apple cameras. G+ organizational features use algorithms to compare images to its database of images, selects the best lighting, tags faces, all without the user having to do it. "But who wants a bunch of well organized photos that aren't very pretty?" (I beg to differ, the camera on the iPad that my job gave me isn't good at all (in my kid's school auditorium.) I'm the type that if I had enough time, I'd take the picture via the good camera and then upload to the G+ cataloging service, but who has the time? And no matter the quality of the camera, you can't get a good shot if there's another person in front of you.

Advertisement: Nextissue.com magazine service like audible.com. Pay one monthly rate, read as much as you want online. "No clutter." I'd be interested to see if the service allows you to bookmark and take notes, like Zenio. (the website doesn't address that issue.) And is the content available offline?