This year’s theme – “The Power of C – Collaboration”.

*Why is there a big snow storm before or after every OLA Super Conference?

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 262 posts. There were 12 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was April 26th with 76 views. The most popular post that day was del.icio.us libraries – September 27, 2008.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.search.wordpress.com, delicious.com, angelacw.tumblr.com, swissarmylibrarian.net, and 23thingskansas.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for embed flickr, flickr embed, tumblr tips, embed flickr photos, and tumblr blog.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

del.icio.us libraries – September 27, 2008 June 2007
55 comments

9 alternate ways to embed flickr photos onto your webpages March 2008
4 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

Tumblr fun with tags and image viewers June 2008
2 comments

Tumblr, a different way to blog October 2007
8 comments

my must-have iPhone and iPod Touch apps November 2009
1 comment

The social bookmarking tool most loved by libraries hangs on a thread.

I’ve exported all 1818 of my bookmarks into an HTML file.  I can import my bookmarks into Safari.  I can upload my HTML file to the cloud, and access it at any time.  I can share my links via Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.   I’ve cURLed by bookmarks into an XML file. So what have I lost? Anyone that’s used Delicious knows that Facebook and Twitter can’t replace it.  There is no substitute.

Yes, I’ve tried CiteULike, the now defunct Mag.nolia, StumbleUpon, and Zotero. Somehow I always ended up back in Delicious.

Delicious brought social tagging and serendipitous search to the forefront of the web 2.0 movement. It’s the first tool most of us started using in our introduction to web 2.0 courses for a reason.  Remember the joy you felt when searching the collective knowledge of a particular tag, only to find something else, all the more exciting and worthwhile?  That’s gone folks.  Bye, bye Delicious. It was good while it lasted.

Key highlights from the study:

Books are faster than tablets.
“The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print.”

User satisfaction: iPad Loved, PCs Hated.
After using each device, users were asked to rate their satisfaction on a 1-7 scale (7 being the best). “The result: iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6.”

I found the less predictable comments interesting and concur: “Users felt that reading the printed book was more relaxing than using electronic devices. And they felt uncomfortable with the PC because it reminded them of work.”

What impact will reading speeds have on the sales of ebook readers? While people may read faster with print, there may be little impact on sales of these devices. According to the Association of American Publishers e-book sales from the “13 publishers soared 176.6% in 2009, to $169.5 million”.

As an ebook reader myself, I find that I do read slower on my Sony Reader. What has increased is the number of books that I’ve read over the past 6 months. The convenience of a portable device has encouraged me to read more on-the-go, and hopefully, the readability issues with these devices will be solved in the future.

This blog has a QR code:

Learn more about QR codes here.

Get one here.

Thanks to Rudy for sharing this tip.

Take a look at Goodreads.

Launched in December 2006, Goodreads is a social network for book lovers, and has become immensely popular over the past year. Goodreads 3.2 million members have added more than 84,000,000 books to their shelves. Goodreads includes recommendations, and lets you keep track of books you’ve read, and books you want to read.

Goodread’s mission “is to get people excited about reading. Along the way, we plan to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world.”

I’ve been a Goodreads member since January. At the time, I was looking for a place to keep track of my books, as part of my goal to read more in 2010. As a new owner of a Sony Touch ebook reader, I found the Goodreads site had a large number of ebook editions for titles that I could add to my virtual bookshelf.

Numerous authors have Facebook-eque fan pages on Goodreads, and you can follow them as you would on other social networks. If you are interested in a particular genre, you can join Goodreads Groups. Setting your location to Canada in your profile also filters Canadian groups on your group page.

Members who have 50+ books on their shelves can apply for Goodreads Librarian status. Goodreads librarians have the ability to edit book and author data, add book covers, and combine different editions of books. Restricting membership to librarian status helps to keep the Goodreads’ catalogue tidy. Get the low-down on being a Goodreads Librarian here.

Goodreads also has Facebook and Twitter integration, that allows you to share your updates with friends on those social networks. The Goodreads iPhone app also synchs up with my online account, so I can access it on the go. If you’re a blogger, you can also add a widget or Goodreads shelf badge to your site, to show off what you are reading.

Has Goodreads contributed to my goal to read more in 2010? Absolutely!

Join me there!

The Library Technicians in Canada group on Facebook provides a great opportunity to meet others and keep in touch. The group is open to all library technicians across Canada.  Recent graduates or soon to be graduates of a Library & Information Techniques Program are welcome to join.  The group has 460+ members and growing! When you join, be sure to introduce yourself on the wall.