The future of publishing – this is a broad topic, covering many different topics and technologies: electronic paper, Kindle, scribd, espresso book machines, and more. And since the future hasn’t happened yet, our only method of determining what is going to happen is to examine history and the present, and infer possibilities from the empirical evidence.

How exciting! Well, here I am at OLA in a pre-conference about recorded books, which seems like as good a place as any to start.

Number one: as a society we are more mobile now than ever. And we have tools that help us stay connected while mobile, which adds to the vicious circle.

Number two: Audio books, like many wonderful and useful technologies, started as an adaptive technology – something to help “impaired” people enjoy books. But, like automatic doors in supermarkets, the application of the technology has now expanded beyond the design, because everyone is “impaired” in different ways, sometimes. For example, many people have no trouble opening a door for themselves most of the time. When they’re pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, they are temporarily impaired, and in need of the assistance the doors provide. Once the universal need was recognized, the technology advanced – so now there are those crazy revolving doors at the airport that you can just about drive your car through. Back to recorded books and being mobile – people still love their stories, but are finding less and less time to sit and read. Commuters and truckers discovered recorded books early on, sure, but now the young people are realizing that they can get these books and listen to them on their fancy mp3 devices. So all of a sudden audio books are being taken seriously as a method of publication – not just a side note, but as a main method of delivery. All kinds of people are becoming consumers of audio-books, even people who are not in any way “impaired,” either permanently or temporarily. They just like to listen to the books.

The future: People are taking recorded books more seriously, so more books are being recorded with better narrators, who are actually enjoyable to listen to for ten, twenty, even thirty hours. I know there have been attempts to publish books that are only available in an audio version – these are called “radio dramas,” and have been around for a while. The audio book version of a radio drama is a “full cast recording” which can sometimes be good, and sometimes not so much. I think that all these elements have the potential of spurring on greater interest in literature that originates as an audiobook, rather than just ends up as one.

Videos and video editing is a pet project of mine, so I like to keep track of what’s going on in the industry.  At several conferences, I’ve seen Jumpcut profiled as a nice resource for people who don’t have a video editor on their PC, or need to do some video editing while they’re away from their ‘puter, etc.  Those days are done, apparently:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/yahoo-putting-jumpcut-in-the-deadpool/

I won’t miss it that much - i tried it a couple times when i was having trouble with my home computer’s ability to make movies.  It always seemed very clunky to me, but maybe that was because I was used to a different editor.  I think it would make more sense if existing video sites offered the ability to fully edit videos as part of their service.

Howdy all - this is a tough economic client for many people.  As a librarian, I’m looking at resources from two perspectives - the ‘what if’ personal perspective, and the ‘how can I help you’ perspective.  I’m working on a class to teach people how to better use the Internet for job searches, with local resources spotlighted.  Increasingly, job searching and career advancement are tied to online networking, in addition to the age old dynamic of realtime analog networking - i.e. it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, blah blah blah.  So, here are 18 20 resources I’m looking at with a mind to profiling them in the class, with a small focus on local job resources.

1. Job Search article at About.com - Great starting place/catch-all for job searchers.  Lots of topics to explore, but because there is so much here it can take some time to find what you want.
2. JobRadio - A podcast compendium - download and listen to mp3s of podcasts on job-hunting topics, ranging from ‘hottest tech jobs’ type podcasts to ‘facebook job hunting experiment’ podcasts, to ‘be careful what you put on your myspace page’ type podcasts.
3. Secrets Of The Job Hunt  -  Blog about job hunting strategies.  Also includes podcasts and stuff.
4. Blank Resume Templates   -   It can be tough to find a free resume building site out there - this site has lots of advice, articles and other help, and also has three templates for basic resumes.  Like the Word resume wizard, you start with a generic resume, and replace the different parts with your own information.  Not the best way to make an awesome resume, but a good way to make a good resume.  A lot of resume sites will allow you to put all your information into their resume wizard ‘for free’ and then charge you a fee to see what it looks like.  Arrrrrrrrrgh.  I.  Hate.  Those.  People.
5. Idealist - Social site for people looking specifically for non-profit jobs and volunteer opportunities.  Need to look at it more before I make a real opinion about it.
6. Not sure what direction you want to take your career - either because you haven’t decided yet, or because you’re looking for a career change?  Check out the Occupational Outlook, which has profiles of all kinds of different occupations, including wage ranges, common tasks and work environment, as well as what the future looks like for that occupation - is it growing or shrinking, etc.

5 Big job hunting/networking sites - the first five are job hunting sites, with some social features involved.  The focus of the sites is to help you find job listings.  Craigslist is… well, craigslist, and LinkedIn is a social networking site focused on career specific networking.

1. Monster.com
2. CareerBuilder.com
3. HotJobs.com
4. Indeed.com
5. Snag-A-Job
6. Craigslist
7. LinkedIn

Local resources:  These are some local resources for Washington, Clark County, and Multnomah County.  Look for similar organizations or local county government agencies in your area.

1. Worksource
2. Clark County jobs
3. Other Clark County-related jobs
4. Vancouver City jobs
5. Vancouver Area Job Openings - The site is a little old-school html looking, but all the links I checked went to real sites of real companies with real job postings, so I’m not complaining.
6. Vancouver Metro Area Jobs Classifieds - Through the Columbian newspaper, but powered by Yahoo’s HotJobs.com.
7. Portland Metro Area Jobs Classifieds - Through Oregonlive.  Also has a resume builder on the site, if you set up an account.

Also, don’t forget the other end of the job search - unemployment:  The Washington State Employment Security Department has a nice site that includes information on unemployment for both employees and employers.  Also, they have a link to WorkSource, for more job searching.

Quick update:

Google Lively, which I blogged about several months ago, is shutting down at the end of the year.  You can read about their reasons here:   http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html

I recently attended Internet Librarian 2008 in Monetery, CA - a great conference if you ever get a chance to go to it, although given the current economic climate, I don’t know how many conferences I’ll be attending in the near future.  Ah well.  One of my favorite presentations at IL2008 was Steven M. Cohen’s “What’s Hot in RSS,” which was a series of profiles of all kinds of fun and interesting and helpful tools to make RSS work better for you.  I’m not going to recreate his whole presentation here - that would just be silly.  But I did want to show one of the coolest things (for me) from the presentation, which is a Firefox add-on called Update Scanner.

If you’re like me, there are at least a couple websites that you would like to put into your RSS reader, but gol-durnit, they don’t have an RSS feed available.  In the past, this simply involved going to each site when I wanted to see if anything was new, and then wondering if anything was actually new, and how new was it?  By using Update Scanner, I can create a list of these sites, and everytime they get updated, Update Scanner keeps track and highlights the changes.  There’s a little icon that appears in the bottom right corner of the browser - an ‘up arrow’ that lights up when there’s something new at one of the sites in the list.  One click on that, and the website comes up with some helpful navigation tools, as well as all the changes highlighted.

So, here’s a site I just added to Update Scanner.  In the sidebar, you can see my list of two sites, and the site itself on the right.  This page gets updated about once per week, but sometimes more often, and if i don’t come back to it all the time, I’m never quite sure if I’ve missed something - I’m not actually looking for a job, at least not at the moment, but I like to see what kinds of jobs are out there and what the qualifications and salary and things like that are.  Anyway…

Here’s the icon that shows up in your bottom right corner - right now it’s grey meaning there’s nothing new at my two sites.  Later, it lights up to a kind of purply color, and I know my sites have updates.  What are they?

Here on my library home page, I can read some really depressing news:

And here at PNLA Jobs i can see that there’s some new stuff, but pickings are a little slim.

In either case, i can use the navigation to see what the previous version of the page looked like, which is also pretty cool.