Check out what our friends from the Netherlands are doing in Jamaica.  Erik is a great guide, so enthusiastic and curious – watching him on YouTube is almost as good as seeing him in person!  Join us at Internet Librarian 2008 in Monterey CA for another exciting Shanachie adventure.

And, on Jane’s 35th wedding anniversary, and our 15th working anniversary, a word about partnerships. Seems obvious, but too often individuals and organizations enter into partnerships without asking, discussing and documenting the answers to the following questions:

1.What’s the specific purpose of the partnership? Why is it being considered?

2. How will it benefit customers?

3. How will it benefit each organization?

4. What are the risks for each organization?

5. What are the exit conditions?

There are many more questions to consider — and we’ll be exploring those on Tuesday June 17th at 7:00 a.m. (argh!!! Breakfast meetings!!) at SLA’s annual conference in the Seattle Convention Centre, Rom 203. Oh yeah - another condition for partnerships? Willingness to let go & to laugh!!!! Love ya Jane -

It is hard for me to imagine that I have been married for 35 years today — yes I was only 3 years old when I was married  (kidding!).  AND, my business partner, Rebecca Jones, and I have been together for more than 15 years.  I am blessed with two long-standing, and wonderful partners.   My mother recently pointed out an article in the newspaper about the longevity of marriages/partnerships being due to annoying your partner.  Guess my partners know all about that!   Partners take the good and bad, the strengths and challenges, and support one another in all the important ways.  I have been reflecting on this for a few days and want everyone to know how lucky I am! 

ITBusiness.ca profiles Googles’ failures in “Ten god-awful Google flops & fiascos.” It’s worth scanning, especially the section about Google Answers, which, despite the quality, flopped in the face of Yahoo’s free answers…..and the fact that Google expects employees to 20% of their time pursuing personal projects of interest —- since out of failures rise 1 or 2 significant successes. If we aren’t falling down occasionally, it’s because we aren’t walking on new paths or trying anything new. And that’s really dangerous, especially for libraries and information services.  Celebrate service ideas that don’t work — it means that you’ve tried something & learned!
Google is just the newest in a long line of successful failures; Einstein, Edison, they all struggled through many “learnings”. Cuz that’s all they are — “learnings”. Check out what we can learn from Google. And here’s the quote of the day I received from the feed to my blackberry: “Thomas A. Edison: “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

Further to my post last week about the Google competition for K-12 students, here is the winner of the contest.  Since we seem to have gone from long, cold winter where I live to a  rainy, cool spring, I agree this is great!  Thanks Google for encouraging students to share their artistic insights.  For more info check out Google’s blog about this.

Sat in on this session at Streaming Meida East  yesterday with a bunch of cool speakers in a session moderated by Kevin Nalts, Product Manager & Industry Blogger, WillvideoForFood.com.  Paul Kontonis, CEO, For Your Imagination talked about making videos interesting, and getting people to talk about them so they keep coming back to view them. He gave an example of a viral video campaign with individuals doing things with a new beer can from Coors which didn’t do week until they found a popular YouTuber to respond to video to help drive views – Sexy Coors Light Girls. He also refered to Word of Mouth amplifiers who help to make videos go viral. J. Crowley, Black20.com talked about talking to your audience, and making it transparent for them so that they know a video is sponsored.  For ad money, he said, you really need serialized content, it is not enough to be popular on YouTube.  He also said that humor, paradies, and nostalgia works for helping videos go viral, his example was a trailer he created for a fake move that brought in a Tetris like environment.  Ben Relles, CEO, BarelyPolitical.com, talked about his political satire site and some of their videos.  He emphasized that you want videos that people talk and blog about (like Obama Girl), a topic that is being talked about online a lot, and using that to create a popular video (Bill O’Reilly, Hilary in Bosnia).  Kip Kedersha, Viral Video Producer and Metacage Top Producer,  who makes instructional videos and makes money at it, says his secret is producing short, compelling videos which for him, has developed a large  fan base.  He used his “turning a maglite into a laser pionter” video as an example with the audience.

This morning Enterprise Search Summit got underway with keynote Martin White, Intranet Focus, and I liked his quote even though he can’t remember where it came from.  If you know, let me know!

The fire of progress is lit by innovation, fuelled by information, and sustained by hope and hard work.

Liked the way Brad Allen, CEO, Siderean, summed up the panel discussion and talked about how search is now trying to focus on finding other information objects, not just traditional text — so true.

Thanks so much Amy for pointing this out to me!  Most people know I love the Google doodles they publish for vaious occasions as I often include them here (see Mother’s Day Google doodle below).  But how about this from Google:

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. This year we asked U.S. kids to doodle around the theme “What if…?”

And you can vote for your favorite from different levels of school kids!  I have two favorites in the K-3 group — the kids (called friendship rules) and the butterflies/birds/flowers (spring into Google — probably because winter here was so long this one really draws me).  And the fish Google doodle (thinking like a goldfish) in the 4-6 group is hilarious!  In the 7-9 group I really like the dragons and castle called ‘Once upon a Google”.   These kis are talented.  Check out the 10-12 “Gothic Google Architecture Blueprint”.  Awesome.  Only problem is there are so many good ones, I’m finding it hard to vote!

      Love it!

Love Dave Snowden’s post today, Open Source is not the same as Freeware.   Certainly in this day and age transparency is very important, just as Don Tappscott said in his 2003 book, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business.   With some of the intersting discussions that took place at Computers in Libraries 2008 last month, this post really hit the nail on the head for me.  Thanks, Dave.