What Does This Mean to Me, Laura?

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(Something kind of fun for a slow(er) Friday.)

A couple of weeks ago I covered Weblins here, and someday, I promise, I’ll get to avatars and gravatars. Each of those examples is a visual way to represent yourself on the web through various web sites and applications. Now, there’s a way to have an aural representation of yourself as well. Thanks to a collaboration between a beatboxer and a team of Ruby on Rails programmers, you can now have an acoustical avatar all your own. It’s called a Soundbadge. Just fill in some personality questions and almost immediately you will be presented with a small sound loop that is supposed to represent you. You can then embed the sound loop on any web page by simply cutting and pasting a very small code snippet that Soundbadge generates for you. Here’s mine:

What does this mean to me, Laura?

Possibly, not much. But part of effectively delving into all things Web is the ability to play. You’re never too old to play with new toys.
This might actually be a fun link for a teen site. Or have your library generate its own Soundbadge and embed it in your teen site. Ask your teen patrons to make their own and share it.
You can edit your badge at any time, so if you suddenly feel depressed, your Soundbadge can easily reflect that. Could be a fun way for kids to keep up with the “moods” of their local librarians.
People like to find ways to make themselves stand out among the huddled masses of the web. This is a new and unique entry into the “Distinguish Yourself” category.

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(With a lot of credit to George Lenzer, blogger at alt.think!)

Here’s some facts about email’s biggest annoyance. Did you know:

Spam is largely automated? There aren’t sweatshops full of people typing up those messages at lightning speed in some less developed nation for half a cent per day. In fact, the automation of spam is one aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat.
Your own PC might be a spam bot? Just as with medical conditions, I’ll leave the diagnosis of your PC being a spam bot to your chosen expert analyst, however… It’s quite easy to have your PC sending out tons of spam without you knowing it. Especially now that the typical desktop PC has 1980s super computer power ten times over and a fairly fast internet connection. You may not even notice a slowdown at all. Make sure you keep those OS updates and anti-virus/anti-malware signatures up to date. Also make sure you keep all of your networked software up to date too. That includes broswers, browser plug-ins, things like Java and Flash, IM clients, mail clients, etc…
Spam can’t be traced back to it’s original source no matter what some movies and TV shows illustrate? In technical terms there is something of a list of routes that tells you where spam came from included in the message. This is known as a mail header and generally says, “The message arrived at your address from the address listed below. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that”… But even if you go back to the first address in the list, it is likely that even that address was just someone’s home PC being controlled remotely by a spammer. So it’s a dead end. There is no way for an end user, or even a network administrator to track the message back to the accountable party and then file charges at them.
Personal home computers infected with worms and viruses can generate spam on their own without a spammer controlling the system? Not necessarily spam that is useful to anyone, but the cryptic sort where you see excerpts of various mail messages spliced together. These systems also splice together the prefix and the domain of an e-mail address (the parts before and after the @ sign, respectively) in order to come up with new addresses to send to. Sometimes those messages actually hit a real person. And worst of all, these infected machines will use all of the e-mail addresses they have access to as the FROM address. This means that for all of the non-existent addresses that are created by this random patter, the unfortunate person being spoofed in the FROM field will get “scatterback” non-delivery messages. This usually makes people worry that they’ve been infected when they haven’t.
Spammers, through the resource of these compromised “bot nets” have the ability to overload entire networks for purposes other than spam? The bot nets are used for more than just sending spam. In the past few years incidences of extortion on high profile sites have occurred. One party threatens another party who absolutely must remain online to be profitable with an attack that will knock them off the internet. That is unless they pay the requested sum of money.

Spam is a huge problem, and one that will not be easily solved. Mail administrators, like George, are constantly trying new tweaks or methodologies to lessen the amount of spam in your inbox…but the chances of them being completely successful are very low. It’s too easy for spammers to deluge mail systems with garbage, too fast. The next time you get a spam message in your email, be thankful you’re not seeing the other 95% of them that your mail admin helped to prevent. Over 100 billion spam messages are sent per day.

What does this mean to me, Laura?

Be thankful for all of the spam you’re NOT getting.
Keep your virus, anti-spyware and operating system up to date so that your PC does not become an infected zombie machine.
Spam isn’t going away any time soon. It will only get worse.
Bring your mail admin some cookies. Really.

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Ah, Twitter is a wonderful thing. I asked members of the Twitterverse to catalog the problems of library web sites, and my followers (as friends on Twitter are called) did not disappoint. I got responses not only from both library and non-library folks, but even a bit of international participation with a comment or two from Australia.

Here’s a sample of much of what I received:

“Nonsensical links to products by name. Bookletters, EBSCO, iBistro.”
“Branch hours/locations not easy to find from the library home page.”
Having to…”scroll waaay down to bottom to find search box and then was Title(not keyword).”
“Animated gifs and blinking text.”
“Focus on library materials and facilities, rather than how people use our materials and facilities.”
“Acronyms.”
“No site search. C’mon, time to leave 1998.”
“Hiding your staff and/or hiding ways (or not providing them at all) to contact staff through the web site.”
“Library jargon: what the heck is a ‘electronic reference database’ to the layperson?”

I saw at least one major theme here: many libraries don’t have sites that are intended for the end user. Too many library sites are designed around the perceived needs of library staff, rather than for their patrons. I encourage every library to take a good, hard look at their public-facing web site(s) and ask the question “Who is this really for?”

Here’s some additional sins I’ll add to the list:

Can’t find the address and/or phone number for at least the main branch on the front page.
Too much text on the front page. Don’t put the whole 3-paragraph story there; just a teaser. People scan the web; they don’t read. When I see too much text, I’m outta there.

What other problems with library web sites do you commonly see? Share’em in the comments!

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