Augusta R. Kolwyck Library, Summer '08

This is my first adventure with Animoto, and I am so hooked! Included in this video are some candids of staff and students here at the Chattanooga State Augusta R. Kolwyck library, and my fellow blogger and library worker Adam (http://adambeavers.blogspot.com/) all set to music and spliced, diced and danceable! Check it out, then go check out Animoto.com, where you can make your own 30 second videos for free, or make full length ones for a reasonable subscription cost. I will be making many more, and posting them everywhere, so keep your eyes peeled!

Have fun with it! Until next time,
yours
Hana

Txt Speak

In a text message (txt mssg) certain SMS abbreviations are used. Like any vernacular these expressions can change from locale to locale and even from friend group to friend group. Some txtrs prefer to spell out complete words; others use as many abbreviations as possible to save time and effort. Still others txt their thumbs off, using both abbreviations and full words depending on the speed necessary for sending a specific message.

There are two forms of input when txting, manual input (using the letter keys, thus 2 would be ABC, so forth) or iTap, a program that guesses which word you are going to use and inputs it automatically, after you enter the first few characters. I personally prefer manual input, just because the words I sometimes use in a txt mssg are not readily found in iTap but it is strictly up to the user.

Some phones, such as the Nokia 9500, the Samsung Glyde and, of course the iPhone have a full keyboard built in, good for the gadget loving and awesome for those that need a keyboard to type anything.

Txt speak utilizes numbers and symbols to rapidly say what needs to be said. Emoticons such as :) and :( :p :D and ;) are widely used. Numbers also replace parts of words, especially 2, 4, and 8.

For instance:
Im going 2b 2 l8t 4 movie
(I’m going to be too late for the movie)

L8t, L8tr, Gr8, Gr8tr, sk8, sk8tr, all are used.

Abbreviations are also used; many are unique to certain groups.
My friends use OMW a lot, which means “on my way”. I haven’t seen this outside my certain friends group.

IDK means “I don’t know” BRB means “Be right back” LMN means “Let me know” MVT means “Movie times”

To purport more of something x2 and up can be used, or x someone of note, or at least notoriety. For instance “xchucknorris” So, it could be “movie rcked xchucknorris!”

Use any abbreviation once and your friends will learn it, and you might even become “famous” for starting something! Leave a letter out if you can do without it, 4nstance…
Just have fun with it!
Next time I am going to look at SMS or "txt" speak and see what language barriers it is transcending...

But in the meantime, happy txting!

:)
Hana

On the Flip Side...

There was an average of 207.9 million cell phone users in America in 2005, according to Infoworld.com. I am one of this number, and among my wide friend pool I have only one friend who doesn’t have a cell phone, or at least use one on a regular basis.

I was talking to someone the other day while programming some important days into my calendar, and they crossly said:

“I remember the days when a phone was just a phone”.

And a phone may just be a phone, but a cell phone, by definition of its very mobility and access makes it much more than that. Try driving somewhere unfamiliar and late at night without it and see how safe you feel! The generation of touch-tone phones and huge belled brass alarm clocks are behind us, my generation uses our phones to remind us of important days, communicate with friends, colleagues and businesses, for entertainment, as a calculator, a notepad, a music player, a camera, as a blogging tool and an email device.

We send text messages to each other, having abbreviated “conversations” exchanging information such as movie times, test scores, weather conditions, dinner plans, weak knock-knock jokes, or just to let the recipient know they are cared for.

We send text messages to GOOGLE (466453) with restaurant names or movies and GOOGLE texts us back addresses, numbers and show times.

We can activate our phone number on Facebook and directly upload pictures from our phones to the site, send messages, and update our statuses from one small keypad.

We can download games onto our phones (I have Bejeweled and Ms. Pac Man) and music, either to play when our phone rings (as a ringtone) or to play over the line when someone tries to reach you (a ringback tone). If you have more than one ringback tone you can make a jukebox and have random tones play on shuffle from call to call, or you can personalize individual tones to individuals own musical preferences.

You can also set different ringtones straight from your phone to ring for different people. For instance, one of my friends is a Tenacious D lyric, another, the chorus from a Pink Floyd song, and another a cheesy single from Boys Love Girls. This way, you can tell who is calling you without even picking up your phone!

We can program in phone numbers for friends, family and work, and create groups of people to send a mass text message to at once. This year for spring break I travelled down to St. Augustine with one of my friends, since they don’t all Twitter I kept them updated by sending a mass text to my “close friends” group. I have also utilized this feature to send out party invites, movie plans/times, and for a “school” group, test times, reading assignments, and class cancellations (woot!).

In case of emergencies something to be aware of, your phone can send a 911 call even if there is no available signal, and the dispatchers should be able to track the call and send help. In the light of several tragedies at schools, such as the Columbine shootings, and the Virginia Tech tragedy some schools have prepared an emergency text alert system to warn students of danger via their cell phones. Not all schools offer this program, but not all students are aware of it even if they do, so be sure to check into the likely possibility that yours or your student’s school has this program.

I have already hit on the benefits of the online “mini blogging” program Twitter, but it is worth mentioning again. I daily reap benefits from this amazing phone accessible program, from getting a great quote for this very blog, or hearing weather reports from a neighbor before I attempted to leave campus during a storm.

Just as it is with any evolving interface, the cell phone adapts to its user. However much you want to use it, and for whatever purpose is up to the individual, just be aware, and try to get excited about the wide spectrum of uses it presents.

This Side of your Cell Phone...

What do you use your phone for? I am aware that I have already hit on this several times before, but I am so excited about the myriad ways that a cell phone can increase effectiveness, both scholastically and personally, that there is but a slim chance that I am going to shut up about it anytime soon!

I have only had my cell phone for about two years, and I have kept my original one (no upgrades or disasters yet). However, many of my friends employ the “grass is greener” outlook when it comes to their phone, always hoping for a faster, sleeker, button-ier model to come along and sweep them off their feet. Still, taking an example from their quick turnover rate I have learned to extract all the “awesome” from my phone and harness it for good, rather than evil.

Some important things to consider before you get your phone. First, who are you going to be talking to? The two major phone providers, Cingular/AT&T and Verizon allow you to talk for free to people within their network. They typically also offer free or diminished weekend rates, starting around nine PM on Fridays. So, from a student perspective I would look around your “group” suss out which network they subscribe to and pick the biggest pool. The free weekend minutes are handy for calling home or keeping up with long distance relationships. For a business person or for a graduate prowling for a job the choice may be simpler. The company or organization that you work for may provide you with a phone and network, or you may simply keep your phone from college. Then it can be used more for networking and interviews than pizza ordering and late night plans.

Next, what phone are you going to go with? There has been a lot of buzz centered on the new iPhone, especially with the decreased pricing and huge ad campaign. According to one of my fellow Twitteroos, Kent Callison, the Marketing Director for Decosimo CPA who just landed the new iPhone:

“Beautiful design, paradigm shifting interface and every communication

tool you will ever need - that's iPhone. No other phone comes close.”

First you might want to actually look at the service providers behind the phone. Cingular/AT&T powers the Blackberry (phone/day planner/everything but the kitchen sink) which has been embraced by many as a feasible way to bring work and entertainment with them wherever, whenever. They are also the provider for the much celebrated iPhone which promotes the thought that perhaps AT&T is geared more towards the serious business person or tech geek.

Then you look at Verizon, which has launched Vcast, a service that allows users to download mp3 music to their phones and listen to it wherever they go. Also, it is constantly premiering swank new phones with luscious colors and extra gadgets, and perhaps serves a more youth oriented, edgy “in today out tomorrow, looking for the next big thing” kind of service. Both services offer detailed coverage maps, so I suggest making sure you can actually “hear me now” with whichever plan you end up with. I chose Verizon because I had a little signal on the mountain I grew up on and also because most of my friends subscribe to the same network.

There are of course more than two networks to choose from, Sprint, T-mobile and Cricket to name a few, but AT&T and Verizon are the most recognized and used, and also the two I am most familiar with. And now that I have (hopefully) lain the necessary groundwork, we can go on to the myriad uses and entertainments your phone has to offer, be it a lowly flip phone, or the exalted iPhone!

See you on the “flip” side…
Hana

From the tin can telephone to...what?

When I was little, my siblings and I were obsessed by making every day things out of junk. It didn’t matter if these things were already lying around the house. We didn’t want the ukulele that my mother brought back from her senior trip to Hawaii; we wanted to make one of our own out of scraps of wood and some bright red rubber bands. The cute little doll house (plastic) held no appeal for us; we preferred the big sloppy one we made out of a tomato box, shingled with real mini shingles. So what if our ukulele sounded seriously twangy, or that our doll family’s roof caved in after a week? We were making something all our own! Of course, these fabrications led us to the classic tin can telephone. We didn’t stop at a couple of pork n’ beans cans, we tried cardboard orange juice concentrate cans, coffee cans, even a couple of “well scrubbed” paint cans that still left paint gobbed in our hair.

This early fascination with the many genres of communication can be seen mirrored in the Instant Messaging world. With over a dozen kinds of IM out there (Aim, Skype, Jabber, eBuddy, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, QQ, Xfire, Paltalk) IM users everywhere seem to just continue perpetuating their youthful “tin can telephone” interests.
When you consider the many evolved forms of communication out there, including email, telephone, cellular phone, fax, telegraph and good old snail mail, IM seems to be the child of a little portion of each technology.

IM can be used as a mini email, or a text conversation that takes the place of a phone conversation, and can cover huge divides in seconds. Many IM services allow you to share files, photos and even music between two users, and some even include video IM capabilities, so you can carry on a “face to face” conversation. Rather than keeping IM chained to your computer, you can direct IM’s straight to your cellular phone, and keep the conversation going. An extra perk that most services offer is creating an avatar or “WeeMee” to share emoticons and moods, allowing the digital image to relate the feelings of the conversation.
IM can be used to update Twitter as well, if you have AIM you can add “Twitter” as a contact and if someone says something so dashed witty you never want to forget it, and MUST share it you can simply send it to your Twitter, to be remembered "forever" or at least fifteen seconds :)

Still, looking back at the fun I had with my siblings making our tin can telephones, the best times we had were making them together. Try not to become so immersed into the many exciting modes of communication that you forget the charm of face to face interaction

Blog in a Bottle

If you throw a rock out into an ocean or lake you will probably never see it again, but the ripples it makes are visible for a few moments. When I began blogging I thought that it would be like that, a momentary ripple and then the words would be swallowed up by the massive “waters” of the internet. Instead, I received a pretty broad reaction. Complete strangers read my blogs and shared kind thoughts and reactions, and much needed criticism. I started to wonder, was this how a writer felt? Was this a tiny taste of the pie I was working for?

Today, I have five “full” blogs, one each on MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga, this very one I am working on now, and another BlogSpot blog, Starshinethousand.blogspot.com. I also have three “Micro” blogs, a Twitter I update from my phone on day to day life and a library Twitter that I update for this blog, then my QuillPill that I started because of this blog. A long and somewhat ragged list, longer than I had earlier thought! Still, I keep most of them constantly updated, along with reading subscriptions from other people’s blogs.

I know many of my friends that also keep up this constantly reeling list of blogs, some with the added task of Photoblogging and Musicblogging.

Why do we feel the need to throw so many “rocks”? And to throw them into so many ponds at the same time, until the ponds are more like puddles? This has to do some with the themes I explored when researching Twitter, themes of voyeurism, fame and exposure. Writers have been publishing under pseudonyms for years. I am currently reading a book called Behind a Mask, the Unpublished Works of Louisa May Alcott. Before Louisa became famous for Little Women and Little Men she wrote scintillating mysteries for dime magazines, the literary equivalent of modern day tabloids. Because of her sex and status as a writer she published under various romantic pseudonyms such as A.M. Barnard.

The web-blogger can also easily hold this enviable status, and write freely on any subject, from steamy gossip to political barbs, to cozy collections of recipes and reminisces.

Scholastically, a blog is a wonderful tool for any student. As an English major I find it is a great vehicle for posting short stories, and inspirational snippets for my fellow writers. I also find myself doing an updated “chain letter” and doing periodical catch ups for my farther away friends. Artists and musicians can utilize it to spread their work, computer programmers and web designers can use it like a huge online business card, and communications majors can hone their job skills for potential job offers. A blog can be like a living resume, a place to learn and grow an art, or simply a place to shamelessly emote, regardless of who sees it.
This blog is a great example of this tool. I am not a web designer, I haven’t created some fabulous Web 2.0 social networking site, nor do I know all there is to know about the origins of these sites, but through research and hands on work I am slowly learning more and more about a new era that I am a part of, and that will be forever valuable to me someday as a teacher.

So, more than a rock thrown into the massive “waters” of the internet, a blog can be a message in a bottle. Sometimes it may return at your feet, full of responses and applause, and sometimes you may never see it again, but by simply putting it out there you have stirred up a few ripples.