Librarian of Fortune

how to avoid hotel AV charges

I do a lot of presentations, and I am just now getting ready for two half-day workshops for the AIIP conference. Unlike most of my talks, at this one I'm paying for all of the expenses myself, so I decided that I didn't feel like paying the hotel $500 for the privilege of using their projector. I discovered  Projector123.com, which will ship a projector to your hotel via FedEx the day before your presentation and provides a pre-paid FedEx label for returning it when you're done. For a fifth of what the hotel wanted to charge me, I've got a perfectly good projector for $100. Comes with instructions, a toll-free panic number, and it plays well with my Thinkpad.

Yeah, in most settings you still have to pay the hotel a usurious rate for a screen and a cart to put the projector on, but that's negotiable if you just ask.... I got mine for free since it was in conjunction with a conference, for example.

A librarian by any other name...

This article in the April 21 issue of Advertising Age is Tom Martin's new idea -- an Insight & Information Department for small advertising firms. Here's his proposal:

[S]maller agencies need to have access to smart people and smart research. Whether it's just the basics of someone actively scanning current marketing writings, magazines, books and blogs and making sense of it all for us, or a more robust option that includes the aforementioned research resources. Our world demands that we have access to and utilize compelling insights to keep our work and our clients' brands relevant.

The big hurdles to this vision are usually the same for all smaller agencies -- time, money and talent. We don't have the time to actually make this vision a reality. And more importantly we don't have the freedom to dedicate a full-time employee, not to mention a talented senior one, to what is in essence an overhead position. [...]

Insight & Information shouldn't just be the privilege of those that have the money and size to afford it. There are smart marketers in every shop in the country and they deserve access to great insight. Even better, if we could find a way to share the costs, a Insight & Information department could even field primary studies designed to answer compelling questions that we all deal with daily. The big boys routinely do it, package it and sell it during new business pitches. Why shouldn't we smaller guys have the same chance?

Dude... that's what librarians do! And organizations that can't invest in a full-time info pro often use people like me, info-entrepreneurs who serve as, well, librarians of fortune.

I'll be curious to see how his proposal develops.

Random search tips

I just posted the April issue of the Bates InfoTip newsletter. I cover a Yahoo search trick, another use for Technorati, and a way to do a "sort-of AND" search.

Now here's a way to market...

I was looking through the Knowbodies blog, maintained by Petter Naess of the US Embassy in Norway. (Petter has twice arranged to have me come to Oslo to give presentations for the Norwegian Online Users Group). It's a great blog but I confess that right now I'm having fun with a tool that lets you customize images with your own message.

Go to either Hetemeel.com or ImageGenerator, select an image and customize the message within it. I'm thinking this would be a fun way to promote a library or information center.

 

Writing books is for losers

This  New York Times article describes how to crank out $500 market research reports without, you know, doing the tedious work of researching and writing. As Philip Parker of the Icon Group International describes it,

Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study. [...] But rather than taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in about 13 minutes. [...] it will then open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets.”

Um, right. Except that an algorithm can't mimic the thought process of a market research analyst; the most it can do is retrieve data and - within limits - analyze it.

This is what happens if you take e-books and print-on-demand to an extreme; it's great that we can self-publish (I'm going to sell a compilation of some of my columns on info-entrepreneurship soon), but there still has to be some brainpower involved in the content.

Water and the West

My dear and talented sister, Sarah Bates, just wrote a long article in the Science Progress blog, titled Restoring the Waters, about the water restoration projects taking place in the west. It looks particularly at the recent removal of the Milltown Dam, near Missoula, MT.

I marvel at the accomplishments of groups like Western Progress, where Sarah works, in changing the culture of Dam the World institutions such as the US Army Corps of Engineers, who in the past never saw a river they didn't want to dam and are now getting used to the idea of restoration and environmental protection. There is hope...

Librarians on smack, part 2

According to this Wall Street Journal article, we can't help it... we're just info-addicts.

...Coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

Thoughts about adaptability

I was talking with Marcy Phelps the other day about, of all things, how Western Union thinks strategically. Yes, we're geeks.

Think about it... Western Union started out in 1851 as a telegraph company, the "New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company". But even then, they identified themselves as a communications company, so they were able to adapt to new technology.

They introduced the first stock ticker, in 1869 (already thinking about additional uses for technology)

In 1914, they launched the first consumer charge card

They pioneered the first commercial satellite in the US, in 1974

And they now identify their mission as:

"We offer one of the easiest ways for families and friends to send money and stay connected almost anywhere in the world."

So, they offer

• Money orders
• Money wires (including FROM a mobile phone!)
• The ability to make regular payments to utility bills, auto loans, mortgages, etc.
• Debit cards
• And they even rent cell phones for the countries they serve. I
  can rent a phone from the US that'll work in Mexico, for example.

So, when I hear people asking me whether the Web threatens my business model, or librarians, or civilization as we know it, I just point to Western Union. They were bleeding edge back in 1851, and they are still going strong, despite enormous changes in their competitive environment.

 

Google Maps goes all-terrain

Apparently, this was rolled out last November, but I just now realized that Google Maps includes an option to have the map displayed not only as a street map and with a satellite view but also "terrain" imaging. I love it!

I discovered this when my sweetie called me on the road, asking the best way to get to her destination. I was able to say "OK, about 5 miles and you'll be out of town. Go over the pass and your turn is just after when the road flattens out again."