Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press

Citation

Trapasso, L. (2012), "Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 29 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2012.23929haa.001

Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press

Article Type: Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 29, Issue 8

Change, you just cannot stop it! More and more smart phones and tablets and the big news on the street is the increase in robberies of these devices. Social networks and the information we make available online is there for all time. New tablets are on the horizon and keep coming down in price to the point of taking the place of ebook readers and netbooks.

A recent piece on CBS’s Sunday Morning asked the question if we are addicted to our devices. Do we now communicate more online than face to face? And then there are fewer reference questions, even online – are our users getting their information from friends around the world rather than using their local library. This is a changing world and each time this column brings more questions than answers. And as one article notes, questions without answers may be an important step to the beginnings of dialogues and collaboration.

Mobile computing

Apple dominates the app world. Not only did Apple supply its own apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPads, it allows the development third-party apps. Google has the second largest app store with apps for Android tablets and smart phones. This article comes with a list of apps that are reviewed in various categories such as asset/inventory management, collaboration, control, design, remote access, test and measurement, and troubleshooting. The trend toward mobile devices in the workplace makes offices mores paperless, and contributes to a greener world (Mayfield, 2012).

For photo editing on the iPhone, there are several apps reviewed. They are PhotoForge2, Average Camera Pro, Photosynth, and LensFare, Camera+, AntiCrop, Decim8, and Filterstorm (Bradley, 2011, 2012).

Barnes and noble Nook ebook reader has a glow light feature. It allows you to read it in any environment. The light turns on by tapping the screen. The only drawback with the light is that it uses extra battery time. This same article compares the Nook Glow light with the Nook Simple Touch, the Nook Color, Amazon Kindle, and the Sony E-Readers. Where the Nook with Glow light received a superior rating, the others scored a rating of very good (Perenson, 2012).

Social media

There are approximately 750 million people that use Facebook. The average user spends 7 hours per month using it. Many experts claim it has abusive privacy policies. However, there is a privacy settings page that is easy to use. Facebook does listen to customer complaints. Facebook forces you to download an app if you want to view content outside of Facebook. But one quote from the article makes one take a step back, “Yes, if you want to opt out, you can delete your Facebook data. But you can’t actually take it with you.” Other social networks have tried to match the success of Facebook. However, Facebook may run into antitrust issues (Johnson, 2012).

It has been said that Facebook is full of narcissists. It has also been said that maybe it is turning us all into one. On the other hand, people like its openness. A positive point about Facebook is that you can share to maintain personal relationships (Parker, 2012).

Talks on Facebook and Twitter yield comments about products and services. A new phenomenon has occurred called sentimate analysis is used to interpret social media data. NetBase Solutions offers sentimate analysis as a service. Radian6 also offers this service. Focus groups fill in by getting deeper data and offer more meaningful content. There is a special tag for graphics. Finally, there is a translate tag (Ritzdorf, 2012). Sentimate analysis also allows one to track trends, and come up with different marketing promotions by tracking the effectiveness of advertising, public relations, and social media campaigns (Henschen, 2012).

Web technology

Spam accounts for 70 per cent of all e-mail traffic but should not be confused with phishing, which is aimed at getting personal information from recipients. With traditional anti-phishing software, there is a lag time before it catches up with the latest phishing attacks. Targeted spear phishing attacks small groups, and tend to fool their recipients. Businesses need to be on top of their phishing filters (Sadeh, 2012).

On the web site development front, in building a perfect web site, do not trust the designers, trust the audience. The author talks about the A/B test that can help with site optimization. It allows subjective questions of design like color, layout, image selection, etc. to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science. Some small changes such as a colored box that one can click to donate or buy can result in over a 15 per cent increase in revenue. For libraries, there are many opportunities in following the lead of those involved in marketing campaigns. Google was the first to use the A/B test (Christian, 2012).

There are a lot of pluses with HTML5. In combination with JavaScript, it makes it easy to use geolocation. You can embed audio and video elements directly into your HTML5 codes. In addition HTML5 is critical with multilingual web sites (Ritzdorf, 2012).

General computing

For those still using Windows XP (or Microsoft Vista) and even Windows 7, it is definitely time to migrate to Windows 8. It is also time to migrate from Office 2003 to Office 2010. Microsoft will cease support for Windows XP and Office 2003 in two years. Microsoft In Tune offers tools and services to help you with the upgrades (Bradley, 2012).

On campus, there are strategies to bring faculty and instructional media together. Most important is peer training. The second one is marketing. The third is to make house calls. The last is informal training (Norbury, 2012).

Civic literacy in the electronic environment is becoming more important. Digital citizens are individuals who intuitively understand that high quality information is easily available. Whether is for free or by fee. Information must be evaluated critically. Basically it should be regarded as a tool. The article further focuses on the needs of greater collaboration among participants. Questions without specific answers are a wonderful way to spur creativity and collaborations. This is a tool that can be helpful for librarians to use in their discussions and planning in a time of rapid change (Waters, 2012).

One article discusses the differences between digital video and IP video. Digital video encodes from a source in binary. IP video is arranged in packets (Hippensteel, 2012).

Lois Trapasso(Marlo2333@hotmail.com) Library Consultant based at Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, USA.