 Good morning and welcome to this week's session of Encompass Live. My name is Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission. Your usual host, Krista Burns, is stuck in Cleveland at the moment, trying to get home from the holidays. So hopefully she will be back with us next week. I also had another co-host lined up for me, but she's out sick today. So I'm flying a little solo here. This should be an interesting 45 minutes to an hour this week. Because what we're also doing is we're starting sort of a, the plan is a monthly tech talk session with me, Michael Sowers, as kind of your host along with Krista, to kind of talk about the tech news in the month, what's going on in libraries, some interviews I've got lined up. In fact, we're going to have one of those today. And the plan is that we will have these pretty much on the last Wednesday of each month as part of the regular Encompass Live. So hopefully you'll enjoy this session. Hopefully we've got all of our technical issues worked out and I can run this software all by myself. So we'll see how it goes. Quick check of something here. Okay, I've got one. Jan can't hear me. There is audio going on. Can anybody else not hear me? I just want to, if you can, leave something in the questions. That would be great. I want to make sure that this is going. Raise your hand if you can hear me. I think that would be the best way to do this. Okay, so my audio is going out. Hopefully Jan will be able to fix her audio problem shortly. But it does look like I am broadcasting, so that's good. Thank you very much. Okay, so my general plan here is you should see on your screen kind of some bookmarks, things that I kind of plan on talking about today. You know, time allowing. We'll get to as many of these as we can. They're all technology oriented, but they're not really techie techie. They're kind of news, things you might want to pay attention to, stories that have been happening that I think might be of interest to you. And what I want to start out with is just a little story to introduce our kind of special guest today. I'm going to be interviewing a fellow librarian. I grew up in Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester, and I grew up going to the Monroe County Library System. And I guess it's partially their fault that I became a librarian. Well, as I was surfing around Twitter, I found this wonderful little tweet from the Monroe County Library System that said, even Santa needs a GPS. This was back a couple of weeks ago. And it says, Santa can borrow a GPS unit from our science and history division, and so can you. And I went, wow, there's an idea. I never heard of a library checking out GPS units. And I've also received a few other stories of some other libraries, one here in Nebraska, one in Boulder, Colorado, of checking out and having some very interesting technology available for their patrons. So what I did was I kind of got on the e-mail and through a series of e-mails and a couple of phone calls, I found Jay Osborn. And I'm going to read a little bit of an introduction to him and then ask him a few questions and have him tell us about this project of his. But the bio assembly says Jay Osborn has been a librarian for over 15 years. He's worked in public libraries and in public and private academic libraries and is currently a librarian in the science division of the Rochester Public Library in Rochester, New York. He considers himself fortunate to be in this position that gives him a surprising amount of freedom to undertake new projects. In the past year, he's been able to do this GPS project, explore creative art spaces in the libraries by circulating an African art exhibit. And launching a book conservation project. He emphasizes that none of these projects even begin without the support of a progressive library administration, to which I will say here, here. When he's not at the library, he can usually be found tinkering with cars goofing around and making things out of concrete or working on his house in suburban Rochester. Hello Jay and welcome to Encompass Live. Well, hello to you. I don't think I've ever been referred to as a special guest anywhere. I've been referred to as a lot of things, but never a special guest. Hey, you know, first time for everything. I'll add to your working on his house. My brother lives in Brockport, New York. Another smaller suburb and he's completely reworking a 150-year-old house with his wife and four small children. So one reason I'm glad I'm in Nebraska. There's no house of that old. Yeah, well, yeah, I don't get to help him. So anyways, so you guys are checking out GPS's. Where did that idea come from? What's the story behind this? Well, about a little more than a year ago, we got a new director who'd been in the system. Actually, she'd been working in Ogden, which is another suburban library, another town library, is referred to them here. And she came in and decided that she wanted things to change a little bit to begin changing the public face of the public library. And you don't get much more bricks and mortar than a library. And in a digital age, that can be a death knell to the next generation of people looking at public services and why keep the library if it's so outdated. And in fact, you hear that from administrators across the country. The first thing they want to do is get rid of the library and not fully realize its economic impact on the community. Not being willing to be thrown in the mix is another institution that can be done away with. Our new director wanted to change our face, as I said. And one of the avenues to doing that was beginning to do things in electronics that other people aren't doing, rather than being a follower, trying to push out there and looking realistically at the economic impact of initiating a failed service is fairly small. A few hundred dollars spent on GPS devices and a few hundred dollars of staff time to try and make the service work. She felt was a good risk. She put the idea out there in a convocation address. And I took up the challenge and she challenged me right back saying get it done within a month. Okay. I'm happy to say that because she's a new director and everyone had a lot of respect for her, it still does. I shouldn't put that in the past tense. She let it be known that this was a project she was behind and we got it done in six weeks. Wow. That's just impressive. When you've got an organization that's staffed with good people that have some level of trust with each other, you can do a lot. I think if I had been a new hire, it would have been a lot harder for me to push it. But since I've been here forever, it was a lot easier for me. It just feels like forever? No. I've been here over ten years now. Okay. So you were given this order. You were given a time frame. I'm assuming you were given some sort of budget, which I guess is probably going to be the lead question. A lot of people's minds is what was your budget? Beyond the budget, what was the process you actually had to go through to pick the equipment, figure out how you're going to circulate it? Did you catalog it? What was the process in that six weeks? Well, like I said, I've got a director that was pushing the whole project and she's also been in the system forever. She's been a lifetime employee practically here in the county system. We're a municipal system and she actually is the county director, which kind of, how would you say, choreographs different activities within the county. In some ways, we all participate in certain collected services like book delivery. And we used to do a lot more, but that's waning somewhat. But the bottom line is she's in charge of the larger unit, the umbrella organization. I actually work for one of the subunits. So the advantage that I had was she has a lot of weight here. And she also knows all the key players in here. So she went down through this checklist of people for me to contact and cataloging and the technical people who would have to make up a new media code and all that. And as we're sitting there talking to her about this, it occurred to us that, well, the dumb thing to do would be to set this up for just GPS devices. And a big recommendation I can make to anybody contemplating this sort of thing, whether it's GPS devices or whatever, is that you look at your media codes, you look at how you're going to sell all these processes and all these negotiations with your cataloging department, with keeping them all those things as plastic as possible. So you can do things like a Kindle. So you can do things like a different kind of GPS device. So it's not all narrowed down to this one kind of device, one particular thing. Because realistically, we're all about service provision. This is just another service we're providing. And keeping everything in line with that as a goal as opposed to making this one service work, you're going to be way ahead. Does that address your question a little bit there? Sure. The money one is easy. So what sort of budget did you have? Or what budget were you given? What did you end up spending on these devices? I'm a cheap guy. I'll be the first to admit that I don't like spending a lot of money. This works well in this organization. And what I was able to do was find the older versions of what we went with the Tom Tom. We could have gone with Garmin, could have gone with anyone. But we found an older unit that was just past being the premier instrument. And I got those for about $133 a piece. Wow. I think the vendor was Amazon. All right. And what are you going to do? You can buy them used. Because after they go out the first time, they're used anyway. If you're giving a gift, maybe you wouldn't buy a refurb. But one of ours was supposed to be new and it came as a refurb anyway. There's more ways to save money than just getting older. You can get one that's actually used. And it came from Amazon. And I recommend a quality vendor like that because they actually came up with all the right parts and pieces that were in it. So it worked out well for us. The second set we bought, we first initially bought three. And they came in overnight. And that was fantastic. After the service was up and running that for a few weeks, we bought three more. And those had to go through the city contract. And that took about four and a half, five weeks to come in. Okay. And so that sort of thing. If you have the ability to have your library has a credit card, has an account with Amazon. And you can find a way to argue that this is actually library supplies as opposed to some sort of... I'm not a budget guy so I don't know how those things are configured in different libraries. But there's different sorts of budget lines. That was the big challenge, actually, was how to get it out of the right budget line. I've been here three years and I'm still trying to figure out how we buy stuff to the state. I can relate to that one. Is it equipment? Is it a purchase? Is it? Yeah, exactly. So what has been the patron reaction? Well, okay, let me rephrase. How have you been letting people know? I don't know if you can see it. There's a GPS page from the website up here with a little video which I've pointed people to and they can look at. But beyond this page, how have you marketed this? How have you told people that these things exist in the library for them to check out? Well, fortunately for us, we've got a pretty well-developed web presence. And we do get a fair amount of information out through that media. There was, at some point, supposed to be a press release. I personally can't remember right off hand whether or not that happened because the person in our communications department that was supposed to oversee that was out sick for a number of weeks. So I can't remember when or where or sadly, even if that actually happened, it may have taken a back seat to other initiatives at the time that she came back. But those are all ways that we pursue generally. We have a fairly good relationship with the newspapers and the media in our town, so we're pretty well connected with that. So we can use that media. But I think the video was one of the most interesting things that came out of it. And there's another one coming that's way funnier. Okay, all right. I will definitely keep an eye out for that. And I know a little something, you know, having grown up with it with your library system. And here in Nebraska, we really only have two libraries of size, shall we say. We have a lot of libraries, whatever. Are your units all at the central library and then available to be checked out, you know, transferred to another branch? Or do they have to get it from the central branch in your case? Right. That's a really good point. For us, part of the negotiations with each individual, shall we say stakeholder in our administration, was that we would lend them directly from the science division. We didn't want to make anyone else responsible for transmitting these things. That's the most stolen items out of people's cars. People will smash a window just to grab this, because you can sell it for an easy $25.50 on the corner. They're completely non-traceable. And we didn't really want those going through. Delivering, have the one turn at missing, and then, well, did the patron get it back to us? Did someone, whose responsibility? We took all that out of the loop and they just go through the science division. We do the circulation on them ourselves, which creates other problems, depending on the sophistication of your O-PAC. Ours is not real good, so our circulation module is pretty clunky. There's challenges involved in that. I remember the old Carl system, so that's... Are you still on that? Well, you know, they're the cheap one on the market, and they do their job, but it is some frustration working on the back end. Yeah. So what has been... I'm not exactly sure. When did you get them in, and what sort of patron reaction, circulation numbers have you been getting with these? Well, we've had at least half of them have been in constant circulation. Great. And we first got them up and running. I'm going to guess now, probably sometime in May or June, we got them up and running. Okay. The first units were in constant circulation. We got them at a three-week loan period, initially, to treat them like books. And again, that was the idea of we're not doing GPSs, we are doing an electronic device. Do we discriminate between electronic devices and books? And we wanted to say, no, we want them all to be the same. In practical terms, that's not workable for these. It's just too long. We had a list of 14 or 15 people at one point, waiting to get their hands on a GPS. So we bought more devices, lowered the loan period, and it's a lot more reasonable now. We rarely have more than three or four people on the waiting list at any time. So what is the loan period now? Two. Two weeks. Two weeks. Okay. Are you finding that people are getting them because they can? They're planning a trip, and they're taking it with them? Have you got an idea of what the use of them is once they have them? Well, I know that several people come to us saying, I want to try a GPS. Never tried one. Thinking about it. And some of these people might be using navigator service on their phone through Verizon or another service. And they just want to see what this other device works like. Or they have a garment they're thinking about going to a tom-tom. We went with just tom-toms just because it simplifies our lives just sticking with one brand so that I only have one set of menus I have to describe over the phone. Which, you know, when you support something like this, and that's another consideration. You want to make sure you have at least a couple people or staff that have actually used these devices. And if they, you know, since it's all through the science division, we've got far four or five people here. Everybody's used them. Several of us have them. So it's just easier that way. But some people use them because they're thinking of buying a tom-tom or some sort of GPS device. Or they just want to use one for one trip. Oh, great. And see if it's worth their time. Yeah. To be honest, I hadn't even thought about just checking one out just to try it. Yeah, well, that's a great idea. Walmart won't let you do that. Right. You get to try it when you leave. Yeah. That's been really helpful. Yeah, I bet. And, you know, returning to Amazon isn't even always the most, you know, convenient thing in the world. I'm just going to interrupt here real quick. Anybody has any questions for Ajay? Please feel free to start typing them into the questions area. And I will read them back to him since, A, he's on the phone, B, for the benefit of the recording. Because I just have one or two more things I want to ask him. Has there been any problems with it? Any difficulties you didn't expect? Unforeseen circumstances? Or has it all been completely smooth? No problems whatsoever? Are you kidding me? I planned it. It worked out perfectly. What are you talking about problems? Yeah, we ran into a couple of issues. One was that we didn't have the foresight to buy a second case in case somebody lost the case or lost a cable. Well, duh. Yeah, I guess that would be an issue. And, of course, we haven't... It has not happened yet that we've lost one, but it just turns out that, you know, well, good God, what were we thinking? We didn't provide backups for these things. Another situation we had, which was actually pretty funny and actually, you know, pretty entertaining for me personally, I spent 40 minutes on the phone with a lady who swore up and down she'd returned her charger that turns out it's identical to the Motorola charger for her Verizon phone. Oops. And as I'm describing the charger to it, she says, yeah, they have a white tag. Yeah, I know I returned it. That's right here. Oh, she had it in her hand. And so it was a challenging public service moment for me, but it was fun. I enjoyed it. So really, no, there's almost no downside from our perspective. You got to have a secure place to keep it at the desk. That's an issue. But no, it's been really positive. In fact, we've spawned some other interests in other divisions. The art division, which does recreation, is actually looking at getting the GPS devices for geocaching. Oh, yeah. Yeah, a little cheap garment for 140 bucks, surprisingly more expensive than the one that your life might depend on. Of course, I guess if you're geocaching in the Alps, it's a different issue. But typically, we don't think of geocaching as more than a sport, but actually these can be used for a lot of helpful things. And kindles are next on our agenda. Now that we've got this done, we're going to see if we can find a way to lead all our way into providing kindles. And if the license agreement even allows you to. Well, that's a big issue. That's a different phone call. Yeah, that is. After having my interview with the Department of Justice, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Well, let me know how that goes, and maybe we'll talk again. Yeah, I'll get you some connections over there. Yeah. Okay, I've got a couple of questions from our audience here. The first one says on the website that you require a credit card, which I had been meaning to ask about. Do you have any problems with patrons wanting to check out and they don't have a credit card? No, because even a debit card, anything will work. Most everybody has a debit card. And in truth, the credit card, again, I mentioned I had to pass this whole set of policies through several people. And the credit card thing was one thing that everybody wanted. Well, we got to get to the credit card numbers. We can't lose these things. They're $150. We have service manuals for cars, for domestic. And they're $400. Yeah, we don't ask a credit card for those. And in realistic terms, $100, well, you know, some libraries are not in our position. Right. Where they don't have a commitment to buying expensive resources and then lending them out for free. You know, you think about it. The philosophy of what we do for a living is absurd, but this is what we do. And it's a great service. But we have never had a problem with someone refusing to or having available some sort of piece of plastic we could run through the paper, the old-fashioned carbon copy type. We do not go online with the card. That's really not what it's about. This is actually almost as much about satisfying internal concerns as it was making sure we have resource. Right. So you're not putting a hold. Yeah, you're not putting a hold on the credit card or anything. This is just in case the device doesn't get returned, it gets lost or whatever you can charge. You would theoretically charge them for it if it didn't get returned or got lost or stolen or... Yeah, theoretically we would. We would do that. What we would probably do is, this is where it gets confusing. Do you build them for a new one? A new one they got it. They would probably be built for around 80 bucks. Okay. The cost of a replacement through Amazon. Sure, fair enough. For a used unit, yeah. Okay. One of my other two questions we have here is, do you know of any situations where a group has checked it out, like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, something like that, or has it must have been individuals and families? To my knowledge, it's mostly been individuals. We have no idea what that individual does with it when they leave. True. However, I anticipate that there'll be more of that sort of activity when we do the geocaching type GPSes. Now, the GPS units we have are not the expensive ones that you can go off-road with. Right. These are just highway maps and a GPS locator that gives you a point on the map and an agenda. The others are a little different, and I expect that we might see that, but I don't think we would ever know what anyone's doing with it. Okay. And our last question from the audience is, can you echo back any specific comments you've gotten from the patrons about, you know, gee, I'm glad you got these, or, you know, I tried it and didn't work well, or any specific comments you've gotten back that you can share? Well, one specific comment was, I love the menu system. Another was, I hate the menu system. Why does it keep taking me off-road when I want to be, he did not want to take the highway. Well, he didn't change the preferences to say, I don't want to go on the highway. Another person said, it kept talking to me and it broke my concentration. One person found that she just couldn't drive with the thing yapping at her. I'll tell you, I took a trip with a girl down to New York City and the car I rented had a garment in it and she was fiddling with the tom-tom. She had them all set to female voices. And so I had three women tell me how to, you know, get down there. It was an amazing thing. I could really sympathize with people that get distracted by that, because I could tell whose voice was who half the time. Right. And, you know, there's only one of them I'm really going to pay attention to, but it was an interesting thing that you can actually have too much data coming in. Good point. I guess the last question I have which just kind of popped into my head, I'm assuming these units need to be updated somewhat regularly, maps, that sort of thing. That's something you guys are handling all behind the scenes. Well, actually, we're studiously avoiding that. We're trying not to get too involved in that. We bought current units. The expectation is that these have a lifespan. We're actually, to be honest with you, stunned. We still have six of them. Our assumption was it would be like buying books that end up getting weeded by, you know, the patrons, essentially, to last after destruction. And none of that's happened. So I guess that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We've not yet had them in service for a year yet. Well, I'm not sure how that's going to work out for us. Well, I was thinking more like software updates. Right, right. The map data. Oh, I agree. And you've just... Yeah, they're just as they are the day you got them and they're working? Yes. Okay. Yes, we had to log into Tom Tom's site and register them so that they are ours. And they see our organization as the owner. Therefore, no one else can go on and update the maps on their own. Oh, okay. Because they'd have to have our log in. Gotcha. We haven't gone into that yet. And like I said, we were not really thinking that we would even have them. We just assumed we'd be buying new units every 18 months or so. Which is a significant expense. And not every library could possibly do that. So, of course, you're going to be talking to someone six months from now, hopefully, from one of the other libraries. And I have to say real quick that before I started this, I called the Mann Library down in Cornell. They've lend out GPS units of the geocaching type. Talked to them for a little bit. I talked to, I believe, that library in Colorado. And yeah, this is something that libraries are going to be doing more of, I suspect. Then again, we may get leapfrog with technology on cell phones. Yeah, I have a new droid. And it's gotten me un-lost a couple of times already. I see these things aren't necessarily for everyone. These are devices that might long-term have, as these functions merge, onto cell phones. Which, ultimately, who wants to carry two devices? Ultimately, the Kindle is going to go away, too. And we're going to have one device that's all science fiction-y at this point, but it's the logical progression. These are the tools that we find that people that really are really happy to have them available are, people just start now trying to figure out if they want to buy one or not. But also, grandparents going to see the kids for Christmas. They're the ones that really find a real value in it. Yeah, my parents now both retired do the day trips and weekend trips all the time. And they still use the paper maps. And they don't even own a cell phone. My brother and I are kind of like, you guys, you know, you might want to get something. Well, here's a little heads up. I'm in the same situation. I had to buy my dad a cell phone, show him how to use it. And I handed him the Tom Tom. And he's all over that. He's a technical guy from years back. He worked for NASA contractors. Yeah, well, neither of my parents are technophobes. We skyped on Christmas Day just here. But it's just, they don't see the need for it. One day they will. So, you know, there you go. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us that maybe I didn't ask about, or do you think libraries should know if they're concerned doing something like this? No, not really. I mean, well, in my conversation with the library in Colorado, that's one of the things that just said gave me the full green light on this. Small library. I think there's the two or three people. The impression I had was there's a very small staff. And she's, you know, I said, well, what are you worried about losing it? It's a big hunk of your budget. I said, well, yeah, but it's a small town and people are basically honest. It's a $25 deposit. If we lose one, well, we lose one. And I might be oversimplifying her attitude. She was incredibly helpful. And my sense is that you got to take a step back and look at the price. What's 150 bucks? I mean, that's three or four novels. But if this is undertaken as a view of, a view of changing how people see you. And remember, the outside of the conversation, that's what it's about. It's about changing the face of the library, changing the internal politics of the library. And it's a device for all those things. It's tremendously successful. The final result to the patron is they get a service they didn't otherwise have. Yeah, you know, and if they're happy... It's all the way around. Everybody wins. Right. And if they're happy with that service, they might vote for that mill levy increase next time around. Well, you know, library districting is always an option for us. Yeah. Or however the funding comes from, they might go, oh, yeah, I do get stuff out of the library. Yeah, I'll just mention just some of the other things that the Boulder Public Library, who I'm trying to get on the phone, is circulating power meters that you plug in your wall, plug the devices into to get how much power those things are actually using. And then we just got a very small library here in Nebraska, who I will be talking to next month, who has one of those photo printing kiosks in their library now, because the closest one was 30 miles away from town. So, yeah, libraries are really starting to look at new things, new technologies, as services to patrons, as opposed to just the books in the magazines as we're used to. Well, you know, Jay, I want to thank you very much for doing this. It was kind of, you know, somewhat short notice and I want to say this went phenomenally well for my first time doing an interview over the Internet. Well, you did a quality job from my perspective. Well, thank you very much. And so, Jay, I'll let you go get back to work or you're welcome to hang out for the next half hour when I cover the other stories. But again, I just want to thank you for doing this. Well, I appreciate it. I do have some things I have to attend to and again, thank you. And I hope this goes well and you'll be able to use the interview in your podcast. Yeah, we'll do. Thanks a lot. All right, you have a good day. You too. Bye-bye. All right. Hey, I don't know about the rest of you on the line, but I think that is just an amazing idea. As I mentioned, we'll be talking to, I believe it's Beaver City next month. If I got that wrong, I apologize. I don't have that in front of me. Their director is scheduled to talk to me next month during tech talk about their photo printing service. And I am also still working on getting someone from Boulder Public possibly on the line in maybe February, excuse me, to talk about their similar to this, but not GPS, but power meter units. So, you know, and any listening have any other ideas if your library is doing something interesting, forward thinking, or you know of another library, you know, drop me an email, let me know. I can be contacted through the Library Commission's website, and I'll see if I can get them on the phone or over the internet and talk to them and share their story also. So, I do have a few other things I just kind of want to throw out and talk about off of my list. Excuse me here, I'm working on my site. And this, I'm thinking this might take 10 or 15 more minutes. I don't think I'll keep you for the whole hour here, but just a few other stories that have kind of come across my desk in the last couple of weeks that I thought if you haven't seen, you might be interested in seeing and knowing about. One is a service that I just learned about about a week and a half ago. This is called Backupify. Excuse me. And this is an online service that will back up your other online services. I'm very intrigued by this. I have literally 25,000 photos on my Flickr account. Now, I do also have all of those in my hard drive and backed up to DVD, but I also have a delicious account and a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and a blogger account, several blogs running in there. And a lot of this stuff lives online. I don't have a backup of this. I don't have it on my hard drive. And in many cases, there isn't necessarily a way to easily download this content. Backupify will do that. And so what it will do is you sign up, you tell it what services you use, you allow Backupify to access those services, and then they will make secure backups of that content, which you can then get back later, should say your Twitter account blow up, you can get all your tweets back. Now, maybe not the best example, who puts anything important on Twitter, but let's say you store all your bookmarks in delicious, or you've written all these wonderful essays in Blogger, and you want to get those back should those services ever blow up or accidentally delete your account or you accidentally delete your account. You can do that. The reason I'm pointing this out is if you sign up with Backupify between now and the end of January, it's free and it will be free forever. Now, forever as long as the service stays around, but it works. And you can even get daily reports of what it's backed up. It's wonderful. I've been using it for about a week and a half now. Seems to be doing the job quite well. I think it's stable enough that it's something I can recommend. So if you're storing a lot of content online, you want to make backup copies of that content, check out Backupify.com and get signed up soon because it's free through the end of January. And no, this is not a sponsored advertisement. I just found out about it. I think it's a cool service. Go back to my list here. Pull up one of these other stories. Some of these are bookmarks that I'm thinking, well, maybe I won't talk about them. So let me pull up this one. This was an interesting story. Turns out, how many of you have had the password talk? I don't want to have this talk again. I've had it in previous sessions. I'll do it in future sessions. But really the point is that you've got to pick a good password. The word password is not a good password. One, two, three, four, five, six is not a good password. Well, it turns out somebody did a little digging in the code behind the Twitter sign up page and they actually have a list of 370 passwords you are not allowed to use as your Twitter password. And if you try it, it will say, we're sorry, you can't do that. This page here kind of gives you a brief instructions as to how to find that complete list if you want. But there's a list of just some of the passwords that are not allowed, such as password, testing, Twitter. Please, I find it amusing that Beavis and Butthead are not allowed passwords on Twitter. So, you know, there you go. And Laura, thank you for letting me know that you've had the password talk. You know, if you hear it enough, you end up starting to give that talk to other people. So I just found this was just a neat little news story, something you can check out, maybe pull up that list for yourself, take a look at it and see if you're using that password on any other of your services. You know, is your password a good one or a bad one? Chances are if it's on this list, Twitter at least does think that it is a bad password. And I will just highlight here, you can download a text file of all 370 banned passwords for Twitter. Back to my list here. Another news story, I found very interesting, and then I've talked to a whole bunch of other people about it and something that maybe you've seen this story. And this story was that on Christmas Day, Kindle Books outsold real books on Amazon. Now there was another story that said the most gifted item on Amazon this year was a Kindle. Okay, that I find pretty cool. You look at this headline, immediately most people are impressed. You're thinking, wow, Kindle Books, man, more people bought electronic books Christmas Day from Amazon than real books. Well, I posted this to Twitter. I thought about it a little bit. Some of my colleagues kind of tweeted back and said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Well, let's not get too excited about this. And I've linked to some of those other blog posts from some of my colleagues about this. And they said, well, first of all, Amazon didn't release any numbs. So for all we know, they sold 15 electronic books and 14 print books on Christmas Day. Now, not likely, but they didn't exactly say that they sold 20 times the number of electronic books versus print books. They just said they sold more electronic books than print books. The other thing you want to think about is, let's say you got a Kindle for Christmas. You wake it up in the morning, you open it up under the tree, it's all there, you get a Kindle. How useful is that Kindle without any kind? So what are you going to do? You're going to immediately start buying books for your Kindle. And if you're somebody who gets a Kindle, chances are you're going to buy more than one. So let's say instead you wake up Christmas morning, you open your presents, and you've got an Amazon gift card. You're going to immediately jump up and run to the computer and go buy some books? Probably not. Although I'll admit I would, but nobody got me Amazon this year. So yes, I think this is important. I think eBooks are really starting to catch on and more and more use and more and more use. I still buy print books. I do buy a few electronic books myself. I have the original version of the Sony Reader. But don't let this headline, in my opinion and the opinion of a few others, make you think like we just hit this sudden turning point in electronic books. Yes, they may have sold more that year, but if you really kind of think about it, maybe it isn't that big of a deal. No, just something to think about and I will leave you with that. Okay, let me just do one or two other stories here. And I will, let's see, let's throw in this one because this one's got eight points. This is eight things every geek needs to do before 2010. Now, I found this last week and unfortunately we got what? Two days left, so you better get off this list. But anyways, maybe not immediately before 2010, but it's kind of one of these end of the year reminders of things you should probably do if you're a computer user. Now, this assumes I can actually get this page to come up. Okay, here we go. So let's run through this list and think about each of these for a minute. Okay, number one, edit your privacy settings and friendships. You're on Twitter, you're on Facebook, you're on MySpace. How many of those people you follow are actually your friends? How many have you gotten to know? Maybe it's time to weed the friends list. Maybe you really don't need to follow 300 people in Facebook. Okay, if you know 300 people, great. But if you don't, maybe some of those people you can go, well, they follow me, I follow back, I don't really know who they are, I really don't care what they have to say, so maybe I can weed them out. The other one is check your privacy settings in these systems. One of the other articles I've leaked to is Facebook recently made some changes to their privacy settings. And a lot of stuff that defaulted to private before actually does now defaults public, so you might want to check that stuff out. Laura, I do see your hand raised, but let me check my questions area here. I don't see something there, so I'm assuming you are on audio. So give me a sec here. Laura, I've unmuted you. Do you have a question or a comment? Okay, I'm going to guess no. And go ahead and finish through this list. Change your passwords. Here's my opinion on this one. If you've picked good passwords in the first place, chances are you don't need to change them. But as we've already kind of talked about, if you don't have very good passwords, now's a good time to change them. Own your name. This could be kind of just a session in and of itself, but do a Google search on yourself. See what's out there. Are you consistently using your name across your different services? I'm generally known as M-Sowers across Twitter and Facebook and MySpace. Either M-Sowers or Travel and Library. I'm not 100% consistent, but at least I've narrowed it down to two. And usually they're pretty well cross-referenced. Proving your feeds. For those of you who are RSS readers, as I am, now is a good time to go ahead and check all that stuff you're subscribed to and maybe weed out the things that you don't watch anymore. I actually did this last night at home with video feeds that I watch on the computer connected to my television, and I went through it and I'm like, you know what, I never watch that show anymore. I do still watch the show, and I don't watch that show, and I unsubscribe for a whole bunch of stuff. Now's kind of a good chance to do that. Find a better mobile or cell phone, as we call them here in the States. This assumes you have the cash and your contract is up, so we'll just kind of skip over that one real quick. Update copyright notices on your websites. How many of them say copyright 1999 through 2002? Go ahead, check. See if you need to change those copyright statements to 2010. If you have a blog, are you paying attention to it? Oh yeah, I do have a blog. In fact, just from somebody in Nebraska this morning, I read a post that said, I just realized I haven't posted my blog in six months. I keep meaning to do that. This is my New Year's resolution. I'm going to try to post my blog more. So, you know, give it a shot. Have you been ignoring your blog? And number eight, back up your data. We already talked about backupify. There are other services out there for backing up other content. Again, completely unasked for, I use a service called Backblaze, B-A-C-K-B-L-A-Z-E. I pay them five bucks a month, and I get unlimited online backup, so it just, everything I've sent on my computer, all of my documents, all of my pictures, all of my videos, just constantly get backed up to the internet. And for five bucks a month, I can give them as much content as I want. In fact, it's taken three months, and it's still running the first backup of everything on my computer. I've got so much on this beast. But for five bucks a month, I know most of my data is backed up somewhere when my computer crashes, but if my house burns down, all of my photos, all of my documents, all of my tax returns, all that computer data is I can get onto another computer and download all that content back. In fact, if I pay them a little extra, they'll even burn all that data to a DVD and mail it to me. So, back up your data, back up your data, and oh, by the way, did I mention back up your data. The stories I think I'm just going to cover for this month. I will go back to this bookmarks page. We will, as part of the recordings or the emails that go out afterwards, link you back to this page. But for reference, you can find these bookmarks at delicious.com slash travelinlibrarian slash techtalk plus DEC as in December 09. So, techtalk plus DEC09 or 09 and you can find links to the stories I've talked about, a few other related links, one or two stories that I just decided not to cover in too much detail. And we do have 10 minutes left and one of the things we did want to do in this session is allow people to kind of play a game I used to like to call Stump the Trainer. But do you have any questions for me? Anything I talked about? Any other tech questions? You know, now's your chance, although you can always call me. You can always send me an email. But if there's anything you want to ask, I'll give you the opportunity. You can either do a hand raise if you've got Mike coming on or you can go ahead and type it into the questions area and I will do my best. While we're giving people a chance to do that, I will quickly point out one other website here that I have on my list. And this is the folks at Gizmodo went back and they took a look at their hot tech items you should buy from the year 2000. And this list is spectacular. I love some of this stuff. I mean, this is an MP3 player at number one here. This is the PS2 game down here. This is the hot smart cell phone going on. If you just want a 10 year old because it's the end of the decade depending on who you ask kind of review what the hot tech was in the year 2000. I think this is a really great list to kind of go through and take a look at. Okay. We're done a little early, but I don't see any questions sitting in the question queue or any hands raised for video questions. So I'm going to go ahead and say thank you all for attending this Encompass Live session in this first of what I hope will be many tech talk sessions. Like I said, I have at least an interview set up for January and I will have more stories for you. And I think we will call it morning. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.