Earlier this month, Google attempted to make a shot across Microsoft’s bow with an Apps Sync for Outlook. Unfortunately for them, it completely fizzled when Microsoft made clear that the plugin disabled key Outlook functionality.

Google admitted as much at the time. But today, they’ve announced that the issues have been fixed. Windows Desktop Search now works, and users can control how the archiving operates. For those who continued to use the completely dysfunctional version, Google will save you from yourself by automatically updating to the current release.

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The Problem

The most serious problem with the Google Apps Sync was that it interfered with Windows Desktop Search, making all Outlook data (not just what was synchronized with Gmail) completely inaccessible to indexing and thus making your email a complete quagmire.

The Fix

To fix this, Google says they “worked closely with Microsoft,” to make sure both the Desktop Search and the standard Outlook search play nicely with the plugin.

In what looks like an attempt to appease Microsoft more than anything else, they also have taken steps to make crystal clear where data is being stored, and making autoarchiving something users can control. In addition to the fix, Google threw a lifeline to those still stuck in 1996 with support for access to Windows Live Hotmail via the Outlook Connector plugin.

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Mountainview, CA Sun has introduced two new solutions that combine the Fedora Repository and the Sun Open Archive Framework. Based on open source software and industry-standard hardware, the Sun Open Archive Framework controls costs, providing long-term sustainability and enabling you to future-proof your digital assets.

Learn more:
• Enterprise-Wide Digital Repository and Archive solution
http://www.sun.com/storage/archive/oasolutions.jsp#2

• Research and BioScience Digital Repository and Archive solution
http://www.sun.com/storage/archive/oasolutions.jsp#4

Both offerings leverage the Islandora work done by the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI, http://www.fedora-commons.org/community/examples/islandora/). Islandora links Drupal with Fedora. It provides an easy, powerful way to create custom web sites with an organizations unique content and branding and offers fine control over access to research collections and individual data assets. Adding the Fedora Repository to the solution’s core provides durability to the content with complete separation between data and presentation or transformation of data while also enabling seamless sharing of content with other applications.
The Sun Open Archive Framework’s Preservation Software layer adds robust storage protection (such as data integrity checking, replication and more) and data handling, while Sun Open Storage devices are the most cost effective and easily deployed storage available. See http://www.sun.com/openarchive.

Record-setting performance numbers
To help you determine the best server/storage configurations for your data load, Sun and Fedora  are conducting on-going data ingest and data access performance testing. Preliminary results can be viewed here http://blogs.sun.com/err/entry/archival_and_preservation_open_source

To learn more or to find a Sun reseller partner in your area who can provide these “out of the box” solutions, please contact me directly at: gail.truman@sun.com subject “Sun/Fedora Information Request.” Contributed by Gail Truman, Sun Microsystems, Open Archive Business Development Manager

According to an announcement today on the Flickr blog, it’s open season for image-sharing via Twitter on the gargantuan photo site.

Users can now share posted content on their Twitter accounts using a simple web-based sharing button or via email/mobile using a unique “2Twitter” email address. Although all uploaded content is tweetable, new content uploaded via the web is not auto-tweeted. Mobile uploads are only sent to Twitter if the user’s 2Twitter email address is used.

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Also, users can tweet images from accounts other than their own.

Once a Twitter account is added to a Flickr user’s account as a blog, the “Blog This” function will allow that user to tweet about any image with a short URL and a 116 character limit. The title of the image is automatically included in the tweet. The “Blog This” icon is located on the Flickr photo page and doesn’t appear in a user’s photo stream.

Here’s what the function and resultant tweet looks liked when I posted a photo from my own account:

And here’s a tweet I sent about an image and design from another user, ThisIsStar.

Sadly, the resultant tweet doesn’t indicate that the image is from another user; we can see this causing some confusion, especially when users are in a hurry. Hopefully, the generator of the tweet will edit the included text to reflect ownership accurately, e.g., “Check out this awesome design from @thisisstar.”

So, what will this mean for other services designed to post images to Twitter? While the new Twitter-posting capabilities at Flickr are exciting, they do present a few conflicts and redundancies. If Flickr wanted to kill other image-tweeting services, they should have allowed users to choose to auto-tweet about new batches of photos without having to select each pic individually after the fact. As it stands, only Flickr’s mobile upload function truly replaces services such as Twitpic and yFrog.

With regard to services such as FriendFeed or PixelPipe that have been shuffling links to our newly posted Flickr photos over to our Twitter accounts automatically, the new Flickr function doesn’t really help consolidate users’ efforts or save their time. Auto-tweets from third-party aggregators such as these are still the only way to tweet new images from the web without taking extra steps.

However, the redundancy issue will rear its ugly head for mobile uploads to the 2Twitter addresses. For example, if I uploaded from my device right now using a 2Twitter address, it would post to Flickr and Twitter first. Then a FriendFeed post would be generated automatically. That FriendFeed note would then get pushed to Twitter. This is clearly too much noise, but Flickr doesn’t give me the necessary incentive to completely turn off FriendFeed’s Flickr integration.

Although these issues mean, from our point of view, that the feature still needs improvement, it’s a great way to share already uploaded content from a wide range of sources.

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People on the internet aren’t always very nice. While some adults may be tough enough to wade into the snark-infested waters of YouTube comments and other particularly nasty online fora - many children could use a helping hand coping with it all psychologically.

Enter Firefox for CyberMentors. It’s a new custom browser made in partnership with the popular anti-cyberbullying organization Cybermentors.org.uk. It’s a good looking option for parents.

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The browser puts users one click of a button away from a live chat with adult staff and other children concerned about cyber-bullying, some of whom have been trained as mentors by the organization to offer personal advice in private chats. It’s a very active site and the 13 year old mentor I chatted with in testing the service was very well spoken. She told me that a majority of the young people she had chatted with sought advice about off-line bullying, but said that she frequently gives advice about online trouble as well. She had been trained in her UK school as an anti-bullying mentor and seemed like she would do a good job helping other young people.

In addition to easy access to chat with trained anti-bullying mentors, the browser also offers one-click access to a media sidebar where kids can see the latest news videos about anti-cyberbullying efforts.

We haven’t been able to figure out what happens to the sites that get reported as inappropriate through the browser, but maybe the CyberMentors staff finds the site owners and gives them a wet-willie.

People who already have Firefox installed may also get a browser plug-in that offers all the same functionality as the stand alone anti-bullying browser.

Disclosure: The author was bullied a lot as a child, but before the internet existed. He considers having a job as a blogger now a form of revenge. You know who you are! May you be plagued by spammy Facebook apps!

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Greetings from Northern Michigan! The days of summer are flying by and I’m splitting my time between trying to wear out our new Labrador Retriever Cooper and prepping for upcoming talks at ALA Annual. I’ll be presenting for LLAMA BES (that’s the Library Leadership & Management Association Buildings and Equipment Section if you’re spinning the wheel of ALA acronyms) in a program called  “Library 2.0 Buildings: Creating Zones with Heart.” 

I’m excited about the topic because sometimes we get so caught up in talking about technology, the spaces and places of our libraries take a backseat. Libraries need to encourage the heart in the physical realm as well as the online. 

I agree with folks like John Beck that the library can offer many spaces and opportunities to varied groups. We should constantly be looking for creative ways to create zones in the library for our different user groups. I also think it should be okay to have fun at the library - gaming, DDR, creation of stuff, etc - as well as make it comfortable and useful for others. I’m not just writing about public libraries but about academic libraries too. 

For my part of the program, I’ve been batting around these “zones” in my head on long walks with Cooper at the “Quiet Area” pond nearby. I’d be very interested in feedback from our readers about these zones and any others they may have in their libraries.

Community Zone

A space for the community to gather encourages people to use the library not only as a place to get “stuff,” but as a central, integral part of people’s lives. Think public libraries and meeting space or think academic libraries and the campus community the library serves: students, faculty and staff.

One goal for a library might be to re-establish the idea of the commons - that shared space that can become many things to many people and everyone feels ownership.  I want our constituents to feel strong ownership of our buildings and services.

Creativity Zone

This zone encourages people to express themselves via technology or other media. Podcasting stations, video production areas, image manipulation setups, space set aside for writing activities, and any other creative endeavour may find its way into the library.

Curiosity Zone

What do you want to know today? That could be the motto for this zone - where any and all questions are answered via online and (gasp!) print resources by knowledgeable and engaged staff. I’m reminded of John Blyberg’s “Let’s Be Curious with our Users” post riffing on Seth Godin’s points about curiosity.

Collaboration Zone

This zone encourages people to come together to work on projects or complete a task. It might be teen-centered, or an “office on the go” type set up, or a craft/art type space or a technology rich environment, but my guess is it will be a mash up of all of these things.

Caring Zone

This zone should encompass the entire space. The wonderful thing - and the thing that brings this post to TechSource is through all of these zones there are two very important threads that tie them together and make them work -technology and people. We need technology - all shapes, sizes, and cost factors - to create some of these spaces, but we also need dedicated encouragers/facillitators to help people learn, experience, and utilize the space. The most important one is the people of course - a caring mindset trumps spiffy expensive technology everyday. The mindset should also be humanistic, kind, and in all ways encouraging. 

Sometimes it seems we get so hung up on control and workflow, that we miss opportunities to involve users with the library and library staff. A recent example is this one, from a photo by Kathryn Greenhill :

“They have added a half wall so that staff and patrons cannot make eye contact or see each other,” she writes. “It felt really dehumanizing to stand on one side of the barrier, centimetres from someone in a building built on service and not be able to smile or say hello.”

The library should be human. The library should be there for users. The library should be built by involving users every step of the way. And spaces and places within our walls should reflect that. At the LLAMA BES program we’ll hear two notable library innovators who have achieved these goals, sharing and talking about their spaces: 

Case Study 1:  Darien Library, Darien, Connecticut, Alan Kirk Gray, Assistant Director - Operations

Case Study 2:  The Commons, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA, Robert E. Fox, Jr., Associate Director, Libraries

Until then, please share your “Zone Stories” here and read more about the case study locations:

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/08/keeping-the-library-relevant-a-tour-of-the-georgia-tech-library-learning-commons.html

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/06/on-the-information-experience-an-ala-techsource-conversation-with-john-blyberg.html

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/05/plugging-in-with-kindness.html

When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS, but push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.

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IM Works, but What About Those Timeouts?

BeeJive, for example, is a great IM app - and so are eBuddy (iTunes link) and IM+ with Push (iTunes link), two other push-enabled IM apps that were released in the last few days. These apps are intuitive, connect to most popular IM networks, and work just as advertised. But when it comes to push notifications, there are just too many little things that are holding these apps back.

By default, BeeJive, for example, will log you out of your account after just 20 minutes. So once you have finished a chat session, you will just be offline again and no new messages will be pushed to your phone. You can push this timeout limit up to 24 hours, but this setting is buried at the bottom of BeeJive’s long list of options. The eBuddy IM app doesn’t even have this option and just automatically logs you out after 30 minutes.

There are probably good technical reasons for this, but this behavior just isn’t what we expected when we first heard about push notifications.

News Updates are Nice, but What About Customization?

While the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) does push out news updates regularly, it is also a bit of a letdown. There is, for example, no way to customize when you want to get alerts and which alerts you want to get. You can’t just subscribe to tech news, for example, or updates about the latest celebrity deaths.

Still no Twitter Apps with Push

We are also still waiting for the first Twitter apps that support push (at least for replies and direct messages), better calendar apps (Remember Milk is the only one in the App Store so far, and it requires a pro account), apps that can push out alerts when an RSS feed updates or when new email arrives, or apps that are simply innovative and beyond our current exepctations.

Maybe Push Just Isn’t the Solution?

While getting the current updates is nice, compared to having to open the app and see what is new, there is so much more that could be done with this technology. But for the time being, either Apple is holding back the most interesting apps, or developers just aren’t able to use it in really innovative ideas.

We have talked to a number of companies that are producing geo-aware apps, for example. But because these developers aren’t able to remotely wake up an app and pull in data about your current location, there really isn’t much that they can do with push notifications at this point.

If only the phone could also run cron jobs, for example. Then that could start an application at regular intervals, in addition to push notifications, and developers could do so much more with this technology.

Of course, we are still in the early days of push on the iPhone, but so far, we have been quite disappointed with the current crop of apps. Hopefully, this will only be a stopgap solution anyway, and by the time the next generation of iPhones comes around, Apple will just allow apps to run in the background.

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Have you ever eaten a casserole made completely with canned ingredients and a potato chip crust? It’s similar to if you’ve ever eaten wet cat food on a dare. It’s terrible. Nevertheless, for many of us, these casseroles are as much a part of childhood as Halloween and jump rope. While we can certainly eat casserole calamities and remember our youth fondly, it’s probably time we contributed some new recipes to the family cookbook - ones that don’t give everyone sodium-induced hypertension. Below is a quick round up of recipe resources:

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1. Recipe Puppy: Type in any ingredients you already have and recipe puppy will match them to a recipe.

2. Foodie View: A recipe website that incorporates restaurant reviews, search from major blog recipes and a healthy dose of food porn photography.

3. Recipe Matcher: This site is similar to Recipe Puppy but it uses drop downs in its search function.

4. Nibble Dish: Formerly Open Source Food, Nibble Dish is perhaps the best food porn / recipe site in existence. The site offers more than 2000 CC licensed recipes in addition to some extremely gorgeous high resolution images.

5. Top Secret Recipes: This site offers users the chance to take their favorite restaurant recipes and make them at home. Something tells me that the Carl’s Jr section isn’t going to be very healthy.

6. FoodNetwork: Offers users many of the recipes off the network including food by Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Giada de Laurentiis.

7. BBC and NYTimes Recipe Search: Both the BBC and NY Times offer recipe engines for their featured recipes. This is generally for people who are searching for a specific recipe from a previous show or article.

8. The Atlantic Monthly: These guys have an extremely sophisticated recipe site. It reads like the J. Peterman catalogue of food. If you aren’t in a hurry, you can get some great recipes here.

9. Epicurious: Epicurious is a Condé Nast site that incorporates recipes from Gourmet, SELF and Bon Appétit. Recipes tend to be a little healthier and the service offers a recipe saving feature for members.

10. Tastebook: This site allows users to bookmark recipes from leading cooking sites as well as add their own recipes. Members can then create a physical cookbook. This is great for gifts.

11. Food.com: This is a recipe bookmarking service. Users can add the browser plugin and select their favorite recipes to save in their Recipe Box.

12. VideoJug: This site, while not specifically meant for cooking instructions, is a wonderful resource for budding cooks.

Chinese: How To Make Crab In Black Bean Sauce

13. Look and Taste: This site offers high quality professional instructional videos. The desserts section looks particularly useful for souffles and creme brulees.

14. All Recipes: This is a site dedicated to user-generated recipes (as opposed to professional recipes). The site also includes instructional video, user photos and a section for slow cooker recipes and a recipe saving tool.

15. Rouxbe: Rouxbe is a community where user-generated recipes are rated, certified and if worthy, made into professional cooking videos. After 30 days users must pay to access video recipes, but text recipes remain free.

16. YouTube: YouTube offers a selection of cooking videos from some great hosts. In particular, Toronto-based Korean cook Maangchi began uploading her videos in 2007 and has since developed a nationwide following complete with meet ups and popular classes across North America.

17. MyDamnChannel: Nobody ever expected rap artist Coolio to host his own cooking show, and it certainly is a fantastic voyage. While you may not find your culinary cravings here, the show is worth a look simply to watch Coolio throw dime bags of spice onto his creations.

18. Chowhound: While the site is perhaps best known for restaurant reviews, Chowhound has a good selection of cooking technique videos. If you can make it past the advertisements, the “You’re Doing it All Wrong” series is the most informative.

We know this is just a small taste of the millions of resources available. If you’ve got a blog or site that you know our readers will love, let us know in the comments below.

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