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In its annual report on careers, U.S. News & World Report today named "Librarian" one of its Best Careers for 2009:

Librarianship is an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons solve their problems and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They may even get to put on performances, like children's puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders. On top of it all, librarians' work environment is usually pleasant and the work hours reasonable, although you may have to work nights and/or weekends.

I can't recall putting on a puppet show at any of the law school libraries in which I've worked. Clearly I need to rectify this. Immediately.

[U.S. News & World Report] Best Careers 2009: Librarian

Yesterday's Boston Globe featured a column by Alex Beam expressing his reservations about Twitter:

You have heard about Twitter. Maybe. It's something other people do, mainly younger people. You subscribe to the service, then you can post little messages on people's cellphones, or on their instant message accounts. About nothing.

[...]

The perfect twitter is a lapidary techno-haiku: I send these pointless little messages, gobbling up Internet bandwidth for no reason. Because I am a twit . . . er.

I send pointless little messages
Originally uploaded by tomboone

In honor of Beam's article, I've created a blog badge for those of us who are the targets of his derision. Feel free to use the badge however you like. I have one in the sidebar of my page that links to my Twitter profile.

Many of you know I post to Twitter several times a day on average, but it took me several months of using (and more often NOT using) the site before I started to get anything out of it. Once I found a substantial number of people to follow (many of whom are fellow law librarians) and who followed me in return, however, the conversation took off. I am now in constant contact with librarians all over the country every single day.

I posted my own favorite Twitter experience as part of a comment to a post at Out of the Jungle about Beam's column:

A few weeks ago a librarian in Chicago Twittered that she was interested in an AALL session on empirical research. I replied to her -- via Twitter -- that I was also interested in this topic because I was working with such materials at work. Two days later, a librarian in LA who isn't even on Twitter asked me about my empirical research after she had a phone conversation the Chicago librarian. Minus Twitter, I wouldn't have made either of these valuable professional connections.

So I will continue to send pointless little messages.

Just a few days ago I posted about Yahoo! News's odd practice of not including a link to bookmark articles on del.icio.us, especially odd given that the company owns del.icio.us. To make my point, I used the New York Times website as an example of one of the many media websites that includes "Share" links to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools with each and every article. I even included a screenshot from NYTimes.com to illustrate my point.

Well, earlier tonight the Times has made some changes, and del.icio.us is no longer featured as one of the site's bookmarking links. It and Newsvine have been removed in favor of two newcomers to the game, Mixx and Yahoo! Buzz. Mixx, which has only been around for about 6 months, is a social news and multimedia site developed by a former exec at Yahoo! News and USA Today. It's sort of a cross between Digg and Newsvine, where users vote on content found around the web with higher rated content placed higher on the site. Yahoo! Buzz is a similar tool that debuted just a few weeks ago.

With this focus on social voting/ratings (the Digg model) in its "Share" links, the Times appears to be giving a quiet endorsement to that model over simple bookmarking (the del.icio.us model). There is, however, another possibility. Given that Yahoo! owns both del.icio.us and Buzz, its possible that the company simply asked the Times to switch which of its sites the news outlet linked to. Yahoo! clearly is giving Buzz a much bigger push than it has given del.icio.us, illustrated most clearly by the inclusion of Buzz, not del.icio.us, links within Yahoo! News.

What do you think? Is the NY Times betting on the future of the social web, or simply honoring a corporate request?

In the last couple of years, bookmarking and sharing links have become commonplace on news media websites. Read any article on just about any news site, and you'll have the option to bookmark the story on del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Newsvine or several other services. This is becoming as true on a small city newspaper site as it is on a giant like the New York Times.

For those of us who use such services, this is a huge convenience. In fact, that "Recent Reads" block over in the right-hand column of this website is partially powered by my del.icio.us account, with many of the articles in that list added via the kind of bookmark link I'm writing about.

For better or worse, my #1 source of news is still Yahoo! News. Using their RSS feeds, I keep up to date with top stories from the AP, Reuters and others all from one source. Sadly, however, Yahoo! News is one of the few big name news websites that doesn't offer its readers bookmarking links. Sure, they have a link to vote for an article on the company's new Digg competitor, Yahoo! Buzz, but there are zero bookmarking options. What makes this omission all the more notable is the fact that Yahoo! owns del.icio.us. Yes, that's right. Yahoo! owns one of the web's biggest social bookmarking services, a service that is linked to by nearly every major media outlet in America, yet the company doesn't even link to it from within its own site.

Note that, for your convenience, I've included a link for you to bookmark this post on del.icio.us. And I don't even own the company.