Daily Thoughts 02/20/2012

 Illustration drawing shows the interior of the reading room of the Boston Public Library, Bates Hall. 1 drawing : wash, opaque white and graphite. Published in: "The New Building of the Boston Public Library" by T.R. Sullivan, Scribner's magazine, 19:88 (January 1896).


Daily Thoughts 02/20/2012


As usual, I updated the Twitter and Facebook accounts for the library.

Looking at pinterest under the subject library.  There are lots of interesting pictures. http://pinterest.com/search/?q=library

I am putting together a personal card for myself.  I have the design pretty much figured out.  It will have my name, email, and skills.  I intend to use Rockwell font, Bookman Old Style font, a black ornamental border, a small picture of an open book, and raised lettering on a creme colored background.  I went and ordered the card in the morning.  It should be coming in a couple of days.

I am going to General Assembly tonight to take an Introduction to SEO class.  General Assembly is an interesting space.  It is focused on web startups, design, technology, and entrepreneurship.  The teacher for the class is from Yahoo. http://generalassemb.ly 

Tomorrow I am going to Literary Brooklyn at the Stanford Club.  It is a program which the New York Librarians Meetup was invited to.  I will probably end up writing about it.  I have to dress a little more nicely for the program.

This afternoon I read some of The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self Deception in Human Life.  This book is about the psychology of self deception.  It is about how we deceive ourselves with overconfidence, self inflation, and the illusion of control over things which we have no influence over.  The book is quite ironic and a tiny bit sarcastic.  It is an e-book which I downloaded to the Kindle for PC program.

I went to a training session on Link Building for Start-Ups at the General Assembly on the Fourth Floor of an office building on 902 Broadway in Manhattan New York.  The lecture was from 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m..  Part of it can be applied to the library website and other parts of it can be applied to this blog.  The person who did the presentation was Byrne Hobart from Yahoo.  The presentation was in the library of the General Assembly building.   There were over 25 people attending the session.  There is an overview of the session on Slideshare.  http://www.slideshare.net/byrneseyeview/linkbuilding-for-startupsgeneral-assembly

The space was very comfortable.  The presenter mostly followed the slides.  Once again, what I am describing is more a matter of my interpretation than what might have been said.

One of his points is that SEO is not a new thing, and you cannot just use SEO to build a business.  It is becoming increasingly hard to game the system with SEO.  It is actually a considerable amount of work to build links.  A lot of it is requesing that people link to you and finding out who is linking to you.

Some of the objectives are to get bloggers and other people to like your site and link to back to it.  This includes actively writing comments on places like Quora and Yahoo! Answers.  I found Byrne Hobart's ideas different from what I was used to.

He also talked about writing articles for other sites, inviting guest bloggers, and getting coverage from the media. He suggested that people build news around what they are doing and become a topic of conversation.  He was talking about how to put links into articles that you have put on other sites and inviting outside people to link to your site.

There was also a reminder to reach out to your old contacts so that they will follow you.  I found the lecture interesting and useful. 

On the way home, I read some more of A Universe From Nothing.  The author is writing about string theory and the concept of the multiverse.