Random ideas for a Monday

I've decided to give you random thoughts & links - you can scan through & see which appeal, but these are the things my mind's wrapped around this AM:

• Meme: the concept, which itself has become a meme (and does that make it recursive?) - essentially that units of culture that are spread person to person (phrases, popular bands/tv shows, ideas, etc.) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
• Stuck/unstuck (listen to the podcast from the South by Southwest interactive conference this spring):
• See the gotomedia.com's May report on the concept of getting stuck (and ideally unstuck - follow her links to the other getting unstuck links) - http://www.gotomedia.com/gotoreport/may2007/index.html
• Communication as a way of preventing "stuck"-ness; continuous feedback loop is useful when doing a web design/redesign project
  
• Be ready, willing and able to fail - but fail quickly
  
• Silverlight from Microsoft - the new Flash-killer application (cross-platform compatible)? Revealed at last week's Mix07 conference; point being, it will help us create more, better rich interactive applications for the web (i.e., RIAs)
• Try out slideshare, if you haven't already!
• From the Web2.0 Summit - note that Amazon has unveiled its entire "web stack" of services - they are no longer booksellers, but web services providers; they include in their webstack the Mechanical Turk for providing expert answers
  (ASIDE: librarians, listen up, between Amazon, Yahoo answers, and Microsoft Live Q&A, is it possible that soon people won't think to turn to librarians for their answers (do they think to at this point anyway?) - but only to turn to the big online web service providers.... On the other hand, maybe there's only room for one large online answering service... Google Answers has been retired as of the beginning of '07, for example (largely due to the success of Yahoo Answers & Google's comparative lack of success). If you haven't done virtual reference yet, maybe it's time to stop hesitating & to jump into the ring - I'm not sure if it's not too late, but it's certainly worth a try folks... for Connecticut libraries, there's InfoAnytime, which combines the resources of libraries throughout the state to offer 24/7 live chat reference services... )