Is your library looking a little tired and shabby? Are you patrons listless and lackadaisical? Are you in need of inspiration? Have you shifted your paradigms recently? Do you believe that ideas should come at regular 15 minute intervals and always be less than 140 characters long?
I should have thought of hooking the Library 2.0 Idea Generator into Twitter a long time ago 
Heh heh — just noticed that the Library 2.0 Idea Generator recently churned out it’s 300,000th idea
So, has anyone actually been inspired by one of the ideas or is everyone just using it to generate funny things which involve discombobulating Michael Stephens or doing inappropriate things to Kathryn Greenhill?
I totally failed to spot that the Library 2.0 Idea Generator has now created over 100,000 ideas!
I’ve no idea what the 100,000th idea actually was, but I hope it was “Build an Idea Generator and sell it to Google for $1,000,000″.
Around about 1% of the ideas were of high enough quality that the viewer added it to the whiteboard. I gave up counting how many of them reference Michael Gorman, but here’s a few that caught my eye…
- investigate Michael Gorman and use him to replace all of your librarians
- closely scrutinize Michael Gorman and then paint him purple
- create Stephen Abram just to annoy Michael Gorman
- write a song about Michael Gorman just to confuse Michael Gorman
- enhance Michael Gorman for the Millennials
- repurpose Michael Gorman and then replace him with a robot
- replace Michael Gorman using Firefox
- add the Netflix model just to annoy Michael Gorman
…poor Mr Gorman — what did he ever do to you?
I must admit, most of my favourite ideas involve the Library 2.0 World movers and shakers…
- vigorously shake Lorcan Dempsey and upload the result to YouTube
- invert Lorcan Dempsey and then paint him purple
- closely scrutinize Leslie Burger and then visualise her as a tag cloud
- digitize Meredith Farkas and observe her from a suitable distance (see here for the result)
- write a song about Walt Crawford and publicise it on your plasma screen
- fall in love with Stephen Abram and embed him into a portal
- impress Michael Stephens and upload the result to YouTube
- podcast about your podcasts and then blame Michael Stephens when it doesn’t work
- unlock the latent forces within Jenny Levine and then run through your library screaming ”it’s all too much!”
If you’ve got a favourite idea from the whiteboard, or if you’ve actually been inspired by one of the ideas, please let me know!
In what might turn out to be the most pointless thing ever done in Second Life, I’ve successfully embeded the Library 2.0 Idea Generator into an otherwise ordinary looking pavement slab…
Woohoo!
Why not leverage the awesome power of the Library 2.0 Idea Generator into your own blog and paradigm shift your way into library nirvana?
If you’d like to include random ideas in your blog, just use the following code:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.daveyp.com/cgi-bin/l2/l24blog.pl">
</script>
If you want to also add a link back to my blog (you don’t need to if you don’t want to), just link to:
http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/106/
If you’d prefer to bring in a plain text idea (rather than one wrapped in JavaScript), then you can use this URL:
http://www.daveyp.com/cgi-bin/l2/l24blog.pl?plain
Have fun!
There’s an ancient Japanese proverb which translates roughly as:
“If you put an infinite number of programming monkeys into a room, one of them will write a Library 2.0 Idea Generator”
So… tonight, Matthew, I am going to be that programming monkey and I proudly unveil the…
If you get any particularly juicy ideas, please post them as comments — here’s a “starter for 10“:
[update] I’ve added the ability to save your favourite ideas to the Library 2.0 Whiteboard
[update] To complement the Idea Generator, I’ve hacked together…
