Submitted by Lara Killian (MLIS ’10):

Lara is a librarian educator at Nova Scotia Health Authority with a full weekday schedule of handling medical literature searches, patient education information, and training health care staff to find the information they need to help their patients. Lara is keen to support our provincial health care system with her info management skills, and she also loves to keep up with technology and trends in gadgets and social media. To that end, Lara co-hosts and produces a long-running tech podcast that has recently been rebooted as a monthly Facebook Live production, with the first half hour “webisode” filmed in February 2018. (http://ambermac.com/commandn-feb-2018-deepfakes-healthy-tech-pixelbook-giveaway-more/)

commandN (commandn.tv) started in 2005 with podcast founders Amber Mac and Jeff MacArthur as a YouTube production, and Lara joined the team as a co-host in 2011. The show covers tech, gadgets, and geek culture, and includes reviews and interviews with tech-related entrepreneurs and personalities. As new social networks emerged and attention spans shortened, the team moved the show to Instagram in 2014 and rebranded it as @15secTech, in honour of the maximum length of video clips users were allowed to post. As Instagram grew, the platform changed the max clip length to a full minute, which completely changed the concept of the series. After 350 mini-episodes, the team took a break to consider what the future of the show would be.

Taking note of the popularity and community engagement possible via Facebook Live productions, the team decided to take their mix of tech banter and quick “canned” reviews to Facebook, and fit the show into their now busy family lives by making it once a month, with a mix of live and pre-taped segments. (If you’re not on Facebook, it’s also posted to YouTube.) Amber and Jeff host the show in Toronto, while Lara moderates the chat (and will sometimes Skype in) from Halifax and all three contribute review segments as well as topic ideas.

The next Facebook Live show will run on Wednesday April 11th at 9 pm Atlantic with Amber and Jeff hosting live from Toronto. Check it out online (you can watch it live and join in the comments, or after the fact!) and feel free to ‘like’ the commandN page! https://www.facebook.com/commandN/