THE END #23

Well, this last post on Web 2.0 and the experience I've had deserves a new color! It's been great fun; well, mostly. Some of the exercises were more tedious than enjoyable, but I feel I got something out of every one, even if it was just that I don't expect to revisit some of them. My favorites were exploring the award winner sites (Web 2.0, that is), and learning about blogging. Quite a few of the things we learned about have now become part of my daily routine, i.e. checking my bloglines, and interacting with my kids on facebook. When I have more time, like when I'm retired, I may even try harder to like Library Thing and Technorati ;)

I guess the best improvement to the format of these exercises would be to build in more time for individuals to get it accomplished. I was sad to see so many start the program and become unable to finish due to time constraints. I'm not sure if extending the overall length would help everyone, but perhaps a few more could have finished. I would definitely choose to participate if another chance to learn was presented...it was enlightening!

#22 Audiobooks

Librivox is a good place to listen to some public domain books, recorded by volunteers to mp3 files for downloading, rss feeding to your bloglines, or just listening to from the website. The catalog was having some issues when I visited the site, but it did seems to have a large number of titles already available, with more being added all the time. I'm all for getting something FREE!

Thing #21 Podcasts

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this one, but as usual, I'll want to go back and play some more at some later date. I did open up podcastalley.com and was at first not too pleased that many of the top ten podcasts included foul language and extreme political leanings, just in their descriptions. I got brave and explored a bit further and was pleased to find that the directory has many, many podcasts to choose from that I might enjoy listening to. I added one from the "religious/spiritual" category that I'm interested in. It was easy to do and it worked the first time I tried it, even with these icky sounding library computers. I'll look forward to my surround sound speakers at home for future tuning in.

Interruption--Have to Share!

I have to interrupt this litany of exercise reporting to share what happened to me this morning, all because of this Web 2.0 stuff. I was reading my bloglines this morning and in the National Geographic News RSS feeds came across a video about using electricity to restore the coral reefs in Bali. I opened the link and began to watch. Meanwhile, my daughter was reading the morning newspaper, seated at the table nearby. All of a sudden, she started asking, where did you find that video, why are you watching that??? Coincidentally, she was at that exact time reading an article about the very same subject. SNAP!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071205-coral-video-ap.html

#20 Downloadable Music

Today I listened to "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" as sung by Andrew Rowan Summers and played on a dulcimer. It's not part of my regular holiday listening list, but it could be! It was easy to find and loaded and started playing quite quickly (how's that for alliteration?) I'm sure I'll be checking out more of this database in the near future...

#19 Web 2.0 Award Winner Pandora.com

First I have to say that this was a tough assignment, tough because I didn't want to choose just one award winner to look at and play with. I actually peeked at quite of few of them and was impressed by what I found. For this post, I'll just address Pandora, a music oriented site that lets you create your own radio station, just by entering the types of artists or songs you already like. It then adds similar projects to a list that you can then edit, listen to, or delete entirely. Very simple, very nice. At this point I only see the personal application of this one, but if we added sound to the pacs, perhaps patrons could choose pre-made lists of certain genres to listen to. Yeah, yeah, I know, the library is for quiet study ;)

http://pandora.com/

Publishing from Zoho Writer

#18 Web Apps

Gee, I'm glad we are on the last week of this 2.0 stuff. I'm having difficulty keeping up with my bloglines, facebook, and the new games I found, all because of these exercises! Lots of fun things!

Actually, this week I used Google Docs to create a spreadsheet in response to a patron's request for a list of Spokane radio stations. Here's a link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pfV-dklJz4UkaWqCOViPqJA I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep it current, but for now... I did find the spreadsheet function fairly easy to use, but it lacked some of the tools I'm used to using in Excel. It's a simplified version.

I also looked at Zoho writer and am using it right now (much easier than some old typewriter!) to write up this blog. Hopefully the "publishing to my blog" part will work and you are reading this there now .

I can see some real usefulness for these tools, even in the library. Customers who forget their flash drives or disks can do their work online and retrieve it later, even from a different computer. Very cool.

Wiki, Wiki

Sounds like someone is calling their little dog! I browsed many of the wiki links given to us for the exercise. I think they have their place in some applications, but I can certainly see that the "unprivateness" of them could lead to their becoming completely useless. I will say that my daughter and her then fiance set up a wiki to disseminate info about their wedding and it was a big success. They filled it with the schedule data, places to stay, things to do and see, as well as their gift wish list and some proselytizing(they are big on their Catholic faith). As with all wikis, visitors are free to read or not read anything they choose. They also have the opportunity to comment or not. That's the best part of wikis, getting lots of opinions in one place. It's also the worst part, as it gives nutcases a place to be stupid and post inappropriate or unrelated stuff.

Libraries could use wikis to keep reading recommendation lists current and user friendly. I just think it would require at least one person to keep out the riff raff and monitor postings. Wiki on!

Web 2.0 #15

I spent some time (probably too much) scanning the articles on Web 2.0 and where it will take "the library". Some of the authors were a bit too abstract for me and Richard Anderson used far too many catch phrases and cliches to be enjoyable for me, but I did relate well to Michael Stephens. He writes about the Librarian 2.0, who is/will be in tune with library users. I liked that he says we should be in control of our technolust; especially in today's world's consumerist society: "Ooh ooh, a new technology...I must have it!" Stephens adds that we need to listen to our users and plan for what they want, not for what they used to want.

Dr Wendy Schultz describes Library 4.0 as an amalgam of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. We have to take the best of the old and keep it "up with the times" to maintain our place as one of society's needs.

It certainly will be great to be a part of this revolution of learning!

Technorati and Popular things

I've now tried a few times to figure out the best way to use technorati. I was able to do some searches and find blogs and posts tagged with spl 2.0, and I also tried a few other searches to see if some other blogs I read would come up. Some did, some didn't. It was interesting to look at the popular lists and see how they differed from the ones on bloglines. Since I already have too much material to wade through in my email, facebook, and bloglines (aside from a job with requirements!), I don't think I'll be visiting technorati on any regular basis, but it's a cool tool among many.

I did meet the challenge and tag my posts, and claim my blog, as well as set up a technorati button on my blog. That was fairly easy. You can now find my blog using "teamleader" as a search term. This exercise was time consuming as it took a lot of going back and forth between windows to figure out what we were being asked to do.


SPL2

#13

This one is easy for me since I set up a del.icio.us account months ago after attending a Web 2.0 workshop. I think it's neat to see how many other users have added your favorites to their own, and the tagging function in delicious makes it easy to group your bookmarks. With del.icio.us, I was able to export some of the favorites I use at work, add them to my del.icio.us account using the import function, and then export them from there to my home computer, and vice versa. All in just a few easy steps. I've also used my del.icio.us account when traveling to get to my favorites on a computer without my desktop. Simple! The other useful thing about del.icio.us is that you can see what others who have the same bookmarks as you might have bookmarked in addition (some links you might not know about). Fun stuff!

More fun

Today I took some time and looked at a few more image generators. I made up a Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor, created a picture of an airplane with my own company name on it, and laughed at some other very ingenius generated images. I also went looking to create an avatar and came across the mEgo website. I think it looks cooler than an avatar ;)

Rollyo

Now I went to Rollyo and created a searchroll all my own. It's called Product Reviews and links to some sites I commonly search to read about customers' experiences with a product I might be shopping for. Check it out: http://rollyo.com/dstone/product_reviews/ There were lots of searchrolls on the Rollyo site that I may try out some time, e.g. "Ask Mr Fix-it", and "The Big Answer Deck". I did find that the results from my searches seemed to include some extraneous stuff. I wonder if it could be made more stringent, as in keep out the ads!

Library Thing

Okay, I went to Library Thing and added some titles to my library. Thing is, I don't really own many books, 'cause I work in a LIBRARY! I don't really see much use in this for me. I think I can get book reviews and recommendations for books to read in plenty of other places. I did try the book suggester and found that it just gives you more books by the same author, rather than some new authors to try. The unsuggester did yield some very funny results. It was very easy to add the books and rate them on Library Thing.

My Posh Twin

I had fun today creating my posh twin in "My Posh Twin Generator" found on Generator Blog. Here's a link to see me as Lady Diana Frances: http://poshtwin.com/view.php?u=30102007_778_n307fwoz Pretty fancy! And it was easy!

Thing #9 Newsfeeds

Time to finish up week 4... I filled up my bloglines list with some feeds from the sites I visit regularly, like weather.com and krem.com. It wasn't too hard to go to the info I wanted, like local news or weather and find the RSS/XML button to get the url for the feed. Then I just pasted it into the box for adding it to my bloglines list. I looked at Feedster and Syndic8 as well as some of the other feed search engines. I found them a bit confusing, or at least too indiscriminate for the searches I tried. Far too many results. I guess you'd have to really narrow things down to get a result you wanted. For myself, I'm happy with some of the popular blogs and feeds I found on bloglines. Who has time to read anyway???



I will say that I'm enjoying the learning and I hope to continue using these new skills when I can. Thanks, SPL, for presenting this program!



PS. Check out this cute picture taken by an 11 year old! One of 2007's best Wildlife Photos as judged by Nat'l Geographic.



http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/photogalleries/wildlife-pictures/photo5.html

Bloglines

Today I worked on Thing #8, creating a blogline account and setting up rss feeds to it. The account set-up was simple, and I liked that there were some basic feeds and popular ones to choose from to start. I'm not certain that I will keep all of what I chose (probably too much material to get through on a regular basis), but I may find some good reading there. Since I was already receiving "Unshelved" in email form every day, I added that to my feeds, too, and I will unsubscribe to the email. My Yahoo and my msn mail home pages have some feeds on them that I regularly read, so I went to the websites and got the rss urls to add to my bloglines feeds as well. Now everything is in one place for perusal! Cool! You can check out my bloglines list at http://www.bloglines.com/public/dstone
I think libraries could use this technology to keep their websites current with news about new titles, library happenings, and more. And, it doesn't have to take up much room on a webpage...just an RSS feed button for patrons to subscribe to!

For the geeks I can't keep up with

Ah, technology! Wonderful, and horrible! How can we keep up? My pet peeve is that just when you figure out the latest gadget (and are able to afford it), it becomes obsolete and the replacement is again impossible to understand or afford. Still, it is fun to ponder the question: how far can we go and what else will we be able to accomplish with technology?

Mashups and Tools

Well, after some frustrating attempts to add photos to my profile (I'll continue trying!), I did go look at some of the Flickr tools. I made myself a jigsaw puzzle and solved it in Flash Puzzle Fun. Alas, I couldn't upload that one either.

We had trouble opening Mappr, too. Sometimes computers can be annoying! But learning about this new technology is very interesting.

Rocky and Zephyr on ATV

Rocky and Zephyr on ATV
Originally uploaded by dstone8

Here's a photo I can write about. It's a picture of my dog Rocky and my son's dog Zephyr waiting to go for an ATV ride. They both love it! I even have a front-pack carrier for Rocky to ride in.

I posted a few more photos on my flickr page. I wonder if others will look at them?

1st time out

Here's my first try at posting on my blog. I think I could get to enjoy this quite well. I might try telling stories or sharing experiences. I might even make up some stuff! I look forward to trying more.