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.