Friday, August 24, 2007

TABS

I'd like to end my journey through 23 Things with a tribute to TABS. When I started right-clicking and opening links in a new tab, a whole new world opened up. A more organized world. A world in which I no longer got lost in a maze of links. It changed my life.
Did you know that if you have more than 10 tabs open in Firefox, a cute little arrow pops up and you can click on it to go visit your exceeding-10-tabs? It's a beautiful thing.
And here are the Things that have become part of my life: blogging (I may even start my own, personal blog because I'm going to miss it!!!), Picasa & PicasaWeb, Bloglines, the Generator Blog, Bloglines, LibraryThing, Del.icio.us, Wikis, GoogleDocs, YouTube, and Fun with Web2.0. 12 Things!
And so, a fond farewell and a hearty thanks...
Is anyone else up for 2.1?

More Enjoyable with a DEVICE

To fully become a citizen of the 21st century, it seems that I must own a DEVICE. If I owned a DEVICE, ebooks and eaudiobooks would be a lot more useful. I'm not going to listen to a book while sitting at my computer!!! But I've been listening to books in the car lately, and I would really like to do away with the whole process of opening the trunk, taking out the 6-CD changer, arranging the disks, replacing the disks I've already listened to, etc. etc. This is complicated by the fact that I am listening to one book while my 6-year-old is in the car with me, and another while I'm alone. Enter the fabled DEVICE and my problems would be over.
I will say I was happy to experience the Overdrive/NetLibrary interface from a user's perspective and it seems pretty easy and straightforward. I think it was Jen who created the FAQ on our site, and it is really helpful!!!!
Before all this Web 2.0 practice, I was pretty uncertain about the downloadable books, even though we're supposed to understand them in order to explain them to customers!! But now, everything tech-wise (at least from a user's standpoint, not how it actually works) has gotten a lot less intimidating.

Homemade Podcast

Check it out. I didn't create this, but a good friend did, and it's posted on John's website. He updates it pretty much weekly, and it's always an eclectic bunch of songs built around a theme. Right now he sends out email reminders when the new podcast is up, but I'm going to ask John to add an RSS option, so I can put it straight into my Bloglines account. (Lesson #1: You can do that with podcasts.)
But here's the thing with podcasts, particularly music ones: I don't have an mp3 player, so I can't easily take them with me. Maybe I'll win the drawing for the mp3 player and all that will change! (Here at CCPL, if you finish your 23 Things by Aug. 31, you are entered into a drawing for an mp3 player. And since I accidentally WASHED John's in the washing machine a couple of months ago, I figure it's destiny for me to win a new one. No, they do not hold up very well in the wash.)
Also, for non-music ones, I just don't seem to have the attention span for them. I must not be an auditory learner, because I always get distracted. A video can hold my attention, but not an auditory podcast. And I didn't find any out there that looked too interesting. But I did subscribe to SLJ's, just in case they put something up that could be useful or interesting.

Fell In Love With A Girl

Here's my favorite White Stripes video! YouTube is cool and I would love to use it here at work somehow, for booktalks, or other "virtual programming". Next challenge: record and post my own video to YouTube. Can't be that hard!

Totoro Montage

Here's an image I created using Montage-a-google. I found it on the Web 2.0 awards. The award was for Guess-the-google, which is a cool game based on Montage-a-google. In the game, you are presented with a montage, then have to guess the keyword that generated it. For example, the correct guess for the one to the left would be "totoro". Give it a try and see for yourself!!
One more bonus of this exercise: in order to post the image to my blog, I learned how to take a screen shot and used Paint Shop for the first time! That's one of my favorite things about this program, how one skill leads to another. Along with the fearlessness to just give it a try. (Which I never had before.)

Google Docs: Two Thumbs Up!

I was lucky to have already explored Google Docs a bit thanks to a coworker who is quite a bit further along than I am in this 23 Things project. She actually used Google Docs in REAL LIFE. We had attended a training together back in July on internet safety for kids. As part of "transfer of training" here at CCPL, we are supposed to post what we learned at trainings to our CCPL blog. This summer has been PARTICULARLY CRAZY so the weeks went by, and neither of us got around to posting, which is definitely a big no-no...so one day, J. sat down, typed her notes into Google Docs, and emailed them to me to edit & add what I wanted. Her email sat lurking in my Inbox for a couple more weeks, then finally when I creeped up to Week 18 of 23 Things, I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone. I edited her notes, and just to be extra daring, I published straight from Google Docs to the blog. I have to admit this was a little "glitchy" as I have TWO blogs through Blogger, 23 Things & the CCPL blog. There is an option in Google Docs to type the title of the blog you want your document sent to, but this didn't appear to work as I had expected. I meant to post to 23 Things, to use that as my proof of exploring Google Docs, but it posted to the CCPL one anyway. Which I did need to do, so it was OK, and now I'm writing this long explanatory post about the whole thing. The only question is, can I manage to direct it to the right blog???? We'll soon find out.
Long story short: Google Docs, thumbs up. I'll be using it in my work & probably personal life. Thanks, 23 Things!

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Wiki Wiki!!

I couldn't help myself. I looked up "wiki" in Wikipedia. It is indeed Hawaiian for "quick" and I'm glad that back in the day this term prevailed. Quickipedia just doesn't have the same ring. Wikis seem to be extremely useful and pretty much easy to use. We are using one to keep everyone updated as we work on updating our Strategic Plan. It is interesting to watch this unfold and compare it to the process that took place just four (?) years ago...it was much harder to share and update information.
I tend to view Wikis as something like "advanced blogs" that other people can collaborate on. PBWiki seems cool, and who could not like that cute little peanut butter sandwich?

Web 2.0: Friend or Foe?

I find lots of pro-Web 2.0 YouTube clips very inspiring, and this was true for The Machine is Us/ing Us. That was the first time I had ever seen Web 2.0 explained in terms of the code that allowed it to be possible, i.e. XML. We owe so much to XML it seems. I have to admit that I find the INTERWEB (as I like to jokingly refer to it) much more fun and useful with the advent of all this Web 2.0 innovation. And thanks, 23 Things, I felt like a real geek this weekend. My sister wanted advice for organizing her digital photos, and I told her all about Picasaweb, and Flickr. Then she wanted a list of good books I'd read lately and I told her I'd send her my Library Thing link. I really love these Web 2.0 things!
But it is in my nature to be contrary, so for the sake of honoring that tendency, I offer this article, from The Register. It offers a cynical view of Web 2.0, and the first sentence really caught my attention: "Imagine a world in which parents read to their children in the evening, not because it was a pleasurable and meaningful activity, but as an investment in the child's future earning potential." This happens! People read with their kids because it is supposed to make them smarter, which will get them into a good college, which will get them into a good career, and make them lots of money. Somewhere in there, the simple act of reading aloud because it is enjoyable is lost. And that's the essence of this article. The author points out that Web 2.0 has brought a drive for efficiency into areas of our lives, like friendship and listening to music, that were once just things we enjoyed with greater simplicity.
But the reality is that, love it or not, Web 2.0 is here to stay, and it is of course of the utmost importance for libraries to adapt. I could ramble for hours about that, but for today, let me just ramble for a couple more minutes. The issue of the day has been our Kids Pages. My coworker spent all morning trying to update the programs for Fall, with limited success & many frustrations using Contribute. Blogging and all this other stuff is so simple and user-friendly...could we use some of it to make our Website easier to update??? And one more idea we're considering: using YouTube to deliver booktalks to middle-schoolers. This would maximize staff time by allowing us to reach hundreds of kids without actually leaving our building. And kids like looking a recordings more than meeting real people, right? Right???
OK, you can give a sigh of relief: I'm done now.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Technorati: Proof I am Not Among the Web 2.0 Elite

I looked around a bit, and watched the video explaining the new Technorati. It seems a bit like Bloglines on steroids. I don't see myself using it anytime soon, even though I like blogging & reading certain blogs. Right now, Bloglines is enough.
BUT, I did find this interesing blogpost about how Angelina Jolie had a tough time breastfeeding! Ah, the wonders of the blogosphere. Unfortunately I have limited time to devote to following the exploits of my favorite celebrities...

Del.icio.us: I need a few more bites to decide if it really is

I've played around a bit on Del.icio.us. I want to like it. It seems cool. I installed the buttons, and it couldn't be easier to add sites. I think it could grow on me, and will be more fun to do as I go, like when I spot a cool site, I can just click on the tag button, and add it to my bookmarks, and I'm set. It wasn't so fun thinking up sites and doing it that way. Also, I'm intrigued by the ability to create a "network" as a quick & easy way to share links. Need to investigate that a bit more, but seems like it could be less clunky than emailing links, which is what I normally do. And it would be exciting to get links from other people. I'm still trying to get used to tagging rather than folders. The Virgo in me likes folders. (That's one of the things I liked about Bloglines). But as the Help feature on Delicious assured me, "If you don't get it right away, that's OK -- you don't have to. Tagging is pretty intuitive and can take some practice to fully understand. Try it and experiment a bit! There are no wrong tags." So here's my account...pretty boring right now, but we'll see, maybe it will grow.

Rollyo: Not So Awesome

This is a tool that I think works better in theory than in practice. A coworker had an idea to set up a Searchroll for buying books, that would search Amazon and some others that she regularly searched. Sounds like a good idea, but when we tried it out, there were so many results, it didn't really make the searching any simpler and more streamlined. You can try it for yourself here.
When I went to set up my own Searchroll, I couldn't think of any ideas. For clothes, I basically shop on one site. For news, that's covered with Bloglines. For health issues, I start with MedlinePlus & that's usually enough. So I looked around at what some other 23 Things Participants had done, and I liked Jen's, which was for Kid's Health. Also, I liked Julie's, which was for storytime ideas. So I created my own along those lines, since there is a core group of sites I seem to always use for storytime craft ideas. Here's the Searchroll. But I tried it a couple of times, and I'm just not convinced that I couldn't get the same results, and perhaps with even greater accuracy, from Google (which is how I search for craft ideas now.)
I also played around a little with some of the other Searchrolls on the site, but didn't see anything that I couldn't live without.
Final analysis: Rollyo, in spite of your catchy red and white graphics, and your edgy "roll your own" slogan, I will not be visiting you again...you seem to be more gimic than substance.
(Unlike that other red and white phenomenon I love so much.)

Saturday, August 4, 2007

LT

This was cool for 2 reasons:
1. Library Thing is EXTREMELY SIMPLE TO USE. I really like how when you create your account, you just give them your username and password and that's it. Quite a relief since we've been caught up in account-creating central with this 23 Things. I think I like LT. I may even try to keep up with it. I read constantly, and hate it when someone asks what good books I've read lately and I draw a complete blank. Also, if I read something particularly good, I like to share it with several people, so maybe I'll set it up so we could all share via LT.
2. I am very proud of figuring out how to put the LT widget on my blog. It automatically updates to show the 2 most recent adds to my LT library...I had to copy and paste SOME ACTUAL HTML CODE and figure out where to do this, which is quite advanced for me. (Although also astoundingly simple due to the user-friendliness of Blogger.)

Sunyata as Sakura Haruno as a photo as a sketch






Here's Sunyata all ready for Otakon2007. Although I have to say, the image was really more striking with the pink hair in all it's glory. In unrelated Generator news, my Goth name is Razorblade Kisses. And I've really been feeling a lot better since I've been taking Mudvinobi.
So there's nothing wrong with a little pure fun now & then, is there?? And yes, I've added the Generator blog to my Bloglines!

More Fun with RSS

OK, so I'm totally addicted. I went to Merlin (I had never been there before) and added it to my Bloglines account, then explored the other library news blogs & added a few of those. I just checked them out very quickly, but added LibraryCrunch , Mashable, and LibrarianInBlack. Some favorites that I had already added to my Libaryland folder are Read Roger (thanks to Rachael Vilmar for that one) and The Shifted Librarian.
I have to move on now or I'll be stuck in Week 4 FOREVER!!!
I will offer one last testimonial: this is definitely something that has become part of my work & personal life. But I think that's obvious!