Web 2.0 Award nominees

I looked at the winners first. Since I was already familiar with Craig's List, YouTube, Google Maps and Twitter, and have recently played with Flickr, Del.icio.us and Google Docs, I decided to look at Mango Languages because we have it as a database. The introductory lession started with the familiar dialog format but using the enhancement of sound, repetition and grammar in a painless manner, more structured than Rosetta Stone.

I then looked at Farecast, which turned out to be Bing Travel. I didn't find it to be particularly impressive as I have used similar meta-search engines for air travel before--I'm not too impressed with Bing as a search engine anyway.

I decided forego looking at PBWiki since I had already joined them in my attempt to reach the now infamous wiki of marylandlibrariessandbox.pbworks.com, and instead checked out LinkedIn. On closer inspection, I saw they wanted me to use my email address to look for possible professional contacts but felt uncomfortable opening up my email information to the world in order to garner a few possible leads, so decided against pursuing it further. I'm already beginning to feel a little leary having too much information up on Facebook, although I can see that LinkedIn has the potential of being a great networking resource--of course we could do this on the PLA site as well but, as I mentioned before, the site is completely dead.

Online productivity

I've given up on the Sandbox for the time being because I still can't get in and decided to move along. I'll return when I can.

Well I learned something new today. I've heard about this kind of online application and didn't really know where it existed. I tried out Google Docs, tested it out to see how useful it would be. I formated the page using the "fixed width" to see how sophisticated or formal a document I could create with it. I don't think this is going to quite replace MS Office but it would certainly work for more casual correspondence and documents. I added an image and inserted comments, a table and links with great ease. And I loved the online thesaurus and translation tools which are quite handy. This is great if you have a computer that doesn't have MS Office because this is more sophisticated than Wordpad. A negative is that it does require a connection to the Internet. . .

Playing in the Sandbox

This didn't start off too well because the site didn't recognize my email address, so despite the password being given, I couldn't enter the site. I tried signing up directly by creating an account on PBWorks but that didn't work so I then emailed the workspace owner. After emailing a second time with no response, and emailing MCPL's own Kate Tavakolian, I decided to give up and move on.

On Library Wikis

I really loved the Library Success: A best practices wiki which I think works well. I even bookmarked it because I may want to look at it again. I'm a big user of Wikipedia and have even updated a couple of footnotes for entries, and remembered using the ALA Annual Wiki a few years ago, updating it with transportation information. Wikis seem to work really well for information like this if there are enough people to monitor it and keep it up-to-date. Wikipedia, however, is a fine example of how uneven the information can be. A well documented, scholarly article on one subject, and mere "stub" of an article on another. I read something from a teacher that mentioned the collaboration possibilities for students working on a project and its availability 24/7, which would be another good use of wikis.

The Loudoun County Public Library has an attractive wiki (http://www.loudounpedia.org/) that can be added to which seems to work. PLAspace on the other hand, is an example of a library related blog/wiki that is completely moribund. Making people aware of these wikis is one thing (a number of people looked at PLAspace when it first went up), but they need to be easily accessible (possibly from another site frequently visited) and there also needs to be relevant, interesting content so that there will be reason to return to the site.

Library 2.0 and the future of libraries

Quite frankly my eyes glazed over on reading some of these articles and I thought I was reading Marshall McLuhan--fortunately the Wikipedia article brought more of a sense of reality to the subject. Wendy Schultz's To a Temporary Place in Time provided an interesting projection into a possible future, but in public libraries I myself am not quite ready to give up the pleasurable physical experience of the book to live in a totally 3.0 existence. The blurring of fantasy and reality (40 hours a week of SecondLife cannot be healthy) can have a dangerous side for society. The 4.0 experience sounded better but somehow the author's use of language, and mixed metaphors/concepts got in the way, and I was not sure exactly what reality was really being communicated to me...

Technorati

To start with, I couldn't watch the Technorati screencast at work because the software for .mov files wasn't installed on my computer. I did find a funny library video by using the search engine, was able to watch it (as apparently uses something other than .mov files), and managed to have it embedded below:




Searching on this site could be better explained for the novice, however.


View technorati.com

The above ticker widget is supposed to display a real-time feed of what users are searching for on Technorati right now but, for some reason, I couldn't get it to work either. ;-(

Del.icio.us

I created a Del.icio.us account and tagged some bookmarks but I couldn't add them in a cloud to my blogsite like I thought I would be able to do.





Postscript: Well this is most frustrating--I created 10 bookmarks with some 25 tags and now they no longer show on the site. It even says that I have NO bookmarks! They were there for several days and now they have disappeared completely--and I have no idea what happened to them. Not very confidence inspiring I'm afraid...and a whole lot of wasted time on my part ;-(

My Rollyo Experience

Well this was interesting to say the least. Instructions could have been better--before I created my own search engine I had no idea what I was actually searching on the site. The results weren't that great but maybe that would come with tweaking this somewhat. They weren't weighted in any meaningful way, howeverr, and my results reminded me of those of some of the early search engines I used to use.

Select Search Engine...Pam's ReferencePam's Travel SearchSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

MERLIN and the Library Community

The MERLIN site I am somewhat familiar with, and have taken one online course with them already. Online learning definitely has a lot of value, particularly for distance learners—you can even keep up with the class on another continent.

As for finding useful library-related blogs, as I mentioned in my previous blog on RSS feeds, many of the blog search engines listed were no longer in existence, or the links had changed. I found Google's Blog Search about as useful if not more so.

LibraryThing

I started a LibraryThing account 2 years ago but never looked at it again until today. Actually I have been keeping a list of my current reading on weRead because it is conveniently reached by a Facebook tab. I tried to import the titles to LibraryThing with no success so it looks like my LibraryThing account will remain empty because of the hassle of having to replicate all of that information. I looked around the site again and found the Zeitgeist interesting reading. The French language LibraryThing might come in useful for ordering French language titles I might otherwise miss (i.e. if I order the French language books next next year).

Powered by weRead

Online Image Generator

I admit I wasn't too impressed with this. Someone sent me one of these (online image generators) on Facebook--Annette was that you?-- to create my own rock band or some such. It was quite clever but more like the things my high school and college-age nieces and nephews are doing these days. The humor seemed, well, not quite that of someone my age. . . Maybe one of those ones that create posters might be worth a try. I thought a new avatar might be useful though--I still haven't found one I'm really happy with. I have an account on Second Life that I haven't looked at since I created it several years ago, but noted that the quality of the avatar I created there is about the same as the Yahoo one I made today. My avatar on PLAspace isn't quite as sophisticated because it doesn't have a nice backdrop of the library. . .

RSS and Newsfeeds

Well I'm pretty frustrated with Bloglines because I couldn't get it to work properly. The instructions given in the Bloglines tutorial didn't work for cutting and pasting in IE, and I also had a problem with Bloglines never confirming my email so that I could't add additional feeds. (I sent them an email about this problem). I'm not totally unfamiliar with RSS feeds--Microsoft has its own and I subscribe to several on Yahoo. Some locations are much more convenient to access them than others, and accessing them with email seems logical. I also found the search engine frustrating. I did, however, find a way to add RSS to Bloglines, not covered in any of the tutorials listed or spelled out clearly on the Bloglines website, so even though my account is not confirmed, by going directly to the site I want (or searching for it with a blog search engine like Google) I can then type in the exact RSS feed address into the Bloglines "add" under the "feeds" tab and add under "subscribe." Only rarely can I do it directly from the site itself which is a definite negative.

Introduction

This is actually post-dated because I didn't have a blog created yet to write on when I started this assignment and wasn't sure what a persistent link was--now I know. Am looking forward to this because the idea of "playing" appeals to me. :-) I'm a fairly intuitive person and "playing" is how I learn.

Blog registration

I already had my blog registered because of an earlier blog I had created for an assignment but am now adding to it as I really hadn't looked at my previous one before in context. This does seem somewhat intuitive but then there are some elements that I am clueless about--i.e. monetize?!!

Flickr

I can see Flickr will be useful for sharing photos and storing photos to play with at a future time. I had a Flickr account that I used once to view a friend's photos a year ago, but never really examined the site closely--I guess it seemed confusing. I do use similar photograhy sites for publishing and creating things but Flickr does seem more versatile.

Flickr Mash-ups & Third Party Sites

I confess I don't have much interest in creating a librarian trading card, but custom stationary and cards from photos, or calendars and business cards are something else altogether. Making a collage image from photos might be a fun thing to do as well.

On Technology

Ain't technology great? Well not always, but it sure has made a difference in our lives. The digital camera can produce spectacular results which can be instantly uploaded, touched-up, and made available for my cousin to see in Perth, Australia. No waiting until the roll of film is used up, developed and mailed. My GPS helps me navigate in unknown territory without a map (well usually--sometimes there are a few glitches when it is not up-to-date or I interpret its instructions wrong or it loses its connection). Given my poor night vision, I find it pretty handy at times in areas I am unfamiliar with. Now I can look up menus of restaurants and make hotel reservations in hotels halfway around the world--almost instantly! And sometimes it helps to see pictures of the rooms and neighborhood online, too. Sure beats the old days when there were occasionally some unpleasant surprises. . . Granted there are a few gadgets that I have no use for because they are not an integral part of the way I live, but that doesn't negate their value to somebody, I suppose. I have an iPod which is fine when I am sitting in an airplane with nothing else to do, but I find the earbuds awkward and a nuisance. Some gadgets like an iPhone would be nice to have but, price of the phone aside, the subscription alone would be prohibitive given my current budget. And yesterday I heard that an iPhone exploded because of an overheated lithium battery. . . makes me leary of those new lithium powered cars. . .

Morocco - doors

Morocco - doors
Originally uploaded by YukinoHanaXXX ♥☺

I chose this because I was recently in Morocco and photographed quite a number of unusual doors. I'm just adding this to my collection.

7 1/2 habits of highly successful lifelong learners

I find structured planning with contracts and goals most difficult so I'm assuming that this falls somewhere between beginning with the end in mind and accepting responsibility for your own learning. Actually I'm learning all the time and expect I always will, but I prefer the "lifelong" learning to be enjoyable and something I choose to do. Since contracts and goals are associated negatively in my mind--i.e. not fun--structured, requiring effort in an unpleasant way, I find thinking in these terms a hindrance to my own personal concept of lifelong learning.

Aspen Hill Library

Concert at the library

The adult reading room at Aspen Hill Library

Picture Jacques and Noisette

On blogging

I'm not sure about this blogging phenomena. Some people like to write about every little detail in their lives and some don't. If the moribund PLAspace is any indication, we may be putting all our eggs in one basket that turns out to be just another fad which appeals to a handful of people. Otherwise said, some people find Facebook eats up too much of their time and others allow themselves to become completely obscessed with it. The same can be said of Ebay--it can be so addicting that some of us swear off of it completely.