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Thing #23: Take a short survey

C'est tout.

Zom Thing

Thing 22: Staying Current

I definitely found myself writing more as I worked through the things. I’m sure there are some things, I will not be using. I don’t know how much I will be adding to this blog but I hope to add to my new house blog soon.

While I probably won’t be as immersed in the web 2.0 things as I am right now, I will be using some of the tools. I am more comfortable in the interactive web 2.0 world but I still don’t think I will put a lot of details about my life on the internet for anyone to see. I am not interested in doing any of the second life stuff because I have enough trouble living my first life.

I will likely use some of the things more for entertainment at home (you tube and podcasts) than at work. But there are podcasts and videos about book talks, library programming, etc that will be useful at work.

Thing 21: Student 2.0 Tools

Both project calculators would be helpful tools for a student beginning a research project. I explored the Assignment calculator in more depth since I didn’t have to give my e-mail address. I like that it goes into a lot of detail about what reading the assignment means. It gives ideas for how to look at the assignment and warns of trying to pad the paper with large margins and big font, etc. I think these tools may help some students who are overwhelmed by the whole research process but it wouldn’t do much to encourage procrastinators to start work earlier.

The teacher guide to the Research Project Calculator seems to have a lot of great information. I like the handouts and activities to help students learn to summarize sources and how to evaluate websites. I didn’t really see a lot of handouts that would be useful to have on hand at a public library. But, I will try to remember this site to suggest to students needing to know how to begin taking notes, etc.

Thing 20: Books 2.0

I just looked at someone’s Kindle this weekend and it was an interesting way to read. The main problem with it that we discussed was a lack of page numbers in the books. This means researchers wouldn’t be able to use the kindle unless there is some secret way to get the page number for the citation. The screen was matte and easy to read and the text was easily adjusted from small to large.
In the information about using the Kindle as circulating material in a library, I was alarmed at the response from Amazon: “If you’re gonna let someone borrow the Kindle just to read a book, you should be fine.” I would think someone would try to pin Amazon down into making a definite statement because “should be fine” isn’t going to help if Amazon decides not to allow libraries to lend kindles.

Books On Your Phone: I looked at BooksinMyPhone. I don’t think I would be able to figure out how to get the book into my phone, nor would I be interested in reading on the 2 by 2 screen on my phone. It is interesting that they have joined the Green bandwagon and are suggesting that this is more eco friendly than buying a printed book.

Readers' Advisory: I looked at ReadingTrails. It took me a bit to find the information about this site (it is at the bottom of the page). I read through the information and looked at some of the trails they used as examples. Maybe, this site will be a better resource as more people use it. Some of the trails have a random assortment of books like one that was every book someone had ever read in order. I find it hard to believe that a professor has only read 105 books in his entire life. The site is difficult to navigate and it takes a while to look through a long book trail.

Online Book Communities: I looked at Readerville. I enjoyed looking at the book covers in the Most Coveted Covers section. I also checked out the literary tattoos mentioned in the blog at http://www.contrariwise.org/.

Book Group Resources: I looked at LitLovers. I like that the information in the reviews are taken from reputable sources like Library journal and includes both positive and negative information. I think I will be checking the book club menus, in the LitFun section, later for recipe ideas. This site is easy to navigate and appears to have a lot of good information for book clubs and other readers.

Audio Books: I have used Librivox before and often recommend it to patrons looking for audiobook versions of classics. Usually, our copy of the audiobook is checked out and with Librivox, there is another option for the patron to get the book. I have found it fairly easy to use the site and the catalog of titles is very impressive considering the readers are volunteers.

Book Reviews: I looked at One Minute Critic. Unfortunately, our internet was extremely slow so after waiting 10 minutes for one minute critic to load, I gave up. Maybe I will try again at home. Some of the topics looked interesting.

Book Rental: I looked at BookSwim. I have been using Netflix for a while and I am always impressed with what is available and their response time to suggestions. I don’t think I would want the pressure of having 3 books to read all the time. It is hard enough keeping up with movies from Netflix. They seemed to have popular titles and classics but not the more obscure non-fiction.

Facebook: I tried to add WeRead but I am still having internet problems so I may have to give up on finishing this thing today.

Thing 19: Other Social Networks

I tried to join Shelfari only to find out I had already joined earlier. I don’t remember joining and it is a good thing that I try to use the same user name and passwords for everything. I added a few titles to Shelfari and it is very easy to search for and add to this. I read a review of a book I liked and checked some of the reviews. I thought it was funny that some of the reviewer’s talked about the book as science fiction or a novel. The book is The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (a non-fiction book about Ebola viruses). It would be nice to think that Ebola isn’t real but unfortunately it is real.

Created by CDC microbiologist Frederick A. Murphy, this colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology displayed by an Ebola virus virion.
Public Health Image Library 10815

GoodReads sounded familiar and when I checked an earlier thing, I saw that I had already looked at it. It was the one with Twilight on the best and worst books of all time lists.

Recently, I read an article about Yelp and restaurant reviews. I think it might have been in the New York Times. I looked at yelp a little and it will be a place I check when I have a specific search in mind.

There seem to be some good options for people who don’t find what they want on MySpace or Facebook. I recently joined Ravelry, a fiber craft social network. It is a great place to finding new patterns and sources for yarn. I am going to try to get to one the local yarn shops (LYS) in Macon when I am up there for the Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend.



by Anna Bencze

Thing 18: Facebook and MySpace

I set up a facebook account about a month ago because I knew it was going to be one of our things. I didn’t really do anything with it until last week. I added some flair and found some friends (including someone I hadn’t talked to in a few years). I found facebook to be a little too into finding me friends by showing all these people from my college. There are a lot of students at UF, so I didn't know anyone they suggested. I also am not interested in friending (is that a word) people from my high school class, who I wasn’t friends with in high school. I did write something on a friend's wall but I don't know that I would use that a lot for communicating.

The group I joined is Librarians and Facebook. I am having a lot of trouble getting pages to load right now so I can't say much else about this group. It seems like it might be a good place to get ideas for using facebook in the library.

I have never had a page on MySpace, and I hope to never have a page on MySpace. A few years ago, the library I was at had a lot of trouble with MySpace and blocked it. From what I saw on the pages I looked at, it had everything the first internet pages had and a little more. By everything, I mean the pages were a visual nightmare. Extremely busy backgrounds and bizarre text color choices made the pages almost unreadable. The sound and video files make the pages very slow to load. There are probably some legible MySpace pages available but I think they are far out numbered by the poorly designed pages.

Thing 17: Podcasts

Podcastalley.com- I looked at this first. It was difficult to find the search box on the page with all the other stuff. I finally found it and was able to search for library podcasts. It was fairly easy to do a search. I found a lot of podcasts but a few didn't really relate to libraries like Switchback (the fan base for the Blue Man Group.)
Here are a few:
ABC Book Review Podcast http://podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=71391
Dr. Pus presents "Library of the Living Dead" http://podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=52825

Next, I tried a search for book reviews and found the following:
Radio Book Lounge http://podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=11937
CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books http://podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=25812

Podcast.com- The search box was much easier to find on this directory. I am going to try the same two searches to see what I can find.
Library: there was a little overlap in the results but not too much that I could tell.
Book Reviews: like the earlier search, there was some overlap but not too much. Here are a few podcasts that caught my eye:
Book Recommendations, Blog and Podcast: Books on the Nightstand http://podcast.com/show/83050/Book-Recommendations%2C-Blog-and-Podcast-Books-on-the-Nightstand/
The Bookcast at Powells.com http://podcast.com/show/18492/The-Bookcast-at-Powells.com/ (I added them to my google reader many things ago)

My only complaints about podcast.com is that I had trouble getting back to the search results and it doesn't give the URL of the homepage for the podcast so I had to search for that in google.

I did listen to Books on the Nightstand Podcast, Episode #20: Sci-Fi for the Rest of Us. They discussed the Sony Reader, which they have been using to read manuscripts. Ann Kingman mentioned that once you start reading something with the e-book reader, it becomes just reading and you forget about using the machine. But, she also said that she prefers to have the actual book if it is available rather than use the reader. Here is the subscription link: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BooksOnTheNightstand

I haven't listened to many podcasts but I did enjoy one I found about a year ago. I think I mentioned it in thing 2 but I will talk about it again as part of this thing. The podcast is Rosemary Goes to the Mall. It is the story of one woman's quest to purchase something in every store at the Mall of America so she could make an art installation with the bags. Here is a picture I found of the finished art work "The Wall of Mall"

Thing 16: YouTube

I explored YouTube at home fairly recently so I am going to just recap what I found then. I am on the reference desk right now so I wouldn’t be able to listen to what I'm watching.

I started looking for things in YouTube after I watched the documentary The Nomi Song because I wanted to see more of the performance footage. I found a lot of really fun things to watch.

At another time, I read something about a Sony Bravia commercial with thousands of bouncy balls set loose on the streets of San Francisco. I had to look for the commercial and then watch some of the making of footage. It was pretty amazing. See for yourself:


I also watched this Sony Bravia commercial with exploding paint on a building in England or Scotland. It was also amazing.


I have also looked for really bizarre and obscure things like the David Lynch commercial for a home pregnancy test where he switched the test the actress did with a test from someone who was pregnant.


Here is another weird video I saw recently:


The other night I was watching Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN and they had some footage from YouTube that was such bad quality, they really shouldn’t have shown it. That often seems to be a problem with YouTube videos, the quality of the footage is just so bad the videos are basically unwatchable.

Thing 15: Rollyo

I tried a search for “meaning of life the universe and everything in it” in The Big Answer Desk. I was surprised by the number of results that got the somewhat obscure reference.
Now that I am buying a house, I am obsessed with house decoration and fixtures. So, my Rollyo search roll is for house decoration. I put in searches for Ikea, Restoration Hardware, Crate and Barrel, etc (I like mid-century modern and similar stuff). I had some trouble figuring out how to add a link to my blog. I then found out how to paste code to add the search box to my site, so here goes:

Select...house decorationSearch The Web

It worked!

I could definitely see this being used by libraries to give access to an easy search of reputable websites about all kinds of topics. There could be search rolls for health information, homework help by subject, biographical information, financial information, etc…

Not a thing

After doing 14 of the 23 things, I am a blogging fanatic. In fact, I have started a new blog about the purchase of my first house (http://paulasnewhouse.blogspot.com/). I even added the countdown widget from thing 14.

Thing 14: Online Productivity Tools

I already use My Yahoo! at home and love it. I have pages set up for news headlines and weather, a page for TV listings (I really miss my digital cable and DVR), and a page for movie times. It is great and makes it easy to find info I want at home with just a click.

I have also been using Yahoo calendar since about 2003. It is great for keeping track of things and very easy to search. It also shows up on my yahoo page and in my widgets on my desktop at home.

At work, there is a calendar built in to the e-mail (outlook) so I use that as an organizer for desk time and projects. And at home, I use the yahoo calendar for reminders of personal events. It is also helpful getting reminder e-mails about birthdays for family I’d rather forget.

I signed up for a Remember the Milk account. I don’t think I will use it because I already put events in my Yahoo or work calendar so I don’t really want to spend time adding events to yet another program.

I looked at the document types Zamzar will convert. I thought it would be helpful when patrons need to print a document saved with Microsoft works and we can’t open it with Microsoft word (converter installation problems) but there is a delay in getting the new file through e-mail.

I looked at Backpack and it combines the features of the others into one system. It would be good if I didn’t already use Yahoo Calendar, MyYahoo, and outlook. I think someone could spend a lot of time adding events to all these different organizers and calendars. I think there is sometimes an easy way to add all the events from one system to another, or at least there was when I looked into switching to google calendar. At home, I started using google docs to share a house hunting list with others. It is very easy to use and has most of the features available in word processing programs.

Thing 13: Library Thing

I added a few books to my new account at LibraryThing. And no I don’t really intend to prepare any of the recipes in the Martin Howard book. This was very easy to use and I love that it is so easy to search international Amazon sites because sometimes books aren’t available in the US. Most of my books are fairly obscure editions so they weren’t very popular. Will Ferguson’s book Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw did have a discussion from March 2008 about travel narratives by the GenX in PDX: A Librarians Book Group. I checked the LibraryThing Local for Ocala and didn’t find any events listed. I checked a few other Florida cities (Gainesville and Orlando) and didn’t see any events.

I think LibraryThing would be very useful for book promotion and event promotion in the new Local section. I could definitely use this to keep track of my books at home.

I checked out GoodReads and was amused to see Twilight in the Best Books Ever list and the Worst Books of All Time list.

Thing 11: Social Media resurrected

Here is an article from the NY Times book section on horror versions of Jane Austen stories.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
publishing date May 13, 2009

and

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford
publishing date unknown

Thing 12: Wikis

SJCPL Subject Guides- This is a great way to promote book browsing for home users. It is a little weird that when I click on the image of the titles in the biography section, I go to a page about the image. When I clicked on the linked title in the list, I go to the catalog record for the book.
Book Lovers Wiki- The pages in this Wiki were very slow to load. It didn’t seem to have as much information as the SJCPL Wiki.
Library Success- This has a lot of great information. It is very easy to navigate and the information is well presented.
Library Staff wiki- This idea could be a very useful place to gather information and make the information available to staff at different locations. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on the site but it takes time to transfer paper manuals to the computer.

I hope to be able to edit the neflin wiki. I am having trouble getting the page to load. Maybe there are too many of us doing Hopefully, it will open soon and babelfish didn't mess up the French too much. I was trying to say "twelve things finished, eleven things remain." Here is my edit in the page history.

I think Wikipedia is a good resource to get an idea about a topic and to find other information sources in the bibliographies. Because anyone can add information to Wikipedia, sometimes the information could be incorrect. Wikipedia does have editors and administrators with special powers to monitor information for facts and bias but they can’t check everything all the time so users may not always get correct information.

Personally, I find that Wikipedia pages tend to be very slow to load so I usually look other places for information while I wait and wait and wait for the page to open. This is kind of ironic since the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia says the wiki part of the name is from the Hawaiian word for fast. So far, that is the only part of the page to open (I have been waiting about 5 minutes).

Thing 11: Social Media

UniqueO Mania♥

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uniqueo/2591953363/

I did the tour for Mixx and did not learn much about it so I decided to just see what I could find there. The categories used to find seemed obvious and this wasn’t a difficult site to navigate. I am a little disturbed by the twit (is that what people who twitter are called) surgeon from a cnn story found in the news category. I think that I would prefer for my surgeon to be thinking about my operation and not about how to tell the world all about my operation.

The tour for Digg was much more informative about how it works. I have seen the Digg link in many articles I have read online so I think this may be one of the more popular social media sites. I found the Wake Up Your Cat photo album after following a few of the linked articles. I have seen the annoyed, barely opened eyes of my cat shooting me dirty looks when I disturb his rest.

Newsvine gave a lot of information about how things work within the site. I found the information about writing your own column and being able to get a portion of the ad revenue to be different than the other sites. Newsvine seems much more news oriented with information from the Associated Press as soon as it is sent out. Both Digg and Mixx seemed to have a lot of random web silliness that someone looking for news might not want to sort through. I clicked on the local news link and it figured out my general area (within 40 miles anyway) using the IP address so I didn’t have to enter any information. Newsvine looks more like some of the newspaper websites than Digg or Mixx. Under the weird news, I found a story about a man who shot his TV because his cable was shut off and surrender to the police after a two hour standoff.

At first, the navigation links in Reddit blended in with my toolbars and other screen information so it took me a minute to find the links to categories. Compared to the other sites, Reddit is not very impressive in terms of appearance or ease of use. The categories seem very random. Of the four sites I explored, Reddit seems like the least usable for me personally and in a library setting.

I think the social media sites can help productivity and also hurt productivity. It helps by putting a lot of sources together and making it easy to find popular stories. Unfortunately with the internet, it is very easy to get lost in following links and realize you have been sitting at the computer reading stories for hours.

In keeping with the food theme of my last few posts, I am sharing an article from the New York Times food section on restaurants serving breakfast items as dessert (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/dining/18dess.html).

Here is an article about a thing yet to be (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/internet/19facebook.html).

Thing 10: Tagging and Delicious

In case anyone is wondering how I know about things before they are posted. No, I am not psychic.

For some reason things appear in my google reader (like thing 10 on 2/9) before actually being posted in the blog. Why won’t the google reader give me the next winning lotto numbers.

I added a few tags/labels to some of my earlier blog posts. The hardest part was thinking of a label.

I have been using Delicious for a while since we move from computer to computer here and my favorites don’t follow me. But since I have issues with sharing (I must have failed that part of kindergarten), I don’t share any of my bookmarks.

It would be nice if tags could be more than one word, like for web 2.0. It just seems wrong to me to type web2.0 like this.

I followed the linked search for popular sweets bookmarks. It took me a while to figure out I could see the comments by clicking on the number of people who have bookmarked the site. Not all of the people put in a comment for Cookie Recipes smitten kitchen but a few did. I have to agree with roadtonowhere about the gorgeous cookie photos.

The network badge could be useful to give a link to URLs in a blog or other webpage but it might be just as easy to put the URLs in the blog itself.

Social bookmarks and tags would be helpful for creating a virtual handout of websites for programs and presentations. Delicious would also be a good way to share helpful websites with coworkers. Libraries could also use social bookmarks as a way to help patrons find information that is difficult to find online, like previous years tax forms, etc…

Thing 9: Sharing - slides, photos, databases

Zoho vs. Slide share: I had a lot of trouble getting Zoho Show to work on the computers I tried to use. I ended up with two presentations with one slide each but I couldn’t open them to add additional slides. I also found it more difficult to browse other slide shows in Zoho. With SlideShare, the browse feature is very easy to find and use.

I finally managed to make this silly slide show about my cat using Zoho Show, which worked much better on my newer computer at home. This would be a good way to share presentation slides rather than make a handout. It was easy to make the presentation once I was on my home computer but it would be very difficult to create a presentation with this with an older computer.

Picture Trail seems to think I am a working mother wanting to go back to school and searching for an astrologer. They couldn’t be more wrong. I think I may be a little older than the typical user because I would not want all the dancing baloney all over my pictures. Here is my simple flick of pictures of my family (not my cat for a change). This would be a great way to make eye-catching slide shows of photos from programs and events. This was very easy to use and the built in preview was a great help in making choices about what the show should look like. I would recommend this to others but I think I would advise against using most of the flashy animations because they were a little tacky.

The lazybase server was having trouble when I tried to create a database. So, I looked at the samples instead. I had a lot of trouble getting things to open in the lazybase tool so I can't really say how useful this would be. If the loading problems are something they can fix, it would be useful to track book club readings and other information about programs. I can't really say much about this since it didn't really work when I was trying it.

I am not really much of a sharer of stuff online. It all goes back to my need for privacy. I can see the useful aspects of some of these tools but users need to really think about what they are showing the world about themselves.

Thing 8: Communication - Web 2.0 Style

Some of the information in the e-mail productivity could be useful depending on what type of e-mail program is used. We use Microsoft Outlook for our e-mail and the notifier has information about the sender and subject in the pop up. If it looks important and urgent, like log out of our online catalog or the server is going to be taken offline, I will open the notifier and read the message. If it doesn’t look urgent, I close the notifier and check when I have time. Because of this, I don’t think changing the notifier would be very useful because I would miss the urgent messages.

I have used the Ask A Librarian service before the recent software change but I am not that familiar with either texting or chatting. I think that with the new Ask A Librarian software that seems to work better during the training, there is not a huge need to set up a separate instant messaging service. The Ask A Librarian service allows a lot more coverage for less staff investment, including coverage when the library is closed. I think it would be very difficult for someone who doesn’t do much text messaging to acclimate themselves to the 160 character restrictions.

I tried to listened to A Conversation with Tim Spalding from LibraryThing.com, from
September 22, 2006. It was difficult to listen to the interview because it was played through a speaker phone and sounded very tinny so I couldn’t listen to it for very long. Recently, I did a Solinet webinar on Using Worldcat on the Web. It was very easy to get used to the software. It was easy to ask a question and to respond to yes or no questions from the presenter. I think webinars are a great way to offer conferences to people who might not be able to attend an in-person conference due to financial constraints.

Thing 7: Online Image Generators

I created this trading card using big huge labs trading card maker at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php


The image I used is a map of the internet from January 2005 available at http://www.opte.org/maps/.

I think using someone else’s work especially work from a television show is not something libraries should be doing without permission. Television networks and producers are very protective of their materials and they have the money and legal resources to support a long court battle. I recently looked for Doctor Who knitting patterns on ravelry and many of them had been removed because the BBC threatened legal action.

Some of these could be used to create handouts and promotional materials using images available through creative commons.

Thing 6: Flickr Mashups

I looked at Clockr. At first I had problems because it took a few minutes for the download something button came up. When it did work, I thought it was a fun way to look at a clock. I may even download the screensaver at home.


I also tried Flickr Color Pickr. This is very similar to the color browse option in the arts and craft seller website, http://www.etsy.com/. I had some trouble opening some of the pictures because I think they were not shared pictures.


I did find this beautiful picture of a red wall with vines over it taken by Baboon™ in Tel Aviv.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/baboon/5877184/

I also found this frozen spider web taken by Davesag in Amsterdam.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davesag/4375721/

I used the speller to spell my cat’s name.

And made a few altered pictures of him. Here they are:

Warholizer

Lolcat Generator

Some of the mashups would be fun ways to show photos from programs or of displays.

If the Spell with Flickr images are free to use, they would be fun for a promotional poster.

I still don't think I would want my personal photos shared with the world on the internet. But again, it all goes back to my need for privacy. I do send links to my photos to friends and family.

Thing 5: Flickr

Cardiff Temporary Library by Ben Bore or Rhys Wynne (as he signs his blog)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbore/243751546/page2/

I have never really used flickr before this. When my yahoo photos account was closed because yahoo wanted the users to move to flickr, I switched all my photos to picasa. I use picasa for my personal photos and I love the map feature and ability to send links to friends and family. I don’t think I would want to share my personal photographs with the entire world but I think this falls back to my desire to keep my private life off the internet.

In my former library, flickr was used as a place to post old program posters, which seemed a little odd since the posters only had month and day and not the year so people might show up expecting a program that occurred years earlier. Clemens and Alcuin libraries of the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University bookcase with links to the catalog for availability is a great way for browsers to find available books without having to go to the library. Flickr would also be a great place to showcase past programs with photos of the event. It is also a good source for ideas for future programming by looking at what other libraries have done. The Library of Congress collection of historic photographs is a really great resource for old pictures. I enjoyed looking at the old photos of Coney Island.

I took the magical tour of flickr. It seems like most other photo sharing/storage sites as it is easy to upload photos through the web, a batch uploader, etc. One feature that would be nice if I took a lot of pictures with my cell phone is the upload by e-mailing to flickr. The interestingness browser is a good place to start finding a picture to blog about. I’m just not so sure about the whole interestingness of all the photos shown for each month. But I guess everyone has different ideas of what is an interesting photo. One photo I found in the interestingness was of a wind farm. I decided to follow the windfarm tag and see where it took me. I saw a lot of interesting photos. And a lot of not so interesting photos. I tried the sort by most interesting but I’m not entirely sure how it sorts by most interesting because the ones I saw were not the most interesting. Perhaps, they really sort by most popular or most comments or something like that.

I decided to search for library signs on flickr. And there were some great signs. The picture I found that I am going to put in my blog is of the temporary library in Cardiff, Wales. [I attempted to add the picture but I can't tell if it is actually in the post or not because it doesn't show up in the preview. It didn't show up so I am going to try to add the copy of the picture I saved.] It’s not a sign but what a great idea for a library exterior. Ben Bore or Rhys Wynne as he signs his blog, the photographer, had a link to his blog post that pointed out the lack of Welsh authors and titles in the mural. I had noticed that the authors were popular ones in this country like Patricia Cornwell, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, etc… The lack of Welsh books didn't register until I read the blog post.

Wow, I guess I had more to say about flickr than I thought I did.

Thing 4: RSS and Newsreaders

RSS and newsfeeds are useful because they put updated information for frequently used websites in one place. Unfortunately, too many RSS subscriptions could very easily lead to information overload.

I used google reader since I already had an account. One of the features of google reader is to automatically subscribe to blogs followed in the linked blogger account.
I remember seeing the RSS subscription icon on different websites but I never really paid much attention to it. I guess I have used the RSS feed that comes automatically with gmail to look at 101 cookbooks so I have used RSS without knowing it.

I think it may be a little too easy to subscribe to different feeds and then have to spend all day trying to follow the feeds. On a fun note, I discovered I could subscribe to one of my favorite comics, Pearls Before Swine, through RSS. The comic from 01/15/09 is even library related.

Libraries could use RSS to promote events at the library with something like a What's Happening At My Library type feed. Books and other items could be promoted through a feed of recommendations by staff.

I only added feeds by searching in google reader. When I tried to add a feed from a website like the NY Times, it said it was going to add something to the internet explorer on the computer I was using. Since we use shared computers here, I didn't think that was a good idea so I searched google reader and subscribed through it.

Library related feeds I subscribed to was YALSA at http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/, NY Times book section, NY Times book review, NY Times bestsellers, and Powell's Books Review a Day.

Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

I searched “teen library programming” in technorati and google blog search. The technorati results seemed to be less relevant to the search. Some of the results were from Yalsa and other library related blogs but at least 5 seemed completely unrelated to libraries. The google results seemed more relevant with some results from library systems. Google seemed a lot easier to use but that could be because I use google to search the web. The main google results page has options to limit by date published. The date limiting seems to be missing in technorati (or at least I didn’t see it in the advanced search or on the results page.) The technorati search results page allows filtering by language, authority, posts and tags among others. Both blog searches have their useful and not so useful features and since there didn’t seem to be a lot of overlap in the results, it would be good to use both to find blogs.

Thing 2: What is Web 2.0?

I will probably work on the 23 things a little everyday so I won’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t think I will have finding some time off desk to work on professional development activities.

I am participating in the 23 things to get familiar with some of the web tools a lot of the patrons are using. I am a very private person and don’t see myself putting a lot of personal information on the internet. I probably wouldn’t use most of the Web 2.0 things, like the social networking and photo sharing, without this encouragement.

I use del.icio.us to keep track of my bookmarks at work. I have also watched some videos on YouTube and listened to some podcasts. I really enjoyed listening to Rosemary goes to the Mall, the story of a woman overcoming a fear of shopping by visiting all the stores at the Mall of America as part of an art installation project.

I am looking forward to working with the different web 2.0 tools and learning how to use them to connect with and help patrons.

Thing 1 continued

I have been changing how the blog looks. I tried a lot of templates until I found one that was ok. I also added a picture under the title at the top of the blog. I think that I could spend a lot of time playing with the different templates. I think it is possible to change parts of the template, which I may try. I am going to look over the blogger information on altering templates and see if I can figure it out.
I also added a list of books I have read recently with links to amazon. In adding the list, I found that basic knowledge about writing html is helpful in order to make the titles underlined.

Thing 1: Set Up a Blog and Register

I guess I am now a member of the blogosphere.
Setting up the blog was very easy but actually writing it will be more difficult.