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.