Week #9 - The End

This has been a fantastic programme. I thought that I was pretty 2.0 savvy before this, but yeaaah... not nearly as much as I thought. And there were a few things that I'd heard of but never really investigated (LibraryThing, Bebo, Technorati and mashups) and even if I don't plan to use them regularly, I'm awfully proud that I finally know what they are.

I've already listened to four episodes of my lovely new podcast. Best place to find similar podcasts, by the way: podiobooks I heart podiobooks. That would be my favourite result of doing the activities for myself, but the big warm fuzzy "I love libraries/librarians" was fantastic. It's horribly cheesy, but it was so lovely to see people helping each other do the exercises, talking about 2.0 things, encouraging people to finish. And I'm so proud of the previously self-confessed luddites who finished, and finished a long time before many others.

YAY US!

Week #9 - NetLibrary

I created a NetLibrary account a couple of years ago so the hardest part of this exercise was finding my username and password... :D I didn't really find many books that I would want to read online though - the majority of the collection still seems to run along the lines of non-fiction DIY, business, studyguide and computing books. Which does make sense - why buy "The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Adobe Photoshop Elements 2" for the library when we'll be giving it away in a booksale two years from now when it's horribly out of date?

It's a perfect medium for reference books (see earlier post about wanting to use control + find on the hardcopy medical text book I was reading a couple of weeks ago...) but not so great for more leisurely browsing. I still do it though - I was reading "The Good, the Bad and the Undead" and left it at home at a PIVOTAL moment... so I mighthavekindofreadwhat happenednextwhenIwasonaslowregistrationshift... Er, and ditto for "Heidi" :D

I can't seem to read "The Good, the Bad and the Undead" online any more though - maybe they changed the level of access... Google Book search is a little better in that regard - you can tell from the beginning what level of access you'll get. Then again.. the only fiction novel in the fantasy genre that is fully available is "Ueber den Begriff des Wortes [phantasia] bei Aristoteles"...

I like that we have these options though: I could read a book at home, listen to it while I go to work, download the electronic copy, convert it into Braille... okay maybe I couldn't do the last one, but still! So many options!

Week #9 - Podcasts

I looked into podcasts when I first bought my ipod, but yeaaah, I downloaded a couple of episodes through itunes never got around to listening to them. I think it might have worked a little better if I walked to work, but the sound quality wasn't really good enough to compete with the noises on my bus. And listening to the history of the spanish civil war in spanish at 8am was a little hard. Far too sleepy to concentrate properly.

But! I discoverd that one of my favourite authors, Mercedes Lackey, has a new book out - as a podcast only: The Secret World Chronicles. Actually, it seems more like a comic book series, which is probably even more suited to the podcast format. But metahumans, with super powers? And a fiery website? Awesome! I haven't been able to download the episodes to my ipod though. Oh wait, in subscript just above the episode list, they tell you how to do it. *happy sigh*. I don't think I could love this author more.

As for the proper sites.. Podcast.net had a pretty extensive collection, but the titles that I liked turned out to have been the author's passing fancy in 2006, with no updates since then :( And the ads were hideous. A flashing pink "Is your love cheating on you?!" banner is very distracting. Podcast Alley had a nicer layout (and better ads) but I had the same problem with great looking titles turning out to be one-off events. But yay for Yahoo! They include the last published date in the search results. Hooyaah! We have found a winner!

I've added The Secret World Chronicles to my Bloglines account as requested, and to my Google Reader account because I'll actually check that one :D

Week #9 - YouTube

I really like YouTube and am still amazed at the videos you can find there. For example, if I were to want to watch a popular TV series that hasn't aired in New Zealand yet, I could pretty much guarantee that it will be available on YouTube. Not necessarily for long, and it'd probably have to be cleverly disguised with spelling errors or outwardly nonsensical abbreviations, but you could find the episodes if you were persistent enough.

Not that I would do that of course, because that would be Wrong and I am currently being investigated as a Spam Blogger (*mutter*) and wouldn't want to add Supporting Piracy to my list of alleged internet crimes.

The only complaint I have is that a Search function powered by Google should have a lot more flexibility. Sorting by relevance, date added, view count and rating are great, but what I wouldn't give for an Advanced Search option... It's just so messy without it. Of course, I could just be horribly blind and it's there already, but if that's the case it should be more obvious :P

I like the Community Groups though, and that could work really well in a library setting. It would probably be more similar to the LibraryThing networks, but the idea is the same. At the very least it could make the library website more interactive, or perhaps even the catalogue...

As for the video I find worth adding as an entry to my blog (and this was very hard given the high standards of my blog...)

Proof that babies are FREAKY AS H*LL:

Week #8 - Web 2.0 Tools

Teeehee, naturally I was drawn to the games section of the Web 2.0 Awards and can confirm that yes, Guess-the-Google is as addictive as advertised... It basically shows you a montage of 20 pictures and you have to guess the keyword that would have been entered to find them in a Google Image search. Some, like 'mullet', were painfully obvious, but there were a couple that I couldn't work out. I wonder if it repeats... Although I am tempted to keep playing until I can beat today's high score 380, I shall settle for being ranked in third with 369. Maybe.

I don't really see how Guess-a-Google would be relevant to libraries so I had a wee looksee at Statsaholic and tried to do a website traffic comparison for the ACL, North Shore and Waitakere Library websites. It didn't really work though because it would only register a comparison between "aucklandcitylibraries.com" and ".govt.nz" not "waitakerelibs.govt.nz" or "shorelibraries.govt.nz". They have some pretty neat examples though: in a comparison between myspace, facebook, and friendster, myspace is kicking arse although facebook is gaining ground. Oh if only I had popcorn to watch the RACE TO THE FINISH!

Hehehe, I have no idea if this information is accurate, and there are probably all kinds of qualifiers that should be taken into account, but it's pretty fun to play with :D And maaaybe if libraries are trying to Stay Up With The Play and were going to set up a library page on a social networking site it might be worth seeing which site is used more heavily.

Week #8 - Zoho

As yet another memory stick is turned in to lost property I am increasingly tempted to use something like Zoho and store my documents online... And after using the delightful tags of del.icio.us I'm particularly impressed with their Tags as Folders selling point: "Tags are the new folders. Not sure whether you want to put a document in the Sales or Marketing folder? That's where tags-as-folders come in. Make the document available in both the folders! Now, isn't that handy?"

Why yes, yes it is. And the adding contextual comments part. Sooo good. I've tried sending people things with edited comments in bold or capitals, but if the formatting doesn't carry across, you can't even tell what's changed, and switching from capitals to lower case is a bit of a pain. And finally! An application that puts the option to 'close account' on the sign in page! I have created soo many accounts with this 2.0 programme and I really would prefer to drop some of them when it's finished, but can't even find the option in several of them.

The only difficulty I came across was that it was horribly slow to make any changes. Again, that could be the internet here, but it stalled completely when I tried to create a new document, and again when I was adding a comment to a document. Still very impressive though :)

OH THE HORROR!

My blog is locked! It was identified as a SPAM BLOG.

I feel so violated.

And can't stop using italics!

*HOWLS IN PAIN*

Oh the humiliation!!!

*mutters* I'm going back to LiveJournal after this. Just see if I won't!!!

Week #7 - PB Wiki

This exercise was pretty fun. There was a moment where I was wondering why you would want to create a sandbox wiki but then I remembered those Friendship Books we used to write in Intermediate... I still remember agonising over who to put as my MOST FAVOURITE CRUSH!!! (Jonathan Brandis from SeaQuest DSV if you're curious..) And I see the similarity in the sandbox wiki :D

So I added my blog to the list of favourite blogs, numbers and holiday places and discovered that eeevery little change is tracked. And emailed to subscribers. It's a lot easier to use than I thought it would be though. My experience with the wiki we used for Library School made me a little jaded - I assumed that wikis would be a little hard for newbies to find their way around as our one was pretty barren and not so user-friendly. This one is much easier though, and the links to creating new pages, comments and files are nicely obvious. And I like the colour scheme :D

Week #7 - Wikis

The St. Joseph County Public Library wiki is amazingly detailed. I really like how you can track changes and to the wiki although there aren't as many nifty screen names on the SJCPL wiki as Wikipedia.. It's not really about the wiki, but their Ask a Librarian page is fantastic - you can contact the librarians by email, phone, in person, or Instant Messenger! So cool! Although it took me a long time to realise that 'asksjcpl' was not just random text but rather 'ask st joseph county public library'...

I liked the idea of this Web 2.0 programme from the very beginning - it's such a good opportunity for everyone to get involved and help each other out with the tasks as well as making us more accessible to our patrons. But I've discovered a very lovely side effect. I heart libraries. More than ever. It's so great to see all of these examples of other libraries jumping on the bandwagon, leading the charge, upping the ante, mixing the metaphors...

Even Library School is getting jiggy with it. Our class last semester on Digital Publishing had a course blog and wiki. And our wiley profession ensured that we learn how to use the wiki by making us post our presentation topic there. Not that I think any of my Dear Readers will follow this link, but my topic was Google Book Search. It was pretty cool to track the changes as I was posting my entry - and reassuring to see that someone else presenting on the same day was also editing their page at midnight...

Week #6 - Library 2.0

We covered a lot of the 2.0 technologies in one of my Library School papers last semester, so most of this course has been relatively familiar to me, but I had an interesting experience yesterday. We had to visit the Philson Library and search for the answers to a list of medical reference queries for my Health Information class using the textbooks available at the library...

Now, until then, I would probably have added a little bit more icy coldness in support fo the "just in case" iceberg mentioned in the first article. It just seemed so wrong not to have a physical collection as well as a digital one. But wow. Those anatomy textbooks are SO UNWEILDY and horribly heavy and replaced every couple of years with new editions. I actually found my fingers twitching as I trying to hit 'cntrl + f' while searching one page for the phrase 'arteria labialis superior' in the ginormous Gray's Anatomy.

I am now firmly of the opinion that every reference text should be digital :D

Week #6 - Technorati

11,672 results for the 'Library 2.0' search in Technorati. Heh. I wonder how many ACL 2.0 bloggers have posted that. Poor acl elgar blogger, you must get so tired of reading the same things oooover and oooover again.

Oh wow! But they have little graphs with how many mentions by day there are for your search term! That's so cool! People went crazy around Halloween... Teehee and you can even post the chart. Yoink!

English posts that contain Library 2.0 per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Aaaaaand

English posts that contain Julia per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

There were some pretty strange choices for most popular blogs, searches and tags. Ron Paul? Eh? The tags wouldn't really work if everyone's not consistent though. Our library for example could be Auckland_City_Library, aucklandcitylibrary, ACL, Auckland_City_Libraries or aucklandcitylibraries... or are we Auckland Central Library... *throws up hands* too many! I wasn't able to find this 'Blog Directory' mentioned in the instructions for this week either. I'm assuming it's somewhere horribly obvious, but for the life of me I can't find it :(

Week #6 - del.icio.us

The PLCMCL2 page on del.icio.us confused me so I thought I'd create my own del.icio.us account but was stymied by the 'install these icons into your toolbar now' bit. The site is more dogged than a car salesman though, so despite only completing two of the registration steps I was emailed the link to confirm my account. It takes a while to manually add websites, but I'm not sure that I really want to add another couple of icons to my already cluttered toolbars at home though, so I may leave it as it is.

My great list of three websites: http://del.icio.us/superslyceily

I loved how you can search for tags by just entering them in the box at the top though and *insert geekyweird moment here* I don't quite know how to explain it, but it's like entering a message in Millennium and seeing it appear in the screen behind you as you write... you enter it in the box, and weee! there it is in the url... *end geekyweird moment*

Ahem. But yes, I also like their colour coding system. I've yet to come across something dark red though...

It's a pretty neat system, but I rely on changing computers/losing all data in crashes to cull my list of favourites. Having to start again makes me choose what I really want to use... and unless I'm supremely bored, that's the only time the favourites list gets tidied. An online version... that would never die... It would be tagged ANARCHY.

Unless you could sort by most frequently used...

Week #5 - Rollyo

I really liked this one. They were really pushing creating Rollyos so that you would be able to search 'sites you trusted', but I liked it more for the fact that it's combining so many sites in one. I created a Rollyo for World of Warcraft sites, but I might create one for my sister too - she's crazy about the NFL at the moment and checks quite a few different websites pretty regularly.


I had a bit of difficulty creating the account (I managed to create the Rollyo before creating an account so I ended up with two of the same Rollyo..) and it took me a while to workout just where to go to add other sites to my search list once it was made. And it weirds me out that they don't have a 'save changes' button when you're editing your Rollyos though. Switching pages and just having faith that it will be updated is so *twitch* uncomfortable.

I've added the wee rollyo search box to my blog though. *pets it proudly*

Week #5 - LibraryThing

I've already got an account at Goodreads so I don't think I will use LibraryThing as well. They seem pretty similar though - you can create, export, sort, message, set up RSS feeds, create widgets and catalogue to your heart's content. LibraryThing is maaarginally prettier, both were very user friendly and not too cluttered, but LibraryThing loses for having an error message up when I was trying to add books to my catalogue... And for some reason it's taking a lot longer to add items to the catalogue than it does in Goodreads although they both search through Amazon.com

Here is my mini catalogue though: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/supersly