Thing 3

This is my first (very late) entry for this blog.  I have been busy with the blog that I’m doing for Readers’ Advisory and have neglected this one.  Sorry.  I really do believe in lifelong learning and am used to having to teach myself to do things as necessity demands.  I guess I do look toward the end product as is suggested because if I knew what would be involved in some of the stuff I have insisted on learning for myself,  I probably wouldn’t have started them at all.  I love new things and I like playing with design and admire pixelated creativity.  I’m hoping to familiarize myself with the ‘new’ stuff so I can find out what my nephew and his friends are so enthusiastic about.

Thing 5

I suscribed to Bloglines and then checked the information. Yikes, what a lot of stuff. I really like the food section–I could spend a lot of time with the recipes. The first thing that came up was a recipe for pistachio, white chocolate chip cookies. Yum. I may have to try that. I like the fact that I don’t even have to go looking for stuff–it just comes to me. It’s a good thing that I didn’t check the shopping box–that could have ended up costing me a lot of money.

The library and book things also had interesting stuff in them. I’m having all this sent to my Yahoo account so I don’t clutter up the others. I sort of sector them off so I have some control over what comes in where and Yahoo is the subscription/possible junk mail place.

Thing 7

The most suprising thing about Flickr to me is that I already have an account.  I went to a workshop almost a year ago (Back to the Book) and one of the presenters spoke about creating Reading Maps and using Flickr as a tool.  I signed up for an account and promptly forgot all about it.  Yikes.   Anyway, some little bell went off in the back of my head and I tried my usual password and it let me in.  So–I got reacquainted.  I never really took the tour before so I did that and then started to look around.  There are some gorgeous photos in there and I kept clicking through and getting lost.  I did find my way to a blog part of Flickr called Love of Cats.  There are all sorts of categories and discussions–stuff about folks who have lost their cats, stuff about cats who are cute—and the most strange of all is a thread about cats’ nicknames.  Over 700 people responded to that.  Weird.  I also went through and looked at different groups/clusters of tags.  You can find photos of cats’ eyes or whiskers.  It’s interesting to trace back from an individual picture to the photostream of the contributer and see what else they have done and where they are from.

I also was interested to see that some of the photos have comments that you can read by mousing over them (usually indicated by a little box).  What a neat source to have available.  I think my main problem will be relocating something when I want to go back to it.

Thing 10

I already have an account on LibraryThing and I really like it.  I am the Cerebral Rat there and I have started by listing the Miss Read titles along with their covers.  I have yet to actually catalog them or give them tags, but I do check in occassionally to see what’s going on.  If you go to LibraryThing, you can see that Heights Library also has a group and I am part of that along with Richard Montanari and most of the RATS.  Our stuff had mostly gone dormant because no one had done anything for almost a year, so I resurrected some of it by commenting.  I also checked for book related events in my area (for when I get back from vacation).  I like the fact that it will generate recommendations–some of which look interesting.  I also did a search under ‘cleveland’ to see what kind of groups there were–nine for the area, so I’m going to have to take a closer look at those.

LitLovers is nice–my favorite section is the one where you can get Reading Guides–I get asked for that all the time.  It was started by a former English teacher (you never quite recover–I speak from experience) and has nice course sections where you can do a mini course on the novel or character or plot and get a certificate when you complete the course.  I can see how this could be a good idea for self improvement–especially for advanced ESL folks or those who want to improve themselves but can’t afford to go back to school.  Another nice feature is the Books to Movies list.  Very handy.

I took a look at BookJetty and liked the feature where you can check your local library’s catalog (if your library happens to be on there–ours isn’t).  Shelfari looks interesting as far as finding new books, but I’m not really interested in something that seems more socially oriented.  Anyway–they all seem to do a lot of the same thing, which is connect people with books and allow them to keep virtual track of what they have read, want to read and are reading.  Cool.

Thing 11

I spent time with all three radio stations–what a great source!  I like them all–I like the fact that you can create your own radio station on each of them.  What a neat way to keep track of music you like and always have it to hand.  I’m impressed by the idea of the Music Genome Project in Pandora, but I’m not sure how well or consistently it will work.  It’s sort of like listener’s advisory and they do use real people to do the analyses, but they do the same in Novelist and I’m not too sure of them either so… I also like the discography and the fact that you can listen on your cell (unfortunately, I don’t use the right carrier).

I liked Lastfm too.  It was fun making a visual of my genre in color–I used New Age and it came out a funky combo of fuscias which seemed really apropos.  It was also neat to see the number of plays for different songs–it’s a way for me to keep track of the current popular stuff even though I don’t always listen to it.  I can check in and see and then maybe I’ll have an easier time finding stuff for customers.

My favorite is Live365.  There’s even talk radio—not that I usually listen to that, but I know a lot of folks who do and I can recommend it to them.  I love there list of genres and I like that you can click on one and then go to different radio stations and find out what they have to offer.  There are free downloads and a bunch of other stuff that I have just begun to explore.  This is the one that feels the most like ‘home’ to me and this is probably the one that I will return to most of the time.

Final note….

I hope you all look at the time I posted these last few ‘things.’  The post date may say Nov 1, but I’m doing this at 11:35 pm and it’s still Oct 31st.  I want my 10 hours of certification credit–please.  It was still a good experience.  I’m going to have a beer and go to bed now.  I guess I’m going to play with the cat first–so he says.

Thoughts on the 23 things experience

I’ve had a great time doing these exercises and journeying through new (to me) parts of the electronic world.  I feel proud of myself for having been able to deal with some of the electronic stuff (it only took me 2 tries to embed my Google map–and with no extra help!) that I had only barely heard of and makes me confident that I will be able to master more things with just a little bit of practice.

I am amazed at the amount of stuff out there and I know that we have only scratched the surface.  I hope to continue discovering new things and will make a real effort to introduce some of these useful tools to our customers. Thanks for all the work the committee did putting this together–it was a great ride.

Thing 23

Wow.   Some of this makes my head hurt.  I guess I am at a point now where I have problems with over-analysis.  If you over discuss, over philosophise,  you end up with tautologies and all sorts of logic issues.  ‘It is what it is’ (unless you are a Buddhist and saying it with whatever authority that brings and, yes, authority is the wrong word) is over simplistic, but there is an element of that in what is coming down the pike. 

I think that the way the Web is being used is changing, but as a result of what users have made of it.   It think that what is going on now is at least partially what the first radical users had in mind.  They just kept plugging away until the rest of the world (and that would include software developers, etc) caught up.  And how nice that they have.  What is going on just makes sense if you think about how the web works–what effect connectivity has in promoting collaboration. 

The same applies to libraries.  We need to listen to our customers, find out what they really want and then find the best way to provide it with the funds available.  They will need guides–they will always need guides and that is what librarians are.  I don’t see print dying, I see it being used in different ways, but reference is a lot different than it used to be and will continue to evolve.  There is no choice about that, there is only trying to keep up and provide the best.

Thing 22

I investigated both recommended sites and I like podcast.com the best.  I did a search for knitting podcasts since it is frequently way easier to understand how to do something if you can see someone demonstrate the technique.  I got some of the same hits on both sites, but podcast.com gives you a little summary so that you know what goes on and can decide if it will be useful or not.  I never thought about there being a separate way to search for podcasts, but these are really handy.  I’ll probably come back to these for more instructionaly stuff (like how to fix my toilet) and maybe recommend them to some of our customers.

Thing 21

I checked out both YouTube and Metacafe and was reminded of something one of my coworkers said to the effect that YouTube is more fun if you have a video camera and can upload.  Maybe–but being the voyeur that I am, I enjoy watching.  I have gotten many hits from YouTube while searching for a topic–some helpful, some not so much.  I am kind of hamstrung here at home because my connection speed is so slow (I know, I know, stop whining and do something), but I see it as just a giant amalgam of stuff, mostly for entertainment.  It would also be nice to find something that would illustrate a point, say about tornadoes, and then find a clip that I could embed in my online post or whatever.  Google movies would probably be better for that.  I like Metacafe for the entertainment value.  I could spend a lot of time looking at goofy pet video clips.  I guess this is sort of a try out place for would be filmmakers and it’s a nice place to display entertaining stuff for your friends to watch.  Just another aspect of connectivity that is so ubiquitous that I almost don’t think about how it works (they have contests?!).

Thing 20

Ok–I must be doing something wrong here, but this is my third try with YourMinis and I can’t find the Startpage, even after signing up for an account.  I did play with the widgets on several of the pages–lots of best ofs and weather stuff–and changed the colors of the print and the backgrounds.  I don’t have a new enough computer to try to download anything more complex (however, I did talk to Matt Hoffman and I think I’m going to be remedying that soon–this one is so slow I should probably get a handicap like they do in golf), but I did move my gadgets around on my iGoogle page.  I can see how they would be helpful and they’re cute, but I’m not yet enough of a wonk to want to create one.  Maybe later.

Thing 19

I like books, so I picked Lulu to explore (might as well start with #1).  Wow–I had no idea what I was getting into.  This is the largest self-publishing site  ever–founded by the guy who founded Red Hat.  They have everything–templates, ideas for designing covers, ways to create a photography book by basically dragging and dropping, access to licensed material that you can use, distribution and all while you get 80% of the profits generated.

I’ve had people ask about getting things like family histories, local histories, cookbooks published and it looks like this would be the place.  I looked at the top sellers for the past week and the content of the books was about what I would expect to see in a traditional buying source–how to books, health books, self help books and quite a few children’s items.

Lulu is billed as the place to go to circumvent traditional publishing venues and it looks to me like it would deliver.  It also appears that the product would look much more professional than a lot of self published things I’ve seen.  And, wait, there’s more.  There are loads of discussion groups that the ‘creators’ (their term) can join and if there isn’t one to your liking, you can start your own. 

i think this would be great for folks who want to publish something for limited use (like your own textbook, if you teach or family stories or cookbooks) and if you are an author you could actually create your own online support group that would take you through the whole process from beginning to end.  Loaded with faqs and all kinds of help, I’d recommend this to would be writers.

Thing 18

I chose the iGoogle start page.  I already have a Google account and their stuff always starts out clean and you can keep it uncluttered if you want.  Of course, I porceeded to add a lot of stuff to it–quotes of the day, games, news (I just found out that Studs Terkel died from one of the feeds), Google Maps and some toys.  i think I’ll enjoy going to my own page and I can always click back to classic if I get tired of it all.

I did try out some of the organizers.  I just acquired a Blackberry and some of them (Remember the Milk) are compatible, so I’ll probably be using them–maybe I won’t forget my doctor’s appointment next time.  I can see how online calendars can be useful.  We used one to create timeline for a committee I was on and, better yet, I could create one that my sister could access so she can see at a glance whether I could cat sit or whatever.  Now if I can only convince her to do the same, all of our lives would be easier.  In some cases it could be a pain to keep up with this stuff, but I think once it’s set up and I become familiar with it, I’ll be happy.

By the way, doing this at home has convinced me that I need a faster connection.  Waiting for these pages to come up is like watching paint dry.

Thing 17

I first heard about Delicious when David F. decided to use it to ‘catalog’ our ready reference stuff and links online.  After reading about how it works, I can see why he chose it.  I tried doing a search for pumpkin pie and found tons of stuff.  I think I’ll use it for recipes and knitting patterns and sites.  I’m always finding stuff and then taking hours to try to relocate it for someone else.  What a waste of time.  I also like the fact that you can tag and access from any computer.  That way, if I come across something at work (on break, of course) I can tag it and take a closer look at home.  I’m going to tell my sister about Delicious–she can keep track of her pet sites.

Thing 16

I created a Facebook account a week or so ago so that I could have time to play with it a bit before I had to write this.  I’ve heard mostly about MySpace and Facebook (the others look sort of interesting, but no one ever asks me about them) and I chose Facebook because MySpace really does seem to be mostly for high school and young college age types.  I’m not much for meeting people online, but a lot of my friends do it on a regular basis (some of them have met spouses) and my nephew has found his last two girlfriends online so I guess there’s something to be said for it.  Anyway, once again, I think it may be a generational thing, at least partially.

It’s kind of neat keeping track of what folks are doing.  I’ve kept my account private so that only Friends can see my stuff and I can see how it would be a great way to keep in touch with people who live far away or to find folks you’ve lost track of (you might want to think about this–there may be a reason you lost touch).  I did help someone sign up after I had so it was useful that way and I read all the warnings and suggestions about what to reveal and possible abuses.  It did not make me feel more comfortable about putting my personal information out there.

I think that it would tempting to reveal too much or maybe somewhat inappropriate information because you are sort of in a vacuum when you are sitting there typing.  You can’t see reactions, the expressions on people’s faces or the tone of their voices (or the tsk, tsk of disapproval).  You will most likely get a reaction, but it may be too late to do anything to correct it.  I think the cautionary remarks should be taken seriously.

I may keep my account for awhile, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.  It’s sort of not ‘me.’