Week 9, Thing 23 - My Thoughts on the 23 Things

I really enjoyed Learning 2.0. It is so awesome that San Jose Library has offered this for staff. I did many of the exercises at home because I'm geeky that way (and love playing on the internet during free time anyway). So to answer the last question here first, YES, I would choose to participate in any future discovery program like this.

 

My favorite things from the 23 things (that I was not previously aware of) were Bloglines and Library Thing. Bloglines is really useful in organizing and viewing news feeds and blogs. I can quickly skim through 45 feeds about once a day and catch up with all the important news and information I might otherwise miss (because it can be cumbersome to visit site after site for new information). Library Thing is fun. I've found a few interesting recommendations of books based on my Library Thing catalog.

 
An unexpected outcome I've had through Learning 2.0 is further developing my knowledge of 2.0 resources that I was 'already familiar with.' It can be kind of easy to skim through the list of the 23 Things and think "I already know about that." In my case, I was familiar with podcasts but I hadn't really explored the scope of what types of podcasts are out there. It's so cool that there are podcasts out there to help people learn a language, or learn Photoshop tricks.

 

 

 

One more great thing about the 23 Things ... I've found that Zohowriter is a handy tool for resizing or stretching images to put in a blog post. The above picture are pistachio shell frogs that I made a while back. I wanted to see if I could shrink the image a bit from one of my online albums and add it to a post. It worked! Another great tool that's easy to use!

 

While I've completed the 23 Things, I am confident I will continue pursue lifelong learning of web 2.0 resources because 1. it's increasingly becoming part of daily life, and 2. I love the internet.  

 

(posted from Zohowriter)

Week 9, Thing 22 - eBooks and audio eBooks

I check out eBooks fairly often, especially the audio eBooks. It's EXTREMELY convenient. I'm surprised at how many titles we have in our collection!! Lots of variety, too! While I have checked out pdf eBooks (and read segments of books from the Gutenberg Project), I'll be honest... those books I'd use as a reference only. It's hard to read a 300+ page book on a computer screen. Anyway, the access is fantastic. I've always been a proponent of various formats for materials in libraries. The more the merrier!

For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to explore SJ library's audio ebook collection a bit deeper and I picked a title that I wouldn't normally pick. I checked out "Don't Look Down" by Jennifer Cruise. I also checked out "Alpha and Oranges" by Atomic Opera from the Overdrive music collection. The World eBook Fair doesn't seem to be offering free downloads at this time, but it appears that they will again in October. It's alright, we have plenty of good stuff in our own collection. Enough to keep me busy for years. :)

Week 9, Thing 21 - Podcasts

I subscribe to several podcasts through iTunes on my home computer, including the awesome Coverville, Acapodcast, MAKE Magazine's podcast, KQED's Gallery Crawl, NPR's Most Emailed stories, and Tim Gunn's Project Runway podcast. Podcasts are fantastic. I am often on the lookout for more podcasts to subscribe to. Therefore, I was delighted to use Podcast.net, Podcast Alley, and Yahoo podcasts to find more great podcasts. I'm currently trying to learn Spanish and I found several podcasts that are mini Spanish lessons, such as Insta Spanish. I'm also very interested in local government, so I subscribed to a few 'San Jose' podcasts. The podcasts that I found through the tools in this exercise are in my Bloglines feeds here.

Week 9, Thing 20 - Youtube

Check out this cool song about web 2.0 on you YouTube:


David Lee King is a librarian!!

I've been a YouTube watcher for well over a year (it turns out that YouTube is now 2 years old). I love it. There is some really great stuff on YouTube!

(Here's another fun video.)

Week 8, Thing 19 - LibraryThing

I love LibraryThing! I started adding my favorite books to my LibraryThing library a few weeks ago:


A lot of my favorite books are classics, and those were the most popular in LibraryThing from my library. There are some discussions on the classics titles.

The LibrarySuggester gave me some interesting ideas of books that are similar to those in my library. I think I had more fun playing with the LibraryUnsuggester, though. You give it the name of a book, and it gives you titles that are least likely to be in the same library.

Week 8, Thing 18 - Zoho Writer

ZohoWriter is pretty nifty!

It's very easy to format a document (and I'm

making this one kinda obnoxious on purpose, just for fun!)

 

 

I posted the above document from Zoho Writer, it was really quick and easy to do! I'm editing the post now in Blogger just to comment on how easy it was to post from Zoho Writer. I see a lot of posibilities for using Zoho Writer.

Week 7, Things 16 and 17 - Wikis

Wikis are a very handy tool for collaborating, sharing information, and learning from others. I think they have great potential for libraries. For instance, Princeton Public Library's BookLovers Wiki is a great tool for reader's advisory. The Library Success Best Practices Wiki demonstrates how a wiki can be used for professional development and sharing ideas. I also like the wikis that were developed for specific events, such as the ALA 2006 New Orleans wiki. That wiki appears to have a lot of useful information for conference attendees!


For Thing 17, I added my blog to the SJLibrary sandbox wiki and I added one of my favorite books, Candyfreak, to the "Favorite books" page.

Week 6, Thing 15 - Web 2.0

I read the Wikipedia article on Library 2.0, Rick Anderson's article "Away from the 'icebergs'" and Michael Steven's article "Into a new world of librarianship." The Wikipedia article on Library 2.0 provides a good overview of the model and I found this meme map particularly useful.

Rick Anderson's perspective was interesting because it advocates practices that are already part of the San Jose Way. He identifies three obstacles to the future success of libraries:

*The “just in case” collection
*Reliance on user education
*The “come to us” model of library service

Stevens basically says that libraries need to provide more access to digital collections (journals, books, blogs, podcasts) and refrain from relying on our print collection. We need to be available to teach our customers on how to use resources, and to make online catalogs etc. as user friendly as possible. And finally, Stevens says we need to find "to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us—whether physically or virtually. At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play."

Week 6, Thing 14 - Explore Technorati

There's a huge difference in search results on Technorati when you search "Learning 2.0" in blog posts (I got 34,554) compared with searching the same term in tags or blog directory. The results when searching by tags or blog directory are more relevant to the search term, which makes sense. The 'search in blog posts' (in this instance) renders way too many results since it's just producing results by keywords.

As a blogger, the advantage of tagging is that your blog posts are more likely to be found by people searching for blog entries on your subject. However, one of the disadvantages is that there is no controlled vocabulary. It gives a blogger greater flexibilty to tag their posts with natural language keywords, but it can be tricky to figure out what terms to search as a blog searcher.

Looking through the popular blogs list on Technorati, I did find some interesting stuff. I was familiar with Boing Boing, but I wasn't familiar with Techcrunch or 43 Folders. Techcrunch is a blog "dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies." 43 Folders is "Merlin Mann’s site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better." I think Techcrunch and 43 Folders are great for keeping up with innovative technologies. I've added them both to my bloglines subscriptions.

Week 6, Thing 13 - del.icio.us

My thoughts after exploring del.icio.us...

The good - it's a great way to store/retrieve your bookmarks and to pick up new favorites by tag or popularity. Also, it's quick and easy to add sites to your favorites list with the del.icio.us buttons.

The not so good - in my opinion, it's a kind overboard with text. For a library's purposes, sharing links with a classification scheme, like this provides a cleaner and neater presentation. It would be useful to have 'subject specialty' accounts. I started to put together a del.icio.us account centered around one of my hobbies: arts and crafts, particularly those made with recycled materials. Here is my del.icio.us account so far. It's got a ways to go!


(Feeling the need to insert a picture ... here's one of my old discarded keyboard crafts)

Week 5, Thing 12 - Rollyo searchbox

I set up my Rollyo search tool to search a handful of San Jose sites so that it could be useful to look up local information and resources. I'm still tinkering with it and adding sites, and I'm trying to find an example of how it can make searches quicker. Hmmmm.

Select...San Jose InformationSearch The Web

EDIT: Testing a great idea for a search box by Classic Librarian:

Select...storytimeSearch The Web

Week 5, Thing 11 - Web 2.0 awards list

I explored most of the sites in the 'honorable mention' category for books on the SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards list. Librarything is awesome, but I've peeked ahead enough in the 23 things list to know we'll be exploring that later.

My new favorite site (courtesy of Seomoz's award list) is Coverpop. In the words of Coverpop's creator Jim Bumgardner, Coverpop is "is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images." The mosaics are all put together with a theme, so it gives you a launching point to start a search for items of a similar type. These mosaics include covers of books, dvds, and even links to popular Youtube videos. Here are a few of my favorites (which would have a lot of use in a library setting!):

333 Non-fiction bestsellers - updated weekly - You can 'browse the shelves' of the most popular book covers all in one glance. If you find a title that catches your eye, you can mouse over to get author and title, or click on it and to get more information from amazon.com.

333 Fiction bestsellers - updated weekly - (same idea, with fiction book covers)

1001 Documentaries on dvd - Mouse over the DVD covers to see more information, click for amazon. The dvds on the left side of the mosaic are older and the ones on the right side are newer releases.

And just for fun... 500 gifts for geeks. I've spotted some things on that mosaic that I really need! ;)

Basically, Coverpop is a fun site for exploring for all kinds of new things through mosaics of thumbnail images.

Week 5, Thing 10 - Online image generator

Hetemeel.com has some funny images to work with, including Einstein. Here's mine:

Week 4, Thing 9 - Library related blogs and feeds

I spent a brief while exploring the suggested RSS search tools. Syndic8 is interesting because it highlights the 5 recently added, the 5 most popular feeds, and the most viewed feeds. It also highlights random syndicated feeds.

The one that was most useful is Topix because I found I could get local news stories most relevant to the Santa Teresa area in my bloglines feeds. Other library related RSS feeds I found include Librarians' Internet Index (New This Week), and Library Link of the Day.

Week 4, Thing 8 - Bloglines Newsreader

I subscribed to several blogs and news feeds on Bloglines, here's my public account:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/leftoverwhimsy

I think this is really great! I hadn't used Bloglines previously. It's a very quick and easy way to keep up with several blogs and news sites.

Week 3, Thing 7 - Post about anything technology related)

This topic makes me want to break out into a Kip Dynamite-like song. I love technology.

I think the best way I can approach this is to share some of my favorite technology related things of the moment:

Text to voice software. I'm currently using the trial version of this one, it works very well. I'll probably end up purchasing it. So far I've mainly been using it to listen to blog posts of friends, it's great to give my friends a 'voice.'

Amazing circles. An LJ friend introduced me to these a while back, they're basically a photo distortion where you can turn a digital photo into a sphere. It's really fun to make them, if you have Photoshop there is a tutorial here that shows how to make them. Here's one what one of my circles turned out to look like:

The original photo was of a beaded styrofoam ball ornament that a friend gave me. That image always reminds me of a glass paperweight. There are lots of great amazing circles pictures on Flickr.

I'm currently using Nero Ultra Edition to make something similar to amazing circles. Nero has a 'kaleidoscope' effect which is really easy to use in the PhotoSnap software. Here's a kaleidoscope I made of the Humpty Dumpty picture:

Week 3, Thing 6 - Flickr Mashups

I've found a few Flickr mashups that are fun to play with, one of them is Spell with Flickr. This one is a tool that lets you spell out words with pictures of each letter (from Flickr). You can go to the Flickr image by clicking on the letter in the lower rendition.

And here's an example, using the word 'blog':

Pretty neat!

Also, Flickr Suduko is pretty fun too. It's a Suduko puzzle that uses images from Flickr instead of numbers. You can change the images and use keywords for search for images, you can even search for pictures of 'libraries' in the puzzle!

One more ... (I found these links on webmonkey's list of the top 10 Flickr mashups, by the way) Captioner, which allows you add captions to images. Click here to see a hungry little mp3 player. :)

Week 3, Thing 5 - Explore Flickr part 2

hdumpty
Originally uploaded by Leftover whimsy.

Here is a recent picture of something from my branch, a giant: stuffed Humpty Dumpty hanging from the ceiling in the children's area. My library branch has several children's literature characters hanging from the ceiling over the picture books. They're very colorful.

Week 3, Thing 5 - Explore Flickr

I have a tiny Flickr album of crafts that I've made a while back. Here's a mp3 player cozy that I made out of fleece. It's helped keep my Creative Nomad from getting scratched!

Week 2, Things 1-4 - Lifelong learning and setting up blogger blog

I consider lifelong learning as essential as lifelong eating, or sleeping. Learning new skills, information, and perspective keeps life interesting. I welcome the opportunity to learn more about web 2.0 through "The 23 Things"!

Of the 7 1/2 habits of successful lifelong learners, the habit that easiest for me is #1 - beginning with the end in mind. Goal setting is the easy part, it's all of the work towards the goal that's sometimes difficult! In the past, I've found that viewing problems as challenges (#3) is often hard. I know that growth comes from obstacles and challenges, but too many problems at once can bring achievement of a goal to a standstill. In the case of my goal of learning the 23 things of 2.0, I'm confident I will overcome any obstacles or problems.