final thoughts.......

Well I have to say that I'm kinda sad that this little exercise is coming to end. It wasn't nearly as painful as I had thought it would be. I have some fond memories of discovering new goofy things that are out on the web. I am finally a blogger, I really thought that I would never find a need for blogging, but after discovering Tumblr, I can say that i have found a new way of blogging that works for me. I feel so much more tech savvy than I was before. I feel like I have much better grasp of what kind of interactive sharing tools are available how they can actually be useful to me in my everyday life.
I had a situation the other day where I had forgotten the text to a story I'm trying to illustrate with my sister. I remembered though that she had placed it on Google docs! I was able to go online where I was at and pull up a copy of the text and stay productive that day! It was awesome! I'm definitely going to try and keep up with all the new technologies.
I'm also a big fan of Bloglines. It is great not having to to go and check ten different websites to see if there is any new info posted, or whether my favorite blogs have any new info. Thats another thing, I never even looked at blogs before web 2.0 and now there a few that I have to checkout each day because they are so cool and informative.
Thanks to all of you who gave me the opportunity to check out all this cool random stuff!

Tumblering, timbling, down

I really think that this tumblr is a way wicked cool fast way of doing a blog. Instead of having to go through all the trouble of having complex blog , or a separate connection with tags like delicious, you can do it all quick and dirty with tumblr. I don't know what other people plan on doing with tumblr, but I plan on using it to post art that I do, just sketches or maybe a week by week page from my childrens book that my sister and I are working on. What is also cool is the ability to see some cool photo and add it quick and easy to your tumblr where you'll be able to find it later. I really like it for art, as you can see. I can also see it used for posting quick little installments of a story or an easy or two.

internet video killed the radio and the tv star

So I ran around looking at all the sites. While many of them are very fine and dandy, I would say that YouTube is still boss. I mean literally you can find anything on that crazy site. What I ended finding that was something I hadn't thought about looking at before were the how to videos. There is a guy on there that does quite a few videos on how to watercolor and the many techniques involved. So basically a Bob Ross video on watercoloring, but at my own speed and for free. How cool is that?! I could easily see those do it yourself and learning tools being applied to our library website. Wouldn't it be great if we even had more videos about how to use the library and the tools within the library. For example, show some videos of how best to look up items using the catalog, or show a video on how to use the microfilm machine. Or even better you could have information videos about art like what I found, or how to build a fence, cement a walk, whatever. You could just keep adding to it all the time.

Casting the Pods

DO now that I have done a bit of the Pod Casting I have decided that sadly enough itunes has control of this market. The other sites don't offer nearly as many podcasts as itunes, but What is nice about the others is that you don't have to sign up for it. However, your looking for one particular podcast there is a better chance of finding it on itunes. I had a tough time finding a library related podcast that I thought would be interesting. Many are related to specific libraries no where near me, so what would be the point? I did find one called LibVibe, which contains all the library related news of the week to one site. I this would be pretty interesting. I did find other podcast feeds related to books and have added those to my bloglines. I think podcasts are an awesome way of catching up on shows from the radio you've missed or different news items that are out there. I just haven't used it that much, but totally see the point and its a good one.

Audio/Visual

So I tried all three of the different social networking music sites. I think I probably liked the feel of Pandora the most, but I'm not enticed enough to want to join up. I would rather use a service like songza which keeps a list of music for you to play without having to make a social connection. I guess I'm not that social and I would prefer not to be. As far as the other sites go I am a big fan of Project Gutenberg. I have used this many times before with looking at ebooks, but didn't realize that they had added music to their site as well. I thoust it was awesome that they had free mp3 books available for download. I feel that this service could be something we could easily include with our own electronic resources. Multnoma County has been using free MP3 downloads of book on their website for a while now and really wish we would! I still like listening to cds and tapes in the car or at home, but that convenience of the mp3 player cant be beat. I really like to use all music mediums available to me. I still buy and listen to records for cryin out loud, so if it plays music I'll use it. I still would rather buy my music in a hard copy and then download it to my mp3. I think CDS will continue to exist as records have managed to exist, but it will take time for the young generation to learn to appreciate the concept of waiting a bit for things and that you cant always have everything right now and something new every two seconds.

Google Docs

So I get the whole Google Docs thing. Its just that I don't actually need to use it. I don't email people that often and I don't need to keep people up to date with what I'm doing. I think it could be a great platform for those in the business world who do lots of interoffice emailing among co colleagues. I could totally have used this all more in college when working on group projects and we were trying to organize group projects. Making slide presentations and combining them all together as we go along without having to meet at some hour at school would have been helpful. Now it seems really not usefull to me, but good to know about.

FUN STUFF

Well this was fun! I wandereed around quite a few of the sites that had been listed. I had my blog rated and now know it is for teens and older and placed my rating on my blog. I next moved on to the sketchcast where I played around with that for a bit. I have never been good at drawing with a mouse and wish I had the pen pad I could use, but non the less I drew up a little something and posted the video on my blog. Next I played a bit of the typing game. Boy i wished I had this beck when I was in typing class, it was way more fun than any of the other timed games they made us do back in school. I could really see this being used to help people with their typing speed and memorization of the keyboard. Finaly I started up a email game of Scrabble with my mom. Should be fun! I can definatly see the usefullness of Yahoo question and answer, escpecially when you have trained people answering questions now and again.

Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki

I happen to really like the concept of Wikis. I use Wikipedia all the time, and not just for library use, but for my personal interests. I use wikipedia when looking for info on authors or illustrators and just want to know their bibliography. From there they offer links to other sites with more info or to their own website. When I was looking at the different Wikis I thought one of the coolest was the Wikihow site. It has just about every kind of to it yourself info or hobby info. The greatest thing about wikis is the obvious, which is the ability to share information and knowledge readily for everyone to use. I think this is great as a book collector when info about specific book editions aren't always available in print. I often find useful info on these wiki pages from people who are quite knowledgeable collectors. For a library I feel this still holds true. If a library offers a wiki connection to their website it allows library patrons to become more involved with the library and the community. Patrons could share info about ongoing events in the community and as well as those being offered in the library, just as possible examples.

Good Readin! Darn Tootin!

I found that out of the two I really like the simplicity and smoothness of goodreads compared to librarything. I've used Librarything before and always found it too cumbersome, but a great idea, I didn't know about Goodreads until now and like it much better! However I wish there were easier ways of uploading your own books and pictures so that I could record what books specifically by edition I have already collected. However, Goodreads sure beats paying the high prices of software that lets you do just that. I wish you could narrow your search more by specific edition, or publisher, and also have the ability to upload pictures of books that currently don't have images, when you could find one on the web or scan one in! But all and all very cool and I think I have a bit more to explore with it.

Technorati

I'm sorry but this one really didn't do anything for me. Technorati's page is set up really badly, its not convenient or easy to use. Its kind of a pain trying to link to the stories that are on there and I found that there are other search tools like Google news if you wanted to find new stories in every field and genre. When I did the advance search looking for blogs and tags for learning 2.0 I couldn't see anything different with either way of searching. It seemed to pull up the same number of results with each search. I suppose this is one way too do search for blogs on topics your interested in, but would not be the one I would use

mmm....delicious

I think Delicious has alot of potential for doing research in a library setting and if your were a student and needed quick links to encyclopedic databases for research papers. I found that the HowStuffWorks is one that would be really helpful for alot of the random questions received at the reference desk. I usually just go straight to Wikipedia, but sometimes you have to wonder about the accuracy of the information on there. I have been using delicious for a little while now, but when you work at a branch where desk hours are always changing and not everyone uses the same delicious account it becomes a pain to pull up your account every time you get on desk or are helping a patron. I think It would be cool to have a collected delicious account at each branch that we always keep pulled up on the computer just like people do with the catalogue.

Playing, but nothing cool

With these image generators I find that they are some of those things on the Internet that are full of cheap thrills and chills for a few minutes and after you've done it what good is it. The only advantage to sites like these is it provides a fun easy way for people new to the Internet to play with it and learn. I personally feel that I get a lot more long lasting enjoyment out of more sophisticated programs like Photoshop where you can manipulate to a much higher degree and have way more freedom. I really tried to find some fun things, but ultimately I got frustrated trying to get the image generators to do what I wanted them to do. I found it a real annoyance to mess with the prescription and have to fight with it just to have the writing go on were it should. You had to click your mouse in just the right spot for it to work! Internet is full of cheap thrills, but it like so many things today are just junk.

social networking

I have done social networking before with Myspace and found that it was cool and interesting for a couple of months and, but quickly lost interest in it. I haven't even touched my account in probably a year. I don't really see the library being the place for social networking. In most cases the networks are heavily used by teens and I really don't see them using the networks to look at library events. I see them adding our website as a link so they can check in now and again. I think ultimately that youth are not into the libraries in the way that we think. They use us as a pit stop or a last minute place of information. Why can't we attract more of the teen to twenty somethings into just coming into the library to hang an relax like a book store. Go into any book store and you will find twenty to thirty years olds reading books, studying, or chatting quietly and using the space more like a library used to be rather than a retail outlet. Hardly anyone goes to a book store to just get in an out like they would a grocery store. Book stores offer what we used to offer and that is a place with the latest books, a quiet place to reflect, and read them. we should put more of our time and energy with finding ways of competing with the book stores and less time worrying about how to use the latest Internet tools. I don't see Powells and Barnes and Noble worrying about social networking to get people into their stores.

Wicked Widget

I am part of an age group where we pick and choose what technologies we use and others we dont use at all. My friends and I dont use IM at all, but I know that all my younger siblings use it on a constant basis more, than the good ol' fashion phone. I think If our library had enough people interested in using instant messenger along with standard ways asking for reference question ie phone and in person. If there is a reference desk where there are people constantly there working at the at computer that can field questions coming from IM, phone and in person it could work great. For smaller branches it wouldn't be very practical since we are always running around all over and might be awhile till we check the IM. I know that we have been talking about using IM within the system in contacting other services such as IT or IS services, which could really be effective without needing to tie up phone lines.

RSS Continued....

So I am now thoroughly tapped into the whole RSS blog thing. I have found that there is entirely more news and info out there than I could possibly ever even dream of wanting. For my meagre needs I found that the most simple and easy search was through google's blog search. With ithat I was able to narrow down what kind of blogs would interest me. I found some cool book collecting websites with upadated info that I wasn't aware of, and a couple of couple links to the library of congress. However I also found as I went through alot of the blog search engines that there were plenty of blogs that were really old and they were often times the ones I thought would be cool. Now the question begs to asked is what finally happens to some of those old blogs that no one wants to look at anymore, or do they go into a special digital archive for the historians of the future? What I see our library doing with RSS feeds is allow patrons to have up to date news information from a variety of sources made available on the PALS. Maybe limit them only to news organizations like CNN, or something that way they dont get out of hand. Or let them create their own accounts with their FVRL account with RSS feeds saved directly there.

RSS SSS SSS SSS SSS SSS

Well I don't know if I will ever use bloglines, but atleast I now know how it all works. I think I will enjoy checking out my comics and having new updates everyday directly from my email. I don' really look at the news online that much, because I listen to it on the radio as i'm going to and from work, plus the good ol fasion newspaper, remeber those? However I think I spent more time on teh web like certain members in my family I might find this all worthwhile. I had a hard time finding any news things to add when searching, so I made more of an effort trying to find things onthe web that I looked at more regularly. Like the Tolkienlibrary.com and tolkien.net.

Sketchy Pete Action Card!!!!

This feature is just too much fun and should not be allowed, or atleast should be sanctioned by the UN. I found it really easy to use and plan to do more and more and share them with everyone!!!! HAHAHAHAHA

Cool Flickr Image

This is one of the coolest images I've ever seen. Its very streamline and smooth. It combines two of my favorite pieces of visual art, escher and chess. What more could you ask for? All due to the kind support of Flickr. All and all pretty cool website that makes image looking way more indepth than in google images. Also thinks its cool the idea of being able to post your own art on there for the world to see.

New Technologies!!!!!

In response to the so called "7 1/2" habits I am not what you would call techno paranoid, but more unresponsive to change and new technologies that can apear to be seemingly pointless. I said I wouldn't do this blog thing, but after careful consideration and with blog vengeance in mind I have decided that I should bight the bullet and go ahead with the whole bloggity blog thing. Sorry that everyone who happens to lose their way onto this page is hit with my negativity. I will try to improve upon that point and hope learn how all this new technology exploitation works.