Thing 30: In conclusion....

Well, I was surprised that the founder of newsflashr.com left a comment on my post about instantbull.com! (The two are sort of sister sites).

I appreciate the need to somehow track that everyone is doing the work, but I sometimes found trying to figure out what to blog about difficult. It would be nice if a way could be found for us to learn such thing without the additional, time-consuming layer of having to blog about it.

While I have used and will be using a lot of this stuff personally, when it comes to the library, it's hard to say what of it can be used--or will be allowed to be used.

I would definitely be interested in more experiences like this. No telling where it could lead....

Thing 29: A la recherche de 2.0

I had a hard time in the beginning because a lot of that stuff I'd been doing for quite a while and so, not only was it an abstract exercise, but one I had to blog about. It got a little more interesting around Thing 14.

Del.icio.us was, of the things that were relatively new to me, the one that I will be using most. I had actually added it as a Firefox add-on quite a while ago. When I added it to my Firefox toolbar this time, I discovered why I had probably removed it before: it really slows things down. So now I just use it as another favorite itself. It seems to work better with Explorer.

I don't do the tagging thing all that much. Maybe I'm being antisocial, but I will leave that for those enthusiastic others who seem to have way more time than I.

Among the other Things, I really did like instantbull.com. I look forward to using some of these newer sites and tools at home.

Ah, lifelong learning goals. I remember those! I said I tended not to begin with the end in mind, but I did view problems as challenges that could lead to solutions.

Perhaps, if the end I had in mind had been to get an MP3 player, I would have found some way to finish all this sooner. But I don't like to wear ear buds....

Thing 28: Rollyo vs. Google Custom Search

Well, first of all, there is something seriously wrong with that "Rare Book Library Search" given as an example. It doesn't seem to have heard of Faulkner or Stonewall Jackson, and only managed two hits for Shakespeare. What's up with that? I made my own search,

Select Search Engine...Rare book finderSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

which you can also see in the upper left hand corner of this blog. I might want to leave Amazon out....

I don't know, I haven't spent a whole lot of time exploring Rollyo--there are no doubt better searches to be found. And the ability to add a little widget is nice. I haven't noticed whether you can do that with Google Custom Search or not. There is a danger in limiting searches to a select number of sites: you may be excluding something that could be very helpful.

My Google version is at Rare Book Finder.

If I search "stonewall jackson's daughter" (I didn't actually use quotes, though I suspect that doesn't matter anyway) with Rollyo, I get 160 hits. If I do so with Google, I get only ten--but they are smart hits, closely related to my search, whereas the Rollyo search was all over the place. This, despite the fact that I used the same search engines in both. Wonder why?

One guy who is doing a similar 2.0 training elsewhere commented that a library could use Google Custom Search and avoid the ads that come with Rollyo.

Thing 27: LibraryThing

While creating an online "library" of books is fun enough, I don't think I would have found this site as appealing as it now seems if I had not participated in an online session about LibraryThing with its creator, Tim Spalding.

It definitely has its uses in finding and evaluating books. The social networking aspects also seem like fun, but whether I'll have the time for that, I can't say....

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Boombots



Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. (w:LibraryThing)
Source

Image from Wikipedia Commons

iCommons article

picture courtesy of LibraryThing
Permission
(Reusing this image)

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Thing 26: Online Image Generators

I wasn't all that enthused about most of the ideas I saw on The Generator Blog, but I did like:



David 大维 - pronounciation (PinYin) : dà wéi

Thing 25: Podcasts and Videos

The line between podcasts and videos is blurry. For instance, I have a MySpace friend who, fairly regularly, does video blogs and posts them to YouTube. He then posts the YouTube videos on his MySpace blogs or bulletins. This technically may not be a podcast, but in effect it is.

The biggest problem with podcasts is finding the time for the ones you subscribe to. The podcast I listen to most is a radio show. I paid for six months worth of it, four hours a day. I didn't renew my subscription--I probably have five and a half months left!

I have several other podcasts sitting my iTunes.... BTW, since iTunes runs on Windows as well as Mac, I would definitely recommend it for podcasts, etc.

AS

Thing 24: Search tools for locating podcasts

I used podcast.net to search for podcasts.....

The Talking with Talis podcast, "Fiona Bradley Talks with Talis about the Semantic Web and Libraries" was a mildly interesting one about a much more interesting subject, which I had only vaguely heard of.

"The semantic web," IUBW (if you believe Wikipedia) "is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web."

The podcast led to some rewarding surfing, such as Bret Taylor's blog, We Need a Wikipedia for Data (April 9, 2008)

Taylor's blog led me to the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. In order to sign in for that, it had me join myOpenID.com, again which, IUBW, "is a shared identity service, which allows internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site."