Ok, I've failed step 1 of this exercise. I searched, I clicked, I got a password screen. So, I've gotten kind of bogged on this one. Needless to say I've found these pages bit difficult to navigate. I went to the Gutenberg page, but I ended up with text files, not audio.
In the past I've used a site called Librivox, which I found pretty easy to use.
So if you're a bit thick like me, maybe you could try that.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Podcasts
I'm used to using iTunes, which I really like, but it does have one drawback in comparison to the other search options I looked at which were Podcastalley and Podcast.net. That is, that the search results are displayed by episode, rather than by podcast program, but on the plus side its easy to browse by genres, so it's good if you're not really looking for anything in particular. The other two displayed lists of programs, but I found the searching a bit hit and miss. Podcast.net found 9 results for "libraries" and podcast alley found 29.
There would certainly be uses for this technology in libraries, like this one which I heard about at the Spun Conference I attended last week, from Coffs Harbour City Library
Voice Of Time Project
Like all of these things, its a matter of having useful product to offer.
There would certainly be uses for this technology in libraries, like this one which I heard about at the Spun Conference I attended last week, from Coffs Harbour City Library
Voice Of Time Project
Like all of these things, its a matter of having useful product to offer.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Cookies please
What's not to like?
YouTube is one thing I'm already pretty familiar with. I don't have a TV, so I tend to find a few bits and pieces on Youtube instead. Most of the videos are short, so you never get stuck for long like you do with TV.
As for using it in libraries, I'd be afraid of doing it for the sake of doing it, not because it really needed to be done. As a form of user interaction, or an art project it might be fun, as we saw in some of the examples from Helen Blowers presentation at the State Library, but I'd want to be sure there was a good reason.
There's certainly lots of handy tutorial material already on Youtube, which could be used to help people with common computer problems. I thought the one we watched about wikis was really helpful.
And why did I choose this video? I was a seventies baby. Cookie monster was my friend. I was also avoiding more cat references, despite the fact that there are oodles of super funny cat videos on youtube....Ok, if you insist I'll just link to a couple (tee hee).
Cat does dog tricks
Mean kitty song
Kitty capers accompanied by sunshine happy song in Japanese
Picnik
This exercise has been just the cure for my wiki weariness, and my document dilemmas.
Some good clean photo fun!
I'm very glad I clicked on the Photography and digital images section of the Web 2.0 awards list.
No 1. Flickr - yep, got it covered, love it!
No 2. Picasa - got it, it's handy
No 3. Picnik - Aha!
I knew more of these type of things had to be out there, but I'd had no luck finding anything useful on my own, and now, here is Picnik. Where have you been all my life?
Picasa is good for basic editing of photos, and it's probably still better than this for doing serious stuff like changing colour temperatures, adding gradients, stuff like that, but you can't add text in Picasa. Enter Picnik, it's definitely designed to do the fun stuff like adding speech bubbles and text, shapes, zombie heads, that kind of stuff you want to do all the time.
But you can still do most of the stuff you can do in Picasa, colour temp, contrast, exposure, saturation, but another real plus is an easy resize option:
If you can resize a photo in Picasa, I'm yet to figure out how.
I was suprised to see it had only recieved four stars for interface and design, when Picasa got 5. I think this application has one of the best interfaces I've seen for while, it even tells you its "sprinkling seeds" and "planting trees" while the page is loading. I love the grass, I love the dandelions. This was a breath of fresh air and fun too! See?
Try it here
Some good clean photo fun!
I'm very glad I clicked on the Photography and digital images section of the Web 2.0 awards list.
No 1. Flickr - yep, got it covered, love it!
No 2. Picasa - got it, it's handy
No 3. Picnik - Aha!
I knew more of these type of things had to be out there, but I'd had no luck finding anything useful on my own, and now, here is Picnik. Where have you been all my life?
Picasa is good for basic editing of photos, and it's probably still better than this for doing serious stuff like changing colour temperatures, adding gradients, stuff like that, but you can't add text in Picasa. Enter Picnik, it's definitely designed to do the fun stuff like adding speech bubbles and text, shapes, zombie heads, that kind of stuff you want to do all the time.
But you can still do most of the stuff you can do in Picasa, colour temp, contrast, exposure, saturation, but another real plus is an easy resize option:
If you can resize a photo in Picasa, I'm yet to figure out how.
I was suprised to see it had only recieved four stars for interface and design, when Picasa got 5. I think this application has one of the best interfaces I've seen for while, it even tells you its "sprinkling seeds" and "planting trees" while the page is loading. I love the grass, I love the dandelions. This was a breath of fresh air and fun too! See?
Try it here
Warning, danger Will Robinson!!
I'd never heard of Zoho before, so I signed up and created a document. I quickly found the little delays in pulling down menus and backspacing over typos a bit annoying, and the features are more limited than in your regular word processor, so I don't think this will be replacing Office for a while yet. Like the other things we've looked at, it might have a place in sharing documents at a distance, or if you were travelling, but otherwise I think I'll stick with the status quo for now.
And then I uploaded my document to my blog, and look what happened! Disaster!
Note the big orange rectangle floating on top of my blog banner. Argggh!!
And then I tried adding another post to see if the orange blob would move, and behold!
And now even as I enter this, all I can see before me is a HTML string, not a picture, I've cut and paste the Html, I hope I've got the right bits!
So if you're going to attempt this make sure you don't have any fancy bits in your document, this seemed to be the result of adding a layer.
So, me and online apps? Methinks not.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Valuable training
Last week I attended a training course with a colleage which I found extremely worthwhile, and I'd like to recommend to everybody.
It was a 2 day Mental Health First Aid training course, which is aimed primarily at recognising when people are in times of crisis, and what to do when you recognise or suspect that someone is in crisis, or is developing a mental health problem. It was very practical information, mainly as regards awareness, but also in courses of action. I think it well worth a look!
Below is a link to the website:
http://www.mhfa.com.au/
It was a 2 day Mental Health First Aid training course, which is aimed primarily at recognising when people are in times of crisis, and what to do when you recognise or suspect that someone is in crisis, or is developing a mental health problem. It was very practical information, mainly as regards awareness, but also in courses of action. I think it well worth a look!
Below is a link to the website:
http://www.mhfa.com.au/
Uuummm....What was the question again?
Ok, so I didn't go and read a book. I'm off to the SPUN conference next week, then I've got a weeks leave,(Yay!) and I won't have much time for homework, so here I am. I had a look at PBWiki, and I left my blog in the sandbox.
Wikis seem to be more about content than pretty templates and wigets (doh!), so I found it hard to really play, without having a raison d'etre, so to speak. But there was certainly some good examples in the material of how they can be used. Again, I feel like this is just a small taste, and I'd really have to do some heavy research and practice with how you add pages and link them etc. before I could really attempt to set something up for library purposes.
Maybe after my holiday...
Wikis seem to be more about content than pretty templates and wigets (doh!), so I found it hard to really play, without having a raison d'etre, so to speak. But there was certainly some good examples in the material of how they can be used. Again, I feel like this is just a small taste, and I'd really have to do some heavy research and practice with how you add pages and link them etc. before I could really attempt to set something up for library purposes.
Maybe after my holiday...
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wiki, that's a good name for a cat...
Well, well well.. what did I think of wikis?
I think these applications would be amongst the most useful for us. A wiki would be great for a book group, or to keep lists of subject links. I read a comment in one of these articles that the use of a wiki was great for these type of pages as it allows users access to fix dead links, and add things they thought were useful. I think this is a big advantage for libraries, as there are so many demands on our time, it's hard to keep up with updating webpages, checking links etc. We can get help with adding and updating information, and most importantly, users get involved, and ensure that the content is what they're interested in. They also get the opportunity to interact with staff and with each other.
It would also be great for sharing of information amongst staff. Email can be a bit clunky. People often get email which isn't really relevant to them. With a wiki staff could share ideas and information freely, without impinging on other's time unecessarily.
Once I started looking at places to make Wikis, I ended up at Wikipedia (...yeah, I know), which listed, at a rough count, 86 places to go! At this point I freaked out a bit and scurried back to the video on the Learning 2.0 page, which ended with a nice tidy list of 3 places. Ahhhh.
I think I'm getting a bit stretched at this point. I'm starting to forget which feature I saw on which bit of software. Now that I've been through these exercises, I have a Delicious account, a Bloglines account, a technorati account, plus all the other stuff. I don't think I could keep using them all. Some of them seem to do similar things, but in different ways, and it seems to me you need to use them quite often to really understand how they work and get the most out of them. Oh boy. I think I'll go and read a book.
I think these applications would be amongst the most useful for us. A wiki would be great for a book group, or to keep lists of subject links. I read a comment in one of these articles that the use of a wiki was great for these type of pages as it allows users access to fix dead links, and add things they thought were useful. I think this is a big advantage for libraries, as there are so many demands on our time, it's hard to keep up with updating webpages, checking links etc. We can get help with adding and updating information, and most importantly, users get involved, and ensure that the content is what they're interested in. They also get the opportunity to interact with staff and with each other.
It would also be great for sharing of information amongst staff. Email can be a bit clunky. People often get email which isn't really relevant to them. With a wiki staff could share ideas and information freely, without impinging on other's time unecessarily.
Once I started looking at places to make Wikis, I ended up at Wikipedia (...yeah, I know), which listed, at a rough count, 86 places to go! At this point I freaked out a bit and scurried back to the video on the Learning 2.0 page, which ended with a nice tidy list of 3 places. Ahhhh.
I think I'm getting a bit stretched at this point. I'm starting to forget which feature I saw on which bit of software. Now that I've been through these exercises, I have a Delicious account, a Bloglines account, a technorati account, plus all the other stuff. I don't think I could keep using them all. Some of them seem to do similar things, but in different ways, and it seems to me you need to use them quite often to really understand how they work and get the most out of them. Oh boy. I think I'll go and read a book.
The future of libraries
Hmmm....
Well,
It seems to me that Libraries 2.0 is about connecting with our patrons online the way have done in our library buildings. If libraries 2.0 is the means, then the end would be a harmonious and fully engaged library community, both online and off. So the technologies here are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I'm not sure whether our borrowers here are screaming out for this kind of online community at the moment, maybe I'm wrong and they reading this right now! If you are please leave a comment. But I do think people who use our websites now, expect a certain level of dynamism in the content. There's nothing more boring than a completely static site is there? This is a great way to achieve that dynamism. I also think that if people are looking for that kind of community hub, then libraries are in a good position to provide it.
So, here we all are, what's next?
Well,
It seems to me that Libraries 2.0 is about connecting with our patrons online the way have done in our library buildings. If libraries 2.0 is the means, then the end would be a harmonious and fully engaged library community, both online and off. So the technologies here are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I'm not sure whether our borrowers here are screaming out for this kind of online community at the moment, maybe I'm wrong and they reading this right now! If you are please leave a comment. But I do think people who use our websites now, expect a certain level of dynamism in the content. There's nothing more boring than a completely static site is there? This is a great way to achieve that dynamism. I also think that if people are looking for that kind of community hub, then libraries are in a good position to provide it.
So, here we all are, what's next?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Yes, I have a cat
What did I find interesting on the "popular" page of Technorati...this funny cat cartoon of course!
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