Week 5 - Searching and Cataloguing

Today I joined Library Thing (see some books from my catalogue below). It seemed like a good website - I particularly liked the local tab or section. I thought this would be especially good if you were travelling and wanted to find out if there were any literary events happening in the town you were in. It would also be a good way for Auckland City Libraries to promote their events.

Week 4 - RSS Feeds and Twitter

Today I explored RSS feeds. I set up a blog-lines account and subscribed to a number of feeds, some of which were blogs like "Scooper" on the Auckland City Libraries website. I thought this would be a good way to keep up with the latest news in the developement of libraries. I was a bit dissapointed to find that some of my favourite blogs didn't have a subscription option, for example, Simon Reynolds music blog, Blissed Out. I thought RSS feeds would be a good way to deliver library news, or could replace traditional news-letters. For example library patrons could subscribe to the "library news-letter blog" to keep up with the latest news at their local library.

Twitter

I joined Twitter today as well and added as people I follow a few bands and artists that I like as well as the National Library. I am fine about using flicker to follow institutions or public enterprises but I don't like the idea of using it for my personal life. It seems like an invasion of privacy, as does the way it collates information and trends. I like a bit of mystery.

Here is a link to my twitter page http://twitter.com/butterpeanut1

Week 3 - Flickr

This week I explored flickr. I already have a personal flickr account and I use it to upload photos and look at my friends photos on-line. It's another good way to catch up with what your friends are doing especially when they are overseas. Tags are a really great feature in flickr because if you want to look for a picture of something specific you can search items tagged with "whatever you're looking for" and you'll get a whole bunch of photos of that thing.

I didn't know about the third party flickr applications though so I signed up to the Big Huge Labs application and used it to make a border collie photo booth effect image (pasted below). It's great how they have a bunch of effects that you can apply to your photo.




This is a movie poster I made using a flickr third party application.



Mashups applications seem really great too in the way that they borrow content or ideas from another site to generate something new.


Online photo editing tools

Unfortunately I was unable to check out picnik on my computer at work because flash player is not installed. I checked out Splashup and Pixenate though and Splashup seemed to have similar tools to photoshop, which I use a lot on my computer anyway. I edited a photo in Pixenate. (see below) These tools will be great to suggest to customers who want to remove red eye from their photos or manipulate them a little.



Generators

I checked the image generators, they seemed like a fun way to make a card or a poster. I made an image using Letter James below. And I used a text generator I found on The Generator Blog to make an old school dj name :)

Old School DJ Name Generator - NamePistol.com

Week 2 - Social Networking

This week I checked out facebook, bebo and myspace. I am in a band so I already use a myspace page for this. I did go through and have a look at some of my favourite bands on myspace and have posted some images below from them. It's really great to be able to check out a bands music on myspace before you go out and buy their album or see their show. It's also a good way to keep in touch with friends and family because you can post pictures and videos on your myspace page. The lack of privacy associated with it bothers me a little but you can set up your page so that only your friends can see your profile which is good.



This is a picture from Jolie Holland's myspace page. She is one of my favourite musicians.

I am on facebook as well and I find this is a good way to keep in touch with friends and family overseas. It would also be a good way to advertise library events because you can set up an events page on facebook and then invite other members of facebook to your event.

I also had a look at bebo as well and checked out the acl bebo page. It seemed similar to myspace in a way except that it doesn't have a facility for playing bands music. I like how the blog part of bebo was on the main profile page similar to the comments section on myspace. Again the privacy aspect of bebo bothered me a bit.

Web 2.0 Week one - setting up a blog

I already had this blog from previous work on the web 2.0 programme so I didn't have to set it up again or set up a gmail account again. I did check out some of the different layout and theme templates available through blogspot and changed my current one. I found that there were some interesting themes but that it was also cool that you can customise the layout and patterns, colours etc of your blog. I have recently started up a teen book club at my library and I think it would be great if we could have a teen blog for our club. That way if anyone happened to miss a book club session they could keep up with what was happening by going on the blog.

Web 2.0 Final Post

So I completed the on-line survey about the License to Play programme. I am a little worried that it I won't be recorded as having filled it in as I completed it on a computer with a generic library log-on and not my own account.

Overall I found this round of Web 2.0 very useful. I think maybe the fiction on-line resources could have been a little better. Some of the author sites were not a lot more useful than google though it was interesting to see them. The Lit-lovers site though was really great.

I enjoy doing these web 2.0 programmes and I get a lot out of them, I think it's great that we get the opportunity to upskill in worktime. It also seems mandatory to our jobs as librarians to keep up with web advances and new ways to get and share information. It would be cool it the next one concerntrated more on non-fiction resources. Also some excercises that focussed on resources/tools for children and teenagers.

Thanks!!

Week 5 - Social Networks

I checked out all the book marking sites and signed up to stumble upon. I searched a few topics that I was interested in and found a good recommendation for an mp3 encoder. I found this site really useful because it is hard to filter through all the information available on the internet and recommendations for sites makes it much easier. I checked out the top art stories on Stumbleupon.com and the top one was about the side walk chalk guy. It was cool to see all his trompe de l'oeil chalk creations.

I found a story in the top stories of the last 24hrs on the Digg it site about the fifty most admired companies in the world. Turns out Apple Macintosh is at the top and Johnson and Johnson is not far behind. This site had lots of interesting stories on it especially ones that related to US politics.

One of the limitations of a lot of these bookmarking websites often seems to be that they largely focus and/or rely on American stories or news sources (Amerocentric).