« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
The articles in the Discovery resources are most likely more pertinent to the librarians and managers but are still relevant to all staff. I particularly like the article “To a temporary place in time”. I want to be around and participating in the neo-library.
I am looking forward to the tagging possibilities in the upcoming upgrade to the library catalog. It should be exciting especially with my love of del.icio.us.
Technorati,
I looked through the popular searches and read through the help FAQ and don't think this is something I will even sign up an account for. The pages are easy to read even with the usuall clutter of adds so prevalent on "free" service sites.
With the blogsphere so large I think it would be unlikely that I'd find a blog that I was overly interested in enough to spend much time reading it.
I think with all the technology choices we have for finding information that we, as information consumers, have to make choices as to where we will get our news and information. The blogsphere isn't my choice.
This is one of the Learning 2.0 technologies that I fell in love with. The other of course being RSS feeds.
I created an account. I discovered that I could import my booksmarks so didn't have to visit each of the sites and add them to my account. That saved a lot of time. Once I found out that doing so would autamatically add the folder name as a tag to the links I decided I needed to first clean up my favorites. I had so many outdated links and things not in folders. Once I had all the links in folders I was much happier with the del.icio.us tags. I found the instructions on the del.icio.us site on how to delete all previously imported bookmarks. Not very easy, but at least fast. You have to delete and recreate your account. This is one of the few sites that lets you use the same user name for the newly created account. Most won't let you use the same user name if you delete the account.
All in all this one of the technologies that I will continue to use. See my blog entries for creating a Network badge.
Wiki's, I love the concept.
How well they work depends on the software behind the wiki. The UM Wiki software has more than a few problems. PB wiki is by far the easiest to use but I also like Zoho wiki. I started a Zoho wiki for storing information about the plants in my yard. However, I am reluctant to put too much effort into an online product that may or may not be there in the future.
I think that wiki's are a great method for storing sharing procedures. I hope the UM Wiki software continues to improve. There as an upgrade in August that did improve the "edit" screen so text formatting isn't quite as formidable. See my other entries on the wiki's I've created for procedure manuals.
This is typed into the Entry Body
This is being typed into the extended entry. This is a test only a test.
This is being typed in the entry body. This is a test, only a test.
To shade out your non work hours in the calendar you can set an option from the Tools, Options menu. See the image below:
Let's see how the linkroll works.
This is the code. Let's see what it does. :)
This is yet another online tool that I spent very little time looking at.
I can see the usefulness of a site like http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ but it's not for me. What I find interesting is the increasing number of "widgets" available on sites. I am also amazed at the number of web pages that have an "Ads by Google" section. I realize that Google is powered by ads but I am still uncomfortable with the ads targeted to specific interested based on, I suspect, my browsing history. I think I'll stick to a pc based program if I want to create images, that or my camera. :))
Update - once again I'm proven wrong. Another staff showed me what she had done with
FD Tools http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ and it was amazing. I played with it some more and can really see the fun factor in using this. The advantage is that you don't need to purchase, install and learn software. Something I like to do :)) However, for those doing a limited number of projects the online image generator would be a good choice.
I explored and played with "Library Thing" but did not create an account. I just couldn't handle one more online account. I think the concept behind Library Thing is geat for those who are catalogers at heart, which I'm not. I think I'd be more interested if I could catalog my video and music collections. I thought the Groups forums were interesting and I ended up getting very sidetracked. :) This isn't a site I'll be activily using though or even actively visiting.