The Generator Blog has lots of possibilities to choose from, but when I saw the chocolate bar, that was it. The catalog card generator no longer seems to work. Too bad. I would have liked to see that too.
From your comments, it seems this image was easier to save then most. I didn’t see the Upload feature on your post, but found it on my blog. Worked like a charm. I uploaded both the thumbnail and full image just to see what they would look like.
There seems to be a problem with the PB Wiki tour. I keep getting an error message:
Sorry, PBwiki has encountered an error while displaying this page. [User Warning error — Smarty:1095] Our engineers have been notified — Please try again soon.
So, I guess I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, I watched their getting started video. Similar to CommonCraft, it covers how to start in just a couple of minutes. I think adding widgets adds a whole new dimension to a wiki, and it might be easier to do than I thought. Hey, just went to the Cool Learner blogs and saw you were sending us to the video I had just watched!
I’ve added my blog to the page.
I knew about Wikis, from various programs and from Wikipedia, of course. I’m amazed at how mainstream Wikipedia is and how fast it’s grown. But now I’m seen more of how they can be used. Those CommonCraft videos are the best-they make everything seem so simple. But then I started looking at various Wikis, and I realized too how professional they could look. And what information! The SJCPL subject guides are very extensive. Could we put something like this up on our website, I wonder? (Would it fit in our City format)?
I had hoped for a little more from the Library Success best practices. It’s a great idea, but only as good as people contribute to it. I’ll have to make time for the ALA annual conference wiki if I go to ALA. It could be helpful, especially to new attendees for whom it’s geared. We could something like the book lovers wiki, though if we have the capability of patrons’ adding reviews, will we need this? There are many ways to accomplish similar things, and we’ll have to decide what work’s best for us.
I’d like to see some examples of wikis for technical services paraprofessional staff. So many things are just geared for reference librarians.
I knew I would like LibraryThing. I have quite a number of books, and for years I’ve known I should catalog them. How many times have I been out of town, seen a book and am not quite sure if I already own it, or own that edition? But, the time to do this. LibraryThing certainly makes this easier. Earlier methods involved typing in all the data. Now, go for the ISBN and hopefully have it all appear.
I pulled a few books to catalog. Of course, the first one I tried is out of print. Still, I was sure LC would have it, but no. Not there, not at Amazon. Then I started trying some of the larger libraries. Still not there. It would be helpful if one could search all 82 at the same time. Finally, I gave up and entered others. I could enter it manually, but just wanted to explore others first.
One of my books was only owned by one other person. I can see the social networking side of this. Who else has it? But, I like it to have my own collection. Plus, it says you can access it from your cell phone. That would be cool, especially out of town in a bookstore.
It’s the tagging that is really powerful for sharing, though. People don’t think LC subject headings. Some of the tags are worthless, but still, worthless in my opinion, helpful in someone else’s eyes. It will be very interesting to see how these tags exist with LC headings.
Oh, here’s my catalog: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lomaxlondon
I love the site’s name-del.icio.us-so clever and easy to remember. Social bookmarking is another new concept for me, and I’m trying to think how we can use it at work. Of course, the first thing I think about are all the bookmarks that the reference librarians have. They seem very well organized, but now I wonder if they are getting too big to be useful quickly? It might be fun to try putting them on del.icio.us and seeing how that would work out.
Another possibility is the session on local restaurants and recipes that we’re doing on staff development day. We could make our own delicious cookbook. We’ll have to see how much interest there might be in that.
Thought I’d take advantage of your offer to just add on comments about Technorati, another good name. This lesson is filled with them. In searching for learning 2.0, there were thousands of posts, but of course many fewer tags and blogs. Clicking on just blogs gave a similar number of hits as searching in the blog directory. And, there’s an advanced search option. I had to go to the FAQs to find out what they meant by authority to see if that would help my search. Technorati has more options to limit a search than did bloglines. In one of my searches I came to two of the blogs I expected to see, immediately. I can see where it might be good to register your blog here.
I tried all the search tools. It seems that even when you have an idea of a particular blog you want to add, the search results are very broad. Sometimes you find other blogs that mention the one you’re looking for, but you’d think the blog itself would come up first in the hitlist.
I used all but topix to actually add a feed, and they all worked fine. Thought I would like feedster more than others, but it seemed bloglines and google did better for me.
Now I’ve got a lot of feeds. I wonder if I’ll be able to keep up with them.
Well, I’ve just spent the afternoon looking at many sites and subscribing to just a few of them. I’m very interested in how RSS works and the ease of having information come to you instead of the other way around. That’s why I wanted to work on this lesson to post to begin with. Anyway, I’ve read all the links again and they do have a wealth of info. Still like the Plain English one, but the preetamrai.com was quite good-lots of detail on what you can do.
Theoretically, I can subscribe to different library sites and keep up with the newest and greatest. Even though this is a time saver, it still takes time to read everything coming in. I guess you just have to try and budget for it but not get too caught up and spend hours reading articles and posts.
I’m looking forward to getting more RSS feeds on our website for our patrons. The hard part will be to get them to know about and want to subscribe to them.
It’s amazing what’s out there.
I’ve been spending my Saturday morning looking at all the things you can do with Flickr. I’ve looked at the examples; many are very cool. I put in “Sherlock Holmes” in Montagr and had 500 thumbnail photos make up a montage, which looked like a quilt. When I hovered over the tiny individual pictures, the picture enlarged so that I could actually see what it was. There were pictures of many people I knew, and some at events I’ve attended.
Did you try the Earth album? Those google ads to the right are very annoying. I’m not sure how exact the map is. When I clicked on Wien, I got the Czech republic (interesting there was no individual Praha listed). Perhaps I just wasn’t precise enough in my click, but it was fun to see pictures of places I’ve just visited.
The trading card maker could be a neat project too. It reminds me when people were having their own “baseball card” made. I looked at the library staff, but didn’t notice any of our staff. Did someone do this?
So, I really liked the Trip Planner. Not only could you enter your trip in, but you can look at trips other people took to places you might be going. You can get a heads up of what to see, where to eat, where to stay. Good starting point.
I set up my Yahoo account today. When I chose my user login, the ID was taken and then everything was frozen. I thought I would be able to choose another name, but could only do cntl alt del and end that application. This happened twice. Just wondering if that is normal?
I read about Flickr and took the tour. I wanted to upload some of our pictures, so I read more about uploading. I decided not to download any software, but went to the web choice to upload. This seemed to work okay. Is one method more favored or better than another?
I just chose a few photos, mainly from our trip (though I had to put one in of our dog, Hatty, too). Here is the url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14951805@N04/
I added some tags, including sunnyvalelearners, and made them public. So, if I understand correctly, if I search by a tag, I will see any photos with that tag if they are marked public? I can’t go to someone else’s account to see all their photos unless I’ve been invited?
I hope to put more travel photos in to share with some of our friends who were in Prague and Vienna with us. One friend suggested burning our photos to a CD and sending them to her as well as suggesting another site to put our photos up on, but I thought I would let them know about this.
