Sunday, August 24, 2008

Discovery Exercise 11

I found the whole concept of a wiki really intriguing. The idea that anyone can establish a collaborative website that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content is fascinating. I assume that this tool is exempt from copyright rules? I haven’t had time to research this aspect further at the moment.

Of the library wikis that I checked out I particularly liked the Book Lovers Wiki - developed by the Princeton Public Library – I was caught by the book reviews and ended up requesting one of the titles reviewed. I think that a North Shore Libraries wiki, established for book lovers by book lovers to add book reviews to should be considered and may be a useful tool for selectors to view.

As an aside my daughter alerted me to an interesting wiki www.tvtropes.org - a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. It includes a page or two on how it differs from wikipedia (less stringent guidelines on language for instance).

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Library 2.0

Web 2.0 is a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities and is the operating platform to which programmers write reusable, constantly updated software components that are embedded or loosely coupled with other Web applications.

Into this environment enters Librarian 2.0 which has been described as a “strategy guide” for helping users find information, gather knowledge and create content in the context of using technology that is changing and developing rapidly. It calls for libraries to encourage user participation and feedback in the development and maintaining of library services. Clearly North Shore Libraries can be seen to be onboard with this concept as one of their objectives is to be up-to-date and relevant, and Action 8 in the Draft Library Strategy identifies the need to “Provide electronic services to meet community needs.’

Week 4 Exercise 9

Technorati what an enormous blogospere! Searching Learning Web 2.0 delivered results that emphasized what a growing environment this is: Posts indicated 8,838 results for learning web 2.0, Blogs indicated 585 Blogs about Learning Web 2.0, however while there were no photos about learning web 2.0 there was a page of links to videos about learning web 2.0. Searching the Blog directory for Web 2.0 indicated 7 plus pages of results but I could only get up to page 5 to display. In the advanced search option I searched for the tag web 2.0 and returned 36,225 posts tagged web 2.0.
Further exploration led me to the Technorati Blog where I was interested to read that
Technorati has experienced a problem with their search result updating infrastructure. They were able to continue to crawl and save data, however, post search results were stale and temporarily stuck at about 3pm Pacific Fri. Aug 15. Link results (reactions) were stuck at Thu. Aug 14. Technorati identified the root cause and I expect the system has caught up now. It was interesting to note that no data was being lost just that the most recent posts and reactions at that time were not reflected in search results.

Week 4 Exercise 8

I have taken the time to look at and learn about tagging using Del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site).
I elected to have a look at recent 'design' bookmarks without any idea of the volume there would be. Some 6441292 Bookmarks at the time I checked it out. It was interesting to see that there were several (11) related tags which included 'inspiration,' 'webdesign', 'graphics', 'illustration' 'art' and others.
Obviously Del.icio.us is a well used tool and it was interesting to see how many people bookmarked the site or added comments. Delicious is about sharing your favourite sites with the community and is a wonderful window to look through to see what other people find interesting.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Search for RSS feeds

7.1
Has anyone pointed out that there is a spelling typo in the exercise instructions for 7.1?
'Often a feed icon will be diplayed somewhere in the navigation of the site.' diplayed should read displayed?
Anyway having created a bloglines account and subscribed to several feeds it was interesting over the next few days to see how many different versions of news items came through. I also found when reading information/articles from other sources that I would look for RSS feeds. In this manner I added Reuters; Top News. It took me a couple of days to figure out how to remove items but this is easy with the Mark All Read Button!

7.2
Explored the search tools noted in this exercise and found the Bloglines search tool okay to use. Looked at the others mentioned, Topix.net, Syndic8.com and Technorati. I found that I spent more time using Technorati the blog finding tool that searchs for blogs -- I looked into entertainment and found lots of interest. Bloglines and RSS feeds are great tools but need to be monitored and used wisely to avoid information overload!!!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Anything technology related

I found facebook was really great to keep in contact with family when overseas -- together skype and the webcam.
Currently I have added 'Scrabulous' (this is a game of scrabble online) to facebook and have two games going with different opponents.
I must admit because I work at a computer for the major part of my workday that often I do not feel like sitting down at night and exploring all the great new technology available. I do realise that I am not taking full advantage of all that is available.

Does anyone else really like 'Spellcheck'? I often find that my mind and my fingers have a difference of opinion so it is great to have a tool to assist -- provided that it is New Zealand English.

Discovery exercise 5

I have had a lot of fun exploring fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that are out there.
I have explored maps a tool where users share where their photos and videos were taken, and see photos and videos taken near them. I was amused by the cheese map at the following link http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/cheese/map?&fLat=48.2816&fLon=1.3183&zl=14&order_by=interestingness

However I think what appealed the most was the ability to create trading cards. As we want to remain anonymous for the purposes of this training I have not created a card at this stage but have viewed several of the librariantradingcards and found it hard to select a favourite. So to prove that I have been there here, and because I think this card indicates a sense of humour here is the link to questing librarian trading card
http://www.flickr.com/photos/questinglibrarian/224598846/

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Flickr

I have had a lot of fun looking around 'Flickr' and decided initally to 'explore' the more interestings bits for the last 7 days. Then by selecting reload was able to view a whole range of images and one that captured my attention was of a spidersweb (possibly because we are doing Web 2.0 training)! by 'Cisco kid 71'http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciscokid71/2138131145/

Next I actually completed a search using the tag 'webs' and returned a result of 5130 in comparison to doing a full text search which returned 867,208 results!
Some images that I really liked were:
Dewy Web by shesnuckinfuts http://www.flickr.com/photos/shesnuckinfuts/315869573/
Frosted Web by shesnuckinfuts http://www.flickr.com/photos/shesnuckinfuts/336437000/

I will probably take my digital camera to work next week and get some photos and actually join Flickr so can upload photos.