Although I had never really listened to podcasts before, I was certainly aware of them. Some of my favorite webcomics (like PvP) have podcasts, and my friends love the This Week in Tech podcast. It's kind of a misnomer, I suppose, calling everything a "podcast," when so many of the ones out there (like some of our own at OCLS) are actually "vidcasts," having picture as well as sound, but I digress. As for audiobooks, I have been a member of NetLibrary for a long time (often it was the only way to read librettos of operas for a class that I took). Although I don't prefer to listen to my books (written word all the way!), it's a useful resource for those long drives to and from work. Or at least it was, until my portable CD player was stolen from my glove compartment while I was at work. But now, with the new MP3 player that I will be receiving, I can use that (along with the tape adapter for my old-school car, which was thankfully left in the car) to listen to audiobooks and music!
As a personal recommendation, I would like to suggest this as an audiobook for people who aren't sure what they want to listen to. It's the abridged (which is a tragedy) downloadable audio version of World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks, but not known for humor). It's super interesting if you like zombie stories at all, and there are a ton of famous people who do the different voices (like Jurgen Prochnow, Alan Alda, Carl and Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, and John Turturro). It's the kind of audiobook I can really get behind, because the premise of the book is that it's the transcription of several interviews with people from around the world about their experience surviving the Great Zombie War. It lends itself perfectly to an actual audio version, and I think it really enhances the whole experience to both read and listen to it.
I won't have a chance to do the Adventure activity for a while, since we're in the middle of moving and our computers/microphones aren't hooked up yet (or even the internet connection), but I look forward to it! In the meantime, I found this neat website PodSafe Audio, which is full of freely listenable Creative Commons protected music. One of my old professors is even up there. He's a local musician, and if you want to hear the songs he has available just search by artist name for "Barry Mauer." It doesn't really seem like it in the picture on the website, but in person he's a dead ringer for David Duchovny!
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Week 9 of Learn 2.0
The video for this week was fun. I really like the idea of people spontaneously bursting into song in the library! It never happens in real life like it does in musicals, and I have to wonder how many of the people in the library were actually prepped for what was happening.
Copyright is a huge issue right now with the internet. I know I used to get a lot of articles ILLed in college when the full text wasn't available online for use in writing papers, so I'm familiar with the librarian copywright scenarios. But with music? Even with the handy example guidelines in the course links, it seems like in some circumstances, there's still a lot of gray area to be considered. When is it okay? Better not to chance it, I guess. But that doesn't stop some of our patrons who check out 30 CDs and return them the next day. You know what they're doing (and maybe even do it yourself). We trespass people for doing it on library computers, but no one can control what you do from home except yourself (and possibly the RIAA police). But that's where DRM comes in, saving you from the trouble of controlling yourself. In some cases, it's better to be too safe (and not even be able to listen to music purchased) than not safe enough (and have yor music poached online) according to big music labels. But Steve Job's open letter exposes some cracks in the veneer, such as DRM only being required on digital music, but not CDs. When it's just as easy to circumvent the whole process by copying a CD instead of buying albums online, why attempt to control one so much more strictly than the other? With Europe being (apparently) the most affected in terms of not even being able to access purchased music, it's a little surprising that the clamor for attention to this hypocrisy hasn't already led to DRM's demise. I understand that there needs to be some kind of watchfulness by producers of content (I'm not quite ready to condone the open source free-for-all plan yet), but obviously DRM is not the way to go. There will always be someone ready to hack any system, but there's got to be some method of ensuring that artists don't go broke (though it seems like the labels are the ones bleeding them dry, not listeners who pirate) without making it so hard just to listen.
In terms of music recommendations, I didn't really like LivePlasma, which I had already looked at for a previous week. I like that it links to the artist's amazon listing, but the format is too busy looking for me, whereas Music-Map was much simpler and easier to see (even if the artists jiggle and overlap a little too much sometimes, making them hard to differentiate). Music-Map is part of GNOD , which has been linked on the "Children and Teens" section of our own website for a long time. My favorite, though, was UpTo11, which is easy to use, presents everything in a format that is colorful, detailed, and simple to understand. You can even set the ranking of artists recommended to you from popular to not-well-known, depending on how generic you want your results to be. I also really like Last.FM, whose radio function some of my friends use at work to get varied tunes all day. The music it played in conjunction with my preferences was all really cool, and over time, if I "love" or "reject" enough songs, it will be tailored even more specifically. I have not yet had the program sift through my music files at home, but I think that it would be equally good in that regard. One problem I had was that sometimes the music freezes for a few seconds (on some songs more than others, and I wonder if running the program on a better computer would fix the issue) before resuming, interrupting the flow. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to go back and look at the music it's played before. I understand not being able to play past songs again, but just a list would be nice, in case I spaced out and don't remember who was playing, or I would like to tag a previous song as one I liked a lot. I've been having some trouble activating my account with MyStrands, so I can't really say much about it, but it seems like a really neat, collaborative program. As a side note, I really liked staff member Emily's music a lot; it reminded me of Nellie McKay, such great piano and voice, maybe I'll hit her show at Infusion next week!
For the Adventure activity, I visited SpringWidgets, where I found widgets that looked good, but didn't offer much variety. On the other hand, YourMinis offered a lot of different varieties of widgets, but they didn't look as professional, or they made my blog run too slowly because they were so complicated to load. In the end, I settled on having the weather displayed on the bottom left of my page from YourMinis. It's useful information, I could pick the color I wanted it to be, and it looks good. The only problem is that it's a little too long for the sidebar on my blog, so you can't see the weather for that last day of the 5-day forecast, and you also can't access the editing tools for the widget. But, it's okay. If only there was some way to combine the two widget pages, so that there was the variety of YourMinis with the polished look and adaptability of SpringWidgets.
Copyright is a huge issue right now with the internet. I know I used to get a lot of articles ILLed in college when the full text wasn't available online for use in writing papers, so I'm familiar with the librarian copywright scenarios. But with music? Even with the handy example guidelines in the course links, it seems like in some circumstances, there's still a lot of gray area to be considered. When is it okay? Better not to chance it, I guess. But that doesn't stop some of our patrons who check out 30 CDs and return them the next day. You know what they're doing (and maybe even do it yourself). We trespass people for doing it on library computers, but no one can control what you do from home except yourself (and possibly the RIAA police). But that's where DRM comes in, saving you from the trouble of controlling yourself. In some cases, it's better to be too safe (and not even be able to listen to music purchased) than not safe enough (and have yor music poached online) according to big music labels. But Steve Job's open letter exposes some cracks in the veneer, such as DRM only being required on digital music, but not CDs. When it's just as easy to circumvent the whole process by copying a CD instead of buying albums online, why attempt to control one so much more strictly than the other? With Europe being (apparently) the most affected in terms of not even being able to access purchased music, it's a little surprising that the clamor for attention to this hypocrisy hasn't already led to DRM's demise. I understand that there needs to be some kind of watchfulness by producers of content (I'm not quite ready to condone the open source free-for-all plan yet), but obviously DRM is not the way to go. There will always be someone ready to hack any system, but there's got to be some method of ensuring that artists don't go broke (though it seems like the labels are the ones bleeding them dry, not listeners who pirate) without making it so hard just to listen.
In terms of music recommendations, I didn't really like LivePlasma, which I had already looked at for a previous week. I like that it links to the artist's amazon listing, but the format is too busy looking for me, whereas Music-Map was much simpler and easier to see (even if the artists jiggle and overlap a little too much sometimes, making them hard to differentiate). Music-Map is part of GNOD , which has been linked on the "Children and Teens" section of our own website for a long time. My favorite, though, was UpTo11, which is easy to use, presents everything in a format that is colorful, detailed, and simple to understand. You can even set the ranking of artists recommended to you from popular to not-well-known, depending on how generic you want your results to be. I also really like Last.FM, whose radio function some of my friends use at work to get varied tunes all day. The music it played in conjunction with my preferences was all really cool, and over time, if I "love" or "reject" enough songs, it will be tailored even more specifically. I have not yet had the program sift through my music files at home, but I think that it would be equally good in that regard. One problem I had was that sometimes the music freezes for a few seconds (on some songs more than others, and I wonder if running the program on a better computer would fix the issue) before resuming, interrupting the flow. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to go back and look at the music it's played before. I understand not being able to play past songs again, but just a list would be nice, in case I spaced out and don't remember who was playing, or I would like to tag a previous song as one I liked a lot. I've been having some trouble activating my account with MyStrands, so I can't really say much about it, but it seems like a really neat, collaborative program. As a side note, I really liked staff member Emily's music a lot; it reminded me of Nellie McKay, such great piano and voice, maybe I'll hit her show at Infusion next week!
For the Adventure activity, I visited SpringWidgets, where I found widgets that looked good, but didn't offer much variety. On the other hand, YourMinis offered a lot of different varieties of widgets, but they didn't look as professional, or they made my blog run too slowly because they were so complicated to load. In the end, I settled on having the weather displayed on the bottom left of my page from YourMinis. It's useful information, I could pick the color I wanted it to be, and it looks good. The only problem is that it's a little too long for the sidebar on my blog, so you can't see the weather for that last day of the 5-day forecast, and you also can't access the editing tools for the widget. But, it's okay. If only there was some way to combine the two widget pages, so that there was the variety of YourMinis with the polished look and adaptability of SpringWidgets.
Monday, June 11, 2007
My pictures on Flickr
If anyone's interested, here are the pictures I took at Main for last week's eXplore activity. I had a lot of fun taking them!
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Week 8 of Learn 2.0
It must be neat to be such a long-time part of a community like Flickr. The people who were meeting for the first time in Hawaii knew each other from their pictures alone, and were so used to the pictures each took that they were even able to do a quiz based on them! Such a close group in cyberspace, it blows my mind the ways that people can find each other from other continents. I am now a member, and I was able to find some really neat pictures (is "The Shifted Librarian" on Flickr the same one who runs the blog, or just someone else who thought the name was cool? Anyway, they had some good OCLS pictures), but I'm not really a photo buff myself, I prefer to see what others take pictures of. It's going to be a little while before I can do the eXplore activity, since I have to wait for my boyfriend to get back from Atlanta so I can use his camera to take pictures at Main.
I had never heard of Creative Commons before, but I can definitely understand that something like it was necessary in this age of increasingly mobile people and ideas. When anyone can find your words and pictures online, it's important to protect them, even if it means just setting boundaries for the ways in which your ideas can be used and shared. And since the Creative Commons website makes it easy to tag and protect your files (the tutorial shows you step by step and it's a very streamlined process), there's no reason not to. Would you want someone else taking credit for your stuff?
I've really enjoyed this course, it's kind of disappointing that it's going to end soon. I look forward to every Tuesday! I haven't been doing this as part of a team, but I have helped several people. Whether it was helping to set up a blog, import a Meez, or add a link list to their Blogger account, I think that I have made a difference in some people's learning. As the weeks wear on, fewer and fewer people have asked for help, which I see as a very good thing! If you take the time to explore a little and experiment, the things that we've approached have not been too difficult. I hope that over the course of this Learn 2.0 voyage, people have become more comfortable and familiar with their own ability to figure things out. But just because we're able to do something on our own doesn't mean that we should be diconnected from those around us, as the Flickr group demonstrated. They didn't just talk to friends and neighbors, but people from all over the world! I hope that this will encourage others to get more involved with the internet and the various new things that are always being created and discovered.
My ProtoPage for the Adventure activity is kind of bland, but it was fun to tool around with it. The setup for the whole thing wasn't very intuitive, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to make it public, and the format isn't exactly what I would want in a webpage, but it's still a cool idea. An easy way for people to create a space for themselves, with their own feeds and widgets that reflect them. Also, you can edit it without having to know any code and change everything around just by dragging it where you want it to be. I have to say, though, I can't figure out how to "tag it with OCLS," as the course page instructed. I looked at everything I thought could help and finally emailed the "feeback" page. If anyone else figures this out before I do, please feel free to share!
I had never heard of Creative Commons before, but I can definitely understand that something like it was necessary in this age of increasingly mobile people and ideas. When anyone can find your words and pictures online, it's important to protect them, even if it means just setting boundaries for the ways in which your ideas can be used and shared. And since the Creative Commons website makes it easy to tag and protect your files (the tutorial shows you step by step and it's a very streamlined process), there's no reason not to. Would you want someone else taking credit for your stuff?
I've really enjoyed this course, it's kind of disappointing that it's going to end soon. I look forward to every Tuesday! I haven't been doing this as part of a team, but I have helped several people. Whether it was helping to set up a blog, import a Meez, or add a link list to their Blogger account, I think that I have made a difference in some people's learning. As the weeks wear on, fewer and fewer people have asked for help, which I see as a very good thing! If you take the time to explore a little and experiment, the things that we've approached have not been too difficult. I hope that over the course of this Learn 2.0 voyage, people have become more comfortable and familiar with their own ability to figure things out. But just because we're able to do something on our own doesn't mean that we should be diconnected from those around us, as the Flickr group demonstrated. They didn't just talk to friends and neighbors, but people from all over the world! I hope that this will encourage others to get more involved with the internet and the various new things that are always being created and discovered.
My ProtoPage for the Adventure activity is kind of bland, but it was fun to tool around with it. The setup for the whole thing wasn't very intuitive, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to make it public, and the format isn't exactly what I would want in a webpage, but it's still a cool idea. An easy way for people to create a space for themselves, with their own feeds and widgets that reflect them. Also, you can edit it without having to know any code and change everything around just by dragging it where you want it to be. I have to say, though, I can't figure out how to "tag it with OCLS," as the course page instructed. I looked at everything I thought could help and finally emailed the "feeback" page. If anyone else figures this out before I do, please feel free to share!
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Week 7 of Learn 2.0
This was probably the least intensive week so far, or at least the one that grabbed me the least. That's not to say that the applications were any less interesting, just that they weren't things I could see myself using. For instance, even if I decided to pursue a more healthy lifestyle (and God knows it wouldn't hurt me), I don't think I would use Traineo. Mostly, it's the touted use of "motivators" that puts me off. If I wanted to do something, that's one thing. Then someone might mention, "hey, have you been doing something different recently? You look great!" and it would feel like an accomplishment. But with this system, your parents, friends, or whoever are vested in your success. Frankly, if someone asked me to be their motivator, I would feel put-upon and not want to help out, whereas if we were doing it together, it would be more of a team effort. I guess I just don't like the idea of everyone else knowing what I'm doing all the time. It would make me feel even worse if I didn't do very well, knowing that other people were getting updates and watching.
Dogster and Catster, on the other hand, seem much more fun (maybe even more rewarding?). I don't have any pets at the moment, but I can definitely see how people who already treat their animals as children would relish the opportunity to create a webpage for their beloved little people. Blufr is a lot of fun, a neat timewaster and way to collect trivia. As for Chug'd and BottleTalk, I'm just not very interested. Not being a drinker myself, it's hard for me to see the appeal, but I can understand how people who make their own drinks or appreciate the artistic sensibility inherent to wine tasting would find it useful. Even people who are new to alcohol would be able to view drinks tagged by other users and try new things based on reviews and "recommended if you like" functions. I liked YouPlay, but it didn't seem that much different from PopCap, the main difference being the specific games offered.
The adventure activity was kind of a disappointment, since my favorite hobby is reading, and we've already looked at so many awesome book related widgets and applications. Instead, I took this opportunity to go back and revisit the library-related web 2.0 applications that we've already looked at, to go more in-depth. I've added books to my virtual libraries and gotten many books UnSuggested to me since then!
Dogster and Catster, on the other hand, seem much more fun (maybe even more rewarding?). I don't have any pets at the moment, but I can definitely see how people who already treat their animals as children would relish the opportunity to create a webpage for their beloved little people. Blufr is a lot of fun, a neat timewaster and way to collect trivia. As for Chug'd and BottleTalk, I'm just not very interested. Not being a drinker myself, it's hard for me to see the appeal, but I can understand how people who make their own drinks or appreciate the artistic sensibility inherent to wine tasting would find it useful. Even people who are new to alcohol would be able to view drinks tagged by other users and try new things based on reviews and "recommended if you like" functions. I liked YouPlay, but it didn't seem that much different from PopCap, the main difference being the specific games offered.
The adventure activity was kind of a disappointment, since my favorite hobby is reading, and we've already looked at so many awesome book related widgets and applications. Instead, I took this opportunity to go back and revisit the library-related web 2.0 applications that we've already looked at, to go more in-depth. I've added books to my virtual libraries and gotten many books UnSuggested to me since then!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Week 6 of Learn 2.0
I liked the video for this week, New Jersey obviously has a devoted library following! I have to say, though, most of the people seemed to like that the library was so quiet, something that I'm not sure we can lay claim to. Between music playing outside and in, constant programs, daily children, and no outright cellphone bans, we're probably not the quietest place to be. But just because we're not "shushing" people like the stereotypical librarians of old doesn't mean that we let the noise get out of hand. People who are alive make noise, and we understand that the normal sounds of humanity cannot be quelled. We're just not above warning and trespassing people who break the limit of acceptable noise levels. Also, rooms can be rented out for the specific purposes of quiet study, if that's what you need.
As someone who is buying a house on soon myself, I can say that PropSmart would have been a useful resource in finding a new home. Instead of dealing with classifieds (in which you often have to call a realtor and give them the number of the listing just to learn the address), driving around neighborhoods looking for good prices, or going through a realtor (and spending days driving around looking at their listings), you can just see a quick comparison of houses in the same place, price quotes, even pictures for a lot of them. All of the contact information is easy to access, and being able to see from the satellite images the size of the backyard, closeness to major highways, and width of roads in the neighborhood is a major plus. The other mashups were also very interesting, I particularly loved MotorMapUSA, which showed me that my ideal 1957 Chevy Bel-Air is for sale right here in Orlando! Now, if I could only get together $12,000... ::sigh:: In Wikimapia I added some tags for my hometown of Panama City. I like the idea of everything being tagged, so that you can not only look from above (as you already could with Google Earth), but if you're having trouble finding, say, your house, you can look at tags from around the area and be able to tell which little dot of roof is which. The site is easy to use, and it's easy to add tags, too (although I had considerable trouble using the "polygon" option, to narrow my tagged space from a big square to a more realistic outline of the location).
I had already looked at LibraryThing in a previous week, but it's still a great way to organize your library (I actually think it seems a little more polished than Shelfari, although that's also a good resource). What Should I Read Next? is cool, but you can get the same idea from suggesters on LibraryThing, Amazon, and many others, it doesn't seem worth it to have a whole site devoted just to that. I'm actually really excited about BookMooch. It's the perfect way for me to unload some of the books that I have, but am never going to read again. I mean, I would never throw books away, and donating has some intrinsic value, but giving it to someone who actually WANTS it is so much better! And to be able to get books I want from other people without having to buy them is also great. The "points" system (basically, you have to give away at least 1 book to have enough points to get 5 sent to you) is a neat way to keep people from hoarding and never giving anything back! I definitely think that I will become a part of the collective trading back and forth. I also signed up for a LibraryElf account, because although I don't really need to get any extra email reminders, I wanted to see how it works. It seems like it would be (I'm sorry to say) a little more reliable than our own email system (or, you can even have reminders RSSed or texted to you, especially good for parents and children, since you can track multiple accounts from one website). Also, the benefits of having your holds listed out (and when they expire) are immeasurable. I wonder if it would be kosher to recommend this system to patrons?
GuruLib is probably the site that I'm most excited about seeing this week. You can catalog your whole library (like in LibraryThing or Shelfari) electronically, but with the added bonus of keeping track of books you've loaned to people, keeping a virtual version of your shelf arranged as you have it, and also being able to keep track of your music, movies, games, and software. There are also other other cool aspects, like having the website automatically track prices on books on your wishlist, so you can buy them when they get to your ideal price. It seems easier to find items to add to your shelf, because there are so many ways to do it (a scanner or webcam of the UPC, the ISBN, or even just searching by title and author). Admittedly, I'm a little disappointed that it said I couldn't add anything to my shelf for about a day after I'd created an account, but I'm willing to wait for something like this. I often surprise myself by finding something on my shelf I didn't even know I had, but now I can keep track of it all from any computer! As soon as I can, I'm going to start tagging stuff.
I also visited Del.icio.us and PopURLs for the Adventure activity. Both of these were easy to view. I signed up for a del.icio.us account (my boyfriend has one and loves it). Haven't there been times when you were away from home and wanted to check a webcomic you usually read, or just visit a cool website that you have in your "favorites" folder on your own computer? Now you can keep a virtual list of these links (where other people can see them, too) and be able to do these things from anywhere. PopURLs keeps track of popular hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit, other user-generated link websites. This way, it's easy to keep ahead of the news and trends, because these articles and links have already been noted as interesting to so many other people. There's no need to search through the front page of any of the sites individually to look for cool stuff (although each page also has it's own "highlights" or "popular" sections, this way they're all put in one place so you can search them at one time). It's like having del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit all on your Bloglines, but without having it update every single time something new gets added, just telling you about the good stuff. Come to think of it, you can add popURLs to your Bloglines, and keep track of them that way, too!
As someone who is buying a house on soon myself, I can say that PropSmart would have been a useful resource in finding a new home. Instead of dealing with classifieds (in which you often have to call a realtor and give them the number of the listing just to learn the address), driving around neighborhoods looking for good prices, or going through a realtor (and spending days driving around looking at their listings), you can just see a quick comparison of houses in the same place, price quotes, even pictures for a lot of them. All of the contact information is easy to access, and being able to see from the satellite images the size of the backyard, closeness to major highways, and width of roads in the neighborhood is a major plus. The other mashups were also very interesting, I particularly loved MotorMapUSA, which showed me that my ideal 1957 Chevy Bel-Air is for sale right here in Orlando! Now, if I could only get together $12,000... ::sigh:: In Wikimapia I added some tags for my hometown of Panama City. I like the idea of everything being tagged, so that you can not only look from above (as you already could with Google Earth), but if you're having trouble finding, say, your house, you can look at tags from around the area and be able to tell which little dot of roof is which. The site is easy to use, and it's easy to add tags, too (although I had considerable trouble using the "polygon" option, to narrow my tagged space from a big square to a more realistic outline of the location).
I had already looked at LibraryThing in a previous week, but it's still a great way to organize your library (I actually think it seems a little more polished than Shelfari, although that's also a good resource). What Should I Read Next? is cool, but you can get the same idea from suggesters on LibraryThing, Amazon, and many others, it doesn't seem worth it to have a whole site devoted just to that. I'm actually really excited about BookMooch. It's the perfect way for me to unload some of the books that I have, but am never going to read again. I mean, I would never throw books away, and donating has some intrinsic value, but giving it to someone who actually WANTS it is so much better! And to be able to get books I want from other people without having to buy them is also great. The "points" system (basically, you have to give away at least 1 book to have enough points to get 5 sent to you) is a neat way to keep people from hoarding and never giving anything back! I definitely think that I will become a part of the collective trading back and forth. I also signed up for a LibraryElf account, because although I don't really need to get any extra email reminders, I wanted to see how it works. It seems like it would be (I'm sorry to say) a little more reliable than our own email system (or, you can even have reminders RSSed or texted to you, especially good for parents and children, since you can track multiple accounts from one website). Also, the benefits of having your holds listed out (and when they expire) are immeasurable. I wonder if it would be kosher to recommend this system to patrons?
GuruLib is probably the site that I'm most excited about seeing this week. You can catalog your whole library (like in LibraryThing or Shelfari) electronically, but with the added bonus of keeping track of books you've loaned to people, keeping a virtual version of your shelf arranged as you have it, and also being able to keep track of your music, movies, games, and software. There are also other other cool aspects, like having the website automatically track prices on books on your wishlist, so you can buy them when they get to your ideal price. It seems easier to find items to add to your shelf, because there are so many ways to do it (a scanner or webcam of the UPC, the ISBN, or even just searching by title and author). Admittedly, I'm a little disappointed that it said I couldn't add anything to my shelf for about a day after I'd created an account, but I'm willing to wait for something like this. I often surprise myself by finding something on my shelf I didn't even know I had, but now I can keep track of it all from any computer! As soon as I can, I'm going to start tagging stuff.
I also visited Del.icio.us and PopURLs for the Adventure activity. Both of these were easy to view. I signed up for a del.icio.us account (my boyfriend has one and loves it). Haven't there been times when you were away from home and wanted to check a webcomic you usually read, or just visit a cool website that you have in your "favorites" folder on your own computer? Now you can keep a virtual list of these links (where other people can see them, too) and be able to do these things from anywhere. PopURLs keeps track of popular hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit, other user-generated link websites. This way, it's easy to keep ahead of the news and trends, because these articles and links have already been noted as interesting to so many other people. There's no need to search through the front page of any of the sites individually to look for cool stuff (although each page also has it's own "highlights" or "popular" sections, this way they're all put in one place so you can search them at one time). It's like having del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit all on your Bloglines, but without having it update every single time something new gets added, just telling you about the good stuff. Come to think of it, you can add popURLs to your Bloglines, and keep track of them that way, too!
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Of Meez and Miis
As you can see from the upper left corner of my blog, I now have a Meez. She's kind of boring at the moment, I couldn't really find any realistic animations that looked good. Also, I'm surprised at how dull my Meez looks in comparison to some of my coworkers'. There are bald ones, disco dancing ones, ones who live in exotic locales, etc, and mine just looks as close to me as I could approximate, standing in (what else?) a library.
I wish that you could be more detailed with your Meez. If I could make her look closer to my actual weight range, I would. Some people were suprised I even put glasses on my little avatar, thinking that I would take this opportunity to make it my perfect version of myself. But I like these little things, skull shoes and glasses, that make it seem more like me and less like an anonymous big-eyed caricature.
I think I prefer the Nintendo Wii avatars, the Miis. Miis can be customized a lot more, with features that can be raised, lowered, made bigger or smaller, to the point where you can make a grotesque figure (like Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars) or even a mysterious blank-faced one. Miis can be made tall, short, thin, or fat. Miis also have the advantage of being used as players in various Wii games, as well as being tradeable with other users. And, unlike Meez, Miis have some degree of AI autonomy, walking freely around your Mii plaza and interacting with each other in Sims-like ways.
I think that Meez would be better if they were much more customizable. And how cool would it be if the moods were utilized in a more perceptive way? Say, if you tagged the most recent entry in your blog with "amazed," and your Meez looked amazed? It would be more like a LiveJournal emoticon, which changes dynamically with the mood tags entered on posts. I just think it would liven up the corner of my blog if she had more personality, but I don't want her jumping up and down all the time, either. I just want a little AI to give her some interesting aspects.
I wish that you could be more detailed with your Meez. If I could make her look closer to my actual weight range, I would. Some people were suprised I even put glasses on my little avatar, thinking that I would take this opportunity to make it my perfect version of myself. But I like these little things, skull shoes and glasses, that make it seem more like me and less like an anonymous big-eyed caricature.
I think I prefer the Nintendo Wii avatars, the Miis. Miis can be customized a lot more, with features that can be raised, lowered, made bigger or smaller, to the point where you can make a grotesque figure (like Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars) or even a mysterious blank-faced one. Miis can be made tall, short, thin, or fat. Miis also have the advantage of being used as players in various Wii games, as well as being tradeable with other users. And, unlike Meez, Miis have some degree of AI autonomy, walking freely around your Mii plaza and interacting with each other in Sims-like ways.
I think that Meez would be better if they were much more customizable. And how cool would it be if the moods were utilized in a more perceptive way? Say, if you tagged the most recent entry in your blog with "amazed," and your Meez looked amazed? It would be more like a LiveJournal emoticon, which changes dynamically with the mood tags entered on posts. I just think it would liven up the corner of my blog if she had more personality, but I don't want her jumping up and down all the time, either. I just want a little AI to give her some interesting aspects.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Week 4 in Learn 2.0
I REALLY liked the video for this week, it's been mentioned on many sites and even got a recommendation in the most recent Wired magazine. As far as Web 2.0 goes, I've always been interested in finding new exciting things that are happening on the internet. I've told my friends about Yahoo Pipes and Grokker, and though I'm not sure how much I would necessarily recommend either one, they are examples of the direction that the internet is going, and I think that it's a great direction to head in. This course is a good way to be introduced to developing trends and sites, while having the added advantage of a built-in group of users also experiencing the same things and being able to talk about them.
I appreciate that OCLS is staying ahead of the curve. The Teen Myspace has a lot of loyal readers, teens who are genuinely interested in the activities that the library can provide. These teens are more likely to become library volunteers and help plan future events, as well as participating. In the future, they are more likely to recommend the library to their friends, and to use it for research and pleasure reading. Of course, it also helps that we cater so well to their reading choices, offering manga and graphic novels. As they say, you've got to hook 'em young! The OCLS YouTubes are a little more adult, aimed more towards showing patrons what we do here (Music in the Library, parade presence, art, gaming, and conventions). People who can see what the values of OCLS are and the cultural standpoint of our system will be encouraged to bring their children and themselves to experience it in person. We have so much to offer here, it's great that we're trying to get the message out. So many more people would become regular patrons if they knew just how much they could do.
SEOmoz was fascinating. I checked out award winners in the Book category and was definitely not disappointed. LibraryThing is like Shelfari, but loads faster and seems like a lot more fun. I LOVED their UnSuggester! CoverPop was also very cool; interested users create collages of covers in a certain theme (vintage pulp fiction, cookbooks, cereal boxes, etc), which you can hover over to get specific details and click on to be linked to the Amazon or Flickr page, whatever works with the subject matter. The items range from being collections of candy to recent pictures of color fields posted to Flickr, and are often even grouped artistically (into color bars or similar shapes, the one with cat toys even makes the face of Felix the Cat in the center!). I also checked out Liveplasma in the Mashups category. It seems a little difficult to understand, but useful in finding new artists or movies based on ones you already like. Out of the sites that I looked at, I still liked Coverpop the best for the sheer interest factor, but Librarything for usability.
I did the Adventure activity, and I'm glad that it was edited since yesterday! Yesterday I created 2 entries in ToEat for restaurants near the Main library, then realized that I had forgotten to tag them with OCLS. Since you can't look at entries for 24 hours while they are verified and put on the site, I made 2 new entries for 2 different restaurants, but couldn't figure out how to tag them with anything other than food categories. In the end, I simply wrote that they were "popular lunch destinations for OCLS staff" in the text box and just hoped that it would count. ToEat didn't seem very useful to me. Admittedly, being able to see restaurants on different streets and break them down by food category and whatnot was interesting, but barely any of the restaurants were reviewed, and there are snarky messages in the map view about errors viewing it in Windows. Something to the effect of "this would work fine if you were using a standards-compliant browser like Linux or Firefox..." All of my computer programming friends know that no matter which platform you prefer, it's always important to cross-test and make sure it will work for everyone. As another nitpicky aside, there is an option before posting a new restaurant to "go back and make changes" to the entry you created, but when you follow the link, none of your previous information is there. It's more of a "go back and write everything all over again." But if it were more easily viewed (all those little pictures of chefs with trays overlap and make it difficult to see which is which) and more user-friendly, it would be a great website.
I appreciate that OCLS is staying ahead of the curve. The Teen Myspace has a lot of loyal readers, teens who are genuinely interested in the activities that the library can provide. These teens are more likely to become library volunteers and help plan future events, as well as participating. In the future, they are more likely to recommend the library to their friends, and to use it for research and pleasure reading. Of course, it also helps that we cater so well to their reading choices, offering manga and graphic novels. As they say, you've got to hook 'em young! The OCLS YouTubes are a little more adult, aimed more towards showing patrons what we do here (Music in the Library, parade presence, art, gaming, and conventions). People who can see what the values of OCLS are and the cultural standpoint of our system will be encouraged to bring their children and themselves to experience it in person. We have so much to offer here, it's great that we're trying to get the message out. So many more people would become regular patrons if they knew just how much they could do.
SEOmoz was fascinating. I checked out award winners in the Book category and was definitely not disappointed. LibraryThing is like Shelfari, but loads faster and seems like a lot more fun. I LOVED their UnSuggester! CoverPop was also very cool; interested users create collages of covers in a certain theme (vintage pulp fiction, cookbooks, cereal boxes, etc), which you can hover over to get specific details and click on to be linked to the Amazon or Flickr page, whatever works with the subject matter. The items range from being collections of candy to recent pictures of color fields posted to Flickr, and are often even grouped artistically (into color bars or similar shapes, the one with cat toys even makes the face of Felix the Cat in the center!). I also checked out Liveplasma in the Mashups category. It seems a little difficult to understand, but useful in finding new artists or movies based on ones you already like. Out of the sites that I looked at, I still liked Coverpop the best for the sheer interest factor, but Librarything for usability.
I did the Adventure activity, and I'm glad that it was edited since yesterday! Yesterday I created 2 entries in ToEat for restaurants near the Main library, then realized that I had forgotten to tag them with OCLS. Since you can't look at entries for 24 hours while they are verified and put on the site, I made 2 new entries for 2 different restaurants, but couldn't figure out how to tag them with anything other than food categories. In the end, I simply wrote that they were "popular lunch destinations for OCLS staff" in the text box and just hoped that it would count. ToEat didn't seem very useful to me. Admittedly, being able to see restaurants on different streets and break them down by food category and whatnot was interesting, but barely any of the restaurants were reviewed, and there are snarky messages in the map view about errors viewing it in Windows. Something to the effect of "this would work fine if you were using a standards-compliant browser like Linux or Firefox..." All of my computer programming friends know that no matter which platform you prefer, it's always important to cross-test and make sure it will work for everyone. As another nitpicky aside, there is an option before posting a new restaurant to "go back and make changes" to the entry you created, but when you follow the link, none of your previous information is there. It's more of a "go back and write everything all over again." But if it were more easily viewed (all those little pictures of chefs with trays overlap and make it difficult to see which is which) and more user-friendly, it would be a great website.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Week 3 in Learn 2.0
I really like the Bloglines software. One of my favorite webcomics, Achewood, has separate blogs for just about every character. I love to read about the daily lives of the characters from their own points of view, as well as that of the artist. Now, I subscribe to all of their blogs via RSS, as well as some feeds that Bloglines picked based on my preferences, like New York Times book reviews. I even added some Epicurious daily recipe feeds linked from the Department Of Fun "Chocolate Chips" link on the course page, as well as the "Technology at OCLS" feed from the library.
As for Grokker, I can easily see how it will become a very useful website. Unfortunately, whether it's because of site issues or just simply still being a beta version, it was too interminably slow for me. The mapping of different categories was useful and easy to understand, just too slow and reliant on longer-loading images to be much use right now. I'm sure as it gets cleaned up, it will run much faster and more reliably, increasing the number of people who prefer its intuitive grouping of results.
The Adventure activity wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be. The tutorial has screenshots and accompanying description, so it was easy to follow. Admittedly, I didn't try to reinvent the wheel with my pipe (just had it aggregate the first 3 Achewood character blogs together in ascending date of publication), but just being able to look at top pipes that other people had created was instructional enough to explore the range of what can be done. I especially like the pipe that takes music from your last.fm account and finds videos for them on YouTube. Similarly, there was one that took the top 10 downloaded songs from ITunes and found videos on YouTube for them. Imagine being able to read Le Monde in English, as one pipe lets you, via a translator. The possibilities are endless and awesome.
As for Grokker, I can easily see how it will become a very useful website. Unfortunately, whether it's because of site issues or just simply still being a beta version, it was too interminably slow for me. The mapping of different categories was useful and easy to understand, just too slow and reliant on longer-loading images to be much use right now. I'm sure as it gets cleaned up, it will run much faster and more reliably, increasing the number of people who prefer its intuitive grouping of results.
The Adventure activity wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be. The tutorial has screenshots and accompanying description, so it was easy to follow. Admittedly, I didn't try to reinvent the wheel with my pipe (just had it aggregate the first 3 Achewood character blogs together in ascending date of publication), but just being able to look at top pipes that other people had created was instructional enough to explore the range of what can be done. I especially like the pipe that takes music from your last.fm account and finds videos for them on YouTube. Similarly, there was one that took the top 10 downloaded songs from ITunes and found videos on YouTube for them. Imagine being able to read Le Monde in English, as one pipe lets you, via a translator. The possibilities are endless and awesome.
Week 2 in Learn 2.0
As much as the "7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners" presentation slowed down my whole process in the Week 1 module (not that I can't see how useful it may be to others, but it just seemed really boring to me), the Adventure activity of this week really spurred my interest.
I really appreciate the blogs that OCLS already uses (especially the Orange Slices on the Orange Peel), and I would love to see us move into an even broader range of links (maybe even making something like Orange Slices available to the public). I feel as though our patrons would like to have access to things we are interested in, the ways in which current technology trends are being incorporated into our website, and so on. While the current public OCLS blogs are great for getting information about what our branches are doing and what the library system is doing as a whole, I would like to see us move in a more casual, "look what else is going on in the world of libraries" direction, too.
Through the Adventure activity, I found the Blatant Berry blog on Library Journal. His journal had an interesting article about the movement towards more and more library jobs being taken from degree holders by employers who move towards giving previously MLS job requirements to non-degree holders. Not having a degree myself, but planning to get one in the future, I find this debate very interesting. I also really liked the Librarian Avenger and the Shifted Librarian. In case you're interested, the Shifted Librarian has a neat link to Myxer involving library-related ringtones, as well as an article concerning a proposed bill to filter all library computers (even staff computers), with a $100-a-day fee for any noncompliance.
All in all, I found Week 2 to be very useful and interesting, and I have high hopes for future modules and the things I can learn from them.
I really appreciate the blogs that OCLS already uses (especially the Orange Slices on the Orange Peel), and I would love to see us move into an even broader range of links (maybe even making something like Orange Slices available to the public). I feel as though our patrons would like to have access to things we are interested in, the ways in which current technology trends are being incorporated into our website, and so on. While the current public OCLS blogs are great for getting information about what our branches are doing and what the library system is doing as a whole, I would like to see us move in a more casual, "look what else is going on in the world of libraries" direction, too.
Through the Adventure activity, I found the Blatant Berry blog on Library Journal. His journal had an interesting article about the movement towards more and more library jobs being taken from degree holders by employers who move towards giving previously MLS job requirements to non-degree holders. Not having a degree myself, but planning to get one in the future, I find this debate very interesting. I also really liked the Librarian Avenger and the Shifted Librarian. In case you're interested, the Shifted Librarian has a neat link to Myxer involving library-related ringtones, as well as an article concerning a proposed bill to filter all library computers (even staff computers), with a $100-a-day fee for any noncompliance.
All in all, I found Week 2 to be very useful and interesting, and I have high hopes for future modules and the things I can learn from them.
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