Week 7: #17 Blog About Technology

Technology - It is moving way to fast for me, although I really do like all the new features. Online banking, fast fill holds, online texts, email, faxing, photosharing, quick access to almost anything if you have a fast server and know what you are doing, the list is endless. I wish more sites would use the same "basics". It is hard to learn all the new programs. Maybe that will be one way libraries can be useful. They can direct users to user friendly sites.

I posted a comment on the "iStar, you Star, we all Star" blog. This person seems to think alot like me.

Week 6: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I added my blog to the hcpl wiki favorites. I then received numerous (understatement) emails from the wiki everytime someone did something to it. I have now chosen to "never" receive email notices. I did find some interesting sites on the wiki. I will definitely be coming back to this for further review.

Library Elf : My Experience

Twice this week at work I had customers mention how they had trouble keeping track of all their library card records. I work at a library where many customers have 2 separate county library cards and a college card. It they have kids they all have numerous cards and mom or dad have a devil of a time keeping up. Many have gone to insisting that the kids use only mom or dads card. Kids want to use there own card and get sad when they can't.

Library Elf to the rescue. I've been telling these customers about libraryelf and they are so thankful, excited and impressed with my knowledge.

I have found it very helpful myself.

Week 6: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I read all the perspectives and agree. We have to provide a service that customers want and need. If customers don't find what they want where and when they want it they will go elsewhere. Providing obsolete service will be the death of libraries and some company will provide the service and charge for it. The internet is definitely the way to go now and keeping up with technology is going to be the most important aspect for libraries.

Technology is changing so fast, it is hard for librarians to keep up with all the new sites and software and how to use them. The same goes for customers. We have to be aware of what is going on so we can direct customers and help them. Obviously we do not have to time train people on all these new changing ideas. We need to make our interfaces easy enough for customers to use on there own. Directing them to these sites, user friendly sites, will be our new job.

Libraries must expand both physically and virtually. They need to stay as advanced as there savvy users and make information available to the less savvy user. This won't be easy but is something to strive for. Embracing change and a willingness to try new ideas is probably the most important thing for individuals and library organizations.

Week 6 : # 14 Getting Not-so-technical about Technorati

When using the Key Word search of blogs in Technorati I got 10 times as many results compared to using tags or Blog Directory. I wouldn't want to have to go through almost 7000 results to see if any looked relevant. I would have to be pretty desperate to go through 684 results. The results in Tags and Blog Directory seemed to be close to the same thing. I imagine if you added a few more tags you could get even closer to what you want.

Popular Blogs in Technorati seemed to be high tech sites, music and video downloading sites and celebrities. I don't see myself using this much.

Halloween Smiley

Here is a smiley I found through an image generator found in "The Generator Blog".

Week 6 : #13 Tagging makes the web 2.0 world go round.

I subscribed to del.icio.us and was able to succesfully add the buttons onto my cubicle computer. This was not an easy task for me. I thought the best part of del.icio.us was that you could move from computer to computer and access your information, but we can't put the buttons on our "circ profile" computers. Is this something that may happen in the future? I can see the benefits of tagging and bookmarklets but you sure have to have a lot of time. I imagine once you take the time to learn a site it will become easier.

toondoo.com, Image Generator, found in del.icio.us

Week 5 : #12 The "Library" Elf will Remind You

This is a neat service. I was able to put all my and my children's HCPL, MCPL, and NHMCCD library cards on this to keep track of them in one place. It even lets you renew from here. I am experimenting with both email & RSS notifications to see which I like best.

Would be great for families and homeschoolers.

Something to tell our customer about!

Week 5 : #11 A Thing About LibraryThing

I have added 6 titles to my LibraryThing library. I learned to change cover designs and delete titles also.

Here is a link to my LibraryThing Library:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php

Here is my Standard LibraryThing Widget:



I tried all styles of widgets and they all come out with a vertical list of covers. I wanted horizontal and the preview showed horizontal, but it still shows vertical on this blog. Any suggestions? Vertical alignment is a real space waster.
Enjoy!

Week 5 : #10 Play Around With Image Generators

My "Sea Lion" creation, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

My "Sea Lion" creation

I went to FD Toys, went into my Flicker account from there, chose the picture I wanted, entered a thought blurb onto my picture, soooo... easy, and then uploaded straight to my blog.

I liked this image generator. I also liked the fact that my Flicker pictures came up all at once as opposed to my Flicker account which shows them one at a time. (Maybe I just don't know how to access them all at once in Flicker.) I did want to look at my picture in a larger format before choosing the text but did not find that option.

In case the link information of the image generator I was using (FD Flicker Toys) doesn't carry over, here it is:

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

I went into "Captioner".

Week 4 : #9 Finding Feeds

I had no trouble finding feeds in "Bloglines". Out of the other four I had the best luck with "Feedster". Technorati, Topix, and Syndic8 were more trouble than they were worth. I just don't have that much time.

I really have been enjoying the ease of Bloglines. Now, if I could just post from my blog from within bloglines! I always expect these things to do more than they can.

Week 4 : #8 Make life "really simple" with RSS and a news reader

Getting a bloglines account was very easy and I have enjoyed using it. I do tend to get carried away when looking at each site. On the tutorial it said that you could look at these sites without the ads, but I noticed that several sites have managed to get ads in anyway. It certainly cuts down on them though. I have added weather, jokes, comics, news, the iHCPL Learning Experience site, 3 coworkers blogs and my own blog.

It is to easy to use.

Week 3: #7 Photo Editing Tools : Original Picture

old mexican homestead, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

This is the original picture before any editing in "picnik".

Week 3: #7 Photo Editing Tools : Edited Picture

old mexican homestead, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

Here I have sharpened, cropped and color edited this picture in "picnik". I had absolutely no luck using "snipshot" or "pixer". "picnic" was fairly easy.

Week 3 : #7 Photo Editing Tools

This is my first attempt to change a photo to the grayscale. Obviously it didn't work, but you get to see the original picture of UNT's Homecoming Bonfire.

Flickr Photo Map

The following is the link to my flicker photo map:

http://www.flickr.com/map/?&user_id=14416900@N02&fLat=35.14371&fLon=-116.982421&zl=12

Good luck.

Week 3: #6 More Flickr Fun

Unless you have a lot of time to spend, many of these API’s and MashUp’s are for more capable computer users than me. I spenthours trying Trippermap and still couldn’t load it onto my blog. Flick’rs map was essentially the same thing.

As I was reading some of the top 10 Flickr mashups and wondering why I should spend so much time on these I came upon the perfect comment: “More of a time waster than anything else, Retrievr shows that programmers can do just about anything with the Flickr API”. This pretty much sums up my feelings on “These cool little tools”.

Yes!

Success, almost. I thought that the description on Flickr would show up on the blog (it appears when you are entering the post) but it didn't.

Sailing Adventure

Sailing Adventure, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

This is my second try at posting a picture onto my blog from flickr. My fingers are crossed.

Not There Yet!

If you looked at my blog yesterday you saw that my picture was retrievable but not the way it was supposed to be. I have printed out the "helps" and will try again.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Week 2 : #4 Online Safety

We have entered the new global community. Things are moving faster and faster and there is no going back. With one key click we can communicate with the world and it cannot be taken back. Just as you would take basic precautionary measures in the physical world, like locking doors, traveling in groups, or being aware of your surroundings, the same is true of the online world. I do feel that since the online world is so new and changing so fast we need to be even more careful of what we do online. Thankfully, alot of others are just as concerned and are making information available everywhere to help us have a safer experience on the internet. Avoiding the online world is not an option. We just need to keep up with online safety issues.