massive procrastination vs massive procreation

Now that learning two point ooooh! has finished i'm trying to get my life back. It's not working!!! I'm trying to create a nancy pearl template in zoho sheet where i add books i've read recently and which 'door' people might be attracted to them by. It's coming slowly.

I'm also downloading like crazy through del.icio.us which is yummy. I really like the idea of tags which allow you describe a website with many subject areas instead of just putting it into a folder, which seems so old fashioned nowadays! It's easier and quicker to search del.icio.us too.

I'm also playing with ning and comparing it to facebook and myspace. I've also done some dirt moving on digg which is a site where you can submit links to pages you like and you think others will find useful. A submission can be 'digged' or 'buried' - digg to like and bury to dislike. This then promotes or demotes the page from popularity. The browsing functions are ok but could be more intuitive. It's fun but I'm not sure how useful for libraries apart from discovering things you would never search for such as orangutan stories

#23 the end of life as we know it

Things will never be the same. I was unaware of how much 'work' would be involved in this blog. I also feel as though I have barely scraped the surface of some of the web 2.0 things.

I may have to be surgically removed from my computer.

I have to congratulate the designers of the program as it has been excellently put together. I probably would not have come across so much material by myself. My fellow bloggers have done some amazing work on their blogs - wow!

Favourite exercises:

• I'd never made a blog before so just signing up, posting and customising my layout etc was really helpful. It doesn't seem so weird when everyone around you is doing it.
• I'll be using rollyo more often to search for that special recipe
  
• I have uploaded my bookmarks to del.icio.us and have to go through and tag them - eeek
• I have some wikiplay to do with PBwiki or wetpaint
  

Unexpected outcomes

• I enjoyed it more than I thought I would
• My head did not explode
• I learnt heaps
• My computer didn't crash
• I like blogging - sort of
• I have a world of ideas that I would like to pursue
  

Improvements to the program

• Some sites were inaccessible from Boroondara computers - perhaps allowing participants to use these sites for a limited time might be a good idea.
• If more time were allowed to complete the program participants could go into more detail.
• Perhaps you should have to complete 18 out of 23. Not all of the features appealed to me and I know some people are bogged down with one particular exercise. Instead of it being a hoop to jump through perhaps they could just leave it and move on.

Here are more things I want to do

#22 ebrary audio books

Fantastic resource! I had a listen to The House of the Baskervilles which is quite good. There are not that many books here yet but the Gutenberg project is amazing and I hope that it continues. I notice there a lot more computer generated voiced books - I suppose this is much cheaper but it is quite unsettling. Human voice is better. A lot of the texts are English in origin and classics so it does have limited appeal. If Gutenbergians add some more contemporary material to the collection I think this would really have legs, so to speak

#21 (pod)casting my net into the world of audio

I wanted to find some book reviews of the books I have read recently but had a lot of trouble finding some. It might be because I use Firefox web browser at home but a lot of the podcasts I found from Podcast.net did not work and the search engine on the website doesn't seem very powerful. I also found the categories to browse by lacking in intuition and rationality.

However, this could be great addition to our new library 2.0 - people could add their own book reviews, we could post podcasts that give people general information about the library or help them navigate their way through the databases or library catalogue. Some people relate better to sound while others prefer to read. With podcasts you can casts the net wide and catch them both.

#20 you tube, i tube, we all tube together!

I love youtube - I've spent many an hour wasting my life away on this site. I enjoy watching crazy cats, my favourite Swedish pop artists, George Bush and bad dancing.

But how could our public library use this tool?

• create videos about how to find things in the library
• create videos showing staff talking about new or their favourite books, dvds, music cds
• video staff booktalks
• or just plain marketing - but hopefully a little cooler than this:
  

and here's my favourite at the moment. Take note there will be a test!

#19 web 2.0 awards

Some people out there are very creative/bored and have a lot of time on their hands. I celebrate them!

I was a bit excited by Yelp but it's only about the US. I think I might also have to use Cocktail Builder one of these hot days! You can enter the kind of alcohol you want to use and it brings up a list of cocktails you can make along with the extra ingredients you need. I'd better get to work on those!

I played the Guess the google image game but it's too easy and you'll get bored quickly. The free wiki sites such as wetpaint and PB might be interesting and need further exploring. I played with 43 things where you add things you want to do win life - and it feels more like one billion things but it's cute. Listdump is for the true obsessive where you make lists of things and share them with others, you can also add things to other people's lists. I also have a Lastfm account which I find quite interesting. You search for a musician or band and it returns with other bands/artists you might also like. It's a bit hit and miss as the retrieval tool is based on what other people have listened to and enjoyed. It steps outside the regular genre demarcations and links artists in a completely different way. Beware though - it's a bandwidth hog!

#18 Woohoo for Zoho!

No more G drive!
And here's my chance to play with a wiki. The only problem I am having is that is it quite slow. Things look similar to Microsoft packages so I guess it's fairly easy to move between different applications. I also created a wiki but it feels a bit clunky and I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I think that these applications are great for resource sharing against distance. Its' very similar to our G drive except that it could be accessible from places via internet not the network. Which means it is accessible from home - handy if you have forgotten which shift you are on! Things are changing so rapidly that I feel as we will need to be importing/transferring documents more often to the new packages that want to use and leave behind the old (microsoft) ones that become outdated. I think we are going to spend a lot more time in front of the computer moving things around - I hope we still have time to actually do some work and play.

I'm in the process of creating some word documents of chutney recipes for some friends of mine that get to together and make huge batches of things - it's really hard to keep a track of who's bringing what through email.

The cheesecake recipes below were added from Zoho.

Cheesecake

Cheesecakes

toblerone cheesecake

1 cup plain chocolate biscuit crumbs
¼ cup almond meal
80g butter, melted

500g block PHILADELPHIA* Cream Cheese, cubed and softened
½ cup caster sugar
200g TOBLERONE* Milk or Dark Chocolate, melted
½ cup thickened cream
200g TOBLERONE* Milk or Dark Chocolate, shaved, to serve

1. COMBINE crumbs, almond meal and butter, then press into the base of a greased 22cm springform pan. Chill.

2. BEAT Philly* and sugar until smooth. Add melted Toblerone* and cream and continue beating until well combined.

3. POUR into the prepared base and chill for 2 to 3 hours until set. Serve topped with the Toblerone* shavings.

white chocolate cheesecake flan

base

1/1/2 cups (150g) plain sweet biscuit crumbs

¼ cup packaged ground almonds

90g butter, melted

¼ cup raspberry jam

filling

250g packet cream cheese softened

250 neufchatel cream cheese

3 eggs

125 white melts, melted

1/3 cup castor sugar

2 ½ tbsl plain flour

1 tspn vanilla essence

¼ tsp almond essence

topping

1/3 cup cream

180g white chocolate, grated.

combine biscuits, almonds and butter in a bowl and mix well. press mixture into a 23cm flan tin. bake in a moderate oven for 10 mins until lightly browned.

filling

beat cream cheese in a bowl with an electric beater until smooth, add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one. add cooled chocolate and beat until combined. add sugar, sifted flour and essences and beat till combined.

pour filling into crust and bake for a further 30 mins or until filling is firm to th touch. cool. then refrigderate.

for topping

heat cream in a small pan until just boiling, remove from heat, add chocolate and whisk till smooth, cool.

pour topping over flan, refrigerate 1 hour. then starting at the centre pipe or drizzle lines of sieved warm jam over the top of the flan and pull a skewere through the jam to create a feather effect. refrigerate for several hours and then add berries and cream.

#17 Sandboxes

I added my blog but now I'm getting lots of emails whenever the pages are edited! Agh! And why is it a sandbox? My childhood memories of sandboxes are tainted by always having cats!!!

I added a favourite wine. I have to admit this didn't excite me very much. Playing favourites has limited scope for me but for our library we could use this to play favourite books, dvds, cd, talking books, websites, etc.

I think you really have to create a wiki and play around to get a proper feel for this. I'm sure it's got potential - i just don't know what that is right now!

# 16 Wikier pussycat, kill kill!

A Ref Desk E manual - fantastic - except for when the computers are down and really, are our computers fast enough? I'm sure you've all noticed that doing 2.0 stuff is slow at work.

I do like the wiki sites on St. Joseph County Public Library cooking page. I like how it links to cookbooks, magazines, cooking careers websites, staff comments, recipes and upcoming events such as the farmer's market! What a great idea. It allows for a more dynamic representation of the resources available to people. If you like cooking you might also like farmer's markets. I wonder if this is more meaningful/helpful for people than our beloved LC subject headings?

However, how do you deal with the hard stuff? Like creationism vs Darwinism and science, or the presence and marketing of LOTE material when some people disagree with this service. How do you manage different opinions within your wiki without being biased in some way? This will be a challenge.

Another thing is that you start to duplicate your information. So all that information is accessible somewhere in the catalogue, the website, a directory, your blog and/or facebook profile. Perhaps this is a good thing because some people favour one particular 2.0 tool in particular. (For example, i have been addicted to facebook and if you're not on there well i just don't know you anymore!)

I like it...I want one!!!

#15 The 2.0 Library through my crystal ball

Collecting books is our bread and butter - imagine the complaints if we didn't! I don't think that our circulation rates our dropping - if a Balwyn 10am desk is anything to go by. Hybrid libraries are going to become better at balancing online and print formats in the future.

I like the idea of taking the library to the user. In fact, I think that delivering meaningful resources to people online, educating people about online resources and helping them deal with information overload should be important goals.

Web 2.0 is different because it allows interaction between users and other users, companies, organisations. It moves users into a more active role in their information seeking or receiving. It also connects people with each other. Many 2.0 tools have a social element to them, you share, compare, give, receive, edit, comment, respond, chat....instead of just reading, listening, watching. We don't just teach the machine, we teach each other. This could have a democratising effect. Libraries should jump at these opportunities.

All this is pretty nerdy so I apologise. I think we should also have fun...this exercise has been good for encouraging us to think outside the library box and play with emerging technologies and hopefully fit them into library services. Gone are the days of shushing librarians guarding their stacks viciously. Perhaps library 2.0 means opening up the traditional library to technology and users. This might also increase connection and collaboration between libraries that are geographically remote from each other. Allowing tags instead of subject headings might help be relevant to the Google generation too. I also respect Michael Stephens idea of controlling technolusts, after all we're librarians, not geeks!

Here are some other things we could do:

• allow users to tag our collection or websites and create clouds for easy access to subject areas,

• allows users to write their own reviews - hey, we already do this, yay us!!!

• youtube video instructions on how to find books or staff talking about their favourite books

• have a facebook presence and make lots of new friends

• federated searching of catalogue, websites, database records

all of this is great of course, we can web2.0 ourselves to craziness but i know there's almost nothing better than curling up in bed on a rainy day with a great book (digital or print?)

#14 getting technocractic

Technorati Profile
I've done it...am I famous yet? I wish I had something interesting to say.....There are many many blogs out there - a bit scary really. Unfortunately, most of the ones I found were on the boring side.

When the library blog goes live we definately need to do this to give us a strong web presence.

#13 Yum Yum Del.icio.us fun!

Library journal 15/09/2007 had an article about libraries and tagging which was really interesting. Click here to read it. Some libraries
Thunder Bay Public Library
Nashville Public Library
have already created clouds on their websites and also allow their users to tag books similar to how librarians add subject headings. There's obviously no authority control (which some librarians will hate!) but that doesn't mean they can't be organised or bundled into groups even corresponding to the Dewey Decimal System.
I like the cloud of tags - representing subject areas visually might help people browse better. I think the best thing about del.icio.us is probably the social element where you can infiltrate other people's search results and jump through the internet quicker than searching with a traditional (boring) search engine!

#12 Rollyo

Rolling along, all together now!!!!
I LOVE this. I have lots of websites that I regularly search for all sorts of things and now I don't have to leap over all over the web. I could be fantastic for librarians help people find out about their favourite authors or new and interesting books they might like to read. Alternatively, we could throw global books in prints together with fantastic fiction and other sites to create a more efficient method of searching for bibliographic information!

I need to know more about this -
What does it search - does it search within hyperlinks and perhaps advertising as well?
It searches advertising but it delivers these in a blue box - like google, so you know what you're dealing with.

Can it search PDF or is it only webdriven.

Can it search other search engines or search engines within websites? Yes, it does! Wow, I have been wasting my time searching so many different sites

And if I add more sites to my rollyo does this automatically change once I have committed it to my blog? Yes, it does! It seems to update immediately.

agh, so many questions, such little blogtime.

#11 Library thing

It's ma thang!
I love Library thing! Yep, it makes me feel special and not completely weird (or high-brow) about the books I read because others read them two! And you can see how pretty your books look on a shelf.
I wonder if we like the same books???

#6 and #10 mashing image generators

I decided to co-blog these as they are so similar.

I"m on a rock star, didn't you know? I play a mean avocado!

Information retrieval by colour is a fantastic idea Colr Pickr or Osokope visual search or retrievr where you need to draw what you want to find. The borrowers that ask for a book only knowing that the cover is blue this is for them! Imagine if we intergrate this into our OPAC - not sure if Spydus is quite at this stage yet. Browsing through the Visual Search Labs could be helpful for that project where you're not quite sure what you need. I love some of the ways that disparate images are connected only through their colour

The library could use photos taken from an event and load them on flickr and then mash them up to help describe the event or people who attended.

I created a librarian's trading card as an interesting social networking exercise and I am hoping to use this to connect with other librarians online - imagine what could happen! It's good to know I'm in such good-looking company!

LOLcats mashups - I can't think of a serious use for this except serious procrastination! i can't get enough.

I"m afraid this didn't excite me all that much but I did make really cool stars with Snowflaking - but I can't load them here - but check it...it's cool, like a snowflake. I did try and break the application though. I get bored easily and so I thought I should test out the application to see where the faults lie. Yep, horrible I know. But you can make ugly stars that look like they've been stepped on.

I"m on the front cover of rolling stone magazine this month - I'm splicing an avocado not playing a guitar.

# 9 newsfeeds

What a great information sharing tool. So great, in fact, that it is overwhelming.

I hope that Newsfeeds have a massive impact for customer service in libraries for our savvy users. It might also help us connect with users that don't visit the library or the reference desk and hopefully non-users as well. I suppose we already do a kind of RSS by allowing borrowers to set up profiles which send them an email when new resources are added to the catalogue that match their search terms. When the library blog goes live to the public I hope there are some keen borrowers out there that RSS is to capture our latest ramblings. We should make it worth their while by marketing services, reviewing new resources, connecting them to other web 2.0 features and promoting literacy education.

I have some favourite cooking websites that I feed into through MyYahoo to receive the most recently uploaded recipes. This means that I don't need to go to the websites every few days to check out what's new. Sometimes you can't even find out what is just been added as the web designers don't have an option for it. I can take a quick look at the recipe titles and decide whether to go further or not. It can really be used to save time searching, hunting, mining and then doing it all over again next week!

Feedstar is under construction so i couldn't check it out but i had a peek at topix. It's quite commercial but I could still spend all day there - I learned some useless things - like a cow recently gave birth to quadriplets in China and a one-house town in Italy was sold on E-Bay. Yep, changed my life that stuff did.

# 8 RSS - moving away from email

I find bloglines a little difficult to navigate. There are a lot of bells and whistles. I suppose that once you have it all set up it makes things easier but there's a bit of work to be done initially. The other thing is that all the formatting is stipped away if you display the blog in the bloglines screen. I suppose that's ok if you only want text.

I'm not so interested in RSSing blogs.

I was thinking that people seem to be moving away from using email. We use social networking tools to keep in touch, we use bloglines or something similar to keep informed. Just last year I probably would have used email alert services whereas now I use RSS. Sometimes things are invented and their usage is not anticipated or they end up being used completely differently from what they were intended to be used as.

I also feel like I'm spending too much time in front of the computer and RSS doesn't help!

#7 Technology - intersect me!

I misread the instructions for this week. I thought I had to add a blog about technology that intersects me, not interests me. hmmm....technology that intersects me could have been an easier topic too!!

what really interests me at the moment is whether natural language searching will ever be sophisticated and reliable enough to replace controlled vocabularies. Pretty nerdy, hey? Stick with me though...

Geeks around the world are currently working on programming computers to construct meaningful subject headings, keywords, terms that describe text as well as humans could. Sounds futuristic? Well, yes it was in the sixties when this all began. Sound scary? Well, why not have machines do the grunt work and let the librarians advance to a higher level of duty.

So instead of humans adding say, terms from a thesaurus, to a full text record in a database a computer program will 'read' a journal article and apply terms to it that it 'thinks' are descriptive of the important concepts covered.

When the database is searched, the user inputs in their search terms in natural language! the computer (or possibly cylons by then) interprets the natural language, searches the database for terms that match and feeds them back to the user. it's like google, only better, more accurate, more ontologically sound, you know.

This way people don't need to remember subject headings, thesaurus terms, synyonyms, homographs, etc.

Is that technological enough for you? yeah, web2.0 is fun and all but it still feels like play not work. i'm still waiting for the day that google goes live with intelligence.

Flickr #5 roostering away

cock
Originally uploaded by pozzle

This is a rooster I met at Hanging Rock winery. It was very obnoxious, which is what you really need in a rooster. It came right into the tasting room and stood there as though demanding its glass of Reisling (it's a well known fact that rooster hate Chardonnay, they have quite good palates).

Anyway, eventually the owner told Mr Rooster he should leave and set the blue heeler onto him. Mr Bluey edged cautiously toward Mr Rooster and there looked like there was going to be a fight. But luckily Mr Rooster plipp plopped off (in that chicken way) to ber-gerk at his hens.

what did you have for lunch?

Contrary to some recently published books I do care what you had for lunch. And don't just say sandwiches. I want details, people! what kind of bread, what filling? oh, why didn't I think of that.

because the universe hath bestowed allergies/intolerances upon me i can't eat regular lunches and i am so jealous of the regular sandwich eaters.

i have salads, nuts, mexican (more on that problem later), cheese (is that really a meal i hear you ask?...answers yes BTW) or fish.

and you lucky geezers pop out your multigrain-breaded sangers with all sorts of goodness squished in between. it nearly makes me insane!

now the problem with mexican is that i just can't get enough. i don't think my mother would agree that something with chips in it is really a dinner (or breakfast or lunch for THAT matter). however, it's the whole package, possums, that i love. the crunchiness, the cheeseyness, the guacamole, salsa, beans (frijoles for those taking advanced mexican). i think one day someone will invent one of those weird lollies that will taste just like nachos. pop it in your mouth and you'll have the multilayered mesmerising mexican magnificance. oh i can hardly wait for that day.

there are two kinds of people....

i'm a cat person, let's get that straight from the beginning. i tried to like dogs by tolerating
my friend's new puppy. damn thing ripped a whole in my skirt, yep, favourite skirt. in trying
to be a nice guest at her dinner party i felt set upon by her dog. the smelly thing (dog) kept
jumping up on me, trying to scratch my stockings (on purpose i'm sure), bumping into me so
rudely, and getting stood on when i couldn't possible move in any other direction and then
yelping so loudly that everyone thought i was a bully.

damn muttified drama queenie, attention seeker!

so, despite the scratches, bite marks, cat hair on clothes i am and will probably always be
a cat person. i am currently sporting a scratch on my NOSE, yes NOSE, that my feline freaky
funster thought would suit me.


if you are happy with my decision, we can move on together. otherwise, depart here dog lovers!