#42 googling together

I'm trying to get over the fact that Googlegroups reminds me of bulletin boards and ye olde worlde usenet (yes, I AM that old)! It isn't very user friendly, its layout is archaic and soc.library seems to be for people in Boston. I think that our Ning sites are much better for handling this kind of internet activity. Even a wiki could handle this kind of data. Posts are organised much better through a Ning, functionality is higher and well, it just looks better. We have all this wizbangery with the internet! Let's use it, people!

I did a search for cooking in googlegroups which returned lots of hits. I checked out rec.food.cooking which has a lot of activity. I think it's a good idea - though you have to be deeply passionate and deeply active to get the most out of this kind of web tool. Perhaps they don't need wizbangery??? I'm surprised that anyone posting here has anytime to cook! I want to know whether you search this stuff through google. Because if I"m interested in 'siliconed poached egg cups' for eg and want to know if people find them useful then searching google groups might be useful. But no, it seems the search doesn't infiltrate that deep.

Personally, I think that googlegroups resurrected the dodo without thinking what point there might be in doing such a thing!

#41 LiveMocha

LiveMocha is great! I can now say 'I'm a short fat man' in Japanese. I'm sure that will come in handy one day. I'm not sure about the social element - seems like a bit too much pressure to me. I chose Japanese which is hard to learn the characters and pronunciation and grammar! I suppose if you were serious you could get a lot out of it. It's a shame that you can't move through the language cards apart from sequentially and you have to follow the set course. But it's a fun way to learn a language!

#40 retro

Well, Retroland must be a good website - I wasted a lot of time here. I fixed my retro-scope'o'meter to the eighties and went mad! It's quite comprehensive - although there are some massive misgivings such as the lack of Footloose!!! Bit of a worry.

But seriously, I wonder if this could be useful for school projects on certain eras? I was helping someone last week who wanted fashion inspired by 'disco' - this site would have been really good for her!

I also like how the site has a history down the right hand side of the pages you have looked at - that's handy - I wish more websites did that! I think this kind of site would benefit from people recommending additions to the entries. It is quite limited and very conventional and mainstream. But fun, all the same.

#39 splicing, dicing your videos

Anitmoto is cool. Well, at least the video I previewed was cool. Although the reason to sign up shouldn't be because Steven Seagal did - that nearly put me off! Unfortunately, the upload took too long - I have to resize all my images which is quite a lot of work. I'll try again when I have more time.

It's seems a bit like a flickr slideshow but with music. The added functionality of having images sculpted into a video is very cool. We could use it on our webpage for all kinds of instructions or as we currently use flickr over at ning - as a kind of glimpse of Boroondara library images and past events.

#38 everyone's a comedian

Except me. I found ToonDoo tiresome. It was a bit fidgety for me and I just couldn't think of a story. So, I get a 0 for creativity.

However, children's librarians might have fun attaching something to our website. I can see the potential, I'm just not the one to produce anything of worth here.

#37 Music to my ever downloading ears!

I love last.fm. However, my boyfriend/ISP has told me off on more than one occasion that I have to stop downloaded from this site as it is a download hog. That made me love it more but also made me relish it a bit more. I often research my favourite bands here and also find out about gigs that are coming up. It's good with international acts but not so good for local stuff.

What interests me here is the recommending function. You can love or hate songs and if you hate them you won't ever hear them again. It's basically like your own music station. The recommender function is based on what other people are doing. If someone listens to both Sufjan Stevens and Bright Eyes Last.fm makes a connection between these two and then delivers that to other users. So it's cool when you come across someone you like you can type them in and find other artists that are similar. Well, I guess they are similar in terms of other people's music collections. But most of us like a very wide range of music so this is very lateral.

#36 FotoFun

I used Picnik and had lots of fun here. It is slow but I guess it is doing quite a bit. I rejigged a photo taken on a camera phone late at night which was shocking and I made it kinda cool. I think these photo sites could come in handy in the library, helping people refine their photos. It would be nice if we could have a link to these sites from our library homepage, wouldn't it?

Meanwhile, splashup is quite sophisticated. I don't use photoshoppy type applications so I found it a bit overwhelming. In fact, I think I need to RTFM first.

With picnik I took this photo
and made it this photo:
Pretty exciting!
BTW - This is a lizard that lives in my garden. It has a big tail!

#35 I feel like a Twit!

I have been a-twittering before. It's cute. It could be used on our library ning - I'm sure some of us have facebooked it. Blogposting a tweet to our library blog could be a nice way of keeping in touch. Many of us never see each other very much so twittering lets people know what you're up to. I'm not sure if there are any other radical ideas I have for tweeting and our library.

#34 We are all getting fat in front of the computer!

I would consider these websites to be weight loss websites not better health websites. All health information is focused around losing weight not actual health. They are both American so foods don't necessary translate the same.

I found them both a little difficult to use and I would not find them actually useful in my daily activity planning. Perhaps if we spent more time actually exercising and less time sitting in front of the computer we might be healthier!???

There are lots of bits and pieces you can use and add. Nutriday gave me a headache - it seemed very complex and I got bored. If I had to use it I suppose it might help. But really, who is going to add all that information about what you do all day and what you eat? It's too overwhelming. Personally I think hints on how to lose weight, what exercises to do and what to eat might be more helpful. Nutriday has a bit of that.

#33 Art online

I have made sand fall (I particularly liked blowing stuff up) and I have flaked some snow. Both of which I used to procrastinate during my Library Degree. Somehow, now that I don't study I procrastinate less, slightly. Mr Picassohead was fun. I created two lovely gentlemen and I felt sad that I can't actually draw. Oh well, this is the next best thing I suppose. Looking at some of the other creations I'm impressed that people can create so much with so little.

Lots of fun - no library application needed.

#31 Organise organise organise!

Getting organised is hard to do. Online tools might help but I haven't found the ONE that will intergrate all my activities, lists, thoughts, events and people. I think this is because they can't be tailored enough to your individual needs, which is one of the keys to staying organised - you have to do it you own way otherwise you will revert back to your old wicked ways!

I use Tada for my lists and I find it very helpful. You can add several lists then tick things off as you go. You can share your list with others. I like that Jotlet has a calender with it as well. But I found it slow and a bit clunky. I certainly wouldn't be moving from my Yahoo organiser to this.

I found Plaxo better than jotlet and better than tada in some ways. But I don't really want to socialise through this website so it won't replace my Yahoo calender which can send me emails as reminders of when events are coming up and allows all the functionality of plaxo but with email. I suppose if all your people were on plaxo and you could just send messages the same as emails it might be ok. But again, I found it slow. I like the Calender, Tasks, Notes functions.

I still need a pen and piece of paper when I'm in the car or in a bar and I have a brillant idea! Which by the way, happens ALL the time!

#30 LOLLing away

I am quite familiar with LOL cats and the lesser known LOL walrus. I really don't need to be encouraged to waste my time here. But let's not over-theorise or intellectualise this hey? It's cats and dumpspeak. But I like the idea of opening up photos and captions to everybody. If we have LOL cats I'm sure we can have other applications that anyone can attach photos to. Perhaps team talk should use this for their social club competition where you have to add a caption.

The screening of photos needs to be a bit better regulated. There is some dodgy stuff that I didn't really want to see when I was trying to build my own cat. Especially from the builder site.

#29 Scrapping

Scrap Book Blogging
This seems like a cool idea. However, my firefox or my linux or one of my people just doesn't like it at all! So I could upload photos and that was about all. All the pretty little things didn't work. I couldn't even look at the sample that Jamie did. I'm sure it's great. But scrap book and my computer just don't gel.....Next!

#28 rock n roll is dead. punk is alive

I'm not sure how this can be used for us. Perhaps we can have photos of our library attached to Time magazine for "person of the year" and have information about how borrowers could do one of these for themselves. I think I prefer standards signs in the library rather than lots of miscellaneous looking styles and prints and colours. Perhaps I'll try one in the lovely Boroondara colours (sic).

#27 is this the walrus's bucket?

If you follow the walrus and bucket story on LOLwalrus you will understand the title.

Anyway, back to photos. I found this one particularly hilarious - ouch! gotta hurt. I hope library books aren't this powerful. I don't like that my albums can't have non-alphanumeric characters. I think the categories for 'finding stuff' could be a bit more extensive.

It seems like a tool to use on other websites - you can share photos to friends through email or your social networking site. I'm not sure about this website. There's something I don't like about...just can't quite put my finger on it.

#26 Widgets are not small annoying biting insects

Those insects are midges. But they may be related. Obviously, Microsoft can't think of anything new so it steals Mac's widgets. My minis crashed my computer. I didn't get very far with them for this reason. I embedded some onto my blog but they pushed onto the writing parts of the blog. That made me cross! I don't like them.

#25 Popping newsletters in the post!

After a few teething problems with signing in and receiving emails from letter pop I had a ball.

I think my newsletter is here but I'm also suspicious that this won't work.

I will definitely use this to help me keep in contact with my family in Brisbane. I wonder if we could use it to describe some of the events that we have had in the library. For example, after the travel demo we could write a newsletter describing the event and its success (naturally).

I find the format a big restrictive and the functionality was a bit basic. Some buttons didn't work and I couldn't figure out what they were meant to do. I think I finally got my address book working.

Update - my link does work! Yay

#24 of Learning 2.1 - Zamzar

Zamzar
This is heaven sent. I'm a big Open Office kind of grl and therefore I am forever converting back and forth, just in case! But no more. This is a great tool for those people who run Macs or Linux or something else and it's over the internet instead of copying onto your USB or email account. You can also download a web browser button similar to del.icio.us and convert things like youtube videos as you go. Handy.

I even submitted this to Digg as I thought it totally worthy.

The only thing that was a bit disconcerting was that when I asked it to convert a blank screen came up so I thought it had not worked - but it had! Perhaps a little tweaking with the features and messages could be a good idea.