Delicious is delicious

Took me awhile but with some help from Wynn's blog and personal help from Quynn I have a Delicious account. Setting up the account wasn't a big deal but getting the bookmarklets to show up took a click from Quynn. Thank you! I was able to pull up Delicious account at home and add the bookmarklets there also.


This should be very useful. It's just going to take awhile to set it up with all of my favorites that I have and forgotten that I have. Once I get everything in there, I can clean some stuff off my desktop. I was going to clean out my favorite folders but I'm reconsidering that. If for some reason I couldn't get into Delicious, I'd be lost. I'm also finding that some of my favorites are no longer available so it's good to get it all cleaned up.


Wouldn't it have been great to have this years ago when we'd get repeat questions in reference. Just put the site with the answer in Delicious with good tags and it would be easily found for future questions.


The tags make it easy to group sites together. You can give a site more than one tag.

Here's a scenario: Your looking for information on anything from blogs to remodeling your bathroom. Your Google search of course brings up lots of matches some good a lot not so good. As your checking out the possibilities you can throw the promising ones into Delicious with one tag for that search. Later you go through the sites under that tag and delete some and add more tags if needed for the good ones.

I like it!!!

Michael Sauers on Blogs & RSS

Here's an interview with Michael Sauers, the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska, http://www.librarybeat.com/longshots/play/114 about blogs & RSS.

Podcasts III

Didn't take me long to delete the NPR news podcast. News on the hour every hour. Did some more searching for something interesting. Lots there but I think a librarian needs to organize it all.

Google Reader

I'm really liking Google Reader. I added Stephen Abrams blog. Maybe most of you read this already but I would always forget to go look at it even though I have shortcut to it. He seems to always have some interesting comments and insights. Two recent ones are http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/08/ala_banned_book.html and http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/08/librarian_ident.html. The fist one asks why not a Banned Website Week like Banned Book Week. The second one is his article for SLA's Information Outlook. It fits with our Library 2.0 Challenge pretty well.

I did find out that blogs that have a discussion going or maybe keep a thread for a month then close it don't work too well with an RSS feed. My Marcusblog is like this. I assume that when it changes threads or when Sept. comes I'll get notice of new postings but right now I don't. I can at least click on the last posting though to see what's new.

Podcasts II

I finally have a RSS feed for a podcast. Some of these pages are so busy it's hard to see what your looking for. I added and RSS feed for NPR news. I found this in Metafly but when I tried thier search bar I couldn't get any results. I went to the next one in the list and searched for mystery book reviews but the list is just too much to wade through. I think you'd need to find a recomended list or just a suggestion from someone else and then add it to to your reader.

Now I think I'm officially caught up!!!

MySpace, etc.

Ok, Jasmine says that Tom is the generic help on MySpace. Everyone does get him when they sign up for MySpace.

My sister, Julie, set up a space on MyFamily.com for my brothers, sisters, uncles, aunt and cousins. We can load photos, have discussions, and recommend books and movies. We've had that for a few years now so it's not that I'm clueless about this kind of social networking. I'm just much more comfortable in the MyFamily setting than I would be in the MySpace setting. There is a small yearly fee for MyFamily but we've really enjoyed having access to it.

Social Networking

I really like ALA's MySpace. I spent some time looking at the videos from the latest conference. I also looked at the other examples listed. Will a "Millennium" actually spend some time at their library's MySpace site? I wouldn't but I'm the wrong generation. I guess the point is to be where ever your patrons might look but it takes a lot of time to keep all this up to date. You absolutely have to keep it up to date. If I go to a site that has old information, I never go back again.

I made an account on MySpace, invited friends, and then immediately canceled it. Carol had time to answer my invite but that's about it. Somehow I ended up single. Didn't see that anywhere when I was signing up. I should have just made up stuff but I didn't so I didn't feel comfortable having any of my info up there. There's a Tom who must have his MySpace site set to immediately send out an invite to new members. Strange.

I can see it's uses and if I had a library I'd probably make a site for the library.

Library 2.0

I'm caught up!!! Well except for the RSS feeds of Podcasts.

Google Docs was really easy to use. I used one of templates and made a birthday/work anniversary list of the staff. I don't have all of the dates so I'm hoping some of my collaborators can fill in the information for those hired after 2004. I sent it myself too so I know it worked.

I can see lots of uses for this. It would be great for committees working on papers or planning a conference. Should be of great use to our remote staff.

Podcasts

I'm really at a loss as to how I can add an RSS feed for a podcast. Someone's going to have to hold my hand to do this. There isn't enough information here for me to figure it out. If I were going to add a podcast to my iPod, I could probably do that but I'm not finding enough info for adding RSS feeds. I'm not sure podcast.com works at all either. Couldn't do anything in there.

YouTube, etc.

I went to Google Video and just searched the word library. The search came up with a wide variety of matches but it was really easy to go through the list and read the partial description to decide if I wanted to view the video. While I was looking at the video, I could continue to scroll through the list and look for more possibilities. When I wanted to stop viewing the one on the screen, I could just click on the next one. It was really quick and easy.

Some of the ones that I viewed were "Your Public Library", a good video promoting the value of libraries in all kinds of communities, ""Ray of Light" St. Joseph County Public Library Version", a fun video, and "Library of the Future", about Stanford and their partnership with Google. There were some not so good ones too that seemed really corny.

Great way to present an orientation for new students but you'd have to really be careful not to make it corny and need to update it to keep up with trends. Some of the 2006 videos already look out of date.

I also found a conference on Academic Library 2.0 so this would also be good for presenting conference material to those who could not attend.

On a personal note, if you search "Adam E Peterson", you'll find my son's mock film trailer. He put it up with hopes of finding an editing job. Hasn't panned out so far. He edited the films while he was in film school. You can see him in first trailer standing in the garage door and handing over the brief case. I wouldn't suggest you watch this a work though of course.

Flickr

I was looking around in Flickr and I'm amazed at how much is added and how fast comments are made. My uncle has a Flickr account so I was looking at his photos. A photo that he just loaded yesterday has already gotten a Blue Ribbon and has had 4 comments. I assume some people liked what he was putting up and added him to their RSS feed. How else would you be able keep on top of everything being added there. If your interested and seeing his Blue Ribbon photo go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/beowulf2/2757258478/.

Flckr b

Maybe I can get almost caught up this week.

It's amazing the number of things people have come up with to do with Flickr. Using Google Maps sounds interesting. I made a trading card.

FlickrA continued

I forgot Flickr picked a picture from my set to be kind of the title picture. It's certainly not the one I would have picked. I don't know how to change that either. Kind of frustrating.

FlickrA

I finally got through Flickr, lesson 4A. I've never worked with this before but Flckr itself wasn't to hard to navigate. If were going to use this alot, I think I'd want to download the tools that would work a little faster. I put in 22 pictures so it took awhile to get them all in there. Then once I got them in there I found out that, as far as order, they're in there backwards and I haven't found any way to reverse them. You can find them by searching the tag Ft. Pierre Deadwood Trail. I think this is something you'd have to use a lot to find all of it's neat little things.

I looked at some of the pictures others have placed on Flickr. Many a really incredible.

Alan & one of Jerry's mules

Alan & one of Jerry's mules
Originally uploaded by sodakmeylor

My husband and one of Jerry Kessler's mules. The mule pulled a wagon all day and Alan watched them go by our house in the morning and then sat at his desk the rest of the day. Who do you think was more tired? I had some other titles for this picture come to mind but I thought Alan might take offence to them.