I realize this isn't library related, but I wanted to post a photo of my new sport bike.
I love it!
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Flickr tool fun
This was rather time consuming, but fun to investigate, except for Mappr. The first couple of times I tried to work with Mappr, it didn't seem to be working correctly. Today I was able to mess with it and see the purpose and advantages of it, but when I tried to actually use it and view photos, I had some frustrating experiences. For example: I chose "oceans" as a tag, and when it brought up a photo in Kansas I became suspicious. It verified that it was "very confident" that this photo was taken in Kansas. Clicking on it showed a ocean beach scene with people all over the beach and a huge rock. It described the location, "Another panoramic view of the world famous beach that attracts thousands of visitors to Biarritz in the Basque Coast." So, I thought perhaps the person that posted the photo was from Kansas, but going to his profile I discovered he's from Mexico. Maybe I just picked the one mistake, but it did shatter my confidence in the tool.
The Montagr link from 2.0 brought up a single photo and no content on how to use or access it. I did find a way to access Montagr via the mashups link, along with many other tool links. However, when I went to the Montagr link, it said it required Flash 7 to use it. You could download it, but it warned of possibly crashing your browser. So, I didn't want to download this on the library computer. There were many different options on the Flickr mashups page to explore. The Color Picker was a lot of fun. It could have many uses, besides being entertaining. I would like to remember it, so in the future, I can come back to play around with it. Another fun discovery was Google Earth, but once again you had to download the program, which I didn't want to do here at the library. This takes quite a bit of time to research, and until just recently we have had dial-up internet access at home. Now that we have WildBlue, I can investigate these further at home.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Happy Spring!
Success! I posted the photo again and this time I'm leaving it alone.
I love it. It makes me want to be in our garden.
I love it. It makes me want to be in our garden.
Flickr : )
Yes, as everyone says, Flickr is fun, but learning how to transfer photos from Flickr to my Flickr account was my first challenge, and since Tammy was near, I asked for her advice on the easiest way to do this. We did a copy and paste process, which did seem the easiest. My next challenge was to find a fun public photo on Flickr that I wanted to add to my blog. This went much better, and having a blog already set up made it go quickly. It just required doing some reading and then guess work to determine the path. My only problem was trying to undo what I apparently messed up after it was on my blog by moving the photo around on the post. I'm going to delete it and do it again, this time leaving it alone. That will also give me practice. After I saw how simple process was once Flickr has your blog identified, I decided to also put the photo from my Flickr account onto my blog. This went much faster. So, off to make the correction!
Josh in Venice
I was so happy to discover this photo of my son, Josh, on Flickr. I've never seen it, because it was taken by his friend, Chris Lowrance, on the Indiana Univ. trip to Italy.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Tags
Del.icio.us
Tags are a basic necessity for keeping track of your online information via bookmarks, but learning about them was confusing, and the more I read about them, the more confused I became! I found the Slacker Manager site with "Several Habits of Wildly Successfull Del.icio.us Users" to be a very helpful for those that know what they are doing, but it plunged me into doubt about what I thought I knew about tags. I did more investigation to see how they're used.
I think I finally have an understanding of how these work and the wonderful sites, such as Del.icio.us, that make it easy to use tags to mark your information for future reference. It's a very handy tool for placing tags on your bookmarks and other data, such as photos and blogs. The MRRL account was helpful to see how tags worked for keeping track of sites and relocating information. It would be an wonderful tool for anyone doing reseach, on their own or with a school, business, or project.
Technorati
It took a long time to access the video tutorial, but it was worth the wait. It was an excellent overview of this website, which exists to compile blogs and allow everyone to find blogs that are of interest to them. You can mark your favorites and rate the blogs. Browsers can add their blog as well. They have both "signed in" or "not signed in" ways to view the site. Someone who has heard about blogs, but doesn't know what's out there in the blogosphere or where to start, can be advised to come here to find blogs of interest to them for fun reading, or to look for information, or to even see the most blogged videos. Things are filed and seachable by subject or tags, or even a blog directory. The results were very different for searching Learning Library 2.0. I got 2,570 hits from using blog posts, 10 from tags, and 55 from blog directories, but it's very easy to check the different options for the same subject, so you can try all 3 to see what works best for your search needs. Truly amazing how many blogs are out there and the numbers are doubling every 6 months-unbelieveable! I thought this was an amazing site and very user friendly. I was going to claim my blog just for the experience and to use tags, but decided not to make my blog that public.
LibraryThing
I thought LibraryThing was incredibly cool for anyone that would like to catalog their own collection. I don't intend to do that, but since it was part of our Learning 2.0 program, I did open an account. Being a member to access the information others have shared about books, makes this a giant web book club, of sort. It's also very easy to catalog your books and to access information about them. Here is my account site. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/crowsnest
Tags are a basic necessity for keeping track of your online information via bookmarks, but learning about them was confusing, and the more I read about them, the more confused I became! I found the Slacker Manager site with "Several Habits of Wildly Successfull Del.icio.us Users" to be a very helpful for those that know what they are doing, but it plunged me into doubt about what I thought I knew about tags. I did more investigation to see how they're used.
I think I finally have an understanding of how these work and the wonderful sites, such as Del.icio.us, that make it easy to use tags to mark your information for future reference. It's a very handy tool for placing tags on your bookmarks and other data, such as photos and blogs. The MRRL account was helpful to see how tags worked for keeping track of sites and relocating information. It would be an wonderful tool for anyone doing reseach, on their own or with a school, business, or project.
Technorati
It took a long time to access the video tutorial, but it was worth the wait. It was an excellent overview of this website, which exists to compile blogs and allow everyone to find blogs that are of interest to them. You can mark your favorites and rate the blogs. Browsers can add their blog as well. They have both "signed in" or "not signed in" ways to view the site. Someone who has heard about blogs, but doesn't know what's out there in the blogosphere or where to start, can be advised to come here to find blogs of interest to them for fun reading, or to look for information, or to even see the most blogged videos. Things are filed and seachable by subject or tags, or even a blog directory. The results were very different for searching Learning Library 2.0. I got 2,570 hits from using blog posts, 10 from tags, and 55 from blog directories, but it's very easy to check the different options for the same subject, so you can try all 3 to see what works best for your search needs. Truly amazing how many blogs are out there and the numbers are doubling every 6 months-unbelieveable! I thought this was an amazing site and very user friendly. I was going to claim my blog just for the experience and to use tags, but decided not to make my blog that public.
LibraryThing
I thought LibraryThing was incredibly cool for anyone that would like to catalog their own collection. I don't intend to do that, but since it was part of our Learning 2.0 program, I did open an account. Being a member to access the information others have shared about books, makes this a giant web book club, of sort. It's also very easy to catalog your books and to access information about them. Here is my account site. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/crowsnest
Friday, March 9, 2007
Got a MySpace!
This was quite easy. Getting a better look to the profile will be a bear, from what I hear, so I'll wait to make any upgrades. I'm going to keep it simple and private, since I don't really have an interest in online social networking at this point. If I get addicted to this MySpace thing, that could change. I do think it's great for libraries, but wish MySpace would set up a template for groups, which would be more appropriate. It's interesting to see who has asked to be a MRRL friend. Other libraries are glad to have company out there.
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