Comics Creator

Using Bubblr gave me the giggles. I could take ordinary photos and give them any caption I wanted. I uploaded photos of myself but this time I had speech bubbles containing words I had wished I had said! This is a great way of making some fun birthday cards with photos that I already have. Watch the post, you may get a greeting card from me soon.

Wicked Wikis

Remembering HTML tags was such a pain! If you were a subject librarian, lots of time was spent making sure that your subject guides content had up-to-date information, and even more time was spent making sure that your formatting was correct. I was glad when wiki's were introduced as it meant that anyone could create and edit web content.

A wiki can be very useful if you have a good brainstorming team. If you are unlucky and have a not so good team, then more time will be spent micro-editing every word and sentence and then you will get frustrated with the lack of proper progress.

I like the fact that you can now invite people to contribute to a wiki. In that way there is some degree of control and authority over the project that you will be working on. You can also track recent changes that were made. This can lead to interesting discussions as to why certain changes came about.

While doing this exercise, I stumbled across a powerpoint on "How to create your own online survey". I think Im going to try this one on some family members. I just want to see how this tool actually works.

Picasa's Pictures

Today I spent some time exploring Picasa Web Albums and Smugmug. The layout in Smugmug is pretty neat. I spent a few minutes looking at all the photos that appear as if they are in a slideshow. In the end I decided to stick with Picasa...I wanted something familiar to play with for now. I think I sighed with relief when I realised I could just use my google account to sign in. Good ol'Google! Perhaps when I have more time I will try Smugmug again.

Librarian 2.0

I started this exercise looking at the video clip first. The last 30 seconds of the video really hit home when I realised how many things we have to have a rethink about - copyright, governance etc. An MLIS student looking for a research topic should have a look at this video.

I think that we have already started to move away from the iceberg mentality described in the prescribed article. After all we are moving towards using downloadable books. This is addition to the fact that for years our e-resources have been made available off-site for years.

Our Any Questions Operators use these technologies often. Our librarians expertise is available to those that cannot physically come into the library for homework help. If you look at the Any Questions and Many Answers sites you will notice the use of tag clouds etc. Did you know that all our operators have Avatars?

After all that reading, all I can say is : if you complete this programme you will be in a better position to help our patrons who may have problems embracing new technologies in the future. I wonder how many of our librarians would like a title like "Librarian 2.0"?

Now its time for some action. I think must get back to SecondLife now. For more than three years I have been an Engineering librarian there too. I have had a fantastic time! You should try it. Its fun!

Technorati and Twittorati

Clicking on the links on the navigation bar exposed me to blogs I would never have come across while just surfing the net. I will use this site occasionally to find out who is blogging about an interest that I may have. Then I would follow their blogs for a while.

I tried a few keyword searches on both the search box on the homepage and then moved onto the advanced search facility. As expected phrase searching and searching by authority got fewer results than just keyword searching which used the AND connector.

I had to laugh when I looked at the popular searches. From the time I started using the internet, I have noticed that Jennifer Aniston and Paris Hilton always make the list!

I looked at Technorati a long long time ago. I dont remember a link for Twittorati then....maybe its old age, or maybe that link was not there at all. In the end I decided that I will look at Twittorati again this weekend. I really dont want to be overwhelmed with information.

I have also decided that I will open an account at Technorati so that I can claim another blog that I have. Its a great facility, so why not make use of it?

Recap Roundup

Last night, I spent some time going over exercises that I had already finished. I can already see the advantage of some of our library staff doing the programme again. There is always the possibility that you will learn something new.

This time I went and looked at the RSS feeds on our own library website. I’m sure the avid reader will be happy to see the feed for the new titles. I also added the urls for all the sites I use often onto Delicious. So when I go on holiday, I won’t have to curse in the internet cafes when I can’t remember the urls.

When I was experimenting with my two computers at home, I noticed that the Delicious logo now appears just under the internet address bar. Really cool. I have also decided not to create a public profile for now. And I will also not be using the network badge for now. Perhaps I will try again when I feel more confident about a possible online profile

On a slightly different note, I have just read an article in the New Scientist on how the quality of information on Wikipedia is expected to degrade over time. Although I still use Wikipedia, I will keep this article in mind and follow the usual evaluation tips when using information from this source.

Del.icio.us

I wish I had this tool in some of my previous jobs! I was part of an academic librarians team and we used to work on subject guides together. I think we could have got even more resources to use in our guides if we had only used this tool. Ah well, lesson learnt - I will keep this in mind for future projects that I work on.

I have also opened up my own Del.icio.us account so that I don't have to wrack my brains for the correct urls for my favourite websites. I am no longer concerned about hot desking at work anymore because with Del.icio.us my favourites can always be found. My next task is to play around with network badges and see if this new tool works to my advantage.

Now that Ive finished this task, Im going to go back to looking at Flickr Color.......I just can't stop revisiting this site....