This is the End

WOW, I actually did it, got all the way to the end (go me). Having started the web 2.0 program so late due o illness I thought I would never catch up. But I did, yeah and quite enjoyed doing it too. When I first heard about exercise I thought, Oh that will be easy as I had deluded myself into thinking that I knew enough about the Internet already. However I was happy to be proved wrong as most of the activities and web 2.0 technologies were new to me and also very interesting and I can see them being useful in the future.

My favorite thing was LibraryThing, I love this website and can happily spend hours on it. I love the social interaction with other people and how you can build up your profile making it more and more personal which then leads you to more aspects of the site and things you might like. My reserve list is already filling up with their reading suggestions. I think that the social interaction and how it adapts to you and gives you suggestions are all the best aspects of web 2.0 and the ones I am most keen to see incorporated into our library.

While the Image generator sites and YouTube are a lot of fun I also really enjoyed finding out about the more educational ones. I really liked the Rollyo technology and I think I will come back to my personal search engine a lot.

Many thanks to the Web 2.0 Admin team for their helpful and encouraging comments and everyone else who took time to comment.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment in having finished, however I think I will miss it a bit.

Thanks for everything

Lizzie.

More Social Networking

the power of Web 2.0 for social networking is immense and I think that if done properly libraries can use this tool to reach out to more people. This has to be done the right way as we don't want to be invading peoples space or adding things to the library just because they are the new thing. I agree with the article on social networking software that the use of profiles on places such as Myspace and Facebook can be great tools for encouraging library. However these need to be more than simple profiles to really encourage interaction. For example, her idea that these profiles should encourage two way communication with the patrons, especially suggestions and questions is a great idea and for us something like an expansion of the already existing AnyQuestions could be a very useful tool.

If these new technologies can bring new people into the library, they need to be utilised but it is very important to use them the right way to have a major effect.

Social networking

I was already a member of Facebook before I started web 2.o so this exercise was easy for me. However I am not on Bebo or Myspace (and do not ever plan to be) so I had a look around those sites. After this I have reconfirmed by belief that facebook is the best of these sites. Bebo and Myspace are more for younger people, but it is great if they can be used to encourage people to use the Library.

Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch and recently it has enabled me to reconnect with friends I hadn't seen for about 7 years. This personal side of Facebook is great and I am very curious to see how libraries will come to use these sites in the future.

ebooks

Ebooks are fantastic and I was very happy to read all the articles on how they are becoming more and more available. I use ebooks all the time for research at university and it is great as it lets everyone have a change to read it and not just the crazy people who start their essays two months early. With ebooks everyone gets a turn and there are no recall wars.

I searched for Jane Eyre on Project Gutenburg and I was impressed by their range. It's great that you can also download audio versions which I plan to try out for myself. Once you have actually chosen a book however, I found the print size and style very unappealing. It would be great if in the future they could become more readable.

Podcasts

Like with blogs I couldn't believe how many podcasts there were out there, people create them about everything. I found the Podcast Pickle the easiest site to navigate as it had good lists of categories and but I thought there should have been better summaries of what the Podcast was about, the site Podnova was very good in this respect. I found some good movie review ones, such as Kendall Weaver's Top five. Nice and succinct movie reviews.

One of My favorite authors Diana Gabaldon regularly realises podcasts of news and other information on her website that I listen to. I think they are a great tool as they are capible of so much variety, as you can listen to them anywhere. They are great for lazy people and have that added leval of personality which is nice.

YouTube

Web 2.0 Winners

All these sites are so fantastic and I had fun exploring a few of them as one was not enough. I was really pleased to see how many I already knew about from doing this program, really getting up to date with what is happening on the web.

I had a look a the books category as that is what I am most interested in and had a look at all the sites. I chose to focus on VuFind and I was very impressed by what I found. I love the social interaction of this site, how you can leave comments and tags and I think the link to Amazon reviews is a fantastic idea. I look at these all the time an they have been very helpful.

I think it is great that this is the direction that libraries are going in and it can't come soon enough.

I also really loved Onesentence, such a great idea and I spent over an hour reading the funny and poignant stories. I can see this becoming a great procrastinating tool in the future.

Zoho

Another great tool, yeah. This site is a great idea and I can see it being very useful. In the past I have always typed a document than sent it as an attachment in an email when I wanted to use it at another location or send it to someone. I can see this being a lot quicker and easier and I look forward to trying it out some more.

I found the site fun and easy to use, all the formats are similar to Microsoft Word so that made it simple. I had great fun playing around with the Zoho Show, great lot of templates and clip art and the Writer is a great tool.

Rollyo

This excercise was quite fun and I can see it being very helpful. When you type something in to Google you get millions of hits and often ones that are not usefull at all, so it is great to have a tool to organise your searchs. I had some fun searching the qoutes and photos pages had a good laugh over my favorite Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen qoutes. None of hte books I searched for appeared in the other two search engines, maybe I was beening to vague.

I decided to create a search engine that could be useful in my art history studies. I get most of my information out of books but I still use websites to get good colour representations of paintings and often short summaries of paintings to get me thinking. I put lots of the official art gallery sites as I knew they are trustworthy and fulled with interesting facts as well as links to scholarly journals and more amateur sites that I still like. Rollyo is a great tool that I think I will come back to again.

Link to my Search Roll

LibraryFantastic

I love LibraryThing, it's so much fun and another treasure trove of a website. I had created an account before starting web 2.0 as one of my colleagues told me about it. I have been slowly adding more of my books to it and I love seeing them all on my virtual shelf. My favorite mark of the site is how they display all the different covers and people can upload more. As two of my main passions are art and books I love looking at all the differnt covers, how differnt people have seen the book and how they have changed over time.

The interaction with other people on this site is great, through forums, reviews and the cool feature of finding people with the same books as you. The reading suggestions are also very good. The only complaint I have is that often the search brings up very poor results and the book I want is often not on the first page.

I am very excited about the possibilities for colaberation with libraries, as the visual and interactine acpects of this site are very cool.

The link to by catalog is here, hopping to add more soon.

Fun with Pics

This activity was a lot of fun and quite simple to use. I chose to explore ImageChef as it looked like the best and most easily navigated site out there, which also had a great bunch of templates. I couldn't resist the flower text, (it's just so pretty), love the effect of how the flowers grow, great to add movement to my blog. The link is www. imagechef.com/ic/flowers/.

I liked this image so much that I chose to add it to my blog as the front of my posts. I tried to add it as my banner but couldn't get it to work. I played around with a few other images (I could spend hours on this site) and also looked around some of the other blogs out of interest to see how everyone else had done it. I found some very cool and creative images. I Would love to come back to this site to add more things as I am trying to personalise my blog more.

More Wiki Goodness

I loved this exercise I never realised how easy it was to use wikis and I had great fun doing it. The favorites page was a great idea and the hardest part was only choosing a few books and movies to put on the list, thought I had better not put more than 5, very hard to narrow them down. It was really fun and interesting to see what everyone else thought, we all seem to agree on a lot of things. I had a little trouble adding my blog at first as almost replaced someone else's with mine (opps). But I soon got the hang of it and it is easy to go back and start again if you make a mistake.

Wikis

I love wikis. They are such an amazing tool and it was really interesting to find out how they are being used. I couldn't believe that they have been around since the nineties (almost as old as I am :)), but it's great to see how they are being embraced now.

My favorite wiki is of course Wikipedia it is such an amazing body of information and it is my first port of call when I'm looking something up. People go on about how unreliable it is but, I've never had a problem and the many people that add to it daily are amazing.

The possibilities for their use in libraries are very fascinating. One of the best ideas I read about was to try and make the library page for a specific title on the catalog like the ones on Amazon. I am on Amazon almost every day looking at books, adding to my ever growing wish list and reading other people's review's about books I am interested in. Having this kind of system in a library catalog would be great as having one local to New Zealand would be a great step.

I think it is important to have some moderation by trained librarians like the SJCPL subject guides, but still encourage ordinary user imput as that is the way to build useful and reliable websites.

WE ARE THE MACHINE

Web 2.0 is daunting but fascinating and I'm really excited to see how libraries will incorporate this new technology. In my mind nothing can never really replace face to face interaction customer service, and actual books but the possibilities are still very exciting.

The aspects of web 2.0 I would really like to see added to library systems is programs such as LibraryThing (which I absolutely love) and tags. Tags are great because they put the power in the hands of the user/ordinary person.

I do think that changing existing library systems and educating patrons will be a challenge, but the usefulness in web 2.0 technology for access to library services and in enhancing these services will be worth it.
We are the machine!

More about Blogs

I didn't find this exercise particularly interesting as I am not the into blogs. However it was interesting to delve into this huge world and see the vast amount of activities and information out there. For people that are interested in Blogs I can see how technorati could be an amazing tool and I was very impressed by their website, very easy to use and filled with information.

On technorati I could not find the search box with the 3 drop down options, just a simple search line. I searched for web 2.0 on this but didn't come up with anything particually interesting or relevent.

Bookmarking

I really enjoyed this exercise as it was interesting and again something I knew nothing about. Like with Rss and many of the other things we are learning about they are so wide ranging and filled with so much information that it is hard to get your head around it. That is why I find Tags such a great tool as they help to organize this immense about of information.

I'm very excited by the possibilities for libraries in this new technology. I've always been very frustrated by the restriction of cataloging and I love being able to create my own tags.

I took the next step (yeah me) and created my own account on delicious, it's a great ideas and since my computer is always breaking down and losing all my bookmarks I will love having them stored forever in cyberspace. It was great fun creating my own tags and unlike my bookmark toolbar on this site the more the better and I will enjoy adding as many as I can to My new account.

RSS 2

I found the suggestions on Bloglines when you first start up so good that I think those ones will keep me going for awhile. I found the Bloglines search very easy to use and tried a few options; searched for libraries and movie news. Came up with so many options, had a look at a few, some very interesting ones. Loved the mix of professional sites and personal blogs, get a wide range on any topic.

There is so much stuff out there it is a little overwelming. The best thing I learnt the meaning of the orange symbol, its so easy to add using it. Now I'll keep my eyes out for it on all my websites and add them to my feeds, I love have everything together like that.

RSS

Haven't been keeping up with my exercises so much lately, my history essay has been giving me grief. But now that is handed in, I'm trying to get back on track and what better way to procrastinate about doing by Art History essay.

I liked learning about Rss, even though I think of myself as quite computer savvy I have never heard of them before. I was quite daunted ad the start as I thought it looked very difficult and I found the Discovery Resources quite confusing. But once I got to actually making my account I found it nice and straight forward and didn't have any problems. I found the Bloglines suggestions very useful and interesting and I am looking forward to keeping up to date with all my movie news. Great to have feeds to sites like Rotten Tomatoes, which i really like but always forget to check.

Technology

A blog about technology, were to start? Since it is such a huge topic I thought I would narrow it down to one of my favorite pieces of technology - the DVD. The invention of the DVD had a profound effect on my life. Growing up we didn't have a TV, but with the invention of the DVD and the fact that it could be played on a computer meant we could stat massing a collection, I could now catch up on movies I hadn't seen in the cinema and most importantly watch and re-watch my favorites.

The technology of the DVD changed the way movies are made and opened up a whole new world for movie lovers. The quality of the DVD was so good that no only could it give a cinema-like experience in your own home but with the amount of space available the "Special Features." These have totally changed many viewing experiences and added so much to the world of movies. Some of the best examples of these are deleted scenes especially when integrated into the movie like the Lord of the Rings extended edition (best movies ever made), informative "makings of" and director and cast commentaries with offer an often humorous and always enlightening incite into the movie making process. (The cast commentary on The Two Towers DVD is possibly the funniest thing you will ever hear).

Due to my feelings about DVDs I was very sad to hear that they are in the process of being replaced by a new model the Blue-Ray, which may be better but could never hold such a place in my heart.

Mashups

Loved this exercise, it was so much fun exploring all the different and extremely creative ways people are using the different programs.

I could spend hours going through the Flickr Color Pickr, so clever. I love how it doesn't really have a purpose, its just really fun and pretty.

But the application I found the most interesting and useful was the "Trip Planner," such a great idea to share your experience with others, see what are the best places to go and see and really get a feel for a destination. Travelers rate each activity and destination as well as keeping a diary of their activities. I loved reading about the totally different trips different people had in similar places and I have added even more destinations to my growing list of places I must travel.

World Youth Day 2008 Concert (#458)

World Youth Day 2008 Concert (#458)
Originally uploaded by Christopher Chan

Here is the beautiful Picture.

Photo by Christopher Chan

Flickr

This site is so much fun, I had a quick tour and look around and I am looking forward to more exploration later. It is great to have a safe place to store all my photos and I plan to upload some of my own.

Since I'm doing all theses activities at home in my holidays I can't take pictures of my library so I went searching. As I was recently at World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney I searched for any good pictures from that week. I found this amazing picture taken at a concert I was lucky enough to attend, the photographer really captured the mood and it brought back some good memories.

Technical Trouble

Site is not letting me post my next blog, something to do with my Html, trying to post this to see if it is just that post

Posting a comment

Really enjoyed looking through the blogs. I think I could spend hours looking through BoingBoing, I loved the Weezer cake, I'll have to make on for my brother's next birthday. The huge variety of blogs out there is a little overwhelming but the ones suggested on the exercises page were really interesting. I'm quite interested in Children's literature so I found Fuse #8 great. I especially enjoyed the comments on the "Most Shameful non-reads," it was interesting to see what people thought were the must read books, I see I have some reading to do myself.

First Blog

I've Been looking forward to creating this blog as part of the Web 2.0 program, I had hoped to stat at the end of July but catching pneumonia on a trip to Sydney has stopped me going to work for the past weeks. Feeling much better now and hoping to catch up for lost time on all the exiting Web 2.0 activities in my holidays.

I enjoyed creating my blog, it was extremely simple and easy and it is fun to play around with my Profile.Creating my own alias was fun, it's a combination of two of my favorite fictional characters. I chose Blogger because it seemed to be the most straightforward and it was. I was surprised to find how simple it was, it was great because it goes through Gmail which already has all my information so sighing up was quick and easy. Haven't started playing around with the settings yet but looking forward to personalizing my blog more.