librarians unite!

email test

2007-04-27T17:45:00.000-07:00

I'm sending this post via email. Will it work? Will it?

Thing Thirteen

2007-04-02T17:15:00.000-07:00

Ads! I can't take all the ads. I hate clicking on a link that claims it's taking me somewhere, but actually it's taking me to an ad page that I have to view before getting to the content I want. Not to quote the Google party line, but their ads really are unobtrusive.

Once I got past that, I enjoyed the article I clicked on from the SJLibraryLearning2 account on Del.icio.us. It's about the joys of tagging, which in my youth meant spray-painting your gang name on other people's garage doors. Now it means an informal, user-based indexing, and I'm all in favor. I'm pleased to see museums agree.

I played around with bookmarking this way, and no, I don't see it as something that would be useful in my life. It's cool, but it would work better for people with zillions of bookmarks or who don't have a primary computer. The bookmarks/favorites menus in my browsers on work and home computers work well enough for me.

Thing Twelve

2007-03-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

I made a search roll for three sites I search often: Snopes, Wikipedia, and Onelook. The search worked and that's pretty cool, but I didn't like all of the ads that popped up before my search results. Also, the results were in a seemingly random order, and I wasn't given the option to reorder them. Again, I just don't think anything can improve on Google, at least for my own personal searches. I know how to manipulate a Google search to find the results I want. This just seems like an unnecessary addition to my life.

Thing Eleven

2007-03-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

Ooh, fun. I picked Coverpop from the Books category. I can't say it's useful at all, but it is durn fun. Pick a category, like, say, purses, and the screen is filled with tiny purses in a million colors and styles. Hovering over or clicking on a purse will take you to the online store at which you can purchase it. Very cool. I liked the Flickr colorfields coverpop best because it covered a variety of photographed objects instead of just one category.

Thing Ten

2007-03-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

From the Visual Poetry Generator:

From the Nerd Name Generator:
My nerd name is Griselda, the Java Magician. Whatever that means.

These tools were easy and fun. Not much to comment on.

Thing Nine

2007-03-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

I couldn't hear the podcast; it was stuck on "loading," and refreshing didn't help.

I played with Technorati and Feedster. Technorati was up first. I found it difficult and confusing. I wanted blogs and news feeds, but separate searches for common terms turned up only pictures and videos. When I finally found a blog I wanted to read, it was totally unclear how to add a feed to that. I added it to my "favorites," but that doesn't help, because I probably won't be going back to Technorati.

Feedster was even worse. Narrowing my search to blogs only doesn't work; I still get product listings, etc. I'm totally disgruntled by these sites. I can't say I understand their use, either; I thought they were going to find feeds that I could add to my bloglines account or to a new account on Feedster or Technorati. Instead, they search for blog *posts*, not blogs, and I'm afraid I don't see how even their intended use could be better than Google.

Thing Eight

2007-03-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

This was fun. I subscribed to thirteen feeds:

Accidental Hedonist
Bloglines | News
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
DogReader
The Lazy Vegetarian
Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week
NASA Breaking News
New Urban Legends
NYT Book Review
PETA Latest News
Salon
The Shifted Librarian
Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logical Blog

I made my blogroll public.
Then I added feeds to Angie's and Mana's blogs as well as my own (why not?), and to Unshelved, Library 2.0, and the Merc-News police blotter. Sadly, I couldn't subscribe to Readers' Club because, according to bloglines, that site doesn't publish a feed.

I enjoyed this exercise. I confess I didn't really know what RSS was. I knew it was a reader that could consolidate all of your daily info in one place, but I didn't really get it and I never bothered practicing. Now I shall. Instead of having bookmarks I click on daily, I will use an RSS feed. I may even have one for home and one for work. YEAH.

Thing Seven

2007-03-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

Yesss, it's freeform writing day.

I've been playing around with Wikipedia quite a bit. My feelings are mixed, like yours may be as well. On the one hand, I consult Wikipedia all the time when I want a description or history of something or someone, or when I want more than just a dictionary definition, or when I want to see how something fits into a big picture. On the other hand, when I was fact-checking children's nonfiction, I couldn't rely on Wikipedia as a definitive source. I still used it, but checked their sources, when they were given, so I could cite a, you know, real source.

I've played around only a little bit with editing in Wikipedia. I fiddled with a couple of pages about various libraries. I didn't really have the patience or focus to stick with one article and argue with other posters about the finer points of it.

To fulfill my comment requirement, I insulted Angie on her blog.

Thing Six

2007-03-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

I made a trading card. My pic is kind of blurry, but perhaps that denotes my mental state.

Thing Five

2007-03-11T20:05:00.001-07:00

I found one of gothmom's Flickr photos by using the Learning 2.0 tag:

banner2, originally uploaded by Gothmom.

which I love because the caption says, "Some art the kids did last year for Week of the Young Child," but I actually made the "art" in the shot. I have since received this work of "art" back from King and have proudly displayed it in the staff room here at EK.

I also created a Flickr account and uploaded a picture of myself in a lavender wig at Mardi Gras 2006, but apparently there's some kind of minimum picture upload as well as an approval process before my photos become public. Thus, I cannot link to it here. It's charming, though, I assure you.

Thing Four

2007-01-13T20:10:00.001-08:00

Done and done. Are all the Things going to be this easy?

Thing Three

2007-01-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

Done. Voilà!

Handy link I used to get the accent over the "a" above: Keyboard Help: International Accent Marks and Diacriticals.

Thing Two

2007-01-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

7 1/2 habits of lifelong learners....why the 1/2? Just to be cute?

The easiest of these habits for me is having confidence in myself as a competent learner. Learning has always been easy for me, and I know it, so #4 is already true for me.

The hardest one is going to be #3, viewing problems as challenges. It frustrates me to have a problem I'm not sure I can solve. I'm okay with the kinds of problems that I know have a solution that's within my reach -- an algebra problem, say, or an upset library customer -- but with more mechanical things, I'm not sure I have the capability to figure it out. Hey, I guess this is related to my easy habit.

Thing One

2007-01-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

I bet I'm not the only one to be thinking, "Thing One and Thing Two? Are we trapped in The Cat in the Hat?"

Lovely podcast. I was trying to figure out whose voice that was, and I never thought of it being Mary.