#20 Relax & Reflect (Completion)

I think this was a very cool project - it's so important these days to keep abreast of changes and developments in the online culture, and I think that this program gave me some kind of an idea how to keep on top of what's out there. Electronic literacy is rapidly becoming an essential skill in today's world - and is perhaps THE essential skill in the information marketplace, so I think the general awareness of new developments instilled by this program was very helpful to me not only as a library professional, but as a library patron.

Thanks everyone!

#19 Gaming

This was cool! I have been using Yahoo for 7 or 8 years for email, but I had no idea that there were so many games on there - very cool. There are some great time-killing games in there - I especially liked the Word Search came and the Scrabble. Fun.

#18 Maps and Geotagging

I was pretty familiar with Google Earth prior to this section, just from working on the reference desk. Google Earth has always delivered something extra when Google Maps doesn't quite get the job done - one feature, though that I was unware of was the star maps available through Google Earth. That was pretty amazing!

Geotagging is another feature I've found very useful for some time - I have been using Flickr's geotagging feature quite a bit through the past month or two, surveying flood damage in my Indiana hometown. The geotagging feature has helped me to easily locate the most recently uploaded images. Very useful!

#17 Avatars & Second Life

This is the avatar I created for the Teen Librarian page. Actually, I should probably update my avatar, I don't have the beard anymore.

When I think of an "avatar," I think of Timothy Leary calling the Beatles "divine avatars." Either that, or the episode of Star Trek: TNG called "Silicon Avatar" (which is actually one of the few decent episodes from the 5th season) , both of which predate the current usage by a number of years.

Avatars are fun. I guess in the online sense, I think of an avatar as more of a cartoony caricature of one's self, or the virtual characters created on sites like Gaia. I downloaded the Second Life software and was a little overwhelmed! It was fun to explore, but I definitely don't live there and don't think I'd like to! It's definitely a cool environment, but it was sort of an "information overload" type of situation for me. It will be intersting to see how this total-immersion virtual environment evolves, I have a feeling that this is the direction the online environment is moving!

#16 Online Applications & Tools

This was an interesting project.

I created a spreadsheet in Google docs, andshared it with myself, using one of my other email accounts. This is actually pretty cool. I had no idea that this service existed.

I then moved over to Zoho, and - to be honest - was a little overwhelmed, there were so many bells and whistles on Zoho, I wasn't exactly sure where to even get started! Clearly, Zoho has a lot more functionality than Google Docs (for now, anyway), but it's kind of a double-edged sword - while Zoho does have the extra functionality, I think that Google Docs is a lot easier to use.

#14 Podcasting: something for everyone

This was really cool - I was aware of podcasts before we started this section, but I wasn't aware of the RSS angle. I have a couple of friends who do some podcasting, and what I'd been doing in the past is going to the website, checking for updates, and downloading the podcast to my desktop and listening to it from there.

I had no idea that, using RSS feeds, it's so easy to subscribe to cool podcasts and have them sent directly to my Bloglines and/or Google Reader account, where I can just click on a button and listen to them - without having to download them to my desktop and open them through iTunes. I really learned something w/ this section. Very cool.

#15 Search Engines

I use Google. ALl the time. I like Google. I have, from the very beginning. I remember when I began using Google - late 90s, or whenever they first got started. The simple, streamlined interface was (and is) a refreshing change from the confusing, overly busy, WTF interface of many other (some of them long-gone) search engines. Ask.com must like Google's interface, too - they've borrowed heavily from it. Here's a question for ask.com - "why did you get rid of Jeeves?" Jeeves was, potential Wodehouse-estate lawsuits notwithstanding, cool!

Anyway, I have been really impressed with the way, over the years, that Google has progressively supplemented their basic web-search capability. Google maps, newsgroup searches, blog searching, and Google Books are all features that I use regularly. Even though I have serious reservations about how Google has become the monolithic Wal-Mart of online information-seeking resources, I feel like their success is well-deserved. Sort of like Starbuck's.

Anyway, aside from those slight reservations about Google taking over the planet, I am 100% OK with Google. I just don't see anything at Yahoo or Ask that really even makes them much of a serious competitor to Google.

#13 Playtime with Online Image Generators

This was a lot of fun! don't have much more to add, but I especially enjoyed the Monopoly card generator!

#12 OverDrive downloads and a plea from yours truly

I had a lot of trouble getting the software to operate properly (due to the DRM issues), but you know, actually, I guess that's probably a good thing. If a patron calls reference now and is experiecing similar issues, I'll know how to talk them through the problem.

Re OverDrive, though:

Did you notice anything you liked, didn’t like?

I liked the fact that, once the Media Player, the interface was very simple and lean and straightforward.

How was the selection of titles on the topics you browsed?

I did a simple search for Shakespeare plays, and was actually quite impressed with the selection of plays available in eAudio format.

Were your favorite authors available in the collection?

Yes.

Did anything surprise you about this service?

Once I got the player downloaded, I was surprised at how smooth the checkout process was - this is definitely a cool resource, I am really glad I got this to work!

#11 Tag, You’re it! Social Bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Checked this out, aside from having a "roving profile" of your own bookmarks, I don't really see how this is much of an advantage over just using a search engine. Oh well.

#10 Wiki Wiki Fun!

i've enjoyed working with wikis for the past couple of years, submitting content for memory alpha (the star trek reference wiki...yeah, yeah. i know, we can say it: "geek") and some short-lived record collector wikis. wikis are fun and they're useful, though i have to admit that the ramifications of planet wiki are a little disturbing to me.

it's way too easy for questionable and downright wrong information to worm it's way into a wiki. if it's something like a staff wiki, or a star trek geek wiki, it's not a big deal. but i see a lot of library patrons, most of them young kids and teenagers, adopting wikipedia as their go-to information resource. the whole eglalitarian philosophy behind wikipedia, if you ask me, just doesn't pan out in the real world: wikipedia presupposes, by its very nature, that it's a GOOD thing that everyone can contribute content, wikipedia presupposes that everyone has something substantive to add. i'm not sure that's the case. a lot of garbage information slips onto wikipedia. wikipedia is at the forefront of the junk-information proliferation, the flagship of the faster-is-better school of mcresearch. i'm not a fan.

for smaller scale projects, though - wikis are useful and fun, as long as people aren't citing wikipedia in their reasearch papers, i am AOK with them!! :)

#8 Facebook, MySpace aka Friend Networks

i've been using myspace for about 3 years now, i've found this to be a fun & useful way of enriching my online communications with friends and family - i often upload images to my photo albums, change my profile song to share music with friends, and leave goofy comments on friends' pages. i like myspace. it's omnipresence gets a little irritating sometimes, but i enjoy the simplicity of the interface.

facebook, from my persepctive, is sort of a much ado about not much. i have a facebook profile, but i don't use it much. the facebook interface is a little too busy for me, and unneccesarily complex. i don't want to spend 3 hours learning how to use a social networking site; myspace works just fine for me. all of this stuff about facebook supplanting myspace as the networking tool of choice...i don't know. i'm not really buying it, myself. facebook is a little too complicated for its own good, there are all these bells and whistles on facebook that are supposed to add content to the site, but i find myself look at these widgets, and asking myself "what's that supposed to do?" and then i shrug, log out, and go back to myspace.

#7 Flickr fun photosharing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32614037@N00/232832830/

i've been using flickr for a couple of years, and often use it to share images of life out here with my friends and family back in the midwest.

when maron and i first came out to washington, in august of 2006, it was for my interview with sno-isle. one of our side-trips during this excurison was down to aberdeen, so i could check out some the nirvana/cobain-related sites - above is a picture of kurt cobain's childhood home i took during that trip.

#9 YouTube, Hulu and Fancast — streaming video

wow. i am going to totally eat my anti-streaming-media words from the last blog entry.

i am very familiar with youtube, and have been using it for about as long as it's been around. i'd been collecting stuff like this for years on bootleg videos

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTtXVrANEhU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZuByRM0GOw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0hcw81X2nI

& it's pretty amazing to be able to pull obscure stuff like this up with a few keystrokes.

hulu and fancast were both revelatory - i had NO IDEA that this kind of material was freely available online. even though the prospect of free, 24/7 access to every episode of the original "star trek" is something of a workplace nightmare...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Star-Trek/96413/watch-it/on-fancast

this kind of thing is incredibly useful for public libraries with long hold queues for popular shows. for example, season 3 of star trek: TOS currently has a hold queue of 16, with 4 holdable copies...whichever way you look at it, any interested patron just adding themself to the hold list for this item is going to have to wait at least several weeks. all of these episodes are on fancast - this kind of instant access to materials can really be a tremdendous help to patrons (with high-speed internet access) who don't want to wait in the hold queue.

#6 Pandora and Streaming Music

I'm not a big fan of streaming media, whoever the provider. I managed to set up a Mog account (after 30-45 minutes of trying) and, at the end of the experience, I'm kind of scratching my head and wondering exactly why this is considered to be an improvement over just playing a CD??? I can understand the appeal of the ipod/mp3 player (though I don't own one or plan to ever use one), and I can understand the appeal of having an old-school stereo (which I do have at home and use every day), but I don't really see the appeal to this kind of thing. This is, to me, a perfect example of how an online gizmo-thing isn't always an improvement over whatever it is its supposed to replace. Bottom line for me is it's still easier to just bring my CDs with me. Oh well.

#5 RSS and Feed Readers

I set up my Bloglines account after Collection Development training a few months back, and it's proven to be a real time-saver. I'm also a lot more methodical about reading my blogs, too - just because I don't have to spend all that time surfing around checking one site after another. This is a very useful tool.

instant messaging

I've actually been IMing for years - usually I use AIM, but it was cool learning about Meebo...I like the real-time games feature. I've been playing chess via email with some friends for a long time, the real-time chess is a nice feature!

OK. It's been a little while since I posted - just been especially busy for the past week, getting all of my loose ends tied up at ARL, so Jocelyn's transition into the job is as smooth as possible. Her first day is 3/31.

Attendance at the ARL manga group is skewing upwards - we had 8 in attendance yesterday, for Wolf's Rain, which was great.

I'm going to be hosting a Guitar Hero booth at the Stanwood/Camano Youth Arts Festival, at Stanwood Middle School, on May 17th. I'm looking forward to it - I had a grea time at the Festival last year, and I think that having the gaming system this year will be great PR for Sno-Isle.

I'm also trying to keep the blog up-to-date at the Stanwood MySpace page - I've got so many blogs going nowadays , it's getting hard to keep track of them!

First Post

It's really easy to set one of these up. The hard part about blogging, I've found, is actually keeping it going, being regular and up-to-date about posting.