Thing 16: YouTube

Wow, I have always wanted to see the Auroraa Borealis!! Great video!!!!

It was fun searching YouTube for something that would be both visually and audibly stunning. I wasn't sure what I was looking for so I searched keywords such as caves, whalesong, space, and then found videos on the Northern Lights and had to share one. This is my favorite of the ones I viewed because I enjoy both the music and the pictures.

Interms of using YouTube for the library, anything that inspires creativity is wonderful as far as I'm conscerned. I would love to have teen challenges allowing teens to submit thier own youtube creations to be placed on our branch web page. And wouldn't it be great for local history projects to create YouTube shorts of local seniors sharing a favorite memory of our local heritage?

Thing 15: Rollyo

Well this is truely cool! I created a search engine of my favorite Arthurian Legend sites titles Arthuriana. This could be a great tool for us to coordinate with school projects -- if the teacher let us know what is being assigned we could set up a rollyo search engine for that class to use! We couls also use it with our teen advisory board for special projects. I love this!

Select...ArthurianaSearch The Web

thing 14: Online Productivity Tools

I already have an I-google page that I set up back in Nov 2008. Not sure how it relates to productivity but maybe I missed the point: I have several game widgets like hangman and several weather watch cities. I never use it at work, but it is nice to log in using my laptop while at the airport waiting.....

RSS feeds are great because I am finding news that I would have missed without the feeds, however, does this actually increase my productivity? While finding out about these tidbits is enriching my life, only one has related directly to work (so far).

I am thrilled to have found ZAMZAR!!!!
We often have patrons come to use our computers because their printer or computer crashed and they bring in their .wps or .docz document and our computers don't read those files. Now with ZAMZAR I will o longer have to search for converting sites, I'll just know where to get it done without searching each time!!!! Productivity Yeah!!!!

Thing 13: Library Thing

Well, this was easy, since I discovered GoodReads for Thing 12 and already set things up there. I added several more books in Library Thing than I did Goodreads and within 2 days someone marked on of my reviews as being very helpful. I started out with 7 books and then added 5 more 2 days later. I like both sites.

We could use Library Thing Or Good Reads with our Teen Advisory Board for them to post book reviews and link back to the branch website or the teen blog (once it gets going). I am going to recommend both sites to the Reading Circle and maybe we can set up our own online group....

Thing 12: Wiki

While I already knew what a Wiki is and held some opinions about them before starting this thing, I confess I like them a little better now that I have explored them more thoroughly. Before I was leery of wiki content because I could not fathom how authority could be verified and how anyone could know the information found was legit. (For example the big Wikipedia headlines recently about fake quotes making it into the mainstream news.) I realize using the World Wide Web could also be chancy if you do not use critical thinking skills and check out the authority, currency, etc of a website. However, at least this kind of checking is doable, if you take the time.

I still don't like getting my information based on popularity or from the unnamed masses, but I can now see some uses for wikis even big popular ones. Big ones that allow individuals to review & recommend books, or movies, etc might be fun. Small ones within an organization could be useful for sharing ideas, for working specific projects, or for building communication within an organization.

I signed up to Goodreads.com a social networking wiki site that allows individuals to review and recommend books, link to friends, and discuss all things books. I posted one review about John Connelly's The Book of Lost Things. After one day, no one has commented back, but I think I will continue to use this site so eventually things will get moving!

Thing 11: Social Media

I looked at all 4 suggested sites and found Mixx to be the most intuitive to use. Diggit was also pretty easy to navigate. I searched each site using keywords like "Welsh Corgi" "Arthurian Legend" "web 2.0" and "Everquest." Then I tried more obvious keywords like "Obama" and "economy." I then went on to "Library" as a key word.

In none of my searching did I find an article of interest that I hadn't already found using my RSS (Google Reader) or my regular news searching. I'm afraid I just do not get the point of these sites. I do not see how I could use them for home or work. Sorry.

And then I tried looking at the comments. Since no 2 people are going to agree 100 % of the time on 100% everything, I expected to see discussion and perhaps some disagreement. I saw some limited foul language and disrespect. I also noticed a lot of people expressing their own opinions, but noticed little of people thoughtfully "listening" to differing opinions before voicing what they thought. I was not comfortable with the quality of the "discussions" taking place via comment. I guess maybe I don't trust "popularity" to tell me what's important. Maybe it's that road less traveled thing.....

I guess if you're looking for what's popular, trendy, or outlandish these are the places to search. I can't say that I'll be using these tools, though.

Thing 10: Tags & Delicious

I practiced tagging a couple of my blogger blogs and it was very easy. If I were to blog several times a day or over a long period of time tagging my entries would be necessary for keeping up. While Blogger's methodology is a little different from Flickr's methodology, both are intuitive and useful.

Before exploring Delicious, I wasn't too sure it would be useful to me, since I don't bother to use the bookmark function of my browser. However, exploring other people's bookmarks by tag is fascinating and can be useful in finding sites that I might have otherwise overlooked. I like using Delicious as a research tool, although I don't see myself signing up and creating my own tagged bookmarks.

Learning about tag clouds was also very useful. Until now, I always found those spaces of words of varying size rather blinding, annoying, and in the way. Now that I understand that the size and boldness of a word is an indication of the popularity of that tag, the usefulness & organization is suddenly apparent. 3 cheers for NEFLIN's 23 Things: transforming the annoying into the useful one lesson at a time!

Thing 9

Thing 9 has lots of options for library use. These tools would go great with Teens and Tweens, allowing website display of teen accomplishments in various teen programs, attractive ways of advertising teen programs on the local branch page, and even for Teens to use on the Teen Advisory Board blog or newsletter, etc. Since I used Big Huge Labs in previous Things, I wanted to try something different. I first tried to use Lazybase to create my personal database of books to read since I collect books I want to read faster than I can actually read them and since there are so many books and so little time. I followed the link easily, read up on the Lazybase site itself and tried to use it. Unfortunately, while it is easy to navigate and use, it must not have been working the 3 times I tried. I meant to try from home , but ran out of time. So I moved on to Picture trail with the above results. Lots of fun, easy to navigate, very intuitive to use. I highly reccommend it!