Week 9 Thing 22 audiobooks

World ebook Fair ws incredibly impressive for $8.95 a year for both ebook and audiobooks. It contained 500,000 books with audio, tech, classic, adult, children's and sci fi. Admittedly, a lot of it was governement or free, but it was nice to gain access to it all in one place.

I've known about Project Gutenberg for quite a few years, but I've mostly looked at their ebooks. It was interesting to note that they now have sheet music, science fiction, ways to download huge portions of their collection to CD and lots of languages. There seemed to be a huge amount of computer generated works, maybe more than human. I'm not sure I could listen that long to a computer voice!

I've used Overdrive quite a few times, so I didn't look at it much. Recently I got a fast cable connection at home which enabled me to download audio items. I plan to use it more now. I even downloaded a video of Archie and Mahitabel, an old favorite story of my mother-in-law!

Week 9 Thing 21 Podcasting

I decided to try to subscribe to a yahoo podcast. I ended up trying to download Yahoo jukebox. This seemed HUGE and I didn't figure out how it worked anyway. I think my Windows XP kept blocking the subscription I was trying to download. I haven't removed the Yahoo jukebox software yet. It might come in handy for music downloads.

I listened to a 15 minute podcast called 2nd life library. It was about the health info island. In second life, they were building the land to create a place where people could learn about surgeries and hospitals. The "customer" could virtually sit down and have discussion about health issues, what surgery or a hospital might be like. I thought this would be a really cool way to alleviate someones fears and prepare for a hospital visit.

I added a subscription to bloglines called Talk with Talis about current library technology issues, things like libary 2.0. While playing around looking for podcasts I got off track and added a few new widgets to my igoogle page about popular books and Amazon's top items. They should be useful later.

Week 9 Thing 20 YouTube

I downloaded a youtube widget to my igoogle page with you tube on it. I placed it on the second page in case it took a while to download all of those pictures. I notice when I pull up the page, a video immediately started playing with load Indian dance music. Fortunately, the video was quite professionally done, probably a movie scene. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the search feature in the widget to work. Nothing happens when I click search. I tried downloading small videos and they didn't seem to work either. On the regular youtube page, I just loved watching libary dominoes. I love to watch humorous films as long as they are in good taste. Funny films about injuries are not funny to me. I had to share the dominoes with my husband. We were amazed to see that many books of a similar size! This could be addicting! Being a big photography buff, I chose to logon and upload a video. I picked a video of Tropical Storm Ernesto when we were evacuated. It's not too exciting, but it is somewhat interesting driving through the water on the road. I could see using youtube with teen programs or to share some computer or photography training.


This video was embedded directly from my computer.

Week 8 Thing 19 Web 2.0 awards

I tried out eventful.com. I've been looking for a scrapbooking conference nearby for a while. I found 2 workshops in Delaware. I also found Silver Spring Camera Club, where you could add an RSS feed for their events. There were various different ways of looking at events, calendars, performers or a search box. I didn't find too much, but some of the events were fairly local. There were events on the Northern Neck of Virginia. You could find people near you that were using the service. A few were listed in Hollywood, MD, not too far away.

Eventful might be a useful tool to find local events for customers if we lived in a bigger city, but I think given our location it would be sort of hit and miss.

Week 8 Thing 18 Workd productivity tools Google docs

Two of us examined google docs and spreadsheets. It seemed like it would be a very useful way for creating documents if you were traveling and couldn't access your home computer. Most of the features were fairly comparable to MS Word, but there were some quirky things.

The symbols look similar to gmail. I added a quote. It makes a special box to put the quote in. But then, it didn't put it in the box. The minute I started typing it the text popped out of the box.

Removing extra blank lines is an interesting feature. You won't get extra blank pages sent to a printer.
Google docs would be easy to share with others. Tables were a little weird. If nothing was in the box, the box didn't show up.

You can upload from your computer or a disk.

Week 7 Thing 16 Wikis

St. Mary's County chose not to try out wiki's in a big way. I have recently seen some potential uses for one. We could use a wiki to keep track of local procedures. I have a procedures page that seems like it needs updating about every few weeks. We could include a section on resources for those hot questions we repeatedly receive.

We could also use it for collecting information on troubleshooting computers as long as it has limited access and couldn't be seen by customers.

The Library 2.0 in 15 minutes a day blew me away. Someone has put an awful lot of work into creating this wiki. (too much for me)

I find wikis interesting, but I'm still a little cautious about using them.

Week 6 Thing 15 Library 2.0

The library 2.0 concept is fascinating because it seems like we are opening a whole new way of looking at libraries. I think customers would love to be able to get RSS feeds about new items added to our collection, especially on their favorite author or topic. I am wondering if tagging will help customers find what they want or if there will be lots of irrelevant tags that will cause lots of false "hits" for information.

I think in St. Mary's County, or at my library anyway, I've already felt the impact of being in "perpetual beta". Although it is sometimes exhausting, we are rarely bored with all of the new technology we keep learning about.

I am happy to be involved with the new Technology plan we are working on.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for our library vendors, such as Sirsi to make new software available that can handle some of these new technologies like tagging, RSS and participatory users.

Week 6 Thing 14 Technorati

I was somewhat confused about Technorati searching until I found the advanced search page at:

http://technorati.com/search?advanced .

I tried a keyword search which yielded 3522 results under "learning 2.0". I noted that using quotes works best for phrases. I got 201 blogs in the tag search, at least 1 in german, 1 french and a lot from Maryland. The directory search got similar results at 214 blogs. I thought it was interesting that blogging seems to be an international experience. I was surprised to note that the 3rd top favorited blog was China Travel, again showing that the whole world is blogging.

I noted that one of the top searches was the word blogs. Why would you search the word "blogs" under a blog finding tool? Maybe people enter something like "blogs about ..." This seemed odd. I also learned that I am not the only person who doesn't remember how to spell utube (youtube).

Some of the top blogs were the same as the top favorited blogs such as Boing Boing and Tech crunch and Engadget.