Mapping

Well -- this was fun! I have a friend coming in to town on Friday and Neil and I are meeting him and his wife at Calories for supper. I thought it might be fun to try and make him a map to get from the Bess to Calories (with pictures and a few snippets of info -- see if it works). Anyway, here it is! http://www.communitywalk.com/getting_to_calories/map/1103402

I can definitely see the use of something like this, especially for situations like this one.


"Fortune sides with him who dares."
- Virgil

Widgets and Gadgets

I think these can be so fun -- although you can lose yourself in scanning through them all!! Widgets can be really useful on webpages, they can be quick links to useful sites or bits of information. I always like the ones for temperature/weather (maybe cuz I'm a prairie girl :-)

Only 58 days until summer holidays!!

"What we think or what we know
or what we believe is, in the
end, of little consequence.
The only consequence is what we do"
- John Ruskin

Social bookmarking

I have been lax, I'm afraid, and madly trying to catch up!

I've never tried the social bookmarking thing, part of my problem is that I find there are so many different ways of sharing -- how do you decide which is best? I guess one nice thing about some kind of social bookmarking is that you don't have to be on your computer in order to access your favourites. That's a plus. I can also see it as a tool if you are working with others on a project or gathering information. Diigo does have more features (highlighting and comments) than something like GoogleReader...

I've done a bit of playing around, but not a whole lot. Found a music group to watch and have one site in my 'Library'.

"The greatest mistake you can make in
life is to be continually fearing
you will make one."
- Elbert Hubbard

Twitter

Well, set up my Twitter account - it wasn't so hard and I even put in a profile picture of myself. My struggle was more how to determine who I should follow, but in the end it worked out. As I'm in the midst of reading Derryl Murphy's new novel, Napier's Bones, I thought I would follow him and then I chose musicians -- David Francey and Great Big Sea (I thought they might be fun). I did not tweet, though, I think I need to decide why and what I will be tweeting about as I don't think everyone needs to know every thought going through my head...


Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Henry Ford

Social Networking

I am probably one of the very few people who does not have a twitter or Facebook account. Not that people haven't asked me to. I have a sister and friends who live in other provinces and countries who are facebook folk and want me to join -- I have always had a bit of a concern about the privacy piece, but a lot of it is that I just don't really want another place to go to connect with people. Dealing with my personal e-mail sometimes is bad enough.... However, I think I might have to succumb :-)

However, at the library I previously worked at, we did have a library Twitter account and it became quite popular. The important thing is to keep it active (but not too active so that it irritates). People actually retweeted tweets and contacted us through Twitter too. By the time I left, the library had about 500 followers -- granted a number were other libraries or organizations, but there were also a significant number of personal followers. I do feel that it can work quite well.

"One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world."

- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992

Flickr

Well, I kind of enjoyed Flickr -- set up my own account and tried posting some photos. It might be a solution, especially if the S-Js get with the 21st century and finally set up a Facebook account (for which my sisters would be happy). I found it relatively easy to do basic things, although I do need to figure out how to rotate my pictures -- all the ones that I want to have vertical are horizontal... I think I am a little leary about just having my pictures of family out there on the open web -- I definitely would mark them private, for viewing only by family (or maybe some friends) -- but with a sister half way around the world, it's an easy way for her to see what's happening with the kids over here.

I did find that exploring Flickr was easy. There are some amazing photographers out there!

"The man who does not read good
books has no advantage over the
man who cannot read them."
- Mark Twain

elephant

elephant, a photo by Peter Metcalf on Flickr.

I had to search for elephants this morning. I had a huge conversation with my 9-year old son last night about elephants, why there is an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka, about poachers, and why people kill elephants. He had question after question. He wanted to know how poachers were caught, especially when elephants are out in the wild. After much thought, he came up with a plan for catching poachers -- I only wish it would work! His plan was that a Poacher's Bar should be built; obviously, because it is a bar for poachers, all the poachers would choose to go there. Once all the poachers were sitting down, a huge net could be dropped over all of them and they would be caught in the net. Brilliant! If only we could trick them that way :-)

My thoughts on wikis

Well, I must admit I don't have a lot of experience working with wikis. I am on the CAPL executive and we did create a wiki using MediaWiki as a way of gathering together numerous articles that would be relevant to public libraries. It worked fine, but really was not the best product for what we needed. After a couple of years, we moved the site to WordPress, which does work better as a central information resource -- the site is Public Libraries Building Capacity and is at www.clatoolbox.ca/caplblog if you want to take a look.

As a tool for working collaboratively on a project or for bringing things together that you want to all access, I think that wikis can work well. I agree, though, with other comments people have made about knowing which tool to use for which job. When do you use a wiki? When do you use a blog? When do you use Google Docs? I'm still not sure about it. The 23 Things wiki child page on the benefits of using wikis is really like a blog, with comments and replies -- does a wiki make sense for that?

Lots of ramblings, not a lot of answers.

Podcasting

Podcasting is kind of like radio on the internet -- interesting. I don't know why I thought that it would include video too...do you think it's because of the YouTube thing, that we're just too used to having a visual to go along with words? Anyway, I thought that I would look at poetry to go along with the quotes that I like to include. I found an interesting site that does poetry translation, saying the poem translated into English and then in its original language. Anyway, I will try and embed the RSS feed into this blog but I'm not sure I know how to do it... Never hurts to try! And if not that, then the link to the site.

Poetry in Translation podcasts

"Victory belongs to the most persevering."
- Napoleon

The librarian song -- a YouTube special

When I searched for a YouTube video I rediscovered this song. I remember watching it a couple of years ago and I really enjoy it. I particularly love how words can take on meaning just by facial expression -- the words themselves are fine, but the innuendo from the singer makes it something quite else. Enjoy!

Prezi

Well, a couple of weeks late -- whoops! It's amazing how the days fill up. I enjoyed making my little prezi; it is easy and fun. I did find that I ended up writing less per 'slide' than I would have with a powerpoint -- and I think that's a good thing. And I was able to include a photo of the new addition to our family. Her name is Grapefruit and she came from the SPCA after being found abandoned in the hallway of an apartment building. She's pretty cute! Check it out
http://prezi.com/w1ikhbac1gic/guinea-pigs-the-pet-for-you/

"Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing,
you will be successful."
- Albert Schweitzer

Google Docs

Well, gotta say I'm not convinced about google docs. I found a couple of things frustrating, one was the fact that curser would show up before the letter that you had most recently typed rather than after --- that was confusing, I thought. The other thing I didn't like, and perhaps it's because I hadn't set it up properly, but the space in which I could type was only about four or five lines, then there was all this white space below. Did I do something wrong?

Anyway and irregardless, I think that tools like google docs are great, especially from a collaboration perspective. At the moment I am using dropbox, which is really a storage site, but also has the capability of sharing files or folders -- I'm definitely liking it and find it very useful.

"The first requisite of success is the
ability to apply your physical and
mental energies to one problem
without growing weary."
- Thomas Edison

feeding me information

Well, I set up the RSS feeds for my iGoogle page and Google Reader. I can really see the benefit of them, particularly if you are trying to follow a number of different websites and blogs. That has always been one of my struggles, keeping track of everything. From a library perspective, I can see RSS feeds as a great way to ensure that you are up to date with innovations and news within your particular subject or discipline area. We can really impress the students and faculty by being totally on the ball! Many of the branch websites already feed information from other sources onto their homepages, making them even more useful and relevant to the people using the sites.

"If we all did the things we are capable
of doing, we would literally
astound ourselves."
- Thomas Edison

iGoogle

Had fun creating my iGoogle account last week. Not sure how much I will use it, but I have set it as my homepage on my home computer -- so we'll see. The widget options are amazing! As a quotes kind-of girl, I really like those widgets, and the art of the day (and comics, optical illusions, news, and....).

So, my quote for the day today is:
"Success is not to be pursued;
it is to be attracted by
the person we become."- Jim Rohn