Friday, January 30, 2009

Monday, January 26, 2009

Thing #5 assignment


(photo by Jason Kraft)

These folks are in the business of selling allergy-free pastries in California. This photo looks more like lunch -- titled "Soba Noodle & Tofu Bento" and includes the description "Soba noodle salad, cucumbers, mango and strawberry slices, golden tofu bites with ponzu dipping sauce ." It didn't take long find this dish by searching keyword "tofu." Jason and Amanda have loaded many more photos of their food creations on their photostream.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Thing #5

Added a flickr badge to the lower right hand corner of the main page -- another addition to the gadget collection. Photography is one of those mediums that has done really well in the digital age.

As easy as it is to load photos from a digital camera into flickr, I like that you can take a shoebox full of old family snapshots, scan them in and archive them someplace. In the old days, you would always fear that if the negative was lost, reproducing and sharing a photo would be problematic.

I was at a family reunion in 2007 where ALOT of photos were taken -- rather than try and load them all into a site like flickr, all the photos were loaded on a flash drive, and the flash drive was passed around. I actually added a couple of photos from the reunion into my flickr photostream, but I wouldn't want them all there.

flickr's free account has some limitations which they remind you about every time you log on.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Thing #4

Thanks to the very informative NEFLIN workshop "Library Blogs and Newsfeeds" which I attended back in '05, I've been using the fantastic Bloglines for a while now.


A blogger I've been reading (and keeping up with via Bloglines) for the past two years or so recently commented, "One of the best — and strangest — things about the internet is that you can become pretty good friends with somebody you’ve never actually laid eyes on."

(Drawing of Plankton by Joey W.).

Thing #3


"With so many online news sources, how do you find the ones that relate to you? Learn about blog search tools."

How to find your way through the labyrinth? -- for me, perhaps the most important factor has simply been total amount of time spent searching the web, using it, running into dead ends, and then successfully finding stuff I'm that interests me -- articles, bloggers, websites, listservs, RSS feeds, and other things that matter to me. Once you've found some sources that you like, they lead to more sources, and those lead to more, and so on.....

Serendipity plays a big part.

As far as subject specific searches goes, I like that Google will let you specify if you are looking for images, news, maps, etc. Haven't tried their blog search much, but will make a point to give it a try.

For folks taking a more academic approach, verification of a source is essential. Here's a guide from UC Berkeley on how to evaluate web pages. If you are just surfin' for fun, anything goes...you'll know after you've followed a feed for awhile whether or not it is worth your time.

It was back on March 15, 2006 (yes, I found my certificate of completetion and handouts), that I attended the NEFLIN "Library Blogs and Newsfeeds" workshop. I believe the entire class signed up for a Bloglines account that day. My account just sat there for awhile. Months, probably. It looked to me like one of those things I'd never use again -- then all of sudden I started adding some RSS feeds from blogs or news sources I read regularly, and pretty soon Bloglines was a page I was visiting every day. I'm up to 96 feeds now. If I'm not sure if a webpage has a feed, I put the URL into the Bloglines add subscription box, and it lets me know.

The feeds require pruning now and then. But I love Bloglines. In fact it might be the webpage I visit most often. It's easily in my top 5.

evernerve likes it too.

The NEFLIN class offered up a list of blog and RSS search engines but I can't find it right now. I think icerocket was one. Unless I am looking for something really blog-specific, I hardly ever use these.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Thing #2


What is Library 2.0?

"Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future." -- Meredith Farkas

According to this entry in Wikipedia, a guy named Michael Casey coined the term Library 2.0 in his blog LibraryCrunch. Casey had an interesting entry on October 30 -- he talks about the 37,000+ people who were part of the Twitter group following the Mars Phoenix lander. The @MarsPhoenix updates on Twitter have now gone dead -- this sounds like it would have been a really neat thing to have been a part of.

Rob Horning reports on a different type of experience in an entry in PopMatters titled "Twitter: the ultimate advertising medium." Horning says "My personal Twitter experiment has failed miserably. I created an account and tried to post for a while; I even set it up so that I could post messages with my phone. But I discovered I had nothing to say in that forum. I didn’t want to share what I was doing with the world, and I didn’t have enough witticisms to keep it thriving. It was tiring trying to think aphoristically—it turns out that most would-be aphorisms require a lot of developmental context to be comprehensible."

Following the update links in Horning's article, we find, via this post in Mother Jones, which says that Twitter has ruined Robert Scoble's life! He has Twittered away 2,555 hours in the past year! Mother Jones contributor Kevin Drum concludes "one of the problems with Twitter: like Facebook, it doesn't really make too much sense unless you spend a lot of time with it. It doesn't have to be 2,555 hours a year, mind you, but both Facebook and Twitter strike me as things that are perhaps moderately useful if you use them occasionally, but potentially highly useful if you're logged into them constantly and use them as primary tools for keeping in touch with people. That's unlike the blogosphere, where most people pick three or four blogs to follow and read them once a day for 20 minutes or so, and it's one of the things that makes these services hard to 'get' unless you're totally committed to them."

Meanwhile, one of Robert's friends is calling for an intervention.

...(later)...OK, I just stumbled on this interesting blog entry by Meredith Farkas, who works in Vermont, and has spent a lot of time in Florida libraries. Meredith states: "Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future" is at the core of Library 2.0.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Thing #1

This blog has been created and registered. (This looks like it could be fun).

NEFLIN offered a workshop awhile back (can't remember the title) but I was introduced to bloglines. I created an account which sat dormant -- then, all of a sudden, I started adding feeds from blogs I liked and now I have several dozen subscriptions. A few random favorites are listed on the right.

Joined the SJCPLS Goodreads group -- pretty neat.




Backyard sunset, January 7th, 2009, Palm Coast, Florida