Week 10 - 23 Is this really the end?

After such a long trek it seems impossible that this is the end. No longer clicking on iSTAR to find out what are this week’s exercises. No more freaking out because something seemingly so easy is frustratingly hard to accomplish! No more creating accounts with every Tom, Dick, and Harry dreaming up user names and passwords!
Some of my favorite discoveries have been Flickr, Picnik, YouTube, Zoho writer, Animoto, Technorati , Library Elf, Library Thing, the Image Generators, Bloglines and RatemySpace.HGTV.
This program has made me more adventurous when it comes to going to web sites. It also taught me that there is a whole world of sites in the Web ready to teach you.
The most surprising outcome from this program has been that I have become a fan of YouTube!
Library Elf and Library Thing are custom made for customer and personal use at HCPL.
The different Generators are great to use for the children’s programs. Animoto can create great presentations to show different pictures of library programs. As a matter of fact all the sites that have been presented during this learning experience are helpful to our customers in one way or another. Also I feel more “with it” than before the course.
I would like to learn more about HTLM, RSS feeds, and Image Generators.
By the way, thanks for the learning experience but we should get 40 training ours instead of 10!

Week 9: 22 Downloadable Media

I became familiar with HCPL digital media site about a year ago. I have enjoyed music, audio books and even movies. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to listen. I had some trouble with the type of portable player that I first bought, somehow it would download the files but I was not able to play them. My second portable player worked much better. I have enjoyed listening to music, and books: Koontz’s “By the light of the moon” and “Intensity”, Johansen’s “Blind Alley”, Patterson’s “4th of July” and many more. I also downloaded a film “Fuera del cuerpo”. The film was watchable but due to my computer being of an older vintage, it would freeze and then start again.
It was very easy to download the OverDrive Media Console to my computer. I like HCPL’s media site because is easy to browse for items and put them on hold (if not available at the time). I enjoy Ebooks for reference type materials although I find it a bit awkward to use. I have not used Adobe Reader or Mobipocket Reader, but some of my friends really like that type of software.
The difference that I found between the library site and the free sites is the fact that the library site is familiar to me and easier to use plus I did not have to create yet another account with username and password!

Week 9 - 21 Pdcasts, Smodcasts!

I really don’t think I am up to be a podcaster at this time. On Odeo.com I found where I could subscribe to a myriad of podcasts. I chose “Uncensored History of the Blues” it looks very interesting. You can listen to the music or download it to you computer.
On Podcast.net I found “Really Learn Spanish”. This podcast would be useful for patrons wanting to learn Spanish without having to check out an audio tape or CD. I did subscribe to this feed and also to "listeneasy.com/podcasts/serenity". The most useful aspect of Podcast.net is the ability to listen to lectures of your interest whenever is convenient.

Week 9- 20 YouTube

I found my favorite song in Youtube

Week 9 - 20 YouTube

I had a lot of fun watching different library related videos. I selected No cookies at the library because I thought that would be a fun video to show at lapsit or storytime. Here is the link
no cookies

My animoto video

Week 7-17 Blog about technology

Oh dear! I was gone for a week and I skiped week 7! Since I do not know how to shuffle posts this one about “wikis” is going to be out or order. My first experience with wikis is http://wikipedia.org/. Ihcpl wiki is very interesting and a good way to interact with our coworkers and share information. It is a good thing that you can edit your entry to correct mistakes. On the other hand the fact that you can edit the information entered it makes it not so factual.
I did create an account http://ihcpl.pbwiki.com/ (another set of user names and passwords to remember!) and added my blog to the favorites.
I also put a comment on one of my fellow bloggers.

Week 7-16 So what's in a wiki?

Oh dear! I was gone for a week and I skiped week 7! Since I do not know how to shuffle posts this one about “wikis” is going to be out of order. My first experience with wikis was http://wikipedia.org/. Ihcpl wiki is very interesting and a good way to interact with our coworkers and share information. It is a good thing that you can edit your entry to correct mistakes. On the other hand the fact that you can edit the information entered it makes it not so factual.
I did create an account http://ihcpl.pbwiki.com/ (another set of user names and passwords to remember!) and added my blog to the favorites.

Week 8 - 19 Zoho writer

What a fantastic web page! Full of options and able to access it anywhere! It is similar in some aspects to Microsoft Office. My question is: how do the finance the support of this website? At this point I do not see any advertisements.

Week 8 - 18 Social Networking

I really am not into myspace . Quite a few of the pictures, videos and/or language are objectionable to me. On the other hand I can see how it would be an ease place to find friends. dogster and catster seem real cute places for cat and dog lovers. www.infieldparking does not interest me at all. Now www.threadless.com looks rather interesting, plenty of designs that can be used for bulletin boards, crafts or decorating. www.xanga.com and www.facebook.com are good places to make friends. www.linkedin.com seems to be the perfect place to interface with other people in the same profession or to look up old school friends. www.360yahoo.com lets you create your own page to share pictures and so on. Now the web site that I did create and account with was www.ratemyspace.com and I can see myself spending countless hours in this social network site for decorating aficionados.
I still feel that you need to be very careful when interacting with other people in any social networking site. There have been too many cases of being harmed by being too trusting in this element.

Week 6 - 15 Library 2.0

Do we dare to dream of obtaining “Library 4.0”, the neo-library?
To have a library where you can exercise your mind, acquire knowledge, feast your eyes, meditate and relax?
A comfortable place, a retreat, with ever the hint a soothing smell, ever so subtle music, good light, and yes, coffee and maybe some chocolates. What a beautiful dream!

The heart of the matter is that with our ever changing world, the library needs to evolve to meet the varying needs of our customers or like a dinosaur go gently into the night

Week 6 - 14 Getting-not-so-technical with Technorati

Tecnorati

Well I did have fun this time! Searching Technorati in advanced search it gives a choice of level of authority plus language. It can search for “ blogs”, “about blogs” or “this blog URL”. After the search is completed the results can be viewed as Posts, Blogs, Videos and Photos.
Pretty neat!
With the keyword “gardening” it displays posts (where to buy gardening related items) blogs (thoughts about gardening/advice) videos about gardening and pictures of gardens.

Week 6 - 13 Tagging/ Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us seem to be the website to use if you have an abundance of bookmarks. The fact that you can categorize them makes it very useful. Also it is fun “getting into other people’s heads”. As with all the other websites you need to spend some time to be able to use it properly. What I found really interesting going to Del.icio.us/ihcpl / was how world wide the tagged websites listed are. Library Thing’s comments by bloggers were mostly in English, in Technorati’s comments you find more non-english blogs, but when you go to colrpickr or picnik the comments are from all over the world.
Del.icio.us is a very important tool for the reference librarian, also it is great for anyone, specially if you are traveling since it can be accessed anywhere as long as you have internet access.
Signing up with Del.icio.us was a breeze, making it work will be more of a challenge.

Week 5 - 12 LibraryElf

This was a super simple exercise. I can see its use, on the other hand it seems like a duplication of what Horizon does right now. The improvement over Horizon notifications is the fact that you can customize Elf to fit your needs (when and how to notify you of items on hold/overdue/etc). Now the challenge is to remember all my user names and passwords.
PS After playing a little more on this site I found out it is really terrific for keeping track of your library account!


libraryelf

Week 5 - # 11 LibraryThing

The library Thing is a wonderful website. It is very easy to create an account. I think I am going to have a lot of fun with it. Keep track of what I have read and enjoyed, and create a wish list for future reading.
In allcomsuming.com you can search for music, book, films and even food. I need to find out how to look for just a song, it only gave album titles.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/seabreaze

Week 5 - #10 Generators

sylvester-baby-tunes_www-txt2pic-com
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

I love customizing comic strips. I can see a lot of uses for this site. FDToys seems like fun also, I am just running out of time today. I got a great wallpaper from Image generators, also liked glittering the writing but have not found the way to incorporate it to my blog. I managed to meet myself in Meez (below). It was really like playing with paper dolls. I need to further check this out.
http://www.wallpapergenerator.com/

http://glitterizer.com/

Week 5 - #10 Customizing comics

This a real easy site.


http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/

stressed-out-stress_www-txt2pic-com
Originally uploaded by http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/<>

Week 5 - 1 Meez

http://www.meez.com/

Week 4 post 2, Feedster, Topix, Technorati

I enjoyed Feedster searching capabilities. I found that most of the results were sales advertisements for your search keyword. Feedwidgets seem to be intriguing way to add feeds to your newsfeeder.

In Topix you can get news from just about anywhere, just plug in the name of the town/state. You can even find news on a foreign country by plugging the name of the country in the search engine.

Syndic8 must be very useful but I found it kind of boring. Now Technorati was a very fun site, with a multitude of very colorful choices for searching blogs.

I did find that the same news appeared in different sites.

Week 4 "Blogline"

blogline
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

I got lost again trying to create an account an account with Bloglines , but by golly I was able to subscribe to news not only from the U SA but also from Europe! Plus it was quite a nice surprise when reading the newspaper this morning I found that I had already read some of the articles yesterday!

Week 3 using mashups

Sea
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

I was able to retrive this picture by using flickr retriver (using the picture that I had uploaded) . This is so much fun! It seems that they are quite a few tools that you can use. I need to play with them to be confortable using them.

Week 3 post 4

seville%20plaza[1]
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

This is a plaza in Sevilla, Spain. It was used during the filming of the movie Lawrence of Arabia

Week 3 post 7

25 Annversity 008
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

Tried "picnik" site. It is very ease to use. I will be using this site for my own pictures. I really liked it!

Week 3 post 6

This was harder than expected, since I am familiar with picture editing tools. Will have to play on the site more to get familiar with it.

Week 3 post 5 -Robin Williams entertaining USA troops

Robin Williams
Originally uploaded by myseabreaze

Another atemp at posting a picture to my blog without showing my name. This "flicker" is kind of fun. I can see using it in my spare time as a way to share pictures with family and friends. But what I am really finding out is that is fun to learn new things.

Week 3 post 1

Week 3 post 1
Originally uploaded by amwilbourn

This is attached to a map

Week 3 Post 1

Learning Style

I am a visual learner so anything that I can view is extremely useful (the proverbial "a picture is worth a thousand words"). I think this learning experience is going to be fun, plundering along in the mystical world of blogs.

Internet Safety

I believe that you really need to be careful on what you put on line, since even seemingly innocent statements or pictures can be construed to be something very unflattering, plus the fact anyone has access to what you have posted.