Thing 18 - Online Productivity

I came across a useful online charting tool earlier this month, courtesy of the Research Buzz newsletter. Making flowcharts in Word is a huge pain, and while Publisher is a little easier, neither one of them is designed precisely for that purpose. Enter Lovely Charts, which is a nice online site (free for the basic version), which has an easy drag and drop interface for creating flowcharts, organizational charts, network diagrams and so on. I played with it for a little while, and it's pretty easy although I had to refer back to the help for some stuff that I hadn't paid attention to in the beginning. My chart, above, is a rudimentary organizational chart which depicts the pecking order of the herd. Really, it's more complicated that it shows, but the main fact that Sierra is the Queen of everyone, is easily understood. In the horse world, mares trump geldings every time.

Thing 15 - Web 2.0

What a perfect time to blog about Web 2.0 - I just ran across the website for the Web 2.0 Summit, which will take place in San Fran, CA (natch), in a couple of weeks. The whitepaper for the summit is entitled Web 2.0 Squared - Web 2.0 Five Years On, one of the keynote speakers is the COO for Facebook, and another speaker is the CEO of something called RedOctane. What's RedOctane? Guess I'll be finding out. It's interesting to think that when the 23 Things first rolled out back in what '04? Facebook was just launched (Feb 2004) and it would be several years before it was open to anyone besides college students. And Twitter had yet to post the first Tweet. What the heck will be coming up in the next five years? Guess I'll read that whitepaper, at least.

Things 8 and 9

Set up my bloglines acct today and picked and eclectic group of sites to send me feeds. Some I already follow on my Yahoo page, some are new to me. - I picked up - Boing Boing, the Shifted Librarian, Library Stuff, Chocolate and Zuchini (food), Popsugar (celebrity gossip,my secret addiction) (now, wouldn't My Secret Addiction be a good name for a celebrity gossip site?), and some others.

I guess it's handy for sorting out the news you want, from that you don't. But I've had my Yahoo newsfeed for a couple of years, and I rarely look at it. Probably should more.

More entertainingly, I am listening to Shepherd College's Internet web broadcast. I love college radio stations - Shepherd turned me on to the Decembrists.

Thing #19 - I can Digg it, finally. Maybe

Digg was the 2nd place winner behind delicious under Social News - the Big Guys. I've heard of Digg many times, seen linked to on hundreds of websites and so figured I would explore further so I can really understand what Digg attempts to do or be. Digg users post items from the web to Digg. Other Digg users either "digg" it or bury it. The idea is "the cream rises to the top".

In searching the top rising stories I find that - a staffer at ABC news Tweeted that President Obama called Kanye West a "jackass" for grabbing the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMA awards. Now, ABC news is apologizing for this being tweeted, since it was from an off the record portion of an interview that hadn't been finalized. This is pretty interesting, since it highlights the Twitter effect of immediacy immediately. Wonder what'll happen to Terry Moran?

Search libraries, and the top story is Philadelphia to shut down all public libraries. This is a threat, if the city government doesn't pass a budget bill by Oct 2. Next story is NE school library gets rid of all books. This is true, sadly. So, in closing, Digg is interesting, but I'm not sure how a library would make use of it???

Thing 14 Technorati blog search

I haven't used Technorati in the past, but I am a fan of Google Blog Search. I understand tags and tagging, as someone who has a YouTube channel, and also a delicious account. Have explored some searchs on Technorati, there wasn't anything particularly wonderful about it that would make me switch from Google. I did find a little article that compared Technorati and Google blog search http://www.searchenginejournal.com/technorati-vs-google-blog-search-which-is-better/4658/

This was posted at Search Engine Journal.

I do like to search blogs for info as well as the web because I think you can get an insiders view sometimes, and of course sometimes the outsiders view. Way outside, definitely. Always interesting though. I may try Technorati more in the future to see if different searchs give better results.

Thing 12 - Rollyo

I rolled my own search engine for Mounted Games (I always use this as a test for new search engines, as I am familiar with what the results should be, and with the sites that should come up). I wasn't very impressed with the results, as the search results were several years old. I also didn't like the ad interspersed with the actual results. I wouldn't use this again. I had more fun yesterday trying out a site that sent searches to Bing, Google and Yahoo at the same time and then had you vote for which masked results were the best. Google won most of the time I did it, but Bing won once, which was a surprise. I haven't been impressed with the results from Bing so far.

Thing 10 - meet my meez

This was fun - I've played around with avatars before, but never finished one up - this avatar is how I think of myself. My Simpsonized picture that I use on Facebook is more true-to-life, I think!!

Thing 11 - Library Thing Thing

I've had a Library Thing account for a while, as I did a training on book social networking sites a year or so ago, but it languishes unattended. I also have a Shelfari account. One of the best things about Library Thing is the local portion that lists bookstores and literary events in your neighborhood. However, today I came across a great book trailer for an upcoming title - "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters."
http://www.librarything.com/profile/av0055

Anyway, here's my link to my profile if you'd like to see what I cataloged.

Thing 20 - You Tube

I started my YouTube channel in 2007, and use it for loading Mounted Games videos. As of today, I have 86,066 video views from my channel, which I think is good for a niche sport. I also use YouTube just for fun, and have used it in library work to help patron locate old shows, etc. There are some hilarious things posted there, as well as the usual junk. If you'd like to take a look at my channel just go to - http://www.youtube.com/user/av0055

Thing 13 - Deliciously

I've had a delicious account for several years, and like it quite a bit. It's very convenient to be able to access your bookmarks from any computer - I also like the Skydrive file storage site. This was one of my first intros to tagging. I also co manage the Delicious tag cloud on the Reader's Cafe lib guide, and we use it at my branch for our inhouse bookmarks.

The Sixth Thing

I jumped around a bit in my things. Today I took some time to look around Flickr and play with some of the fun mashups. I found a list of 275 mashups - many combos of Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube. There were some that were just fun stuff - posterizing, making a clock of images from Flickr and so on. It amazes me what people will do for fun. The other thing about Flickr is that there are some really excellent photographers posting their work on there. It's a great time sink.

The strands of the web

Here is a picture of my lovely office. I never thought I'd work in a library as nice as mine, I must say. I have worked in some that we could say, were a little the worse for wear.

What's been interesting in getting this Flickr acct, is how it's owned by Yahoo, so I only need my Yahoo id to sign in. Same for Blogger, now owned by Google. I have had a YouTube channel for about 2 years now, and now it's owned by Google also. I do tend to keep things separate if I can, and not use just the one id for all - smacks too much of Big Brother to me - I was also reading an interesting article about Bing VS Google, and the Chrome OS vs Windows. The big showdown between MS and Google - from the article, looks like the money's on MS. What do you think?

Flickr posting

Man, that couldn't have been easier!

Mitch and Cbass

Mitch and Cbass, originally uploaded by liberrians rule.

My girlie and her bestie, doing what they both love.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Fourth Thing

Well, got my blog registered, I hope, and will be moving forward. It's interesting to think of how many new developments have cropped up just since this project began back in 2007. Twitter, for example! That should probably be added to the "things".

My Third Thing of 23

I think of myself as fairly tech savvy, and I have thought of blogging for years, but knowing me, I'd never keep it up. We'll see how this goes - as far as lifelong learning - I'm always ready to learn new things, but it's always the time constraint that gets me.