Thursday, December 11, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Virtual Worlds
I don't know that there would be a benefit to using SL in my profession at the library. There are some negative technical aspects to SL that would make it difficult to integrate. In order to appreciate the full experience of SL you really do need a very fast computer with a graphics card that is suitable for gaming. I don't think there are any computers at my workplace that would be optimal for this program. I also think it will take people longer to learn how to use SL effectively than it would be for other Web 2.0 applications. It does take some time to learn how to maneuver your avatar and navigate through SL. Information you might find on SL may be more easily found in other formats on the internet.
Some potential benefits to using SL would be an engaging program for library staff and patrons who are into gaming. It might be an interesting way to put together an educational program. It could be a way for staff to attend a lecture or meeting and have an opportunity to ask questions directly to the presenter. Although other programs like Elluminate have these capabilities.
As far as my personal interests, SL may have communities that I'm interested in that I don't have access to in my real community, but this is probably true of the internet in general. There are art and photo galleries on SL, but the artists may have their work on other websites on the internet that I can also access. One thing that I did find unique about SL is the ability to build objects yourself but also add animation to objects using Using the Linden Scripting Language .
Since I am interested in web development and programming this is one aspect of SL that I may get involved with in the future.
I found the experience with SL interesting, but initially I did have some technical difficulties. I could not use SL on my computer at home because I have an Intel Extreme graphics card on my computer which was not compatible with SL. Since I am a Student Assistant at IT services on campus I have administrative privileges and was able to check out a laptop and install the program. Had I not had admin privileges this would have been a lot trickier for me to access this program.
Some the places I visited on my own on SL were the Cleveland Public Library and the Rescue Park at Canis. The Cleveland Public Library had a really nice exhibit of photographs of ancient chess pieces. The graphics worked well here (perhaps because my avatar was the only one in the library). The Rescue Park at Canis was a dog rescue park where you had virtual dogs you could adopt and pet with your avatar. I found my experience on SL fun, but not particularly educational or informative.
I don't have any concerns using SL. If I had children I would have similar concerns that I would have with children using online sites such as online predators etc...
I think SL would be a program I would use in the future. I'm thinking about buying a MacBook so I would have a computer that would meet the system requirements. SL so far has seemed more like a game to me so it would be something I would consider to be entertainment rather than useful in my profession or hobbies.
Some potential benefits to using SL would be an engaging program for library staff and patrons who are into gaming. It might be an interesting way to put together an educational program. It could be a way for staff to attend a lecture or meeting and have an opportunity to ask questions directly to the presenter. Although other programs like Elluminate have these capabilities.
As far as my personal interests, SL may have communities that I'm interested in that I don't have access to in my real community, but this is probably true of the internet in general. There are art and photo galleries on SL, but the artists may have their work on other websites on the internet that I can also access. One thing that I did find unique about SL is the ability to build objects yourself but also add animation to objects using Using the Linden Scripting Language .
Since I am interested in web development and programming this is one aspect of SL that I may get involved with in the future.
I found the experience with SL interesting, but initially I did have some technical difficulties. I could not use SL on my computer at home because I have an Intel Extreme graphics card on my computer which was not compatible with SL. Since I am a Student Assistant at IT services on campus I have administrative privileges and was able to check out a laptop and install the program. Had I not had admin privileges this would have been a lot trickier for me to access this program.
Some the places I visited on my own on SL were the Cleveland Public Library and the Rescue Park at Canis. The Cleveland Public Library had a really nice exhibit of photographs of ancient chess pieces. The graphics worked well here (perhaps because my avatar was the only one in the library). The Rescue Park at Canis was a dog rescue park where you had virtual dogs you could adopt and pet with your avatar. I found my experience on SL fun, but not particularly educational or informative.
I don't have any concerns using SL. If I had children I would have similar concerns that I would have with children using online sites such as online predators etc...
I think SL would be a program I would use in the future. I'm thinking about buying a MacBook so I would have a computer that would meet the system requirements. SL so far has seemed more like a game to me so it would be something I would consider to be entertainment rather than useful in my profession or hobbies.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Web 2.0 and Ecommerce
Technologies:
Searching for articles on Web 2.0 and ecommerce issues, I found some interesting ones on Jakob Nielsen's useit.com site that are critical of Web 2.0 technologies because they don't necessarily translate into profitability and can confuse web site users. He also says that the more profitable technologies are older and more simple. When I took an HTML class at UAS about a year and a half ago we had some Jakob Nielsen articles about web site useability as assigned reading.
The first article Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, states that Web 2.0 technologies are over-hyped and concentrating too much on developing these for your website can take the focus away from older technologies that matter much more to users. Ajax and Mashup sites can actually be confusing to users. Another article, 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities, discusses technologies and parts of web site design like email newsletters and high-quality photography that actually will translate into higher profits. Also making your site more accessible to senior citizens will increase your profits because many senior citizens are wealthy.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization refers to methods web site developers can use to increase traffic to their websites through search engine results. One article I found, How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog gives detailed instructions on how to put specific keywords on your site that will increase your rankings in search engines. Even though the article was written for blogs, you could use it for other types of websites as well. Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker is a site that will give you keyword suggestions based on keywords you enter relating to your site.
Marketing Magic
I think a company like Amazon is successful for a variety of reasons. In an interview with Jeff Bezos for Wired magazine, The Zen of Jeff Bezos, Amazon's early success was do to having such a large inventory of books that it spread through word of mouth that Amazon was a good site for hard-to-find titles. Amazon's search engine makes it very easy to find items you are looking for. I often will use the Amazon site at work at the library if a patron is looking for a book but doesn't know the exact title. Often a book will not show up on our online catalog unless you know the exact title or author. Amazon has innovative aspects to their site like the search inside a book function. According to the Wired article, sales of books with the search inside function increase by 9% over books without it.
How Web 2.0 Service Providers Make Money On The Web
28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website describes many ways to make money on the web, mostly through advertising such as Pay Per Click, Banner Ads but also monetization widgets and RSS feed ads. It also covers techniques like creating an email list or newsletter and selling a book.
To be an ecommerce company and be successful in the Web 2.0 environment you need to first create a site that uses technologies such as in the 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities article that have been proven to increase profits. You should employ techniques to improve Search Engine Optimization through effective use of keywords on your site. You should also develop effective advertising on your website.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Privacy
I don't think anyone completely understands the consequences of Web 2.0 technology on privacy and how this may negatively effect people's lives. As a person over 30, I was completely fascinated with an article I read from New York Magazine, Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll , about younger people using Web 2.0 technologies and their attitudes about privacy. It's such a cultural shift in attitudes, but I also wonder if it isn't a little naive.
What I'm curious about is how combining sources of data from the internet may affect your privacy in ways you may not be aware of. Here are some sites and articles I have found as examples.
Where is Your Username registered is a site I found on the popular bookmarks lists on delicious. It allows you to search for usernames on popular Web 2.0 sites like Myspace and Flickr with links to people's userpages. Before I took this class I wasn't really aware that so many of people's userpages were actually viewable by anyone on the internet. I never really thought about it or just mistakenly thought that you had to have an account with one of these sites to view other people's pages. Since people often use the same username for multiple sites it is easy to collect multiple sources of information on one user. You can view what a user has bookmarked on delicious, what music they listen to on Pandora, and what they are selling on Ebay, for instance.
Facial recognition slipped into Google image search is an article about how you can search Google images but just limit the results to faces. There is currently not an option to select this while searching Google. What you do is add "&imgtype=face" to the end of the search URL and it will restrict your image search to just faces. Here is the Google image search for the University of Alaska Southeast limited to just faces.What I'm curious about is how combining sources of data from the internet may affect your privacy in ways you may not be aware of. Here are some sites and articles I have found as examples.
Where is Your Username registered is a site I found on the popular bookmarks lists on delicious. It allows you to search for usernames on popular Web 2.0 sites like Myspace and Flickr with links to people's userpages. Before I took this class I wasn't really aware that so many of people's userpages were actually viewable by anyone on the internet. I never really thought about it or just mistakenly thought that you had to have an account with one of these sites to view other people's pages. Since people often use the same username for multiple sites it is easy to collect multiple sources of information on one user. You can view what a user has bookmarked on delicious, what music they listen to on Pandora, and what they are selling on Ebay, for instance.
Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives With Amazon Wishlists demonstrates how to find names and addresses of people who read "subversive" books using Amazon Wishlists and then find a satellite image of their house using Google Maps. It makes you wonder why the government would even need to get records from a library of books a person has checked out if this information is easily attainable over the internet.
I tend to be more private on the internet and not intentionally give out a lot of personal information. When I registered at Diigo, I was asked for a lot of personal information such as my gender, city and state, and industry I worked in. At first I didn't realize it was optional and I put it in. When you create a user profile it also gives you information on who has visited your profile. As soon as I registered my profile I started being visited by a user "Anonymous". This person did not have a photo and all of his/her bookmarks were private. Because I didn't know anything about this person and why they were visiting my profile and bookmarks I thought it was kind of weird. This person has visited my profile on many occasions since. I have since deleted most of the optional personal information on my Diigo account. I think I may also consider using different usernames for different Web 2.0 applications I use in the future.
As for children I think it should be more up to the parents to decide what kind of internet controls they should use to protect the privacy of their children. I'm not comfortable with the idea of using filters or blocking certain sites in a public setting like a library. I think these controls would be to restrictive to adult patrons. I also think that young children should not be unaccompanied in a public libraries for safety reasons.
Security
Our assigned articles on security concerns and Web 2.0 technologies left many unanswered questions about what I should be doing to protect myself as a user of Web 2.0 technologies. For example the article Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors seemed to be geared toward IT professionals that would be creating Web 2.0 sites or computer security systems in organizations rather than your average user. I haven't taken classes yet in AJAX web development or XML for instance so it was difficult to fully understand the descriptions of the Web 2.0 attacks.
I did do some researching on my own and I found some interesting articles on security and specific Web 2.0 applications:
The article How to protect against Web 2.0 threats made a very important point:
Other than the Web of Trust software I don't have any specific advice beyond the conventional advice given for internet security - updated antivirus protection, avoiding phishing scams, etc..What to suggest for your average user is unclear to me.
I did do some researching on my own and I found some interesting articles on security and specific Web 2.0 applications:
The article How to protect against Web 2.0 threats made a very important point:
Web 2.0 sites are, by definition, more open than traditional sites. The hundreds of thousands of users contributing content to Web 2.0 sites make it easy for malware authors to hide and insert malware on dynamically generated Web 2.0 pages.These articles finally convinced me to install the Web of Trust software that was suggested at the beginning of the class. However, these articles are still geared toward an IT professional and not an average user. Also the articles I found were all written in 2006. I'm not sure what to make of that. Was that because it was a hot topic at the time? Has there been a greater awareness of security dangers of Web 2.0 technology and has that technology improved on it's security since then?
Other than the Web of Trust software I don't have any specific advice beyond the conventional advice given for internet security - updated antivirus protection, avoiding phishing scams, etc..What to suggest for your average user is unclear to me.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Mashups
What makes mashups different then web applications is that mashups use data from more than one source to create a completely new web application. The mashups I chose were:The Similarity Web is an Amazon mashup that takes information that amazon displays on an item for "customers who bought this item also bought" and displays it in an interesting visual format with links back to the Amazon website. I thought this mashup would be useful at work to help patrons find similar books based on their favorite authors and other books they have liked. I have tried it on a few books and found it is a little slow at times but I still like it. Also sometimes if you enter the title of the book nothing shows up, but putting in the author's name will make the book show up. You can also search for other items besides books - any category that Amazon sells. I will continue to use this mashup at work and recommend it to patrons.
Dumpr is a cool image editor/Flickr mashup combo. You create an account and can use photos on Flickr or photos you upload to the site and create new images with different "effects". I spent several hours just trying out the different effects on some photos I had taken:
This is a photo I took and modified with the Rubik's Cube effect.
This effect allows you to take an existing photo and show it like it is an image in an art gallery.
This is called the Brilliant Circle effect. It was from a photo I had taken of cow parsnip and fireweed.
Dumpr is very easy to use. You save your finished photos in your account. You also have the option of saving them to your computer, sending them as email or uploading the image to Flickr. There is also options to publish the photos on various blogs, social networking sites and news aggregators. I will continue to use Dumpr because it is a lot of fun!
Dumpr is a cool image editor/Flickr mashup combo. You create an account and can use photos on Flickr or photos you upload to the site and create new images with different "effects". I spent several hours just trying out the different effects on some photos I had taken:
This is a photo I took and modified with the Rubik's Cube effect.
This effect allows you to take an existing photo and show it like it is an image in an art gallery.
This is called the Brilliant Circle effect. It was from a photo I had taken of cow parsnip and fireweed.
Dumpr is very easy to use. You save your finished photos in your account. You also have the option of saving them to your computer, sending them as email or uploading the image to Flickr. There is also options to publish the photos on various blogs, social networking sites and news aggregators. I will continue to use Dumpr because it is a lot of fun!
Friday, October 10, 2008
Web Applications
Here are the four web applications I chose for professional/educational uses:
I heard about Elf from work at the library, but I haven't tried it until now. Elf is a notification system that lets you know when library items are due or holds are available. We currently have an email notification system with the Juneau Public Library System, where we sent out notices a day before items are due. But it's limited, and we often get complaints that people aren't receiving our emails. Elf gives you many more options and customization features. With Elf, you can choose an email, RSS feed, or text messaging notification, or any combination thereof. You can also have an email notification ccd to one or more email addresses.
You can also select when you want notices sent out to you. You can choose a day of the week to send out notices, or how many days in advance you want the notice sent. You can also select to have notices sent out repeatedly. Currently Library Elf is only available in Alaska at the libraries in Juneau and Fairbanks but hopefully it will be available at other Alaskan libraries in the future. I set Elf up to get an email notification at two separate email addresses and also put a feed on Pageflakes. This is something I would recommend to some of our more computer/tech savvy patrons.
For my next web application I picked hakia Search Engine. I'm curious about alternative search engines to Google so I thought I would give it a try. Hakia is supposed to be a meaning based search engine where you can ask it questions and it looks at the meaning rather than the text keywords. I decided to do a search for the question "how contagious is whooping cough?" on both Google and Hakia. Google gave me results that were based on keywords in the search were as the results Hakia gave seemed to look at the question more as a whole. One useful thing about Hakia is that it will separate your results into all results and credible sites, which have been recommended by librarians. I would like to have Hakia as a firefox extension so I could have it on my firefox browser as a drop-down search engine selection, but that isn't an option now. I plan to use Hakia, particularly if I'm not not happy with the results I'm getting for a particular search on Google.
My next web application is TinyPaste. TinyPaste is a site where you can quickly enter text and save it as a webpage. I think this is useful if you have some information that is not on the web you can easily create a webpage and then save the link on your social bookmarking site. You can also create a page and then download it to your computer as a text document. I like to keep bookmarks of all my favorite recipes but I haven't found all of them on the internet. With TinyPaste I could type in the recipe, save it as a page and then link to it from my social bookmarking site. I am sure I will find many other uses for this application.
FaceYourManga is a fun site where you can create your own avatar. Its very easy to use and you create a cartoon likeness of yourself. You first select your gender and then you get a whole bunch of options for face shape, skin color, hair, eyes, mouth, clothes, glasses etc... I took a picture of myself and tried to create an avatar that looked as close to the picture as I could. When you are finished the image is sent to you by email. I used the image I created on this blog and also as my student picture for my classes.
The web applications I chose for my hobby were Tin Eye Image Search and Worth1000.com.
Tin Eye Image Search lets you upload an image or put in a URL to the image on the web and it will do a search of the internet and tell you where else the image appears on the web and if it has been modified. I thought this might be useful if you had a lot of photos on the web and wanted to see if people were using or altering your photos without permission. I tried searching with some web images that I thought would be very popular but I did not get very many results. Tin Eye is still a beta version so perhaps it will eventually become more powerful and useful.
Worth1000.com is a Photoshop site where you can create an account and enter and vote in Photoshop contests. There are many examples of excellent and hilarious photoshop pictures here.
I heard about Elf from work at the library, but I haven't tried it until now. Elf is a notification system that lets you know when library items are due or holds are available. We currently have an email notification system with the Juneau Public Library System, where we sent out notices a day before items are due. But it's limited, and we often get complaints that people aren't receiving our emails. Elf gives you many more options and customization features. With Elf, you can choose an email, RSS feed, or text messaging notification, or any combination thereof. You can also have an email notification ccd to one or more email addresses.
You can also select when you want notices sent out to you. You can choose a day of the week to send out notices, or how many days in advance you want the notice sent. You can also select to have notices sent out repeatedly. Currently Library Elf is only available in Alaska at the libraries in Juneau and Fairbanks but hopefully it will be available at other Alaskan libraries in the future. I set Elf up to get an email notification at two separate email addresses and also put a feed on Pageflakes. This is something I would recommend to some of our more computer/tech savvy patrons.
For my next web application I picked hakia Search Engine. I'm curious about alternative search engines to Google so I thought I would give it a try. Hakia is supposed to be a meaning based search engine where you can ask it questions and it looks at the meaning rather than the text keywords. I decided to do a search for the question "how contagious is whooping cough?" on both Google and Hakia. Google gave me results that were based on keywords in the search were as the results Hakia gave seemed to look at the question more as a whole. One useful thing about Hakia is that it will separate your results into all results and credible sites, which have been recommended by librarians. I would like to have Hakia as a firefox extension so I could have it on my firefox browser as a drop-down search engine selection, but that isn't an option now. I plan to use Hakia, particularly if I'm not not happy with the results I'm getting for a particular search on Google.
My next web application is TinyPaste. TinyPaste is a site where you can quickly enter text and save it as a webpage. I think this is useful if you have some information that is not on the web you can easily create a webpage and then save the link on your social bookmarking site. You can also create a page and then download it to your computer as a text document. I like to keep bookmarks of all my favorite recipes but I haven't found all of them on the internet. With TinyPaste I could type in the recipe, save it as a page and then link to it from my social bookmarking site. I am sure I will find many other uses for this application.
FaceYourManga is a fun site where you can create your own avatar. Its very easy to use and you create a cartoon likeness of yourself. You first select your gender and then you get a whole bunch of options for face shape, skin color, hair, eyes, mouth, clothes, glasses etc... I took a picture of myself and tried to create an avatar that looked as close to the picture as I could. When you are finished the image is sent to you by email. I used the image I created on this blog and also as my student picture for my classes.
The web applications I chose for my hobby were Tin Eye Image Search and Worth1000.com.
Tin Eye Image Search lets you upload an image or put in a URL to the image on the web and it will do a search of the internet and tell you where else the image appears on the web and if it has been modified. I thought this might be useful if you had a lot of photos on the web and wanted to see if people were using or altering your photos without permission. I tried searching with some web images that I thought would be very popular but I did not get very many results. Tin Eye is still a beta version so perhaps it will eventually become more powerful and useful.
Worth1000.com is a Photoshop site where you can create an account and enter and vote in Photoshop contests. There are many examples of excellent and hilarious photoshop pictures here.
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