MyShutterspace is a social networking site about digital photography, which is a hobby of mine. Library 2.0 is a social networking site for librarians and other people interested in the uses of Web 2.0 in libraries. I was attracted to these sites because they both were pretty popular with a lot of posting activity. When I was looking for social networking sites to join I found many that only had a couple people as members. Also I looked at the discussion forums at both sites and they had many discussions of topics I am interested in.
Our WebQuest: Social Network assignment says to participate in these sites for about one week before posting our responses to the blog so I will have a follow up post next week with more detailed information of my experience.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Home Page Syndication
I've decided to try out Pageflakes as my Syndication Aggregator for this class. I'm used to using Bloglines, but I wanted to try something with a different layout. The default view for Pageflakes is a web page with different boxes called "flakes" on the page for each RSS feed. You can drag the boxes around to change the layout as well as edit each box to view each feed differently. You can also add new pages of "flakes". The main page I will use for feeds that I want to check most often, and then add additional pages for different topics. You also have the option to view Pageflakes in a Reader style which is similar to Bloglines.
One thing I don't like about Pageflakes is that there is a sponsored ad box that you can't move around or get rid of. That's something that Bloglines doesn't have. You can change the theme and layout in Pageflakes which is something you can't do in Bloglines.
When you first sign up with Pageflakes it asks you about your interests and gives you a main page with flakes of feeds based on your interests. You can go in and delete these flakes if you want. I added Yahoo! News: Top Stories and The Anchorage Daily News feeds to begin with. One thing I noticed is that there isn't a link to the main page of any blog or site in the flake, just to each individual post or story. There also isn't much of a contrast in color between posts in feeds you've read and haven't read. I'm going to have to play around with the settings to see if I can change this.
One thing I don't like about Pageflakes is that there is a sponsored ad box that you can't move around or get rid of. That's something that Bloglines doesn't have. You can change the theme and layout in Pageflakes which is something you can't do in Bloglines.
When you first sign up with Pageflakes it asks you about your interests and gives you a main page with flakes of feeds based on your interests. You can go in and delete these flakes if you want. I added Yahoo! News: Top Stories and The Anchorage Daily News feeds to begin with. One thing I noticed is that there isn't a link to the main page of any blog or site in the flake, just to each individual post or story. There also isn't much of a contrast in color between posts in feeds you've read and haven't read. I'm going to have to play around with the settings to see if I can change this.
Using a Syndication Aggregator saves me time by keeping updates to sites I visit on a regular basis on one site rather than just going to each individual site. It's a good way to quickly get updated news information. Also it's a good way to keep track of blogs that you like that don't update very often.
Social Bookmarking
The Social Bookmarking site I decided to join was Diigo. I currently use Delicious, which I like a lot but I wanted to try something different. I did some research on recommended social bookmarking sites and Diigo was mentioned several times so I decided to give it a try.
The sign-up process was pretty straightforward; first name, last name, email, user name and password etc...One thing that I noticed that was different than Delicious is that Diigo asks for more personal information when you register such as your gender, city, zip code and the industry you work in. Although I just went back through the registration process and now realize that filling in that information is optional. Delicious gives you the option of creating a public profile if you want but it is separate from the registration process. My initial impression is that Diigo emphasizes the social part more and Delicious emphasizes the information.
Here are some of the bookmarks I've saved so far on Diigo. These are some things I've come across while doing research for the class. They are additional information on subjects we have covered in class that I want to look at later:
Searching for bookmarks on Diigo seems to be more complicated than Delicious. You can click on a link for "hot bookmarks" but many of these bookmarks have 5 or less people who have bookmarked the links so I am not sure what the criteria is for "hot bookmarks". Doing a search for a subject gives you a list of bookmarks which you can sort by recent or popular but it is unclear what is meant by "popular". You can also look through bookmark lists that people have created on various subjects. You can search these lists and also browse the lists, but the browsing categories are pretty broad. I will have to play around some more with this site to figure out what is the best way to find new information.
The sign-up process was pretty straightforward; first name, last name, email, user name and password etc...One thing that I noticed that was different than Delicious is that Diigo asks for more personal information when you register such as your gender, city, zip code and the industry you work in. Although I just went back through the registration process and now realize that filling in that information is optional. Delicious gives you the option of creating a public profile if you want but it is separate from the registration process. My initial impression is that Diigo emphasizes the social part more and Delicious emphasizes the information.
Here are some of the bookmarks I've saved so far on Diigo. These are some things I've come across while doing research for the class. They are additional information on subjects we have covered in class that I want to look at later:
- Knol: a unit of knowledge (Google Wiki)
Searching for bookmarks on Diigo seems to be more complicated than Delicious. You can click on a link for "hot bookmarks" but many of these bookmarks have 5 or less people who have bookmarked the links so I am not sure what the criteria is for "hot bookmarks". Doing a search for a subject gives you a list of bookmarks which you can sort by recent or popular but it is unclear what is meant by "popular". You can also look through bookmark lists that people have created on various subjects. You can search these lists and also browse the lists, but the browsing categories are pretty broad. I will have to play around some more with this site to figure out what is the best way to find new information.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Elluminate
This class is the first time I have used Elluminate. I thought the basic set up and use was pretty straight forward, but some of the more advanced features may take some practice. I like the fact that you could share websites, files and other applications with people. I found listening to the meeting and having other things going on such as the chat and watching applications at the same time a little hard to follow. I think the more practice I have the easier it will be to follow everything.
Perhaps Elluminate or a program like Elluminate might be useful in the library because we have conference rooms that people can book for meetings. We have wireless access and laptops that people can check out and it we had this on our laptops people could have a way of conducting online meetings if they don't have Internet access at home or their own laptops.
Perhaps Elluminate or a program like Elluminate might be useful in the library because we have conference rooms that people can book for meetings. We have wireless access and laptops that people can check out and it we had this on our laptops people could have a way of conducting online meetings if they don't have Internet access at home or their own laptops.
Wiki
For my Wikipedia topic, I decided to look up my job title "library technician" to see what it would say. The entry for library technician in Wikipedia is generally accurate in terms of what library technicians do. However, in terms of qualifications, the Wikipedia entry states that "library technicians typically require a college library technician diploma". I don't believe this is the case; certainly it's not the case with the Juneau Public Library. The minimum qualifications to be a library technician with the Juneau Public Library are a high school diploma and 1 year of working in a bookstore or library. You can substitute the bookstore or library experience with college classes in any subject. To my knowledge, none of my library technician coworkers have library technician diplomas. Most have a bachelor's degree in a wide variety of subjects and all have at least some college. The training for working at the library is all on the job. It is interesting that the references cited for this Wikipedia entry are Canadian. It may be a different situation in Canada than the United States.
I talked to my supervisor about using Wikipedia as a reference and he said to look at the references cited and to make sure they are primary source material.
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The wiki that I joined from Wikia was the Recipes Wiki . I ended up editing a recipe for Easy Chocolate Mousse. It was a recently posted recipe that needed some formatting and grammatical corrections. It's difficult for me to post my edits because I didn't add any content to the wiki. Here is the link to the page showing it before and after my edits:
http://recipes.wikia.com/index.php?title=Easy_Chocolate_Mousse&diff=278542&oldid=278490
My edits are on the right hand side. What it doesn't show is that the list of ingredients was previously just written out in a paragraph. I formatted the list of ingredients into a bullet list so that it was more readable.
I don't know if I will continue to visit this wiki. I didn't find many recipes that were rated so I didn't have any idea if any of these recipes were any good. I also found the wiki difficult to navigate. There are a couple recipe sites that serve a similar purpose that I find more useful like FoodieView and Supercook .
I talked to my supervisor about using Wikipedia as a reference and he said to look at the references cited and to make sure they are primary source material.
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The wiki that I joined from Wikia was the Recipes Wiki . I ended up editing a recipe for Easy Chocolate Mousse. It was a recently posted recipe that needed some formatting and grammatical corrections. It's difficult for me to post my edits because I didn't add any content to the wiki. Here is the link to the page showing it before and after my edits:
http://recipes.wikia.com/index.php?title=Easy_Chocolate_Mousse&diff=278542&oldid=278490
My edits are on the right hand side. What it doesn't show is that the list of ingredients was previously just written out in a paragraph. I formatted the list of ingredients into a bullet list so that it was more readable.
I don't know if I will continue to visit this wiki. I didn't find many recipes that were rated so I didn't have any idea if any of these recipes were any good. I also found the wiki difficult to navigate. There are a couple recipe sites that serve a similar purpose that I find more useful like FoodieView and Supercook .
Blogs
The two blogs that I choose were:
The NEKLS Technology Weblog is a blog from the Northeast Kansas Library System. It is a blog about technology in the Northeast Kansas Library System, but a lot of it would pertain to libraries in general. I choose this blog because it contained a lot of interesting and useful postings about how technology, in particular Internet technology, is impacting and shaping the services libraries provide. Some postings that attracted me were Reading Online vs. Reading Books: Is there a difference? discussing a New York Times article comparing online and book reading; Gaming and School Libraries, which has links to articles about the controversial topic of gaming in libraries; and Using RSS and Z39.50 to Find Books Your Library Doesn’t Have… Yet. which discusses and links to a blog post by a librarian that wrote a perl program that would search his online catalog and create an RSS feed of new items in the library so he could be one of the first people to get a hold on an item. Something like this might come in handy because the RSS feeds for new items on our online catalog at the Juneau Public Library don't really work yet.
The NEKLS Technology Weblog is helpful for my work at the Library because it is a way to keep informed of current issues and the latest technology. I definitely would continue to visit this blog because there are many interesting posts in the archives as well as current posts I would like to subscribe to with a RSS feed aggregator.
The blog I chose for personal interest was PSHERO . PSHERO is a blog consisting of photoshop tutorials. This is a very nicely designed website with some very good photoshop tutorials. The posts that caught my attention were creating text with stitches and creating complex repeating patterns . There are also posts reviewing photoshop books. I have bookmarked this site and would use it as a reference for future photoshop projects.
The NEKLS Technology Weblog is a blog from the Northeast Kansas Library System. It is a blog about technology in the Northeast Kansas Library System, but a lot of it would pertain to libraries in general. I choose this blog because it contained a lot of interesting and useful postings about how technology, in particular Internet technology, is impacting and shaping the services libraries provide. Some postings that attracted me were Reading Online vs. Reading Books: Is there a difference? discussing a New York Times article comparing online and book reading; Gaming and School Libraries, which has links to articles about the controversial topic of gaming in libraries; and Using RSS and Z39.50 to Find Books Your Library Doesn’t Have… Yet. which discusses and links to a blog post by a librarian that wrote a perl program that would search his online catalog and create an RSS feed of new items in the library so he could be one of the first people to get a hold on an item. Something like this might come in handy because the RSS feeds for new items on our online catalog at the Juneau Public Library don't really work yet.
The NEKLS Technology Weblog is helpful for my work at the Library because it is a way to keep informed of current issues and the latest technology. I definitely would continue to visit this blog because there are many interesting posts in the archives as well as current posts I would like to subscribe to with a RSS feed aggregator.
The blog I chose for personal interest was PSHERO . PSHERO is a blog consisting of photoshop tutorials. This is a very nicely designed website with some very good photoshop tutorials. The posts that caught my attention were creating text with stitches and creating complex repeating patterns . There are also posts reviewing photoshop books. I have bookmarked this site and would use it as a reference for future photoshop projects.
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