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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