#17 Playing Around With PBWiki

I finally managed to add one of my favorite wikis to the favorites page. I was trying to type in the URL with the | key and brackets, etc but gave up after trying it with spaces and .com/ and all sorts to try and get it to work. In the end I just used the lovely little button I found at the top which said 'add link'. *phew*

Currently waiting for someone else to finish so I can add my blog. :)

#16 So What's In A Wiki?

Wikipedia has long been a valuable resource to me. I've used it often in the past few years, many for following family tree and history type things. I'm intrigued by the English Royal Family, not so much the current residents of Buckingham Palace, but the many who have gone before. With Wikipedia you can (and I have) go back though history from Elizabeth 2 to Alfred the Great and even further back to Egbert of Wessex and his relations (who all seemed intent on killing each other).

It's fascinating stuff and I love that it's set out in easy to read paragraphs with sub-headings and pictures. Written by real people! (instead of professors with degrees in writing dry, 'can't keep your eyes open' type information)

Even though I have used Wikipedia before I hadn't really thorght about the fact that anyone can edit it. It does take away some of the credibility when I think about the fact that I could add an entry about a made up royal who did all sorts of impossibly silly things. At least with such a largely used wiki someone would be quick to see and fix it.

The uses in librarys are obviously many and varied. I would love to set up something like Meredith Farkas suggested in her article on using wikis to create online communities, where the library's online wiki would be a central hub for our community. Reading other peoples thoughts on local restaurants and trade people would be fantastic.

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I made an effort to try and read all 5 of the perspectives on library 2.0. The iceberg comparison was probably my favorite, not only because what Rick Anderson was saying made sense, but also because it was an easy to read article. The others tended towards to long, boring and preachy. The thought that the 'just-in-case collection' is outdated especially rang true. If I was in charge of weeding the non-fiction, we'd never get rid of anything. (I'm a hoarder!) But the fact of the matter is that it's often quicker to jump on Google and find something than it is to find information in a book.

I agree with all the writers that libraries are changing to keep up with the evolving technology. We need to jump on the bandwagon and make sure that we cater to the younger generations. It does worry me that the older patrons will feel alienated and wont be able to access the resources that they are used to though. I think it would be fantastic if you could bring your ipod into the library and download e-books for instance, but how many grandparents do you know who have access to an mp3 player?

I'm all for moving forward as long as people don't get left behind.

#14 Getting Not-So-Technical With Technorati

Well I know that I have been raving on about how good everything is but Technorati just doesn't do it for me. I tried the suggested search of learning 2.0 under the three different search options. Posts with tags....on the 5th page I finally found something that was relevant to what we're doing. Searching my entire posts worked a little bit better and I was able to find about 4 relevant posts in the 9 pages that I scanned down. Searching by blog didn't seem to be turning up anything, I gave up when I got a message saying that it was currently down on the 2nd page.

Now to be fair, i suspect that finding learning 2.0 sites and blogs will get easier as people add tags (or labels as technorati seems to call them) to their blogs. In the mean time I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't find The Sandbox. :P

I was typeing this as I was waiting for the video of technorati tour to work. I'd given up when it started talking to me in the background and I flipped over to it. Hmm let me try this again after registering and then searching. (*sigh* and this was going to be a short post - sorry learning 2.0 people who have to read this and 700 or more ofter peoples waffling....i hope you are using bloglines!!).

Ok *phew* still can't see a drop down menu (like in the video) and the search results are still the same. And I have another log in to keep track of. lol

Checked out the popular section. Learning 2.0 is in the top searches....you know that's cos I tried to a gazillion times? Right??

#13 Tagging, etc in Del.icio.us

Tagging, Del.icio.us....who thinks of these things?? I think this is absolutely fabulous. Del.icio.us is definitely going to be something that I will use post-L2.0. My bookmarks/favorites (which are different on the three or four PCs I have regular access to) are a bit jumbled. To the point where Google is a favorite of mine because I'm always having to try and find sites that I once visited at one stage of another.

The big long list of favorites that I do have (half of which I don't even use anymore) I do try really really hard to keep in some kind of order in folders, etc. But tags are cool! Just off the top of my head I've added 16 pages that I visit regularly. All have the tag 'daily' and a lot of them have the tag 'learning2.0'. I haven't even started putting in the WoW, Pokemon and gardening pages that I like.

The resources for this week are worth commenting on. Us.ef.ul I found to be decidedly not so. A big lot of text is something that I don't want to see when I trying to learn and have fun and take it all in. I skimmed my way though it and managed to pick up a few things. Might be more helpful once I have got myself sorted out. The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users was a lot more helpful and easier to take on board. But 5 stars go to the youtube video on Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Very clear, Very clever. I was impressed by the pointing and the moving papers and the fact that it all made sense. Fantastic!

My only downer would be that I got excited by the tags and got a bit carried away. I also wasn't very consistent. So I ended up with a lot of tags, some of them only relevent to 1 site. I tried to delete some of my tags in an attempt to streamline and organise myself. I had some trouble with that because I clicked delete and choose a tag from the drop down menu and...it didn't seem to do anything. i also then couldn't continue and choose another tag to delete from the drop down menu. Not sure if that makes sence but try and keep your tags simple and uniform.

I've signed up at Del.ioco.us and you can join my network with the badge to the left.

My Del.ioco.us Sites - check out my mess here :P

Not an Offical 'Thing'

Ok well I've been home sick for almost two weeks now but I'm still trying to keep up with this Learning 2.0 stuff as I'm terrified that if I get behind I'll never catch up and will get discouraged. So I've borrowed a laptop and have been learning and playing in between naps.

The last few 'Things' that I wrote about gave me no end of trouble because the pictures that I was trying to put in were appearing at the top of the page and the text refused to wrap around them. Looking back at my older Flickr posts and the same thing has happened. I'm now pretty sure that it's my fault and not just blogger chucking a wobbly at me. You see in an effort to put one of my avatars up from #10 I ventured into the edit html tab....whatever happened wasn't good and i nearly lost the post that I was typeing at the time. I managed to fix it all (or so i thorght) but then had some trouble with the pictures and text.

Finally decided today to bite the bullet and ask IT for help. Unfortunately my work email has decided not to work from home and is coming up with a very worrying message saying that the HTTP 404 could not be found and that perhaps the link is out of date, eep! Looks like I'm on my own for this one. Quick google search (I thorght about trying to set up a Rollyo search for this but decided I should go with what I know for now) and I found this page http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/article.php/3478131 (hmm looks like the hyperlinks are working now.) The title of 'If you know nothing about html, this is where you start' got me interested and looks to be quiet simple.

Just tryied adding a pic and it worked fine, text wrapped around it and everything. So at least it's not affecting new posts. Going to see if I can get the pictures, text and hyperlinks to work on my pervious posts.

#12 Rolling a Rollyo Search Engine

I really should stop being so surprised that these Things are not only fun but very very useful. A few weeks ago I had about 8 tabs open on my browser trying to find a good guide to growing dwarf citrus trees in pots.

This week I spent 10 mins registering at Rollyo and adding a few gardening sites to my search engine and....poof! 42,600 results for citrus. I tried 'growing citrus in pots' and it still came up
with 4450 results, all of them helpful and relevant. Ok maybe not all of them, but the first few
pages were very interesting! :)

After making my 'gardening helper' search engine I made another one 'warcraft help'. For this one I used some of the main World of Warcraft pages. The great thing about Rollyo is you can do several different search engines, one for each of your interests.

You can do a search for anything garden related here:
http://rollyo.com/branchbaby/gardening_helper
Feel free to leave a comment, I'd love to know how you went. :)

I'm also going to attempt another widget which should allow you to search using either my gardening helper or warcraft search engine.

#11 All About LibraryThing

Ok a little bit of confusion as I couldn't seem to find the 'sign up here' button. Figured out that I don't need a long complicated sign up page. Just pick a username and password (numbers and letters only) and away you go. It was almost too simple! :P lol

This is another new thing/Thing that I'm really pleased to have found/been shown. Fantastic tool for keeping track of all the books. Although I don't have very many books myself, I know a few people that I will be telling about LibraryThing!

Didn't have much trouble inputting books either. Some of my older David Eddings books needed a bit of fiddleing because Amozon.com (the default searcher) only had the newer ones. Lucky for me UNC Chapel Hill had all the old seperate books. Although they don't have
pictures of the covers.

Most exciting for me it that I have managed to put a widget of my library on my blog! If it keeps working (fingers crossed) it should show a random selection of book covers from my library. :)

Check out my library catalogue at:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/branchbaby
or click on the link in my widget. I'll try and add some more of my books later.

#10 Playing with Image Generators

I'm actually finding that I am having more fun! I must admit that until now it's felt a bit like I'm back at High School and trying to find a balance between doing an A+ job and trying to get it finished on time. This doesn't even seem like work/school at all. (Although it kind of is because I have to write about it. hehe :P)

The Generator Blog was a huge help in finding funny things to play with. Having them all listed like that made it easy to scroll down and read about the generators that looked interesting to me. Lots of hilarious looking things to play with!

Doppel Me was fun. Did anyone else ever play with those paper dolls with all the different clothes when they were younger?? This was just like that, but without having to spend 5 mins trying to fold the tabs right so the clothes would stay on.

JWebGen Pony Generator was a blast from the past. It allows you to play with My Little Pony images. You can chose which colors you want it to be and after you've made a father and a mother you can blend them into a baby pony. Very cute!

Pocket Emo -I did make a pocket emo but it wasn't very fun to play with. Very sad teenager type who only seemed to be happy when I gave it a diary to write in. Even then it scribbled away for a few seconds and then the very depressing thorght bubble above it's head proclaimed "at least my diary understands me". Not sure how this is fun but poked him for a while and fed him lots of hamburgers.

I'm having trouble sticking pictures where I want them so I've put them down the bottom for now. :)

Pony Generator:

Doppel Me:

#9 Finding Feeds

Well I'm not having a lot of luck with this one. I did a search for 'gardening tips' on feedster. It came up with all kinds of things. From dating sites to an article about computers being used in street raceing!

I was very pleased when I found my own blog by searching on Google Blog Search. Although I don't think many people would try and the combination 'branch baby' and 'learning 2.0' and 'the sandbox'.

I did stumble across a feed which looks good. It's an ABC2 tv guide. I'll have to see if I can get guides for all the stations....not that I ever watch tv. I do like to watch movies though. I did a few searches on IMDb, I was hopeing that I could put in an actor and it would give me updates on any new movies/tv series they were in. I couldn't find any rss links on there though. Am I doing this wrong? Or missing something?

I'm looking forward to reading what others have added as I think my main problem in finding feeds is that I can't think of anything to look for! :)

#8 RSS & Bloglines

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

When I first listened to the podcast I was impressed. This is a fantastic little piece of technology. I didn't even know it exsisted. Bloglines makes it so much easyier to keep track of it all as well. Although I did have it put my thinking cap on for what to add. And at least half the newslinks that I added are things that I wouldn't normally look up.

I was disappionted to learn that not all sites have rss. (I thorght I'd be able to keep track of all my interneting in one spot).

It took a little bit of fiddleing and searching but I also found a real estate site which will update me of new houses for sale in my area. Very cool tool for keeping track of the market.

My Public Bloglines is at:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/BranchBaby

#7 Blog About Technology

I was trying to think of a Technology that I couldn't live without. Something that I use all the time and which still amazes me. I considered the internet and telephones, cars and planes, television and dvd players. There are so many things we can thank technology for, in big ways and small. I decided that my newest toy should feature.

In a recent fad of healthy eating, I decided that I would need a blender to make all the smoothies that I was going to be drinking at least once a day. After staring at the rather overwelming range in Harvy Norman for a while (and with the help of a lovely sales assistant) I eventually came home with slightly more than I had set out to get. The very shiney blender/food processer from Moulinex now has pride of place on my benchtop.

Now why did I feel that I was getting a bargin by spending $200 more than the base blender I hear you, my mother and my housemate asking? Well, at the risk of sounding like an infomercial, it slices, it dices, it chips, it grates, it grinds, it mincers, it presses, it whisks, it extracts juice from vegies, it juices oranges/lemons, it liquidisers, it kneads, it blends AND it has an LCD display which has pre-programed recipes in it. Thats right! If I one day wake up and decide that I would like some Pear Moelleux, I can find the recipe under cakes on the display. It tells me what ingredients and what attachments I need to make it and then steps me through the process.

This is perhaps a piece of technology that I could live without....but wheres the FUN in that? :)

#6 More Flickr Fun

Loved the mash-ups, etc. Had a lot of FUN! Played around with some of the different things. The Trip Planner looks great. Couldn't resist jumping in and trying some of the trading cards. I made a few of my friends and emailed them there own cards.

My brother used to play the card game Magic. The cards looked just like this (well pretty close). Now I just need to find a color printer.....

#5 Discovering Flickr

Well I've found week 3 to be a bit tricky. Mostly because it was hard to choose a picture out of the millions available. I orginally wanted to get my digital camera up to the library and take some pics and then post them on flickr. I made a yahoo account and a flickr account without too much trouble. Unfortunatly I never got around to remembering my camera. With everything we've got going on at our branch atm (rearranging non-fic, school holidays, etc) it always seemed to slip my mind.

I did decide mid-week that i would just bite the bullet and stick any old photo from flickr onto my blog and I'd add some of my own later on in the program. Thats where things got tricky. There are so many pictures and photos it was hard to choose! I spent a while looking at Kilted MadMan's wedding photos, which had a definate pirate theme going on. The cake was amazeing! I found some cute kittens and some interesting arty pictures. In the end I found some great landscapes which were taken in Ferntree Gully and decided that would at least have some relevance. (I work at FTG branch of ERLC). Wrote my post and stuck the pic on. Was ready to post when someone mentioned copyrights.....eeeep!

So I emailed the helpful learning 2.0 people and ascertained that I could only use the flickr pictures that were marked as free-for-all or creative commons. It was about this time that I came down sick and was in bed recovering for the rest of the week.

So now I am back at work and a bit behind (another challenge to overcome). I've found this wonderful picture of a wave crashing. Fantastic timing on the part of Breno Peck, who all credit must go to for a wonderful photo.

*EDIT*
I've added some photos to my flickr account, check them out at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/branchbaby