PileOnEverest

Missing this stupid blog...

2007-11-29T17:11:00.000-05:00

I thought I was done with blogging, but last night I had to send a link to it to a friend who'd asked if I had one and wanted to see it, so I had to open the page to get the link, and found myself re-reading all the entries. I can't believe how much work I put into it when I was working on my 23 things, and how much of it I captured in the blog. Even if I'm the only person re-reading it later, it might be worth it? We'll see...

Jasper Fforde

2007-09-08T12:34:00.000-04:00

Jasper Fforde's books are called Harry Potter for adults.

I had to do this extra post, because a colleague asked how to insert videos in the blog, and I realized I'd forgotten how to do it, and after I played around and remembered, I thought I'd keep the video here.

Let's see if I can add a podcast about him as well?

Final Thoughts

2007-09-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

I am glad I overcame my reluctance to do journal entries and my distrust of blogs and decided to participate. I liked all the fun things I learned about, I loved ZoHo, but I liked even better the fact that through trying to figure out each individual site, I started to have a better understanding of the elements that stay the same from site to site -- the way to link pages and insert elements. That is what I'm happy to be able to take away from this exercise. (Well, that, and the MP3 player.)

I would like to participate in a similar program in the future. It was wonderful to have all the links collected to be able to go to one or two sites that concisely explain what the new "thing" is about, and then just plunge in, so I want to thank everybody who streamlined the learning process for all of us.

Podcasts

2007-09-08T10:17:00.000-04:00

Podcasts were interesting to explore until I realized that just like commercial radio, they can be full of commercials. I was hoping that saving radio shows as podcasts will be about selection and creating "tracks" where not the whole hour long show would be shoved into a podcast, but it would be broken down and tagged, so people would be able to go straight to what they need.

But back to the start. I liked the fact that Podcast alley doesn't require any additional software, I didn't like Podcast.net at all, the player didn't work for me, and while it included international podcasts, it missed out on some local ones. Yahoo seemed the most appealing in appearance (plus it helps that you don't need to create yet another account). It is nice that yahoo allows you to download the podcasts and play them later. I didn't like the subscription plan there that would require you to install the software or use iTunes -- I would prefer for it to just create a music file or let you choose Windows Media Player to be the default player. I have iTunes on my computer and when I subscribed to a podcast it automatically went there, which I wasn't happy about, because for some reason I have to work extra hard now to remove it -- it doesn't follow the rules of other music files and doesn't allow me to delete it.

I did find some interesting podcasts to listen to as a one time thing, but I don't usually listen to radio, so I don't see how podcasts would be appealing to me. We'll see. My technology at home is slowing me down -- I can't do a lot of podcasting or YouTube stuff there. Hopefully when we upgrade our connection, I might find a way to narrow it down to what I'm interested in and make it more part of my everyday life.

Thing #21 -- check!

7 and a half

2007-09-08T09:47:00.000-04:00

This is my least favorite task, so the post will be short. The most difficult habit is to begin with the end in mind. Being a perfectionist, I find it daunting to think about how much time and effort it would take to become really good at something. To me that is overwhelming. The easiest -- to use technology to my advantage. I love meaningful technology. I don't in general like to think how to do something, I like to plunge in and do it, and let instinct and inspiration guide me instead of a list. I often don't get everything done that I wanted, but along the way I sometimes come up with things that I could not have envisioned at the start and I go off on rabbit trails and love it.

Thing #2 -- check!

Downloadable books

2007-09-01T12:32:00.000-04:00

I have been using Overdrive for a long time now, and I got some very good audiobooks for homeschooling there. I burnt a bunch on CDs and after that uploaded them on the I-Pod. I just wish the markers from the Overdrive Player would translate onto CDs, because 70 min long files are too long not to have tracks. I will try Netlibrary when I get my MP3 player.

I have used Project Gutenberg for years, and I liked it better before their main page was a wiki. For my needs, I like Project Baldwin better (I understand its actual location is Baltimore -- go Maryland!). I have also found WOWIO to be a good source of free ebooks. World eBook Fair and World Piblic Library Association are subscription only, even when the books are free, there is an annual fee to use the sites. The fee is nominal, so I might join if I need something from there.

Thing #22 -- check!

Thing #19

2007-08-29T19:24:00.000-04:00

Award winning web 2.0 sites, here I come!

Completely intimidated by the long list, I had it narrowed down for me and picked from a short list.

I was not impressed by a lot of the sites -- not because they are bad, but because I didn't seem to have the void they would be filling for me. I did like Netvibes and even went as far as creating an account. I don't know if I will use it.

Pros -- accessibility from anywhere, the potential to accumulate all the web stuff on the same page (del.icio.us, web search, blog search, video search, rollyo (? - don't know yet, but I guess if I was able to add it to the blog, I can figure out how to add it to Netvibes), the ease of editing.

Cons -- limited selection, concentrating on feeds (another "pro" -- preset choices for feeds, "con" -- massive number of feeds coming, a little overwhelming). Didn't see the way to list all yahoo groups -- am I hopelessly 20th century?

Interesting -- I was able to add a webpage in one of the "squares" allotted to each feature (could not change its size so it really doesn't help much); I added a "To-Do list" (I can use it when I want to remember to get a library book or two for the kids and have to email myself at work -- now I can just put it ont he To-Do list"); the weather forcast automatically came up for Baltimore (I didn't need to enter the zip).

Thing #19 is NETVIBES! Check!

ZoHo

2007-08-25T16:04:00.000-04:00

I'm officially in awe! Publishing a doc that I created in ZoHo is great, but what I liked even better was the ease with which I can email documents and change their format. For example, if I have a Word doc and I need to send it to somebody who doesn't have MS Office, I can put it through ZoHo and turn into a pdf. OT: it doesn't look pretty in Russian. But it's amazing that it is available to work in many languages.

GoogleDocs is OK. I would have been more impressed with it if I saw it first, before ZoHo. Now... not so much.

Thnk #18 -- check!

For the blog

2007-08-25T16:00:00.001-04:00

This is wonderful! I will be bookmarking it on del.icio.us for all Edgewood librarians to use! All the advantages are obvious, after publishing this to my blog, I'll know how easy it is to manipulate it.

Let's try adding to it. It worked!

How about a picture?

That worked as well!

I got this picture from here.

Off to import it into my blog!

Sandbox Wiki

2007-08-24T11:09:00.000-04:00

There are only two more blogs on the Favorite Blogs page for HCPL. We don't look too good!!! I did add our logo, and I have to say, it looks like the best one on the page -- very classy. Other counties have much longer lists there. I guess we lose our participants to the Front Page. Oh well!

Thing #17 - check

Wikis

2007-08-21T19:15:00.000-04:00

Wikis are OK. All the cons and pros are right there in the instructional slideshow. I would like to see how they are being used in education. What I have seen in quickly glancing through examples, doesn't look all that revolutionary from the result end. On the other hand, the idea that web creating is so easy and intuitive is very encouraging. I have already started a couple wikis that I would like to use in our homeschooling, but my kids are too young to set them completely loose in the www. I was thinking about going through 13 moons series by Jean Craighead George and having a page for each "moon," i.e. each animal, and ask the kids to add interesting facts about each animal. We'll see how it works.

Thing #16 -- check!

Thoughts about Web 2.0

2007-08-20T16:42:00.000-04:00

First, I have to admit I had to use Google to figure out what OCLC is. Even though it sounded familiar, I could not think what the acronym stands for. So much for "one-button commands" -- kind of ironic, not a single link there was to the homepage, their own article about being user-friendly was not. So I learned from the first google page of hits that OCLC is Online Computer Library Center.

My other thoughts about the OCLC newsletter are even less "progressive," so I'll keep them to myself. I'll just say that there is nothing wrong with having a place where you can simply walk to and just by browsing the shelf find an obscure book you always wanted to read or simply leaf through. And there is nothing wrong with having to click more than one button to find information. I think libraries are a reflection of the society, but I also think they (we) shape it in a way, and we don't need to contribute to shortening people's attention span and convincing them that if something is more than one click away, it's not worth the effort.

Moving on...

Out of Order - YouTube

2007-08-20T16:20:00.000-04:00

YouTube -- Check!

The site is intuitive, easy to use. I don't like watching videos online, so I don't think I'll be returning there often, especially since I don't have enough of the imagination to do a search that would bring anything worth watching. I did find a couple interestting videos -- like a snippet from a book talk by Jasper Fforde -- can't link them here, don't remember where they are.

The video I'm posting here is also related to Jasper Fforde, and it's related to libraries -- it's a tease for The Eyre Affair which happens to be one of my favorite books. I think it's very creative.

Technorati

2007-08-17T11:22:00.000-04:00

It was only a matter of time until the blog community started working on its own search engine and came up with Technorati. It was just common sense. Technorati itself is not always. The most obvious feature that Technorati is missing (or is it me who is missing it? or simply can't find it?) is the opportunity to sort search results by relevance. I have had entries that don't even have the word I was searching for come up among the first five. Just to test it, I did a search on Technorati and on Google, using exact same terms and adding the word "blogs" on Google and I found much more relevant and interesting results. Besides, if you take an extra step before you put in your search term, you can get to the Google search page that only searches blogs. Another drawback of Technorati is that it may "find" your keywords in book titles people list as favorites, and those "hits" are really useless. Search by tags was more satisfying, and I was pleasantly surprised by some video "hits" relevant to my search.

I'm not going to mess with tags on Technorati -- I understand the concept, the site looks like it would be easy to figure it out, I just don't see the need -- my blog doesn't have any earth-shattering information or insights, so I'm not going to clutter cyberspace just because I can.

Thing # 14 -- check!

Savage Nature

2007-08-14T19:14:00.000-04:00

No comment...

Del.icio.us Thoughts

2007-08-01T17:48:00.000-04:00

In a nutshell -- great potential, not worth the trouble personally, redundant professionally. I can see that it would be awesome help if we didn't already have all the links amassed on our HCPL website. I was very impressed with the Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users article, and it's wonderful that del.icio.us can do all those things, but at this point I am not going to try and set up an account and transfer all my bookmarks there. I consider sites like this and Rollyo to be a step (or several) away from Google, but they are just too time consuming to set up to be a big improvement. You are basically trying to do manually what google does in seconds even on a dial-up computer. I have a lot of bookmarks already saved on my computer, and I very seldom consult them, then I stumble upon new cool sites, and I don't even bother to bookmark them anymore, because I'm afraid I won't find them in my sea of bookmarks, so I put shortcuts on the desktop, and never look there either... I don't want to spend time setting up something I will never use. The idea of del.icio.us sounds very similar to what a9 -- I think -- tried to do a couple years ago, and I tried it, but never got in the habit of using it. I don't think it allowed to create your own tags, I simply don't remember. I'm not sure it's still around, I do remember Amazon.com was pushing it and offering monetary incentives.

I took a look at the lists maintained by libraries, and most of them didn't look very user friendly. Once you start tagging sites by very specific tags, the list of tags will get out of hand. For example, one of the tags was aquarium (with just one link in it), and I can't imagine time when I would purposefully look for "aquarium' on the list of tags. When your search is that specific (and broad at the same time -- not a specific animal), you might as well... that's right, Google it. A lot of tags had just one site underneath, which is not very efficient, you might as well make a simple list of favorite sites if you have them "unbundled" like that.

Moving on...

Rollyo

2007-07-28T15:10:00.000-04:00

Rollyo might be the answer to attempts to put some boundaries on the infinite. This might be a good way to search for lesson plans and stuff like that (homeschooling mom has no time off). I was very excited that I was able to add the Rollyo tool bar to this blog. It took a little bit of searching but I was able to find it way before the frustration level hit. I didn't have all my good links handy, and I don't know if it would be easy to add them to my searchroll right away or it will involve creating a new list with added links and deleting the old one, the way I had to do it when I tried to edit my existing list.

Will I become a steady Rollyo user? I don't know. I like my Google, and especially Google image search -- I've started doing image search even when I need information as well as images, because somehow when I do image search, I always find very informative sites that also are very well done visually.

Wowio: (Belated) Post on Something Technology-Related

2007-07-26T18:28:00.001-04:00

Thanks to an article in PW, I now have something to write about for my "technology-related" post -- WOWIO. I got the name of this site from a homeschool yahoo group. It was recommended as a site that offers free ebooks (in Acrobat), with an example of a title that I was very curious about. Books on the site are NOT old, public domain titles, like Project Gutenberg or Baldwin Project, but very current. When you register, you are told that you are only allowed to download 5 titles a day (due to "tragedy of the commons" which I had to look up -- interesting...), and that you are not allowed to share files with anybody, because of the little markers imbedded in the files, and failure to comply with the rules may lead to banning from site.

Sign-up was not easy -- for some reason my computer refused to accept the link from the email sent to me to confirm the account. It was only after I forwarded the email to work and responded from there that I was able to get to the good stuff. From home I couldn't even contact help. Once the account was established, it was fairly smooth. Search is sraightforward and easy, as is checkout. The books are large files, but look like good quality (I have not tried to print yet). The first day, I downloaded 3 books. They came to me all presonalized (with my name on the first page of the file). Once you download a book, it's not deleted from your "cart" -- you have to manually delete it, which I forgot to do (the "remove" button is not very prominent), so today by mistake I got three old books and two new ones. Once the books are in your "cart" you have three days to download them.

I was interested to read about the business end of it in hopes of being able to better understand and to predict how long it will last. I hope it's a long time!!!!!!!

LibraryThing

2007-07-26T16:30:00.000-04:00

I've used LibraryThing before, I like the idea of being able to add tags and make your personalized catalog searchable. I even had a chance to recommend this site to a patron. I had a retired school teacher come in inquiring about the price of Horizon and Novelist (!!??!!). She was taking a computer class, because she wanted to keep her teaching certificate valid, and in her long teaching career, after getting Master's +30, she had taken just about every educational class she could find, and they were not letting her take the same kind of class again, even Children's Lit, even though things change so fast, with so many new writers and trends. After what felt like a very long round-about reference interview, in which the patron kept inquiring about Horizon and would not devulge why she needed the information, it turned out that what she wanted was exactly what LibraryThing had to offer -- an opportunity to list titles and tag them for searching later.

Another thing I like about LibraryThing is the ability to make your catalog public. One of the uses I put LibraryThing to was to host booklists for homeschoolers on specific topics. For example, instead of creating a webpage on our homeschooling website, and type up the titles and providing links, I can put all the books in LibraryThing under a new user name, and all I do on the homeschool website is provide the link, like this -- http://www.librarything.com/catalog/HAHSAautism or http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=HAHSAunschooling At first I thought I would have to provide log-in information, and I was worried about people changing the list, but I played with it a little more and discovered that if the catalog is public, it's very easy to link to it. And it is amazing how many resources are at the user's fingertips, including links to Amazon.

On the personal level, though, as much as I liked cataloging my books, I never went back and by now I have forgotten my log in information. Creating new accounts is way too easy and there is no way to retreave log in info for the account you have created and forgot about (like me). Better luck next time, huh?

LibraryThing -- check (thing 11)!!!

Geez, meez!

2007-07-21T12:46:00.000-04:00

Meez -- check!

I liked M&M creator better -- it's more fun, less glamorizing. More choices in Meez, of course. Both are easy to use and are pretty intuitive.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to export images from LetterJames, and I know it has been done. Given that it is a European company selling stuff, I'm not going to worry too much about it. The idea is neat, though. Well, maybe I'll look more into it later...

I finally saw a blog that I won't mind coming back to -- The Generator Blog, where the host keeps track of all the image generator sites on the web. Well, all the sites he/she comes across. I found a bunch of The Simpsons-related generators, along with some linguistic ones.

As I was trying cunieforms and hyeroglyphs, I remembered the site that generates mirror-image writing, a la Leonardo. I actually emailed the host a suggestion of a website to include. We'll see what he/she says.

I added his RSS link to my bloglines.

Oof, all that took a lot of time away from HP 7. Better go...

RSS Feeds -- Check!

2007-07-19T19:41:00.000-04:00

My daughter enjoyed making trading cards. She used a silly picture she took of her sister for a Warholized creation. She was excited she was able to do it.

RSS feeds are OK. Pro -- they all come to the same place, con -- another place to check. That's of course, if you even want RRS feeds to begin with. I thought it was interesting that blogs at bloglines can have their own RSS, but I thought it is superfluous to have RSS feed at bloglines to the blog at the same site.

So far this was the least exciting of all "technology exercises" Moving on...

A zillion things you can do with pictures

2007-07-09T18:06:00.000-04:00

I played with some web gadgets, made a bunch of trading cards, a couple of them prominently featuring my cat. Finally got Mappr to work and put a different picture of my kitty there (just look for pictures with the tag "cats"). I figured you can't ever have too many pictures of cats.

It's all nifty and all, but I doubt I will use it again. Maybe I should show all the crazy things you can do with pictures to my 9 year old and see how long it will take her to create a bunch of cards with Neopets... I hope this idea doesn't backfire... I'll keep you posted.

Smooth Flickr

2007-06-30T14:13:00.000-04:00

Flickr is OK. I like how smooooooth it is. I wish it would let people create more than 3 sets for free, but oh well. Playing with captions was fun. It is not very intuitive and not as all-inclusive as I would like it to be. For example, I just stumbled upon Mappr and the place where you add captions, etc, but I had to really search for them to try and go back. It's my first experience with it, and it does seem more "fancy" than the Webshots site I've used since 2001 to show off my kids' work.

To start. Or not...

2007-06-27T18:38:00.000-04:00

You know they have those frames around license plates "I'd rather be..." Well, I'd rather be doing any of the zillion other things that can be done on the computer than writing in my blog. I'm not a diary person, so my posts will be short and sour.

Oh, I just had an idea -- I'll be indiscriminately adding pictures with some unrelated captions. My lifelong journey is out in the real world. Ok, maybe not quite. How about this -- my lifelong journey is between the real and imaginary world, with occasional stops in this virtual one.

See you at my next stop.