Week 6

Tagging

Wow, Delicious.com is great! So often you forget which search terms you used to find something on Google - and I have on occasion not been able to find some obscure sites again - so this is great - once bookmarked, you can access it anywhere. Tagging also helps you to easily separate social from work related sites. I've registered and am converted!!

Technorati

A keyword search for the phrase "Learning 2.0" resulted in 436 hits A tag search resulted in 640 hits, however a tag search for the phrase search for "learning 2.0" resulted in only 176 hits. Web 2.0 under the directory listings bring up a different set of results again.

Moral of the story - there is a lot out there and you will need to be a bit more specific with your search criteria when you're looking for a particular blog or a blog on a particular subject. I like blogger Central with rising blogs of the day. There were 8,038 posts tagged "library" Wonder if we could convince them to add "libraries" as a directory heading??

On Library 2.0

The article on "Icebergs" and "Into a new world of librarianship" really inspired me. It made me excited about the future of libraries - the way I felt as a student when I was doing my postgraduate library studies. It's supporting my drive to get rid of our "just in case collection" but have also made me rethink user education. We should not need to have to provide extensive training in library resources. If everything else informative out there is so easy to use - why will people use complicated library databases? Of course they will not!

I'm making these two articles compulsory reading for all staff - they provide some useful guidelines:

Librarians 2.0 plans for their users - Librarian 2.0 embraces Web 2.0 tools - Librarian 2.0 controls technolust - Librarian 2.0 makes good, yet fast decisions - Librarian 2.0 is a trendspotter - Librarian 2.0 gets content

Week 5

Wikis

I'm definitely going to use a wiki for the library - its great for how-to manuals and library procedures.

We put together a wiki for Library Week. The idea was to upload your story. It wasn't hugely successfull - partly due to lack of advertising - we are limited to free community newspapers - but I'm encouraging staff to upload some of their stories, so that everyone can see how it works and share their thoughts on how we could implement it in our own library. You are welcome to add your story - go to https://livingbook.pbwiki.com/ and follow the instructions.

Week 4 Techno guff

Mmm anything technology related... I must say, our telephone account would be so much higher without Skype. Skype enables you to call people anywhere in the world for FREE, provided you both have the software loaded and have an Internet connection fast enough to deal with it - broadband is usually a must. You can also conference call on skype and add as many callers as you would like. On Christmas day our whole family was together, I joined from Auckland, my parents from Cape Town, South Africa and my sister from London. It was as if we were all together - amazing!! Facebook has allowed me to keep in touch with Friends abroad. They can share a little more of my life as I can upload photos for them and even instant message them if we happen to be online at the same time. Old friends from High school have been joining Facebook and we've been catching up - it's quite incredible!

Week 4 Mashups

Mashups

Flicker mashups:

I absolutely love FD Toys. I put together this magazine - these are my friend's dogs. She got them reindeer ears for Christmas - you can see that they're absolutely delighted about it!! I figured for all their efforts they at least earned their own magazine cover...

Week 4

My introduction to Flicker. We use Picasa at home - not to post photos on the Internet, but to manage the photos on our own drives. It automatically sorts it according to the year in which the photo was taken and also give great options to edit not-so-good-looking pictures. But today is all about exploring flicker:

Have tried several times to upload an image from Flicker by using the "blog this" button on top of the image - but it's not playing! So I'm the other way now - using blogger to upload the image.

Nothing seems to be working for me today! THis is supposed to be an image of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour bridge. Will have to bribe hubbie to lend me his skills tonight...