Thing 5: Flickr

I have had a Flickr account and used it to share pictures with friends. Since I had a set of pictures that I wanted as a flickr badge (another cool widget) I thought this would be easy. Now it really is but as with most things on the web the first time it gave me indigestion. So here are a few tips. 1. Make sure your photos are for public viewing. You can mark them for public viewing by set or by individual picture. 2. Use the HTML gadget in Blogger when you're copying the code from flickr.

Angela has set up an ACLD Flickr account with several sets of pictures. She tells me that the whole account has received 600 hits--pretty good. I think that this is one 2.0 feature that libraries can use in marketing. It's another access point for library events and publicity. Internally, any of us can now grab a picture when we need it. The Library of Congress project of tagging pictures has opened up the ability for anyone to find a picture of a subject and use it or comment on it.

Flickr is a good thing.

Thing 4: RSS and Newsreaders

I do know and actually use RSS feeds and aggregators. I thought the Common Craft podcast “RSS in Plain English” was excellent. I have used Google Reader so I decided to set up a Bloglines to compare the two. Both are simple to use and the only trouble I had with Bloglines was remembering my account passwords, etc to set it up. That is becoming more of an issue and I need to get more organized and simplified as I sign up for more of these things. I put a Blogline extension (notifier) for Firefox on my browser but I’m not sure why. I also put a Blogline button on my bookmark toolbar. After adding library blogs (different ones) to both and putting them in folders, I stopped (this was Friday). Today I went back to see if there were any major differences in presentation, organization or functionality between Google Reader and Bloglines. Both are quite user friends but I find Google Reader more intuitive for me. That’s probably because it looks like Google and that’s become a comfort. Although Google Reader did get a facelift last month that improved its look and functionality

I looked at some of the suggested “interesting reading” list and have added a couple to my blog list. Speaking of blog lists—I did create one on my blog at the beginning and if you’re really using your blog that tool is just as handy as an outside aggregator.

If you use these tools for your professional reading, you really have little excuse not to stay up-to-date. Pick 3 or 4 major library news sources and/or blogs in your field and it saves you reading 5 month old journals.

As with many others, this is truly addictive….

Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

After reading Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, my eyes hurt. Not sure I needed all those statistics about blogging. Statistics can be used to prove anything so I guess the conclusion the world is blogging but what percentage of the world? Seems to me that those that blog are do a lot of it which skews the statistics of how many people actually blog.

And blog--what a word! who thought that would be appealing?

I tried searching on all four blog search engines. I now know there's a person with my name that invented the Dump-A-Matic, a device that turns any pick-up truck into a dump truck in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information but he's very popular on the blog scene.
Google gave me the most hits (of course), Technorati's list seems more relevant; BlogPulse gave a scarce half dozen and nothing about Mr. Dump-a-Matic; and Bloglines had 4 results. In looking at them all: Google--there's nothing to look at; Technorati--obviously wants to be the leader in everything about blogs; BlogPulse has some cool tools and is coming from a business analysis perspective; and Bloglines is pushing its blog aggregator (I'm going to return to that feature later and use it).

Thing 2 What is Web 2.0?

To all those who just can't see why we're doing this:

"No profession can survive if it throws its core principles and values overboard in response to every shift in the zeitgeist. However, it can be equally disastrous when a profession fails to acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change in the marketplace it serves. At this point in time, our profession is far closer to the latter type of disaster than it is to the former. We need to shift direction, and we can’t wait for the big ship of our profession to change course first. It’s going to have to happen one library—one little boat—at a time." Rick Anderson, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries

Thing 1.5

I've enhanced my blog today and yes indeedy I am learning things. I delved into adding more gadgets. Gadgets, widgets--real time wasters but very fun.
1. I added my picture--I know it kind of blows the whole anonymous thing--but I'm not concerned. It's always good to practice cropping, resizing (wish it would resize me), etc. I find adding pictures whether using flickr, camera software, downloading from the web, etc to be one thing I have confidence in doing.
2. I added a blog list--decided to make it halfandhalf, personal interest and librarianship. Obviously my personal interests include politics so I won't make that list right now.
3. Added a text widget to explain my blog title
The functionality of the blogger gadgets makes enhancing a blog a simple process. I have noticed that gadgets that aren't "Blogger" gadgets can be troublesome.

Wordle

I just added a really cool 2.0 feature from Wordle. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. If you decide to play with Wordle you'll need to sign up and can use your same username as you used for the 23Things blog. Wordle is like flickr in that anything you create on it is posted on the net and to use or import those images you grab them on that site. Wordle is a bit cumbersome because you cannot just copy and past what you create. You either have to post it through html on your blog or use a screenshot and save it through as a jpeg through Photoshop. The latter option is way too complicated for me today but I'm going to try doing it soon.

Thing 1 is a snap

The hardest thing about Thing 1 is deciding what name to call the blog. Blogger is indeed a simple process. I have just used Blogger for another blog we started at the library so it wasn't my first time. But I found it intuitive then and so similar to Microsoft Office functions that it's instantly friendly. It will be interesting to add cool things to this one and then use that knowledge on the library blog.