10 Random Things For Bonus!

1) I don't feel very good today.

2) I just finished my third win at National Novel Writing Month, an online writing contest where you try to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November - check it out @ http://www.nanowrimo.org

3) I'm originally from rural Pennsylvania.

4) I'm Quaker

5) I like villains - Sylar from Heroes, Ben from Lost, Joker from Batman, etc

6) I dressed up as a mad scientist for Parson's Poetry Scram and won first place

7) I have a secret crush on Cilian Murphy - shhh....

8) I like to sing in the back room with Amanda P!

9) My husband is getting his PhD in Economics from Ohio State, so I've heard lots of mini lectures about the bailout!

10) I hate when people beep at me for not turning right on red. I know it's red, I'm not going to go if there's cars coming because I'm not stupid, so just hold your horses and only use your horn if you're about to hit me.

The End of the Road

Well, Learn & Play, it's been fun, but we've come to the end of the road.

I've really enjoy this program: more than I thought I would, to be honest. I figured that it would be an easy breeze through program and I would collect my flash drive and go on with my life unchanged.

Most of the things I *was* very familiar with - YouTube, Flickr, etc - but instead of making it boring, it was more like a nice break in between learning new gluts of technology information. I appreciated their inclusion because it meant I didn't have to think as hard as I did when learning about, say, that annoying pb wiki or the rss feed one.

On the whole, though, I've seen a lot of benefits from the program. I think it was a fun opportunity for all staff to bond together in a common project. I really enjoyed watching everyone share with each other all the fun things they've discovered how to do. It was kind of a level playing ground, too: while I was often called on to help with some of the tasks, there were definitely ones where I had to ask someone else what to do, and those people would ask me on the next task, etc. It was all circle-icious!

Thanks for the opportunity to Learn & Play, CML. It was lots of fun, and I'm a little sad it's over...

MOLDI

Dug through MOLDI a little bit this morning. I'd seen it and tried it out when I first moved to Columbus and started using CML as a patron, but my computer wasn't that great and I had a lot of things on my mind - like planning a wedding and working on my MLIS, for two - so I sort of disregarded it. Now that those things are taken care of, I have more time for this sort of thing. Plus, I have a pretty long commute to work and have taken to getting audio books on my iPod for the trip. I think MOLDI will be a good resource for me.

It's not a bad site: pretty user-friendly, and pretty straightforward. Just by browsing for a few minutes I found one audio book I put on hold and one I was able to check out. (Now I just need to remember to download it when I get home!) The selection isn't quite where I think we'd all like it - some more popular titles, and so forth - but it's not that bad, and I think it's also a chance for people to expand their interests a little. It's a fun option for our power users or for some of our patrons who may have exhausted our supply of books on tape and are casting about for something new to listen to.

The music....well, let's just say I'm not too excited about the music choices. But of course, I'm pretty sure my demographic is *not* the target audience for MOLDI, so that's OK. :)

Podcasting

To be honest, I'm not nearly as excited about podcasts as I used to be. Once upon a time I thought podcasts would be awesome. I was sadly disappointed.

This is not because podcasts themselves aren't a good idea. It's just that I don't have the time/inclination to listen to them.

Example: I subscribed to the podcast for my morning radio, The Riot on 88.7. I thought I'd listen to the podcast on days when, for whatever reason, I missed the show. Then all of a sudden I realized it was a month later and I had this whole mess of episodes built up that I was never going to get to. So I deleted them all, unsubscribed, and there you have it.

I was looking around PodcastAlley to see if there was anything that caught my eye, and I just wasn't getting excited. All the library ones either had nothing to do with libraries or sounded very dull. All the ones I searched for using my fandoms were either low on material (Harry Potter news? Really? There's no Harry Potter news any more...) or too broad (really it's a podcast about comic books but Neil Gaiman's name just happened to be in the keywords.)

I think what it really comes down to for me is that podcasts are just a place for people to hear themselves talk. I tend to get very irritated when people are talking just for talking's sake - I like silence, I like quiet - and I *especially* get irritated when they're ranting, like pundits on TV or most radio personalities. Why would I subscribe to something that is basically stuff I don't like? And, as seen above, even when it *is* something I like, I won't like it enough to actually force myself to listen to it at a future point.

So, all in all, I think podcasts are a lost cause for me. I'm sure there are people who enjoy them - the people that watch talk shows and listen to radio personalities - and that's fine. Me, I'm going to pass on getting any deeper into this one.

YouTube

I'm not going to talk long about YouTube. I've been on to YouTube since college - lots of fun videos for bored college kids to enjoy, and when we entertain our friends now we mostly end up just sitting around watching YouTube videos all night - and my husband and I also have our own account where we post videos of our youth group kids (http://www.youtube.com/user/engelhardtlm1) so I consider myself *very* comfortable with YouTube and the way it works.

And that was an incredibly long sentence.

That said, here is a fun music video by the French group Dionysos. They do good stuff:




May I also recommend Hulu (www.hulu.org) for TV shows and movies online, and Animoto (www.animoto.org) for a place where you can make your own short films to share your photos online. Both great video sharing sites.

WOW

Holy crap, I just found my new favorite waste of time. I was on the CML toolbox looking through the different links we have. Most of them I'm already hip to, either using every day several times a day (Google, Firefox, etc) or having tried them out through Learn & Play (delicious, LibraryThing, and so on.) I decided to try out Stumble because I had never even heard of it before.

This site is absolutely amazing.

Stumble (at least the way I tried it out) works as a toolbar added on to your browser. Even though I know it won't stay once the computer is rebooted, I decided to download the toolbar anyway and play around with it. When you sign up for Stumble, you select your interests. Then it adds a button to your toolbar (well, a few buttons, actually, but one main one) and when you hit it, it takes you to a random site based on the interests you selected. You can then click on thumbs up or thumbs down, depending on whether you liked the site or not, and those ratings will affect the next sites you get.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have found my new time waster.

One of the other buttons added to your toolbar is deceptive, because it says "Favorites" but what it really means is "List of things you liked." When you click on that button, it takes you to a blog that basically is just a list of the sites you said you liked. That way, when you "stumble" on that awesome site, it's not lost forever. You can also share sites with people if you know their email address. My friends and I are always sending sites back and forth, so this is a really handy way to quickly send it without having to sign into my email or onto my blog and post it that way. Click a button, type in their address, and it's done.

I know this toolbar will go away when the computer restarts, but as soon as I get home tonight I'm putting it on my own browser (Firefox) and will probably promptly spend hours just clicking through, looking at all the awesome things. I love the internets, and I love the things people put on the internets, and this is just one more fabulous way of finding them. Thanks, CML, for linking to it! :)

Comiqs

Out of the Web 2.0 awards list, I decided to play with the website Comiqs. It was ranked third place in the "Fun Stuff" category.

At first I was incredibly enamored by this website. I love places where I can play with pictures, and the idea of being able to make an awesome webcomic *easily* is very exciting to me. Unfortunately, the more I've played with it, the less user-friendly it becomes. I was able to make one or two strips, but the menus are not very intuitive. In places where you'd expect the site to just go to a new page, it would inexplicably open in a new window, which cluttered up my screen and made me angry. (I'm a tabs person, anyway.)

If the navigation would become a little more intuitive, and if there would be less screen popping up, and if directions were a little more clear, it would be an awesome site. I can see why it got third place. The concept is awesome, but the execution is lacking as is.

Google Docs

This is really cool! I can see just a lot of situations where Google Docs would be a great tool. One personal application that comes to mind: my sister and I have different versions of Word. We're both writers, so when we're trying to send documents to each other to read or edit we run into lots of problems trying to get our computers to play nice. Google Docs can definitely clean up that problem and make it way easier for us to share things.

I can see how this would be great professionally, as well. In the HHC, kids don't always have A) time B) money or C) inclination to print out their assignments. If they needed to, we could save their work on a Google Docs account and they could bring it up at school the next day or on one of our other computers if they wanted to work on it again. So easy!!

Wikis

So I'm reading this article by Meredith Farkas (http://www.webjunction.org/social-software/articles/content/438229) about wikis and their potential use in libraries. It's overall not bad, except I don't think she was careful enough about hiding either her bias or the bias she assumes her audience has. From what I'm reading, she's clearly writing for librarians who are A) older and/or B) not comfortable with technology. For example:

"It can be difficult for people to get used to the idea of a website that anyone is allowed to add to or edit. The notion of private property is so deeply embedded in our society that it’s difficult to imagine going onto someone else’s website and changing things, even when they want us to. "

Um, no? Not for me and my generation, at any rate. The idea of popping in to a website and adding content is pretty much run-of-the-mill for us. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, a wide variety of message boards, even things like fanfic sites (http://www.fanfiction.net/) or original fiction sites (http://www.fictionpress.com/) or video creating sites (http://www.animoto.com/ - and I really recommend this site, it's awesome) are a part of our normal lives.

All that to say, I wish she would have stayed away from assuming that all of her readers are uncomfortable with this.

Because we're not.

The wide majority of the article, though, is really good. I enjoyed her suggestions for how libraries can use wikis; I especially liked the idea of subject guides as wikis. I can see CML using wikis for things like organizing when different branches have tech trainings or FOL booksales, and also for lists of specialty DVDs or books, like Triple Crown books or horror movies.

Also posted a few things on the CML wiki sandbox. Fun, except I kind of wish the formatting was different. This seems more like a many-paged message board. Not as clean or streamlined as I'd wish, but then again, I'm kind of picky about that.

Library 2.0 stuff

As someone who uses "open" technology quite a bit, there's a lot about Web 2.0 and consequently Library 2.0 that I like. I like user-directed stuff, and I like that users can share content. I also have to add some caution in there, though. Open content means, of course, it is also open to abuse, and there are still people on the web that are not wise to that and seem to be surprised when some sort of abuse happens. There's a balance that needs to be struck between enjoying the variety and diversity of user content and understanding that with that enjoyment comes the possibility of seeing something that maybe you don't enjoy so much.

I think that balance is something that needs to be taken into consideration when implementing user-driven features in our libraries. Many people don't understand that balance or aren't willing to strike that balance, and even though we as librarians love new technology and are always ready to jump on the technology bandwagon, I think we need to keep these people in mind, as well. I'm afraid that we'll go too fast; that we'll lose our "lifelong" customers while we try to court the fickle young minds that adore this technology.