Thing 47 Evaluation

A couple of weeks ago, I did not think I was going to get this done. I put "other things" aside and concentrated on these things and I am now happily done. But I am not really done because I have a list of things/places to go back to and explore some more. I never thought I would get into Facebook, but find myself in it reading what my "friends" are doing that I definitely wouldn't know if it weren't for Facebook.

We have access to so much on the internet that it is just too hard to keep up. Activities such as Things on a Stick are a great way to be exposed to new technology and see what others have found useful. I would participate again.

Thing 46 WebJunction Minnesota

I have been a member of WebJunction for quite some time and my favorite part of it is the online courses. I once directed a friend who worked as a receptionist in a library to it because she wanted to get a job that was more library work related. It is also a great place to find out what is happening in the library community in Minnesota. You can find links to events, news and even job postings. I urge everyone who works in libraries in Minnesota to take advantage of this great resource.

Thing 45 Cloud Computing

I have used Google docs quite a bit for my own documents and last year did a cooperative project with two others using Google docs. We put together a PowerPoint presentation online and then all met in Long Beach to show it. The main complaint we had was that it did not have the same formatting as our original PowerPoint and some of the media functions did not work at all. There are other options such as slideshow.com. One of the conferences I attended had many of the presentations available there. We all know the importance of backups and these online backups are even better, because you can get to them any time or place that you can get an Internet connection. In the end we will probably all leave a trail of data behind us on all the clouds we used for a while and then abandoned for the next thing.

Thing 44 The Economy

I am at the age where if I don’t know anything about managing money, I am in big trouble. The first video was, however, a very plain explanation of how things have gone wrong in our economy and we will be paying for this for quite a while. So my investment strategies over the years are not paying at this point. I am among the ones who wonder how long to delay retirement in hopes that the economy improves.
The things that I was interested in this section are ways of not spending too much money. I already walk/bike to work and many other places to save the car, gas, and the environment. I will go to garage sales, thrift stores, and use coupons. I read through FrugalDad’s page and picked up a few more tips. I laughed about the chickens in the city sections because my town recently decided not to allow them. I grew up with chickens and am not a big fan, so I am not too heartbroken about it. I used to be afraid I was cheap, but after reading this thing, I know that the real term is frugal which means avoiding waste. I like that a lot better!

Thing 43 Online TV & Video

I did not know about Hulu and Joost before I started More Things. I did know that you can watch TV programs online and it seemed like a good idea to me. You can watch them whenever you want, so if you become addicted to Desperate Housewives, you can go out and have some fun Sunday night and then catch up with the girls later. You can also save time because you don't have to watch commercials. Well, I take that back. I went to the fitness center today and watched an episode of 30Rock online while I was bicycling (they don't call it TechRec for nothing!). The episode only lasted 23 minutes, but there were a few ads right during the program, but nothing like the 3 or 4 minutes of commercials on TV these days.

Today was actually the first day I have watched an entire show online. At home, I use a wireless connection and I think it is a little too slow to view TV programs. I can see people giving up cable connections and watching online TV exclusively-well probably not so much my generation, but the younger ones for sure. It won't affect my home at all because my husband loves TV.

Thing 42 Music 2.0

I know a lot of people who can't get anything done unless they have some music on, but I am not one of them. I do enjoy music and I like to have it on in the car and when I walk, but I don't take the time to put it on at work unless I am at my desk on a weekend or at night. I have looked at Pandora and have an account. It is based on the Music Genome Project. They analyzed music so when you put in a song you like, Pandora comes up with other songs like it that you will probably enjoy too. I would like to take the time and see if I really do like the other suggested songs, but for now I have found out about it.

Thing 41 Mashup Your Life

When I started More Things, I downloaded the Flock browser and it took over my online world. It uses a master password to log me into my Twitter, Facebook, and blogger accounts. It also brings my feeds together on one page called My World. My World collects together all of my favorite web sites, news feeds and media. Flock will automatically update news and media feeds when new content is added. It has been very helpful for doing this project because I don't have to keep looking through my bookmarks, username and password lists. I wouldn't say it helps my productivity because it is easy to get sidetracked at work and I find myself not caring too much about some of the updates I get.

Thing 40 Mashup the Web

It looks like mashups are only limited by your imagination. I tried TimeTube and did a timeline for Stephen King and the Beatles. Did Wheel of Food which is a wheel that you can spin and it has restaurants from a zip code you enter. I looked at a daily dose of interesting photos and checked the walk score for a few cities. (Buffalo is great, Niagara Falls not so great).

Since people come into libraries looking for all sorts of information, any of these could be useful to them.

Thing 39 Digital Storytelling

I used Smilebox to create a slide show with pictures from a presentation I did earlier this spring on collaborative projects between the Library and the campus computing center. We developed a pamphlet and a PowerPoint slide show. The Smilebox slide show is extremely easily created and could be used by any library staff to create an interesting presentation. It could be set up on a public computer to run during demonstrations, parties, open houses and the like. I think it is a very nice tool.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Thing 38 Screen Casting

I have used SnagIt which is kind of Camtasia Lite. We did a usability study with about 20 students and used SnagIt to do screen capture and audio for each student. Other librarians have also done some tutorials using different screen capture programs. I actually learned something about optimizing photos in PowerPoint today that I coul have used much earlier in my career. I have also used Jing. These tools are great for making tutorials and I can see them coming into much more use in the future. If used as a tutorial, I would recommend also posting a text version because if you forget one step of a process, it is annoying to have to go back through a video to find the information you need.

Thing 37A Photo Tales...

Thing 37 Photo Tales

I have used Flickr in the past and recently started using Picasso. I did some very basic editing in Picasso and also used it to make a photo montage that turned out pretty well. I have been looking for something that we can use on the Library website to display some collections of photos and I think something like PictoBrowser will work. I used free photos from FreeDigitalPhotos.net and animoto to make a music video. You can see my work of art in Thing 37 A.

Thing 36 Comic Relief--Generate Some Fun

This thing is just a hodgepodge of stuff. I have never used any generators before, but it was very fun to look through them and I saw some things that might be helpful in the future. I didn't really have time to do anything with cartoon generators and am not sure, since I work with our Library website, that I would ever use any cartoons there. The Lolcats site was hilarious.

Over all, it boggles my mind what can be done with just a bit of code.

Thing 35 Books 2.0

The Books 2.0 was kind of overwhelming because there was just so much to do and so many choices. I am a reader and belong to a book club so I saw a lot of sites that my club members would be interested in--many of the members find an author they like and then go back and buy all his/her books so the places to get more books cheaply are interesting. The readers advisory sites will be helpful because we are always looking for new authors. Online discussion groups look interesting and I might use those to decide what to read also.

I investigated ITrackmine to organize a dvd collection. It seems to work better for dvds than LibraryThing and also offers a loan function that I could use to keep track of who might have borrowed from me.

I am interested in electronic books and downloaded a podiobook that I hope to put on my Itouch and see if I like that. People continue to read actual books in our library, because sometimes you just want the low-tech page turning experience. Our library has a number of electronic online books and have also bought some electronic devices called playaways, preloaded digital players. The user just plugs headphones into the device and presses play.

Thing 34 Is it Competition? Online Answer Sites

Because so much information is now online, today's students are less inclined to ask questions at a Reference Desk. They are so used to doing online searches that they feel confident that they can find information on their own. We all know the pitfalls of this approach with the multitude of databases many with their own unique interfaces. Lauren Pressley thinks most of the questions asked at the Reference Desk now are more technology related rather than reference. She thinks the best thing to do is focus on really good instruction. Along that line of thought, I will share a report I just read about an E-learning pilot done at the U of M. U of M Libraries offer over 100 face-to-face workshops per semester. The workshops are very popular so the Libraries launched a study and found that students were able to learn as much from an online version of the workshop as they did from the in-person version but in much less time (about 40 minutes for the online compared to a 75 minute face to face class. Here is a link to the study.

I can see a trend toward more electronic and virtual reference and other online help and I can see where some people might tend toward online questions and answers for somethings. We need to continue to educate users about information literacy so that they can get the best most accurate information when it really counts.

Thing 33 Travel 2.0

Travel 2.0 is one of the Things that interests me the most. I get to do some conference travel for my job but have to make my own arrangements, so I am always looking for a bargain. Conference hotels are always expensive and it is a challenge to find a room that is close enough to the conference to make attendance easy yet at a decent nearby hotel that won't break my budget. I use sites like TripAdvisor to find out about hotels (I won't stay at any that are rated dirty and out of the way)I tried Boo.com and Gusto and read some posts from the Cranky Flier, but I really like TripAdvisor the best for its ease of use and the many comments. I use Mapquest to find out how far it is from a non-conference hotel to the conference and look at public transportation as a way to save money too. I leave for Buffalo next week, so this has been a good exercise.

I find that travel sites like Expedia and Orbitz have comparable flight prices, but sometimes one or the other will have better hotel deals. Sometimes flights are cheaper through the airlines themselves.

Public libraries have long collected travel information into vertical files so the tradition of providing this information is there. First hand accounts from travelers who have been the same place are invaluable for others.

Thing 32 Google Maps & Mashups

Google mashups is a lot of fun. When I go to conferences, I never rent a car and try to rely on public transportation wherever I go. You can make a mashup of public transportation and places or destinations so you can see how far you have to go to a metro or bus stop and then where you get off to get to your destination (HotStop API). Other useful mashups are free wifi hotspots on a map, iMap Weather, and one that I thought I would enjoy a lot describes where you would end up if you dug a hole straight through the earth to the other side. When I was a kid, we dug many holes thinking we would end up in China. This mashup gave me coordinates, but i couldn't figure out what was on the other end. All very interesting.

Thing 31 More: Twitter

I used a Tweeter tool to analyze my few followers and no one has dropped me, so my followers are listed as loyal. Of course, I have only done 4 tweets. I looked in Itunes to see if there is an "app" to do tweets on my Itouch. There was pages and pages of social networking apps, so I gave up on that. I just don't think I am going to take the time to get into tweeter much. Facebook has something like this where I can see little short updates from my "friends" and these I will read through. But I just don't have the time and patience to use this myself.

Thing 30 More Ways to Use RSS & Delicious

One thing I will say about RSS feeds is that it has helped keep my email a little more under control because I have unsubscribed to some of the email updates and use RSS feeds to get the same information.
To prepare for More Things, I downloaded the Flock browser. I have it remembering my passwords and it has direct links into my accounts like Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, etc. See my screen print that shows the links:



The only thing is that it only works on the computer I have Flock installed on.

It is extremely interesting and useful to see the feeds and bookmarks for people in similar positions or with similar interests, but it is just so overwhelming that the best one can do is pick something and stick with it. I guess I should set aside some time to explore each week, but other responsibilities get in the way.

Thing 29 Google Tools

I was experimenting with SearchWiki and was about to add a comment when I was warned that it would be a public comment linked to my Gmail username and I did not want to do that. I had thought that the comments would just be for my own use, so I probably won't do that. I would be interested in reading other people's comments, in moving the results around, and removing results that I didn't find relevant. The person who wrote the article against SearchWiki wonders why Google made it and thinks they just want to see what they can find out from it. His example shows an entry with many comments which end up taking a lot of room and many have limited usefulness. I guess it would depend on what kind of thing I was searching. I read a bunch of the comments about SearchWiki and agree with the ones who say there should be the option of keeping your comments private.

I looked at Goog-411 and think that would be pretty useful, especially since it seems everyone has a cell phone these days and use it them for everything. I read over the information on creating a Google website and it would be extremely simple and Google hosts it free. I feel like I have enough of a web presence, so I did not make one. I have used the Google toolbar for sometime and have used but uninstalled the Google desktop because I have Microsoft's desktop search. I would be reluctant to put my health information on the web, so I would not use the Google Health function. The web knows enough about us the way it is!

Thing 28 Customized Home Pages

I looked at pageflakes and netvibes but have been using IGoogle for sometime now and will probably continue to do so since Google has so many related functions. I like that I have one username and password for all the things that I have done with Google--my blog, Google Analytics, Gmail, and Google Docs so far. Having to register for yet another account is a big turn off for me and I can't say how many times I have had to have usernames and passwords emailed to me so I can get back into accounts like FaceBook and Twitter. I have Google email, calendar, RSS feeds, and bookmarks for things I need to check frequently and I like that no one else can see the information on my page. It is very easy to setup, can be viewed from anywhere and also can be viewed on portable devices so I can use it as my Itouch homepage. I tried making my own gadget and it was really easy. I added a to do list which will be useful and will help do away with all the little slips of paper I keep in my pockets. I have added another gadget that I think will be useful below.

Thing 27 Twitter

I have a Twitter account and I have actually used it. The last conference I went to used tweets extensively and it was kind of funny to sit in a conference session and see the tweet that someone sent about the very thing I was seeing and hearing. That said, I still need to pay attention to speakers and if I am distracted by tweets or emails or anything else, I might as well stay home. I can see the use for tweets—for example if both my husband and I used them at the mall, I wouldn’t spend so much time looking for him, but at this point in my life, I will probably just wander around. If this becomes really big in the future, forget I said this.

Thing 26 Join the 23 Things Ning

I joined Ning in the 1st round and posted the emblem on my page. That is pretty much where I left it. This time I went back in, updated my information, posted my picture, and responded to someone’s posting. While I can see how useful it would be to use with some ongoing group, I probably won’t use it much for this group. In the past I was part of a Yahoo study group for Milwaukee’s library school comprehensive exam. We were a cohesive group brought together by the fear of failing our final exam and wasting all the time and money put into our MLIS classes. These groups and the means of communication have very definite value in the context of the need. Otherwise, it is just another place among many to look at every day.