Number 23 - Is this really the end? Or just the beginning ...

Break out the champagne, I've finally got to number 23 yippee!!!. This was a journey of discovery for me and an eye opener. I had heard about web 2.0 but didn't know much about it, doing the web 2.0 exercises enabled me to learn alot more about RSS feeds, image generators ( manigraph was my favourite), flickr, wikis, Del.icio.us, Zoho Writer ( great for accessing your files from any computer), ebooks and podcasting. I must admit this was definitely a challenging but exciting adventure for me.

Ebooks (aka the end is in sight...)

It is interesting to note that Project Gutenburg was one of the first producers of electronic books (ebooks), and can only offer text from books published before 1923, so you will definitely not have a problem finding classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to name a few. The only downfall with Project Gutenburg is that it cannot offer the lastest bestsellers or even up-to-date computer books, as these books are not in the public domain and are subject to copyright. I looked at my favourite classic author Jane Austen ( I must admit I got hooked onto Jane Austen because of the movie Pride and Prejudice) and was amazed at the different ways you can download the titles you want to read. You can download Pride and Prejudice using the formats Plucker, Plain Text, Adobe PDF and TeX. I also looked at Sense and Sensibility and the formats that were offered here were Plucker, HTML, Plain Text and Adobe PDF. I must admit this is a great way of reading classics because you can access the whole novel online and read it in your own time and it's free. I guess this is definitely a selling point for people who love reading classics but cannot afford to purchase the novels. Maybe Manukau Libraries could have a link on their website to Project Gutenburg, so library customers who love classics can have access to these books from the comfort of their home or in the library.

Finally a word about Kindle, this is a wireless electronic book reader. The great thing about the Kindle is that it can store up to 200 books, and these can include best sellers, and it takes less than a minute to download a book. However the downside is that you are charged for any content that you download, so downloading a bestseller could cost you $9.99, which I guess is cheaper than buying the bestseller. I however still prefer to hold a book in my hand to read, there's just something about curling up in bed with a great book. You can also download blogs or newspapers to the Kindle, however this will cost you e.g. subscribing to the New York Times could cost you $13.99 per month whereas you could read this newspaper online for free.

Week 9 - Podcasts

I had a look at the Podcastalley.com and did a search for book reviews. I chose the podcast called Books on the Nightstand and added their RSS feeds to my bloglines account (go to the folder called #21 - Podcasts, and the RSS feeds for Books on the Nightstand will be found there) .Each podcast for Books on the Nightstand would start off with a thought provoking question e.g. is there a difference between murder and suspense novels?, do you judge a book by it's cover?, or what do you look for in a book?. This type of discussion really hooks you into their podcast and makes you want to listen to what they have to say about the books they are reviewing. I must say I loved the content of their discussion on the plot, characters and underlying themes of the books - boy after their discussion on the book "The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson" I really wanted to read this book (access their podcast,10: Books with Buzz and you will see what I mean). This is definitely a tool that Manukau Libraries should include in it's Readers Advisory Service. By providing RSS feeds to podcasts like Books on the Nightstand customers are able to access book reviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from any computer, ipod and cellphone as long as there is an internet connection, I like to think of this as "Book Reviews on the Run".

Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos

I like YouTube because not only is the site very user friendly, it's attractive and anyone can upload and share their videos on the web. I did a search for library videos and came across a great video called "Your Public Library" by cclibrary. This video is great in explaining why we need public libraries. I loved the video's description of the library as an information mall, similar to a shopping mall where people come not to shop for things, but to shop for information. This video describes how libraries can help their communities through education and provide computer technology that may not be available at home. I found there is good information on how to encourage teens to use /join the library, one of the ways that Carver Bay Library in the U.S.A did this was by having a gaming club onsite. Carver Bay Library found that teens loved playing video games, so for teens to join the library gaming club they had to checkout a certain number of books per month. Check out the video below titled "Your Public Library":



Libraries can make videos similar to those on YouTube and put them on their library websites. Manukau Libraries can produce videos where customers are taken on a tour of the library, and the commentary on the video explains how to join the library, how to access the electronic resources of the library (e-resources), the computer technology available within the library and the programs that libraries have set up e.g. reading clubs.

Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I selected a site from the Web 2.0 Awards list (the short list) and decided to look at imcooked which came first in the food category ( this is a web community for video sharing of recipes). I did a search for any videos related to the topic chocolate, and found a great video titled "Chocolate Mocha Cake" - this is really a recipe for all you chocolate lovers out there. Have a look at the video below:



The imcooked site is where users upload videos of themselves demonstrating how to cook their own recipes, even kids can demonstrate how to cook their own recipes, check out the video below titled "kids cooking shrimp stir fry".



This is another resource that library users can access from the internet, here they can look at cooking demonstrations online wherever they feel like it, leave comments, and make friends with others who enjoy cooking similar recipes. This is a web 2.0 site that libraries can definitely point patrons to.

I did have a look at the category called Events and choose Upcoming, you can definitely apply this to a library setting, although you must register first to advertise your events. You can search for events happening within your own country, you can even choose the day and month to see what events are happening on that particular day and in that particular month. Great for advertising Library Week, Manix, School Holiday Programmes, and Tea and Topics happening in Manukau Libraries. This could also be used to advertise festivals taking place in Manukau City like the Polynesian cultural festival, Chinese New Year celebrations, and concerts being held in the local area.

#18 (Week 8) Take a look at some online productivity (word processing, spreadsheet) tools

Zoho Writer is a web-based word processing tool that has many advantages, the major one is it's free, free I hear you say, YES it's free. Zoho Writer has the advantage of accessing files from any computer as long as we have access to the internet so we don't have to worry about dealing with defective floppy discs or using a flash drive. You can upload your existing documents/files and put them on the website, your documents are stored on a server on the internet which makes it accessible to all people you invite to edit this document. The good thing about Zoho Writer is people can work on this document simultaneously and create text collaboratively, you can track changes to this document and revert to earlier versions of it. You can edit, save and create new documents from any computer - the compatibility issue with different software versions doesn't exist here, which solves the problem of being unable to open particular files on the Learn.Net pcs e.g. Microsoft Works files. The features that Zoho Writer offers like - page numbering, footnotes, templates, sharing, publishing to the web, exporting files as a .pdf document and an email feature is far superior to Microsoft Word. However the application is dependent on the internet and maybe a liability, because if one is dependent on the internet and the internet goes down then work can be seriously lost/delayed. So in this instance it may not totally replace the traditional word processor. Another plus is documents can be emailed on-masse or uploaded to the web or blogs. The major advantage of Zoho Writer is that any changes I make to a document will regularly save across the internet to Zoho Writer, if I am working offline my documents can be downloaded and stored on my laptop, I can then view and edit my documents offline. When I go back online my changes will automatically be saved to the server, and others can then see the changes I have made.

Week 7 or Thing 17....

This week I looked at the Bebo page Auckland City Libraries (ACL) had set up and was amazed at how much homework help students do get from ACL. ACL offered homework help forums through to word cloud topic searches and RSS feeds. You can also request to become a friend of ACL. I esspecially loved their bunnyhero pets where you can adopt your own vitual pet, feed and play with it. I had great fun clicking on every single one and having a play with them all. My favourite was definitely bebo puppy, he barks, chases a ball and you can even feed him vitual dog biscuits and hear him munching on those biscuits. Looking at the video called A Flip-book story which ACL had put on their bebo page was ingenious, simply by flicking the pages of 2 books simultaneously it looks like the person holding a flower in the first book is passing the flower to the person in the second book, this reminds me of how the first moving pictures were made.

The good thing about Myspace was you could take a tour round the site before signing up (a big plus as far as I was concerned). I found Myspace very user-friendly, and the layout of the site was very attractive. Inspired by the movie Mamma Mia I decided to look into the music of ABBA, so went to Myspace. I was able to watch video clips of the group ABBA performing songs like Mamma Mia, Waterloo and Money Money. Click on the link below to see the video of ABBA performing Mamma Mia.

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2688623

I also found a great image of the group ABBA to add to my blog, and since I loved the movie Mamma Mia I decided to put another image of the group posing with the cast of the movie.








I also had a look at some very funny videos, here's one of my favourite's titled "hippo and dog singing the lion sleeps tonight". Click on the link below to view:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1665858

Facebook was a site I really didn't like because of the sign up first policy, you sign up before you even look at the site, who signs up to a site without knowing what the site looks like I certainly don't, a big minus as far as I'm concerned for Facebook. Visited Hennepin County Library page on Facebook and they definitely have a successful library profile, it provides their website address, catalogue search widget, a post wall for people to leave comments on and there was even a link to chat to a librarian ( I guess this is similar to Any Questions that Manukau Libraries have), generally a very attractive site with a great layout.

On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ....

Reading the first three perspectives I agree with Dr Wendy Schultz that librarians are tour guides of the library because they have the knowledge and experience needed to find information required by users. However Michael Stephens view of Librarian 2.0 is more to my liking, he sees Librarian 2.0 as "strategy guides" which help users find information, gather knowledge and create content. As Rick Anderson rightly points out we library staff still need to help educate patrons, his focus is on teaching research skills to users so there is no barrier that exist between users and the information they seek. As libraries are thrust into the world of web2.0 users will expect access to digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds, so libraries have to become more user-centred and provide access to all this information. According to Michael Stephen's libraries have to find new ways to bring library services and content to the patron's preferred location - the web, Manukau Libraries have done this by offering the homework program called Any Questions, where the librarian help patrons online with their homework queries instead of meeting them face-to-face. According to Michael Stephens the question libraries should be asking themselves before implementing the new online technology is whether this new technology is meeting users needs in an new and improved way and does it create a useful service for putting users together with the information and experience they seek.

Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

Took a good look around Technorati and did a keyword search for "Learning 2.0" in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. There were differences in the results. From the Technorati Search Page I found putting a capital "L" and a lowercase"l" for the word "learning" and having a gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" and having no gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" gave you different results. I found these results:

Learning2.0 - 251 posts
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts
learning2.0 - 254 posts
learning 2.0 - 684 posts

So as you can see there is a big difference in how you do tag your blog posts.

Using Technorati's Advanced Search I did a Tag Search and found again that there were differences in the results and here they are:

learning 2.0 - 686 posts tagged
learning2.0 - 266 posts tagged
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts tagged
Learning2.0 - 263 posts tagged

I then looked at the Blog Directory and the directory is only used to find blogs about subjects you are interested in or to find blogs by their blog title, it doesn't give you the number of blog posts which have the same tags - so no results here.

Exploring popular blog, searches and tags I found the most popular blog was Boing Boing with 3,820 fans and the Top 100 blogs by authority was Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post, which had 26,454 blog reactions (comments). Under Top Searches I looked at the topic Olympics and came across this blog post Beijing 2008: Sky Team's Microblog [IMG] - in the blog it mentioned that 22 Sky News people will be covering the Olympics by contributing to a Microblog using mobile phones, this is very ingenious for getting news out of China and bypassing China's censorship rules don't you think.

Tagging, folksonomies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Took a look around Del.icio.us using the PLCMCL2 account and clicked on a bookmark that had been bookmarked by alot of other users, 3745 to be exact, the site is Us.ef.ul: A begginners guide to Del.icio.us, the most common tags for this site were del.icio.us, howto, tips, web2.0 and tutorial. I clicked onto other users that had bookmarked this site and had a look at what other sites they had bookmarked. I came across a very useful reference website called 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You've Never Heard Of. This reference site is great for students, teachers, librarians and even the general public. The section on Teacher's Reference is great because this provides a teacher's guide for double-checking facts, looking for quotes and providing ideas for lesson plans. This section also featured the Children's Literature Web Guide, where award-winning children's books could be located. Under the section Librarian References I found great reference sites for librarians like Historical Text Archives, and the educational search engine called KidsClick! developed by librarians and organized into topics like society & government, health & family, machines & transportation, there was also the Library of Congress Online and Library Spot, which provides links to encyclopedias, business references and public libraries. Under the Search Engines section I found Rollyo ( how interesting), this section provided other search engines other than Google e.g. Giga Blast ( which enables you to search websites, videos and images). I think Manukau Libraries would benefit from having a link to this website for homework and general knowledge questions.

Quotes about Libraries was another site I found when clicking onto another user's bookmark. Here are some interesting library quotes:

Booklovers never go to bed alone.
-Unknown

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring a container.
-Unknown

Seventy million books in American's libraries but the one you want to read is always out.
-Tom Mason

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way.
-Franklin P Adams

Borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of symmetry of shelves and creators of odd volumes.
-Charles Lamb

I think we library staff can relate to the last quote really well. Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site beause you are able to see how other users have tagged similar sites and from their tags you are able to discover other websites that could be of interest to you, or could provide new insights/ information for the research you're doing. Because your bookmarks are stored online you are able to access the same bookmarks from any computer and easily add bookmarks as well this is the great advantage of using del.icio.us.

Playing around with PBWiki

Had a look at the Learning 2.0 Favourites wiki and found this is the easiest exercise of the lot, just login, click on any favourites title e.g. Favourite Blogs, then go to edit and add any comments that you like to make. This is just so easy and yes I did add my blog to the Favourite Blogs page. I also added comments to Favourite Books, Favourite Movies, Favourite Television Shows and Favourite Holiday Destinations.

Learn about wikis

I looked at several library wikis and found that Princeton Public Library had developed a Book Lovers Wiki, the adults that registered with the Summer Reading Program could rate the books they read, write a book review and have it posted onto the Book Lovers Wiki, they could also make comments about other people's book reviews on this wiki. The library also provided helpful instructions on how to do a book review and a rating scale that people could choose from to rate their books ( how easy is that). I think the incentive for doing the book reviews were the prizes that you could win, because the more book reviews you posted onto the Book Lovers Wiki the more chances you had to win prizes such as book vouchers, movie tickets, lunch and dinner gift certificates. We have Manix for our teenagers but what about having a similar reading program for our adult borrowers, now there's a thought Manukau Libraries.

Looking into how a wiki can be used in libraries I was interested to read that part of a library's website could be developed into a wiki for community information. This community wiki would be very much like a online community noticeboard where members of the community would post reviews about the best car mechanics they know of, or when a certain sports events is being held, or even the best restaurants in the local area. Other members in the community could agreed with the reviews on the community wiki or disagree, so the community wiki could end up being like an online discussion board for the community.

To read more about this click on the link below:

Using Wikis to Create Online Communities

For librarians a wiki is a great way to share ideas with other libraries about what projects, resources and technology worked at their library branches, so other librarians can borrow these ideas and use them e.g. replicating school holiday programmes. Wikis can also be used by libraries for planning and documenting projects, having a pathfinder/subject guide like St. Joseph County Public Library, posting library newsletters, book reviews and advertising library events like tea and topics.

Click on the link to find out more:

Library Success: A best practices wiki

Create a blog post about anything technology related that interests you this week.....

Digital cameras have revolutionized the world of photography. Digital cameras are not only compact but lightweight and are capable of taking photos and videos. Most models have a viewing screen which functions as a view finder as well as a picture viewer, this gives you the ability to view pictures that you have taken just moments before and if you don't like the picture then you can delete it and take another. Images are stored on memory cards and once the storage capacity of the memory cards have been reached then photos can be transferred or stored on your computer, CD or DVD thereby freeing up storage space so more photos can be stored. Finally short movie clips along with their audio soundtrack can be shot with a digital camera, so we can all be amateur film makers.

More Flickr fun....

Explored a few of the fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools out there and chose FD Toys Trading Card Maker to do my blog on. The FD Toys Trading Card Maker is very easy to use all you had to do was choose a file from your computer to upload. The fun part was deciding on a colour for the card and an imaginative title, sub-title and description. Choosing 7 icons to put on your card was fun, the hard part was deciding which ones to chose.

To see my Librarian Trading Card look to the right.

Having some Flickr fun.....

Flickr Color Pickr is very easy to use all you have to do is to choose a specific colour and Flickr finds the public photos that match that colour. I chose the Flowers Color Pickr and clicked on the colour dark pink and hey pesto a number of fabulous pink flower photos came up including a great photo of a pink rose. Click on the link below to see what I mean:

http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/index.php?group=flowers

Exploring Flickr

Petronas Twin Towers of Kuala Lumpur
Originally uploaded by manukaulearn

I created a free account in Flickr by using the generic logon in Yahoo that was provided so I didn't have to set up another email account. Uploaded a photo that I took of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to my Flickr account by just following the simple instructions and then added tags like Malaysia,Kuala Lumpur, tower, night, Petronas and twin towers. I used the Flickr blogging tool to add the image to my post, by again following simple instructions on how to do this. For a better look at the Petronas Twin Towers click on the above photo.

Now to tell you a bit about the fantastic Petronas Twin Towers. The Petronas Twin Towers are the tallest twin towers in the world measuring 451.9 metres in height and containing 88 floors inside the structure. The Petronas Twin Towers are part of Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), here one can find one of the biggest shopping malls in Malaysia - Suria KLCC (if you love shopping head straight there and shop till you drop). Housed within KLCC are offices, banks, multiplex cinemas, food courts, art gallery, auditorium, a science museum and restaurants. Talk about the convenience of travel there was even a metro train station at the basement of the building. So if you're heading to Malaysia this landmark is really worth seeing.

Roll your own search engine with Rollyo

I found Rollyo was a very user friendly site with clear instructions on how to register and set up your profile. To create your own searchroll all you had to do is pick the sites you want to search/trust in and a custom search engine is then automatically created for you - this saves time as you only need to go to your custom search engine and all the sites are there ready for you to access. This is fantastic particularly for kids/teens hunting for homework help, they no longer need to search every site, they can just access the custom search engine and all the well known sites are there like wikipedia.org

Kids/teens could customise their own searchrolls and share their searchrolls with other kids/teens in the library system, now there's a thought maybe Manukau Libraries could look at doing something similar to this.

Finally if you want to look at the two searchrolls I have created (Kids homework help and Family health) click onto the link below:

http://www.rollyo/nweb2

I did manage to do the optional part of the exercise and if you look to the right I have added my Rollyo Searchroll.

LibraryThing.....

I found LibraryThing was easy to sign up to all you needed was a user name and a password, from there I added books I enjoyed reading to my online catalog. LibraryThing connected you to people who had similar reading tastes as yourself and the book page shows you who has the book and what they think about it. You could see reviews written by other people who had read the same books and you can even join up with group forums to discuss a particular book that you have read. I think maybe the Manukau Libraries might think of doing something similar so our patrons can connect to each other through forums and have their own online catalog that they can share with others.

If you are interested in looking at my online catalog click on the link below:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/newweb2&sort=stamp

Playing around with image generators

I choose to look at The Generator Blog and picked Wordle to look at. Wordle is used for generating "word clouds" from text or a URL that you provide. You can change the font, layout and colour scheme to make the cloud more interesting. The words that appeared more frequently in the source text were given greater prominence in the cloud.

I decided to use http://elgar-mllearn.blogspot.com. The words that appear most prominently in the "word cloud" were Manukau, Libraries, programme, blog and staff. To take a closer look click on the image.

I decided to give manigraph a go as well and found that using low resolution high contrast images worked best for this. Uploading an image from my computer of a car I decided to create my own vector images of the car in red and blue and do the whole Andy Warhol thing - I think I've succeeded in doing this. Just remember to use paint.net to do this.

Locating a few useful library related blogs and/or news feeds

My thoughts on using the search tools Topix.net, Syndic8.com and Technorati to find RSS feeds of interest.

Topix.net was totally confusing and the only thing I found useful on it was the Kids and Teens Directory, where approriate web sites for kids and teens could be found. I was amazed to find that Lakewood Library in the US had put step by step instructions on how to do book reports and book reviews on it's site, maybe Manukau Libraries can look at doing something similar as homework help for kids/teens on their website. Another site worth looking at under this directory was the Hersey's Kitchen, for all those chocolate lovers out there the recipes are mouth watering and the accompanying pictures are great however I digress.

Syndic8.com took a long time to load which was fairly frustrating, however once the site was loaded it didn't look very inviting/attractive and getting it to do a search was pain staking to say the least another long wait. With bated breath the result screen came up and you guessed it I didn't like this either. I would definitely be giving Syndic8.com the big thumbs down.

Technorati was very easy to use and I was able to find blogs about subjects I was interested in quite quickly either by doing a search, or clicking onto the related tags. The loading time was fast which impressed me the most, no waiting around so for me Technorati gets my vote.

RSS feeds yet again!!!

Having subscribed to news feeds, colleague blog feeds, book feeds and leisure feeds I thought hey this is not so bad. Sharing the public bloglines URL was not as easy as I thought it would be, after many goes I finally succeeded (persistance pays off) so here it is:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Newweb2

Done and Dusted - RSS feeds

I found the tutorial from Palinet and the YouTube video extremely helpful in understanding about RSS feeds, however what I found most frustrating was the online tutorial that gave you instructions on how to set up a Blogline account and how to subscribe to various newsfeeds. Although the tutorial was great once you understood it, the amount of time spent flicking between screens to get the instructions was very time consuming and frustrating. However once my Blogline account was set up and I subscribed to my first newsfeed TVNZ I could read about news that occurred within 24 hours just brilliant, boy talk about keeping up to date with breaking news stories.

I found that RSS feeds allow you to get the lastest news/content right away without searching the web and arrives in a form that is compatible with your computer so you don't have to worry about not being able to read the information. Libraries can use RSS feeds to notify patrons of new acquistions, library events, and providing a link to the library website or other websites appropriate to the interest of their patrons.

Amazing !!!

I thought why not have a go at uploading a picture on my next blog how difficult could this be, so armed with instructions from Blogger Help I attempted to give it a go. Now all of you out there who are not technology savvy like me will be surprised by what you can upload to your blog, it could be funny cartoons about the web or cute pictures of cats or dogs that make you laugh or go "aw", so give it a go.

Yes Success !!!

For all of you who think blogging is hard think again I just set up my first blog what an achievement considering I had never done this before. The instructions were very easy to follow, however I did have fun and games coming up with a creative title for the blog, I 'm sure all of you will find this fun as well.

I'm looking forward to reading other people's posts on how easy or difficult it was in setting up their blogs. Stepping into the Web 2.0 adventure is going to be an exciting and fun journey for all of us and now for the next challenge....