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....