#23 - reflecting on my learnng journey

I think that through this course I have been able to further expand on my knowledge of web 2.0. This course has helped me to be more efficient online and gave me awareness of many tools that are fun and useful that I wasn't previosly aware of, such as Zoho Writer, which helps with transferring files and such (love it!) and LibraryThing, which is just lots of fun.
It took me a while to actually get in to doing the exercises and finding it fun.
Some particular highlights:
- the web awards
- facebooking :P
- LibraryThing
- Image generator things
- Conan the librarian!
Thanks for providing this interesting and helpful course :)

#22 - facebook as a tool for promotion

I've never really considered this much. Plenty of organisations use them to create awareness as people join the page if they are fans and then all their "friends" see the update seeing that they joined. However getting to know your patrons and what exactly the users want is another thing.
I think it is a good idea to get into the space of the people and ask them what they want as was mentioned in a recommended article. However, this could be seen as being invasive if it is pushed too much.
Maybe if there was a page that linked to our own search catalogue and then have something ust as interactive on our own page.
Sounds good I suppose :P

#21 social networking

:) This is my favourite thing on all the interweb! I love facebook. I would even go so far as to call myself a facebook addict however the apps are very time consuming so its good when you want to procrastinate and play some games with your mates or make new friends or fight bunnies.

I visited Auckland's page on bebo and added them as my friend. Where is NSL's page? I'll make one if I can't find one :) I love making group pages on bebo. However I find that bebo hasn't adjusted well to the addition of apps to social networking sites and there pages are now hard to view. A lot of people have so many apps that you have to scroll for miles before you are able to actually leave a comment for them. I have this same issue with MySpace. Their pages seem to just go on forever and I see little point in wasting so much time on them.

MySpace is mildly outdated as no-one i know still uses their MySpace accounts or has deleted them. That is why it would be unfashionable for me to create a MySpace account at this point in time. I did however use their serach function to look up pages of my favourite band. I like it how they make videos available to watch. This feature is also available on bebo. However Bebo presents it in a nicer way. I looked up my favourite band on bebo too and found 23 fan groups and joined all of them.

That is why the best social networking site is Facebook <3. Facebook has an IM fuction which I like a lot. It means I do not have to log in to msn to chat with my mates and can chat to people who are on facebook at the sametime. i also love the fact that facebook recommends people you may know. Bebo is more popular among tweens and promotes anonymity whereas facebook encourages people to use their real identity so that people they know can find them. I had a look for library groups and was mildly suprised by what I found :)

#20 eeeeeebooks

I used google books to search for Pride and Prejudice. There were many results and it was easy to find a copy of the book online. I love being able to use eBooks. I use them a lot for research assignments at uni. The University of Auckland has many eBooks however for some reason they are only available to one person at a time which is rather annoying due to the fact that someone may accidently leave a window open which they aren't using and no one can access that particular eBook even if they were using it first and had to go offline because their internet connection is so fail. Grr ><. lol. Anyway, I think it could be something to do with copyrights or something (anyone?).

Pride and Prejudice was available as a PDF to read online, a downloadable PDF or in basic HTML. I don't mind just reading PDF documents as it is just like reading a book. In fact I read New Moon and Eclipse by stephenie meyer as PDF documents which was so much faster than waiting as a hold or even for my order from Real Groovy to arrive.

Reading books online lacks the physical element of reading. Scrolling just isn't as fun as page turning :P and occasionally your eyes need a break from the monitor. I think that most people enjoy reading books more than ebooks and it takes some adjusting to get into an ebook. It would be useful if NSL could offer eBooks to patrons however, it will be a while before it catches

#19 - Podcasts the way of the future

I'm not so keen on pod casts, it's sort of like listening to talk back radio which is incredibly boring. I guess I just have to find something I am more interested in order to fully appreciate the use of this tool.
I did try to find some "interesting library related pod casts like book review pod casts or library news" as suggested by the exercises blog but failed to find anything that I found sufficiently interesting. However I do feel that this could be an interesting tool to link in with our library as we could link pod casts such as the NY times book review to books or at least encourage our users to notice and use this technology in order to gain further knowledge on what they are researching or to find out more about books that they have heard of and are not sure whether they would like them.
Even though I didn't find a sufficiently interesting library pod cast, I did find a Hamish & Andy pod cast :D Hopefully, I will be able to use these tools in the future in order to find more hilarious and entertaining pod casts

#18 - youtube lol

Haha omg i loved Conan the librarian. I watched a few random librarian vids on youtube and god there is so much rubbish on there but there is so much funny stuff too. The videos that interested me most were :

The Librarian Song
;) I chose this vid because it was something to do with librarians and also a song! it isn't really that funny but it is slightly amusing and that is why I chose it. The librarian comedian that I watched was mildly disturbing and i now know why librarians are not also comedians.

However I don't know how useful this would be in a library. I guess patrons could watch video links at home to certain things but really in a library watching video clips may be slightly annoying.

#17 - exploring the interweb awards

i love it! this exercise was heaps of fun. i love looking at the "best of" things. Google took home quite a few as to be expected. Google is taking over the internet O_o anyone else freaked out about that? i suppose that's another blog entirely :P

I looked at a few sites:
- Cocktail Builder - you just enter the ingredients you have and it tells you what cocktails you can make
- Groowy - this looks cool, an online desktop but groowy "are no longer accepting new accounts." and that is why i was unable to check that out which was pretty disappointing
- Twitter - i joined this which is apparently more useful than facebook...but I don't know anyone on it
- mango - you can learn languages with this american voice guy. quite interesting but it is much better to have an actual teacher, i think face to face is a much easier way of learning
- Pandora - which is also now unavailable to users outside of the US due to copyright restrictions

The website that I checked out to write about though was Last.fm. This site is interesting because it connects to your media player like iTunes and gets information about what type of music you listen to and then can adapt your experience with their website. i love it how the web becomes so personalised these days. Like when amazon recommends you read certain books because of what you browsed earlier. It's great. I liked that you don't have to download the plugin in order to be able to enjoy the site and that it is free unless you would like to upgrade unlike the other finalists in the music category. It is also fun for the social aspect and meeting people with the same music tastes as you. I think it would be possible to utilise a similar type of tool in the library in the way that we log the books that people read and the rating they give to these books. We would be able to recommend books that they might also enjoy and other people who enjoy a similar taste in books. It would be useful to have forums for discussion of genres, books, authors etc and a direct link for patrons to reserve a copy of the book.

This sounds exciting to me and I can't wait for it to be implemented by our system however this may take quite some time.

exercise #16 - Zoho writer

I always knew these existed but for some reason I thought they weren't very good quality so I never tried to use online word processors. It's actually really useful and all my misconceptions have been cleared up. This really makes emailing yourself documents so unnecessary.

The only problem I had was doing the embedding thing. I don't know how to publish my documents in my blog. I tried copying and pasting the coding it told me to but ended up with an error which I tried to fix but my HTML kinda sucks. <--! Help me pls <--/>

I love Zoho writer! I also love the feature where you can take your documents offline so you don't loose any work if you're knocked off the internet (grr slingshot >_<)

event

src="http://writer.zoho.com/public/janman/Events/script"
>

Events

exercise #15

This tool looks like it would be useful if I had a group of websites that I was looking for or as is suggested in the exercises blog, a set of similar online resources that I frequently use to answer homework or reference questions. Generally however I find it easier to just use google.

I created my own search for My Chemical Romance information and images, however it sort of didn't work out because I added their wikipedia page and of course that searches all of wikipedia everytime which is annoying and couldn't work out how to fix it up :( so I joined up and made an account and made a new one. A better one :). I am now on a hunt to find more relevant websites to go in, if i can work how to edit once they are created. Anyone know? ^^

exercise #14 - that library thing...

LibraryThing is a very interesting site. I love looking at my books online and reading and writing reviews about books I have found to be interesting. I love it how the site recommends more books you might like. It is similar to LastFm which shows your music library through "scrobbling" the music that you listen to.
I also think it is great how it tells you libraries that are similar to yours. It's fun :)

I think that this sort of technology is great and would be very useful to libraries as it is very interactive and fun. I can't wait to get more time to get my whole library up

exercise #13 - antimotivational posters

motivator3168768
Originally uploaded by Jan Man

I love image generators! I used one to create a motivational poster using an image i had on my desk top. I always wondered how people always got them so uniform. You know when you are looking at like say motifakes or un-motivational posters? So that is what inspired me. fun fun.

exercise #12 - playing in the sandbox

This website is very user friendly. I love it how the site allows you to write a comment and then log in with out deleting all the stuff you wrote. I contributed to the favourite books. I find it is a fun and interesting way to discuss things.

Exercise #11 - wiki madness!

I can see how the wikis would be quite useful in a library, especially the SJCPL Subject Guides due to the fact that we are sharing knowledge accross the world. It could be useful in our library system as users could write information that they know about a particular item so then there would be more information available to our online library users.

excercise #10 - Library 2.0 perspectives

These articles were very interesting :) It's interesting to think about the future of a library in an increasingly technology base society. Some of the major concepts I thought I'd blog about were:
> Reliance on user education - Our library is already implementing some of the web 2.0 principles by having our catalogue available online. However a lot of the technology and specifically the my info pages are not intuitive and we rely a lot on people reading their brochures.
> Collect user intelligence
> The 6th principle of web 2.0 is 6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device. To my knowledge this relates to the use of iPods and such, not just PCs. Maybe NSL could soon be incorportating this technology into our current operations :P

I really enjoyed reading these articles

exercise #9 - technorati

This activity wasn't all that interesting imho. It would probably be more useful to me if I was interested in looking at something in particular. The searches I carried out brought back vague results and all sorts of blogs that contained those words. Web crawlers and such are pretty fascinating though :)

exercise #8 - delicious

Wow delicious is neat!

It's fun to look at everything that other people have tagged.
I feel that this technology would help a lot with research as sites that you find are easily retrievable at any location. I feel that the tags help alot.

exercise #7.2 - RSS searching

This exercise was interesting as it brought to light some alternate ways of searching for blogs.

The Bloglines tool was particularly helpful in finding rss feeds because it had a function which allowed the user to limit the search to rss feeds. I found it easy to search for feeds about my favourite band My Chemical Romance.

The next suggested tool I tried was Topix.net. While this was an useful tool for searching for blogs, not all of the blogs presented had rss feeds. Secondly, it was unable to bring up any useful feeds or blogs about my band :P. It would be useful if you were searching for a specific news feed or maybe for articles for an assignment.

Another suggested tool that I implemented in my quest to gain more feeds was Syndic8. Syndicate seemed more to be aimed at people's personal blogs and feeds from the few searches I carried out and didn't bring up any results for some search words.

Overall, I found the easiest and most effective way to search for feeds was through using bloglines, however it is not presented as nicely as Topix and you have to have a clear idea of what you are searching for because there aren't really ideas about what you are looking for on the bloglines page.

Exercise #7.1 - RSS

It was interesting to learn about the news reader. I have used RSS feeds before when learning how to make a web site. We used them to show the date and time on our cake website :) this was fun, i enjoyed learning more about feeds

exercise #6 - I love Pxts!

Yup I love the combined functionality of Camera phones. I think this technology is just so awesome! You always have a camera in your pocket and with todays technology. If you don't photograph it, it just didn't happen. Even though the camera on my phone is not the highest quality it still allows me to snap a photo when a Kodak moment arises. And I can:

-pxt that photo to whoever I want (like Mum when we are on holiday),
-email it anywhere in the world
-store it on my phone to show someone later when you are trying to describe something that you did or went to

or even
-send it to my Vodafone PxtWorld account.
-I could bluetooth the photos to my laptop

Then I would be able to upload the photos to my new Flickr account and begin photo-sharing.
And that is why I love Pxts.

exercise #5 - mashups

You could literally spend hours and hours looking at all the apps that are out there for Flickr.

I found Flickrbits really useful for finding more Flickr mashups. It's pretty impressive. The one that I have found the most interesting (thus far :P) is Retrievr This was really awesome because it uses a sketch that you draw to find pictures on Flickr. So while you are drawing using a pretty basic paint set, say you draw a red dot in the middle of the blank screen it will bring up images of a lady beetle on white space, or a maple leaf on a book or anything which matches the colours that you are entering but if you decide that the image you are actually looking for has purple spots in the corners you can add them straight away and it will be searching while you are drawing. Its very cool when you have a basic idea of the image you are looking for or want an image to match a colour scheme.

It also allows you to search using an image that you have on your computer for other similar images.

It is so interesting and I highly recommend checking it out!

exercise #4 - photomania

dragon
Originally uploaded by Janis Markie

This was a fun and interesting task. I think I will even continue to use this account with my personal photos.

The only thing I hate is having to use a yahoo login. They are so impossible to create! :P I find their password restrictions annoying and will probably quickly forget my login, good thing they have my actual email address to send it to when I do.

I took 2 photos on my cell phone while at work today which I posted to Flickr. This is a photo of a dragon used in the holiday programme which Margot made and I coloured :D

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Exercise #3 - Posting a comment

This was a fairly interesting task. I enjoyed surfing through the various links provided on the main "Exercises" page. I had never been to Boingboing before and found some of the articles there semi-interesting.
One of the posts I was most interested in was this cool clip about a street performer who instead of doing the "pretend-to-be-a-statue" trick, placed an actual statue on the street. Sounds so hilarious!

Exercise #2 - my insights

This blog making activity was intense. In order to complete it I overcame many a challenge.

The first of which was deciding upon a name. I chose 'Jan man pan' because man rhymes with Jan and pan rhymes with both Jan AND man. Witty, isn't it?

Secondly, a URL had to be chosen. A URL is very important as it helps potential viewers to find and locate your blog. There were a few options:

- Janmanpan: while this URL is clear and easy to remember, it lacks a certain ‘pizazz’ and is quite boring and repetitive
- Janmanpanchanwichaa: this was by far my favourite URL option. However, it was ruled out due to the fact that it was very long and hard to remember
- Janmanpanchan: this was the URL I decided on because it incorporated factors from both of the aforementioned URLs

Finally, a colour design had to be chosen. I went with green.

another practice blog...

I decided for aesthetic purposes to make 3 blogs.

This one will say nothing.

Hanging out at uni ftw!

(btw: ftw means "for the win" which sort of means its awesome, you can look it up on urban dictionary or just google it :))

So i'm hanging out at uni and thought I really ought to get on to making this blog at some point :P and now I have. It wasn't too crazy hard but it was slightly interesting.