Of all of the topics in the course so far, this is probably the nearest and dearest to my heart. To pass the time during my 2 hour commute each day I make liberal use of podcasts.
I use ITunes to sync the podcasts directly to my phone, but before that I would download the files in ITunes then drag and drop them onto my MP3 player. Once you get used to it it's pretty easy to do and it's well worth the few minutes that it takes to put new ones on there.
Every once in a while I'll venture out and try a new podcast but for the most part I have my set standards that I listen to and enjoy. They fall neatly into the categories of tech, comedy, music and sport. One interesting thing about podcasts is the cross-pollination that can happen. Most of the podcasts that I listen to have guests. Occasionally these guests have also had podcasts, and I've stumbled onto some great ones that way.
Another good way of discovering podcasts is to use a podcast directory and look for highly-rated ones in topics that interest you. I use ITunes for this but it looks like you'd find good stuff from the other podcast directory services listed in this lesson as well. Here's one that's put out by a reference librarian.
The podcasts that I'm listening to at the moment include This Week in Tech, The Adam Carolla Podcast (definitely not safe for work!) and the Onion Radio news (also not safe for work). In the past I've also listened to music podcasts which played songs from new artists and also watched a video podcast that produced photoshop tutorials. It seems that there's a podcast for almost everyone and covering almost every subject.
I think the world of podcasting could be useful for libraries. A topical library could record a podcast on different topics serviced by the library, or it could be as simple as researching different podcasts that others have created on the topic and linking to them from their library website.
11 November 2009
21 October 2009
Testing the embedding of a google map
This doesn't work in wetpaint (there's no option to enter HTML like is required) and my last attempt here crashed the browser. Third time's a charm?
View Larger Map
View Larger Map
20 October 2009
Mashups
The first example of a media mashup that I can remember experiencing was a song that combined the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" with "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails. It wasn't all that creative - they just alternated lines from each song - but from the looks of this test drive people have gotten a bit more skilled at making useful and interesting mashups over the years.
Mashups that use Google Maps seem to be the most functional. The one that jumped out at me was suburbview, which allows you to enter a suburb and displays houses for rent or for sale in that area. You can also sort by number of bedrooms, rental price, etc, so it seems like a very useful tool. Other mashups I've come across haven't been as useful, such as antipodr.com, which you give a location to and it returns a point on the exact opposite spot on the globe.
With twitter being all the rage these days I had a look at mashupawards.com to see if I could find any useful mashups there. Unfortunately most seemed to be pretty gimmicky, and the one that I was interested in looking at (twittervenn, which shows you a Venn diagram of twitter search terms) wouldn't load for me.
As far as using mashups in a library context, the one way I can think of it working is to link photos or historical information on a google maps interface.
Mashups that use Google Maps seem to be the most functional. The one that jumped out at me was suburbview, which allows you to enter a suburb and displays houses for rent or for sale in that area. You can also sort by number of bedrooms, rental price, etc, so it seems like a very useful tool. Other mashups I've come across haven't been as useful, such as antipodr.com, which you give a location to and it returns a point on the exact opposite spot on the globe.
With twitter being all the rage these days I had a look at mashupawards.com to see if I could find any useful mashups there. Unfortunately most seemed to be pretty gimmicky, and the one that I was interested in looking at (twittervenn, which shows you a Venn diagram of twitter search terms) wouldn't load for me.
As far as using mashups in a library context, the one way I can think of it working is to link photos or historical information on a google maps interface.
16 September 2009
Online apps and tools
I enjoyed looking at the sample videos and slideshows for this lesson. I've used Google docs before to hold our family budget - not so much for collaboration but more to get access to the spreadsheet no matter which PC I was on, whether or not it had a compatible Office suite on it.
As I listened to people talk about Google docs I drew a parallel to the wiki and at first it seemed that they were essentially identical tools and that you'd use them for the same purpose. But the more I thought about it I saw some differences - a wiki is good for having collaboration on multiple topics and is usually more presentation-focussed. An online document can be used and edited by multiple people as well but the content seems the main priority. There can be crossover, though - we're using the private wetpaint wiki that we created to collaborate on a template to use in the library, but we could just as easily use google docs or a similar service.
I went to Slideshare and searched on library 2.0 - a few of the presentations looked interesting, like Library Hacks and The UnLibrary, but they never got around to loading for me. I also had a look at a few of the sites mentioned in the presentation - dimdim looks really interesting, as I think it might be a way of having multiple person video chat, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do before.
I created a sample library survey form using Google docs and was surprised how easy it was. Forms have never been my favourite thing to do when working in HTML, but it was very painless and easy (though I've just noticed it hasn't included my third question for some reason or display the questions, just the text boxes).
Zoho looks feature-packed, and I signed up for a free account. I found it interesting that a google docs competitor allows you to sign in with your google account credentials. The wiki looks really good, especially compared with the buggy wetpaint site that our team has been using as a wiki for the last few months. I'll definitely have to check this out a bit more. The document and spreadsheet tools look similar enough to google docs that I'd have to play with them both for a while before I settled on a winner.
I've enjoyed this lesson and I've come across some really great tools for work and home.
As I listened to people talk about Google docs I drew a parallel to the wiki and at first it seemed that they were essentially identical tools and that you'd use them for the same purpose. But the more I thought about it I saw some differences - a wiki is good for having collaboration on multiple topics and is usually more presentation-focussed. An online document can be used and edited by multiple people as well but the content seems the main priority. There can be crossover, though - we're using the private wetpaint wiki that we created to collaborate on a template to use in the library, but we could just as easily use google docs or a similar service.
I went to Slideshare and searched on library 2.0 - a few of the presentations looked interesting, like Library Hacks and The UnLibrary, but they never got around to loading for me. I also had a look at a few of the sites mentioned in the presentation - dimdim looks really interesting, as I think it might be a way of having multiple person video chat, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do before.
I created a sample library survey form using Google docs and was surprised how easy it was. Forms have never been my favourite thing to do when working in HTML, but it was very painless and easy (though I've just noticed it hasn't included my third question for some reason or display the questions, just the text boxes).
Zoho looks feature-packed, and I signed up for a free account. I found it interesting that a google docs competitor allows you to sign in with your google account credentials. The wiki looks really good, especially compared with the buggy wetpaint site that our team has been using as a wiki for the last few months. I'll definitely have to check this out a bit more. The document and spreadsheet tools look similar enough to google docs that I'd have to play with them both for a while before I settled on a winner.
I've enjoyed this lesson and I've come across some really great tools for work and home.
26 June 2009
Mmmm... Links.
I signed up for a Del.icio.us account a few years ago and never really got around to using it. At the time I thought it would be a useful way of having access to my bookmarks wherever I was, but I think I wound up using My Yahoo to get the most relevant bits of information from my most frequently visited sites.
One of the podcasts I listen to, This Week in Tech (also known as TWIT), uses del.icio.us in an effective way that I think could work for a library as well. TWIT is a weekly podcast where different tech writers and personalities get together via Skype and discuss tech stories of the week. The shows usually go for over an hour, so it would take one person quite a while to find enough stories to discuss for one show, let alone on a weekly basis. So they've set it up so that anyone who comes across an interesting story can tag it with the tag "for:twit" in del.icio.us and they all show up on the Twit del.icio.us page. Not only can everyone on the show find links to all the stories they're talking about in one easy location, but since you can subscribe to the page as an RSS feed it's a really easy way to keep on top of interesting and important tech stories in your feed reader.
I think this approach could be used effectively in a library as well - not only for keeping track of links for the employees of the library itself, but also to help outward-facing customers as well. If you have to hotdesk in your role, your favourites are sometimes stored on the PC itself so you may not be able to get to them when you're at a different desk. This issue is solved with del.icio.us, as you can get to your bookmarks wherever you have a PC with an internet connection.
It also makes it very easy to find resources that you might be able to use. If you go to the site every once in a while and look for sites tagged with tags that interest you, you may be able to find sites that you might not otherwise come across using google searches. You could then create a delicious page for your library with relevant information, and people could use your links as a jumping off point to start looking at other resources with the same tags. Tag clouds also give you an indicator of what people are tagging/searching for and you can emphasise these points of interest in your library displays.
In setting up my own delicious account I found it interesting to go through and see the different tags that people used to classify these sites, and then to look at the people who had tagged the same sites as me and have a look at what else they'd tagged. You can go off on a tangent very quickly and learn about topics you hadn't expected to.
I see a lot of potential in Technorati in the same way. While google can be good at picking relevant information out about a site, a lot of what you'll find in a google search result is determined by the words on the website itself.
With tagging everyone can get into the act, and the search engines will spit back a more democratic result. Different countries will use different terms to describe things - a jumper here is a sweatshirt in the US. If you did a google search on the term "jumper" you wouldn't get too many American websites showing up in the results. But if you searched in delicious or Technorati for the term jumper, knowledgeable Aussies could tag American sites and all of a sudden you get a much bigger pool of results.
One of the podcasts I listen to, This Week in Tech (also known as TWIT), uses del.icio.us in an effective way that I think could work for a library as well. TWIT is a weekly podcast where different tech writers and personalities get together via Skype and discuss tech stories of the week. The shows usually go for over an hour, so it would take one person quite a while to find enough stories to discuss for one show, let alone on a weekly basis. So they've set it up so that anyone who comes across an interesting story can tag it with the tag "for:twit" in del.icio.us and they all show up on the Twit del.icio.us page. Not only can everyone on the show find links to all the stories they're talking about in one easy location, but since you can subscribe to the page as an RSS feed it's a really easy way to keep on top of interesting and important tech stories in your feed reader.
I think this approach could be used effectively in a library as well - not only for keeping track of links for the employees of the library itself, but also to help outward-facing customers as well. If you have to hotdesk in your role, your favourites are sometimes stored on the PC itself so you may not be able to get to them when you're at a different desk. This issue is solved with del.icio.us, as you can get to your bookmarks wherever you have a PC with an internet connection.
It also makes it very easy to find resources that you might be able to use. If you go to the site every once in a while and look for sites tagged with tags that interest you, you may be able to find sites that you might not otherwise come across using google searches. You could then create a delicious page for your library with relevant information, and people could use your links as a jumping off point to start looking at other resources with the same tags. Tag clouds also give you an indicator of what people are tagging/searching for and you can emphasise these points of interest in your library displays.
In setting up my own delicious account I found it interesting to go through and see the different tags that people used to classify these sites, and then to look at the people who had tagged the same sites as me and have a look at what else they'd tagged. You can go off on a tangent very quickly and learn about topics you hadn't expected to.
I see a lot of potential in Technorati in the same way. While google can be good at picking relevant information out about a site, a lot of what you'll find in a google search result is determined by the words on the website itself.
With tagging everyone can get into the act, and the search engines will spit back a more democratic result. Different countries will use different terms to describe things - a jumper here is a sweatshirt in the US. If you did a google search on the term "jumper" you wouldn't get too many American websites showing up in the results. But if you searched in delicious or Technorati for the term jumper, knowledgeable Aussies could tag American sites and all of a sudden you get a much bigger pool of results.
05 June 2009
Take me to your (RSS Feed) Reader...
I can't remember how long I've been using RSS feeds. My first exposure to them was the My Yahoo! website, where I would enter various sites that I was interested in and get new news or sport information.
At some stage I made the move to igoogle. Technologically it was leaps and bounds ahead of My Yahoo. I still had website headlines so I could see what was happening and only visit a site if I were interested in a particular story, but there's also little applets that do things like display the weather radar or allow you to convert between currencies. The vast majority of the web surfing that I do starts off from clicking on a link from one of the feeds in my IGoogle page. (I also couldn't survive my daily commute without the podcasts that arrive in Itunes via, you guessed it, an RSS feed).
Onto the actual lesson. I signed up for bloglines and picked a few of the suggested feeds to get started. As luck would have it one of the first ones I came across was for a site called the Shifted Librarian, though some of the posts were a bit too long for my taste (yes, I realise that I'm the pot and the Shifted Librarian is the kettle in this scenario). I also added the OPAL training blog, read about how Skype is adding screen sharing, and got excited in a way that only a guy/gal with two technologically parents halfway around the world can appreciate.
At some stage I made the move to igoogle. Technologically it was leaps and bounds ahead of My Yahoo. I still had website headlines so I could see what was happening and only visit a site if I were interested in a particular story, but there's also little applets that do things like display the weather radar or allow you to convert between currencies. The vast majority of the web surfing that I do starts off from clicking on a link from one of the feeds in my IGoogle page. (I also couldn't survive my daily commute without the podcasts that arrive in Itunes via, you guessed it, an RSS feed).
Onto the actual lesson. I signed up for bloglines and picked a few of the suggested feeds to get started. As luck would have it one of the first ones I came across was for a site called the Shifted Librarian, though some of the posts were a bit too long for my taste (yes, I realise that I'm the pot and the Shifted Librarian is the kettle in this scenario). I also added the OPAL training blog, read about how Skype is adding screen sharing, and got excited in a way that only a guy/gal with two technologically parents halfway around the world can appreciate.
I can see a few uses for the library here. For example if the major publishers have a website and with an RSS feed that lists new titles available for purchase, an acquisitions librarian could potentially save a lot of time by having all of the feeds in a feed reader than remembering to check all of the sites to see if there's anything new and of interest.
It's also an easy source of additional content for a library. If there's a site that regularly publishes content that's relevant to your audience, some web publishing platforms allow you to publish that RSS feed on your website. That's a great way of adding more useful information to your site without having to do much (or anything) to maintain or update it.
In my role I work with online departmental documents. It'd be really handy to use an RSS type setup to have a "New documents" feature somewhere on my area of the intranet.
29 May 2009
Social networking
Here we go, my first fully-positive blog post with no "yeah, but" statements! (Aside from convincing the powers that be to remove these sites from the internet filters, but I've already mentioned that so it doesn't count).
I have been a member of Facebook for a few years now. Since I grew up overseas and have been in Australia for less than a decade, my network is small but geographically diverse. It's a great way of keeping in touch with people who live far away, and sharing photos, comments and links with people you think will find them interesting. Having said that I am mindful of privacy and identity theft, etc, and have most aspects of my account locked down so that only current friends can see them.
I can't see what the UQ library is doing with Facebook because it's blocked on our network, but one Facebook use I could see being really useful is the "Fan Page". A library could set up a fan page, for example, and they could use it to advertise events or highlight interesting items in their collection. The nice thing about it is that it would be a totally opt in/out situation, where people would only receive the updates if they became a fan of the library, and could leave the group at any time. Or a Facebook "group" could be created - the advantage of this is the discussion threads that can be created.
I can see Twitter being very useful in a similar way. If you advertise the fact that you're on Twitter to your clientele, and they add you to their list of followers, you could let people know when you had a new publication come in that people might find interesting, for example. Also, I know a lot of people use Twitter as a research or polling tool. Like if your library was going to subscribe to a PC magazine you could ask which PC mag people find most useful, and then get an idea of which ones would be the most popular.
Another interesting feature of Twitter is the real time search. If you were to consistently post about topics that people find interesting, they would be picked up by the search and you would grow your followers organically. Again, if people didn't want to receive your messages anymore, they can simply unfollow you.
The one trick to keep in mind with all of this is to post only when you have something that you think people will find really interesting. If you're posting stuff just to post, and you're posting multiple times a day, people will unfollow you at the drop of a hat. I know I have.
I have been a member of Facebook for a few years now. Since I grew up overseas and have been in Australia for less than a decade, my network is small but geographically diverse. It's a great way of keeping in touch with people who live far away, and sharing photos, comments and links with people you think will find them interesting. Having said that I am mindful of privacy and identity theft, etc, and have most aspects of my account locked down so that only current friends can see them.
I can't see what the UQ library is doing with Facebook because it's blocked on our network, but one Facebook use I could see being really useful is the "Fan Page". A library could set up a fan page, for example, and they could use it to advertise events or highlight interesting items in their collection. The nice thing about it is that it would be a totally opt in/out situation, where people would only receive the updates if they became a fan of the library, and could leave the group at any time. Or a Facebook "group" could be created - the advantage of this is the discussion threads that can be created.
I can see Twitter being very useful in a similar way. If you advertise the fact that you're on Twitter to your clientele, and they add you to their list of followers, you could let people know when you had a new publication come in that people might find interesting, for example. Also, I know a lot of people use Twitter as a research or polling tool. Like if your library was going to subscribe to a PC magazine you could ask which PC mag people find most useful, and then get an idea of which ones would be the most popular.
Another interesting feature of Twitter is the real time search. If you were to consistently post about topics that people find interesting, they would be picked up by the search and you would grow your followers organically. Again, if people didn't want to receive your messages anymore, they can simply unfollow you.
The one trick to keep in mind with all of this is to post only when you have something that you think people will find really interesting. If you're posting stuff just to post, and you're posting multiple times a day, people will unfollow you at the drop of a hat. I know I have.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)