Thing 40! Mashup the Web

Today I tried MANY of the suggested sites for Thing 40.

For MUSIC, I enjoyed searching and saving selections in Pandora.FM. The link for Splice did not work.

For BOOKS, I checked all of the sites listed.

For SOCIAL, I did an account for Ping.fm. It is good to be able to combine account information for Facebook, Delicious and Twitter. I also tried the Lunchbox and Wheel of Food sites. These sites are more useful when using a zip code such as 55423 in the Twin Cities area rather than our local rural zip code which yields no results. As I have not had lunch yet, thinking of the food sites makes me hungry!

Of the PHOTO/FLICKR sites, my favorite is Interestingness. I had fun doing random views of the photos.

For the VIDEO sites, I enjoyed TimeTube where I used Supreme Court as a search topic and now have a reminder when it is updated.

For GOOGLE, I did a search for a neighborhood under Walkable.


Being I had used Big Huge Labs before, I tried new mashup options, and posted a simple Palyvore fashion one below:

Thing 33! Travel 2.0

Thing 33 was a fun one for me! I enjoyed exploring many of the travel sites listed. Lost Girls was an interesting blog. It was fun to check Baden-Baden (where we were years ago) in My Kugelhopf. In Notes from the Road, I enjoyed the great photos. The Texas Hill Country, Harmony and Lanesboro, MN and the SPAM Museum in Austin were places I checked. For review sites, I liked the collective wisdom of http://www.boo.com/ and plan to return to that site. It was fun to see what I could find on the Prague Castle and other places where we had been in Prague. I also checked the opinions of the Holiday Inn Capitol in Washington, DC where we stayed in March and found that I agreed with them. The Newseum http://www.newseum.org/index.aspx in Washington DC, is just a little more than a year old, so with nothing listed for it, I can add something myself! Gusto was fun for 10 Great Places on Earth You Don't Want to Miss. On http://www.vcarious.com/ I enjoyed the photos of Barcelona.

I definitely plan to do more exploring of Travel 2.0 and added some travel entries to Delicious. We booked hotels in Anchorage and Vancouver for this summer earlier. Now I plan to read more about them on sites that I learned about in Thing 33.

Although the sites in Thing 33 may apply more to public libraries, I could probably find some use in the Research QuickStart subject pages that we are adding to our library site at Minnesota West.

THING TWENTY-THREE!!!

23. Complete a survey and comment on 23 Things.

Although the 23 Things have been completed, I am happy to continue a journey that gave me many opportunities to learn about Library 2.0. The most fun was the day I started my blog in May when I did an avatar and added links for Delicious and Shelfari before doing the required Things. I thought, "I can do this". Even though there were delays and frustrations along the way, the self-paced tutorial was a great format for me to follow. Although I am a person who usually likes to do things in order, I found that if I had challenges or spent too much time on any "Thing", it was best to move on and return later. After having problems posting a YouTube video, and asking two people for help, it worked fine when I tried using a different video. Now that I am completing the project, I have had fun going back to do more - like adding letters 358 from More Flickr Fun today.

I already had accounts for some of the Things, but I learned more when exploring each Thing. My favorites to continue working with are the photo ones like Flickr and PictureTrail. At work I also want to do more with the ZOHO site that we started using last spring.

Thank you for offering 23 Things again. Even though I am back at work now, I was glad to be working on it mostly in the summer when it did not matter if I was working at one or two AM. Having a dial-up computer connection at home takes more time than using the wireless that I use when I take my computer elsewhere.

Now I understand the Facebook culture better, and am happy to be a member. It has already been fun to "re-connect" with people, and I will probably use Facebook more than many of the other Things.

One of my favorite parts of 23 Things was to look at the blogs of others. After finishing a Thing, it was fun to read what others had done for it. At first I looked mostly at blogs from our SAMMIE region, but recently have looked at many others from throughout the state. I plan to continue reading them, and look forward to expanding my horizons. I would be interested in another similar experience if offered during the summer.

Thing Seventeen!

17. ELM Productivity Tools.

At our library I make extensive use of Proquest, Ebsco products, and NetLibrary. When we do class presentations, we instruct and encourage students to use them. NetLibrary is a great resource for our students to have access to current books.

Because I am more familiar with the higher academic resources, I concentrated on searches using the Gale Discovering Collection geared for students from grades 8-12 and did searches in MasterFILE Premier tonight. After hearing Nancy Pelosi on NPR this noon, I did a search on her as well as on other names and topics. I must admit that this was the first time that I logged on the ELM Portal on my personal computer at home using my public library barcode number. My barcode number from my college id. card has been in my memory for years, but I never even thought of using my public library number to access ELM databases from home. Searching different databases gave me a new perspective of the many resource available to us in Minnesota.

I had not tried the Page Composer or RSS Feeds in ELM yet, and was surprised by features that I did not even know were available. Besides doing an account and a new folder, I also saved an article to my Del.icio.us account. The search for images is easy to do in the EBSCO databases. Tonight I spent a lot of time on Facebook as I wanted to have a "head start" on Thing Twenty so that I have something to report by the time I reach that THING. I will return to Thing Eighteen soon to do more exploring.

LATER: I returned to ELM on 09/14, and had time to work more with the search alerts feature, a very useful one.

Thing Eleven!

11. Learn about tagging and del.icio.us.
After attending several sessions on social bookmarking sites at conferences, I established a del.icio.us account. Mainly I have used it for articles that I save to refer to later. My account is linked from this blog on the lower right side. Until 23 Things, I had not thought of it as a place to also store photos, and now have some from Flickr there.

Looking at some of the links to libraries using del.icio.us, I found some ideas. Being my cousin from San Mateo arrives in Minnesota today, I checked the San Mateo Library site first. I browsed it for awhile, and found it to be user-friendly. When I checked the del.icio.us links, I found that New Books were there. For the past few years, we have debated how to list new books on our website. Currently we send e-mail messages. The del.icio.us option is worth considering.

CHALLENGE - FURL

I learned about FURL at a conference session that I attended, but just signed up for an account today, so will soon be exploring that more.



Thanks to Sarah Parrott for posting her nature gift tags on Flickr!

Thing Four!

4. Explore FLICKR. http://www.flickr.com/photos/zaykivi/287714927/ Here is a link to one of many great Prague photos.

In FLICKR I enjoyed exploring a few of the many photos available. I saved some favorites of Prague in my del.ic.ious account. On the first day that I worked on this blog, I linked my del.ic.ious account on the sidebar on the right.

Prague is a wonderful city where I would like to return sometime. I was only there for two days (before digital cameras were available).

The notes that the St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict's Libraries use to label their books is a great use of FLICKR that I first saw at an MLA session last year presented by LeAnn Suchy.

LATER: On 09/07, I posted a photo from FLICKR on this blog as Thing Twenty-four.

Thing One!

1. Getting Started: Set up your own blog.
Do your first post. Add an avatar.

This was all fun to do a few weeks ago when I set up the blog. I already had a GOOGLE account, and added my Shelfari and del.icio.us links being I had been working with them for quite awhile. Later I can change the arrangement if I want. The avatar was new to me, and fun to do. After I decided that the colors of the avatar that I selected did not look good with orange, I changed the template from an orange look. (Look for the avatar on the sidebar at the right.)

I wanted to do 23 Things On A Stick when it was first available, but that was a busy time of the school year, so I hope to be able to complete the Things this summer. On to Thing Two! (Reminds me of The Cat in the Hat!)