i'm a twit? twitterer? (#12)

twitter seems like a streamlined version of facebook. personally, i don't need to know what everyone (or for instance, the library) is doing at any given point in time. and i sure as hell don't want the play-by-play texted to my phone! ugh. would people really subscribe to the library's twitterings and be kept updated that regularly? i had a hard time finding people and apparently ran out of searches i was allowed to do at once. seems ill-advised to limit the number of searches, but as i won't continue to use twitter, i guess i don't really care. as i mentioned when i ranted about facebook, it's yet another place to spend time with updates. both for the person conveying the updates and the person looking for the information. i suppose as we move away from printing everything on paper, these sites will be more and more useful. however, not everyone has high-speed internet access in their homes or mobile devices, so it may be a while before we have to rely on twitter. on the other hand, some people LOVE that constant messaging and practically live on the internet, so they would probably really enjoy seeing a library twitter page. i suppose it can't hurt to utilize all our options, so maybe it's just a matter of time before we try to sucker -- sorry, i meant before we choose an AMAZING and INCREDIBLY INTELLIGENT person on the staff to take up the task...

face the facebook (#21)

i had no interest in joining facebook and after signing up a couple of months ago for this project, i am confirmed in my belief that this is not for me. especially since i was most emphatic about not wanting to be found by anyone who might want to get in touch with me. sort of defeats the purpose of this entire exercise. i mean, it's interesting up to a point as far as getting a quick glance at what your friends are up to, but i just have no inclination to keep everyone updated on what i'm doing or to spend that much time keeping in touch with everyone i know or HAVE EVER KNOWN. for instance, both my brother and sister have between 100-150 friends listed on their facebook pages. i can see how this can cut down on time spent staying in touch with them individually, but you still have to check your page and read their input and all their millions of friends' responses and make responses of your own, etc. so are you saving time or spending more time at yet another site you have to remember to log in to? and while a library facebook page might be useful (for however long facebook stays in favor), it is all very time consuming (both for the library and the patrons looking at the library page). i know it's important to try to reach people every way we can, but how universal can it be kept? will patrons have to go to several different websites (for example, the newsletter, the library homepage, facebook, twitter) to find out all the things that are going on at the library?

(#15) which wiki would work?

wikis seem to be used like blogs, only they're better organized. it's easier to find past "posts" or to contribute to a particular subject within the wiki than it is to comment on and find older blog entries. i like the book review wiki and the library success wiki -- the latter one was like going to a roundtable without having to get lost on the way to the host library. might be good for a summer reading program or maybe even a troubleshooting manual? maybe the millions of emails you get if you subscribe to the clc or conntech(?) lists can be replaced by a wiki somehow. or is there one already?

Podcasts (#10)

Not sure when i'd sit around and listen to these. i tried both podcastalley and podfeed and they seemed about the same to me. i tried wreckless media radio, vegan 101, and the movie bandits but found them all too annoying to listen to for longer than a few minutes. i'm sure there are a GREAT MANY podcasts that fall under this category. i was excited to see a vegan review podcast where they talk about different vegan product on the market but while not as annoying as the other ones, i had a hard time accessing anything other than the first episode or the last one. i guess you could listen to these when you're just surfing the web or doing housework (that isn't too noisy), but i can't see just sitting around listening to podcasts unless you can figure out a way to play them while you're driving. i'm sure i would get frustrated and give up long before i ever found a podcast i'd go through the trouble to listen to.

favorites wiki extravaganza! (#16)

working on the pages was pretty easy, since it's so similar to microsoft word -- however, that same similarity made it a little frustrating when it didn't have all the functionality i'm used to. i added my blog to the "favorite blogs" page, and a category for food and cooking, with my favorite blog on that subject (vegan of course!). wasn't sure what exactly we were supposed to do, so i also added a page i listed as "favorites on the loose" with some non-blog-related categories. the whole thing reminded me of slam books that people passed around in junior high school -- does anyone remember those? it was a notebook filled with questions that you anwswered and then passed it on. i've also seen some some emails that went around with a similar theme. as far as work-related uses (oh yeah, this is work-related...), i like the ease of use and universal access aspects of it. seems a lot better than a printout or email in every mailbox and then having someone bring all the input together again. i skipped #15, so i'm sure more wiki-things will become clear momentarily.

anything? #8

online gaming. i had no idea that i would get totally sucked in. i've been playing world of warcraft for about 3 years and have recently started playing on xbox live. it's actually a fun way to make friends (you obviously have something in common, since you're all playing the same game) and a great way to keep in touch with your real life friends. i haven't looked at second life yet, but i imagine it's the same sense of community without the actual game part. world of warcraft (or WoW) is a MMORPG -- massively multiplayer online role playing game -- set in a fantasy world. there are millions of people (official number was 11.5 million in december) all over the world who are playing this game. right now there're doing a promo with mountain dew, they've made it onto south park, and i've heard it referenced on a few tv shows. you can chat in-game or privately, group together for quests, keep a friends list of players you want to keep in touch with, and an ignore list as well for those you don't, mailboxes, holiday events, you can even sell your gear in an auction house that's just like ebay! warcraft is really a whole world of its own. xbox live isn't quite the same thing, but what they have in common is that you can talk to your friends when you're connected and play games together no matter where they are. i have a friend who moved to las vegas who i only ever talk to when we're both gaming, and another friend said just last night that she hadn't talked to her sister because neither of them had been playing WoW lately -- and they both live in ct! i made friends with a woman who was living in germany while her husband was in iraq, a guy who works nights at a hotel in ohio, a stay home mom with two kids, a college student, a music teacher... you name it. it took me awhile to learn all the chat abbreviations, like "afk" (away from keyboard) or "omw" (on my way), but luckily i had friends who were old pros to explain it all to me without making me look like a pathetic n00b. it's fun and it makes distances irrelevant (kind of like online shopping) and it really brings people together although you'd think just the opposite, since everyone is doing it from home... weird huh?

who else loves the discworld? (#13)

I do like the idea of library thing (i added it as a gadget instead of putting it in this entry), and i'm going to use it to list new graphic novels on the teen blog (trying to add multiple images within the post using blogger is so frustrating and just takes waaaay too long). I like the fact that you don't need to have the isbn on hand to add titles to your lists, BUT when trying to add multiple titles by the same author (for instance, terry pratchett is one of my very favorites), the "Recently Added" list replaces the list of books by the author and you have to hit search to get it back, AND it starts you at the beginning of the list again. if there is an easier way to do this, i'd love to hear it. So i only added a couple of titles for each of my favorite authors or just the first title in a particular series, etc. similarly, if you want to delete several titles, it refreshes the page after each one (i didn't see a way to delete more than one item at a time), so you constantly have to restart at the top of the page. i've experienced a couple of crashes on the website, don't know if this is a recent occurrance, or if it crashes all the time? other than that i think it's a fun site and i love the visual effect of all the cover art! are online book groups active? i think we're also going to try to use it to promote summer reading and teen interaction. yay.

don't you know the dewey decimal system?!? (#11)

so #11 is youtube. actually i've been scouring this site for a while now, looking for an old snickers crunch commercial but it still hasn't come up (the one with the subway conductor who "crunches" people in the doors, although the "i am batman" superbowl commercial is still my favorite). i've used it for finding live performances of bands, interviews with celebrities (try tom waits fishing with john lurie) and authors, favorite scenes from movies ("i drink your milkshake!!"), etc. it's fun and it's easy, but sometimes it's hard to find what you're looking for just because there is SOOO much to look through. i've never tried to put any videos on it personally, but i bet it's easy.

youtube preview

indu and i were checking out youtube for our next entries -- so (as you can see) we practiced embedding the video into a blog! then of course we talked about food. more on this (youtube, that is) later!

unless you'd rather talk about food...

old news

something i noticed about google reader -- i can't see a way to get rid of the old messages after you've read them?? i mean, i guess you're not really STORING them, and they do give you a way to search, but i just seems strange that you can't purge the ones you've already read from your lists. maybe i'm missing something -- either some functionality, or some fundamental rss knowledge... or it looks so much like email that i'm expecting the same things from it.

finally for ipod! (#9)

okay, so i'm going to skip around anyway, even though i thought i'd go in order from now on. indu and i worked on downloading audiobooks (#9) a couple of weeks ago, and i just haven't had a chance (if only i had a nickel for every time i heard/said that...) to blog about it.

first off, i was really happy that netlibrary finally has a selection that is ipod compatible! i do like to listen to audiobooks when i'm driving, walking or even doing housework, and it's nice to not have to tote around yet another gadget (different mp3 player) or change discs (books on cd). however, the selection is very limited, and that was a bit of a let-down. also, browsing by subject doesn't show you the format for the titles -- it seems you have to click on one of their links (subject heading, author, reader, etc.) to get a list which displays which formats are available for those titles. roundabout, but better than having to "show details" for each individual item. however, this is just what worked for me, but maybe someone else had more luck? the search engine also seems temperamental. i forget exactly what i was doing, but one time i put in an author's name for a title that i MADE SURE they had, and my search found no results.

downloading the selection i finally made was easy. i attached my ipod to the computer, then selected "my portable device" on the One Click Download page. there was a small glitch during the download where i got a message saying "your portable player is working on another request, please allow it to complete its current task and select transfer to portable player again" when all i was doing was downloading the audiobook. hrm... a little annoying, but not insurmountable. i downloaded The age of fable, by Thomas Bulfinch and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, by Mark Twain. i also downloaded Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey to my computer because this was one of my favorite books when i was in junior high school (that's a picture of the cover it had when i first bought it in a used bookstore on my way home from school) and i've read it many times, so i wanted to see what the audiobook was like.

arya a trading card?? (#7)

(her name is arya) so here is #7 (flickr mashups), i think i might be able to go in order now.

unfortunately, the card creator had to crop my picture so you can't see her whole face, but you can see the original picture here. this trading card creator was fun, although i can't really see making a whole deck! i did like the flickr color pickr, it was very striking and i really liked seeing the different pictures that matched the chosen color. the color fields group seemed like a fun one to join. the flickr notifier looked cool, but i didn't want to download anything. if i had more friends who were uploading pictures, i might consider it, or if i had long-distance family members who were exchanging photos with me, or something like that. it's flickr AND rss in one -- what a timely discovery!

back to RSS (#4 & 5)

since i already have a google acct, i set up an rss newsreader on Google Reader, which was really easy. i didn't want to set up yet another new acct somewhere else (with bloglines), and it imported the blogs i was already following automatically, which was nice. i noticed that it only added the ones i was "following" as opposed to the ones i added to the blog as a "gadget". i added some of the blogs suggested by maura, new science fiction and books on cd from our library, the post punk kitchen (vegan cooking), patrick rothfuss (the author of The Name of the Wind - the sequel has been delayed a couple of times, so this should be a good way to stay updated on when it will finally come out!) and of course my favorite addiction, world of warcraft.

i like the convenience of having all the blogs coming to one place and not having to jump from website to website. the layout is similar to email, where there is a list of blogs you're following on the left, with the number of unread blogs entries highlighted. i don't normally read blogs, so i don't think i'm going to make a lot of use of this, but i can see the tremendous advantage if you do follow more than a handful of blogs. or if you want updates on the newest books coming out at the new canaan library and you don't work in tech svcs!

much better now

okay, this picture is a good description of how i was feeling about finding time to do Learning 2.0!! but after laurie's inspirational class today, and listening to everyone's personal experiences and suggestions, i have a renewed desire to explore. i did work on downloading an audiobook with indu on sunday, but i haven't downloaded it right to my ipod yet, so i'll write about it after i've done that. i've been around youtube before, we touched on rss feeds today, and librarything sounds like it could be useful both at work and at home, so i'm excited about looking further into those first. so i WILL be posting again soon! no, really.

i'm late! i'm late! (#6)

well, i realize that i haven't been prioritizing the learning 2.0 blog AT ALL, so i'm going to cheat a little and skip topics 4 & 5 for now and jump ahead (that sounds odd, since i'm still behind!) to flickr at #6, which is something that i had already explored in the past.

if you look at my photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8787305@N02/), you'll see from the dates of my last uploads that i haven't been prioritizing flickr, either! it was fun for a while, and it is convenient for sharing pictures with a large number of friends and family at once, but i found i wasn't really interested in other people's pictures, or sharing with people i didn't know or even spending that much time messing around with my own pics. (i'd rather be playing world of warcraft) i did try the "project 365" group (where you take one picture per day for a year), but soon came to realize that i'd be scrambling to take a picture at the last minute or would take a picture just for the sake of taking one for the project. so i ended up feeling obligated rather than inspired and dropped it. i mean, as a photo essay of a year in my life, i didn't think it would be really meaningful to look at a picture of my feet a year later knowing that i'd taken that shot 5 minutes before bed since nothing else had interested me enough to bother that day -- no matter how artfully the light was hitting them.

btw, the picture above was taken of a window display at design solutions on elm street. also, i had a problem uploading the picture with the "add image" function on blogger using the url ("add an image from the web"), so i saved it to my desktop and used "add image" with the file from my desktop instead. apparently if you want to "blog this picture" from flickr, it should be the first thing you do, because when you use that, it adds the image to a new blog, rather than adding it to a blog you've already written. unless there's something i'm missing, which is possible.

On the loose with L2.0 (#1-3)

you will be mine newcanaanlibraryflashdrive, oh yes, you will be m-. wait. everyone can read this, can't they... whoops.

um, lookingforwardtolearninghowtoaccessevenmoreinformationontheinternetand
discoveringallthewonderfulnewwayspeoplecancommunicateandsharetheirideas??!