Technology ramblings

Social networking sites are of interest to me, not because I spend a lot of time on them but it's an interesting modern phenomenon. Friends and relations have asked me to join up otherwise I'll miss out on news (especially about their most recent overseas trip), photos and just generally keeping tabs on them. So I've relented and opened a Facebook account. It's left to be seen how much use I make of it!

Zoho writer

The last time I used Zoho writer was when I added information on the newspaper collection to the trial slv wiki. That was some weeks back but I'm back investigating this application under Week 7 of the Learning 2.0 programme.

In the meantime the SLV desk diary has been launched and trialled for about 3 weeks or so and it's a good resource. I found out that if someone's asking about Christmas opening hours we need to publish the notice for each day between 25 and 31 December or you won't get a complete picture.

Text generator

This is exciting! The text collage generator came up with this cool graphic. Being of unartistic bent I wouldn't have been able to come up with anything like this on my own so I'm really impressed. There is a rider that the image "may be subject to copyright" so I'm owning up to "borrowing" it for research purposes. Makes me wonder about artistic compositions generally and how easy it is to use the hard work of others.
The URL is http://www.languageisavirus.com/textcollage.html

Not exactly the rooftop of the world but the view from my office.

Flickr-ing

It was interesting to compare the downloading of a photo from flickr and another taken with my mobile phone. Both are quite simple processes but on the photography side of things one can see that photos taken by a mobile phone's just not as good.
Flick-r is huge and one can waste a lot of time (as I did!) comparing different views of places that I'd seen in Europe. I had previously uploaded a selection of my Europe photos to flick-r but the limit of 200 is a little on the small side.

Grand Place, Belgium

I was amazed by the architecture in this square in Belgium and this is a photo by Paul Smits that I found on flickr. A great fish eye view of Grand Place.

More about Technorati

Searching for "Learning 2.0" in blog posts, tags and the blog directory brought up similar results (I did this in the advanced search option at the top of the Technorati website). I find it interesting that not many people in the online social networking community link up to learning 2.0 sites. Check out the blog directory and see how many "fans" our community has. Guess we're not the movers and shakers we'd like to be.

Looking at the popular category I noticed a lot of .com sites represented. There are very few .net or .org sites. For all of that it's interesting to note that the most popular blog is Boing Boing (good name, gives the impression of something bouncing back and forth amongst that community of readers). It's described as a "weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies". Great if you have the time and inclination but I prefer something a little more targetted to my own interests.

Technorati

I resume this learning discovery after a hiatus of several weeks of leave, project work etc. Fearing that I'd lost the momentum and the thread of continuity I'm pleasantly surprised that one's able to drop and pick up this programme of learning anytime. This flexibility is an important aspect for many of us who balance a whole lot of tasks at work while trying to fit in important stuff like Learning 2.0.

Technorati works like a search engine for blogs, all types of postings and tags assigned by users to find blog posts, photos, videos, audio. There are other websites that do this function such as Feedster and Bloglines. Even some traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo do the same thing to some extent. Google has searchable categories such as news and groups while Yahoo has entertainment, sports and video.

Technorati certainly gives you a feel of how over-populated online opinion is and opens up opportunities to link up to like-minded communities.

RSS Feeds

This may all be old hat but I've never investigated this fully. My first attempt was when the State Library started issuing rss feeds but that’s a while ago.

Feedster is convenient to use but one needs to be quite specific when typing in a query. For example, just typing in the word “libraries” retrieves a lot of commercial websites. The advantage is that you can narrow down to specific types of feeds—blogs, news feeds, podcasts etc.

Topix has a very busy interface and works on a directory structure. Has an American bias but I guess so have the other 2. Of interest is a box on the front screen that allows you to search for local Australian news. The majority of results are from overseas sources though.

The google blog search works very well, presents an uncluttered screen and once you type in a subject of interest this search engine retrieves an overwhelming amount of blogs/feeds. The word “libraries” retrieves 73,830 results. Of course as with googling for any information you do have to sort through the dross and not all sites have rss feeds.

I hate to say it but I would use the google blog search. To target local Australian newsfeeds I simply type in the additional “site:.au”

#5 And more wikis

I've had a go at wikis late last week by adding to Mark's RB wiki and also to the SLV desk wiki. Returning to them this morning I found the second wiki (Holdings of Melbourne newspaper which should read "newspapers") has a most ungrammatical title. Tried everything to change it but the wiki help pages advise that I can't change the name. That can't be right. I shall run this past Lynette and see if I can remedy this.

This exercise in posting wikis has shown it doesn't take a great deal to be able to do this but I'm wondering about the look of a wiki. A cut-and-paste job from an existing word document seems to be a very basic effort and ok for now but longer term, should more be done to standardise its look? Like some form of template? This wouldn't be hard to do but would that be going back to the bad old days of time-consuming editing on behalf of 1 or 2 people who are given higher level editing privileges?

Our procedures already have a standard template so that's pretty much taken care of, but there is a great deal of information for information desks around the library that we can migrate to a desk wiki.

I like the wiki's ease of use. It would be a cinch to edit/update information.

#4 Wikis
This is quite exciting and I can see applications for our Information Desks as well as for other divisions within the library. Working with colleagues on the slv21 project Service Desk Intranet Portal we discussed using wikis or some similar technology to keep all desk staff informed and up-to-date.
I am impressed by the energy behind some of the American public libraries in connecting up with their local communities and reaching out to their users. Of course being the State Library we can't open up our pages to free-for-all editing but we can connect with our users in learning and discovery programmes in a more dynamic fashion. There's something about websites of large organizations such as ours that have a staid and immovable look about them. I think we need something that's a little more agile and wikis seem to fulfil this function.
wikis

Helpdesk video

I was charmed and mightily amused by this video. See what you think. It may take a little while to load though.

Feeling determined

Get with the programme! I'm like that white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland..."I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!" Everything's a mad rush these days and I'm feeling determined to conquer Web 2.0 but I won't get ahead of myself just yet.