Week 9, Exercise 21 - 23

Podcasts, again somehing new for me! In order to figure out what they are, I followed step-by-step the tutorial. After browsing through a lot of podcasts in all three directories, linked myself to NPR Science Friday, a podcast as from the public radio. Topics included: science, technology, health adn environment.


I am familiar with e-Books, since I did updates on more than four thousand bibliogrpahic records in our library's catalogue, browsed through a couple but never read one. They become more and more popular with our customers and are very easy to access, can be downloaded by several users when print copies are out.

Hurray!!! I've done it, I've done it. I started this programme very reluctantly, thinking about the time I'll spend on it and being afraid it will be boring. I learned a lot of new things and what surprised me the most is that I had a lot of fun. Of course RSS feeds gave me a bit of a head ache. Enjoyed a lot the image generators and the wonderful photos on Flickr, etc.
Many of us completed the programme and the question we have to ask ourselves is - is it the end or only the beginning?

Congratulations Jayne and the team - it was a wonderful journey!

Week 9, Exercise 20

I am a long time friend of You Tube and have spent hours and hours exploring it long before I started blogging. Now, inspired by a comment done by atramper who wanted to see more cats on my blog I added 2 video clips - Love between a cat and dog and Memory, from the musical Cats, interpreted by Elaine Page on a live concert in London in 2000.

Love between cat and dog



Elaine Paige- Memory Live (London 2000)

Week 8, Exercise 18 - 19

I did never come accross Zoho writer or Google docs before. Signed up for Zoho writer and discovered that it is a tool very easy to use and much better than Word. Created a document and a slide show http://show.zoho.com/public/wildcatnewzealand/What%20is%20a%20mistake? but I did not have the patience to export my document - it took ages and gave up. Selected a couple of sites from the list of Web 2.0 Awards nominees.
One which I would recommend to bookworms is http://www.biblio.com/ - a site where one can search for out-of-print books from independent booksellers.
For drinkers it will be fun to use http://www.cocktailbuilder.com/ Tell the Cocktail Builder what liquor and mixers you have lying around and it will tell you what cocktails you can make!
From Mashups http://www.ning.com/ browsed Ning which gives everyone the opportunity to make their own social network for anything.
I would like to explore more, but if I do I'll won't be able to complete the 23 things!

Week 7, Exercise 16 - 17

I suppose we can say that wikis, collaboratively edited web pages, are old news, being out there for a while. They are easy to use, have a simple syntax and you are not required to know HTML. One of the disadvantages could be that sometimes they can be a bit disorganised and with so many people having editing access they can be very prone to errors.
I can see them as a very useful tool in libraries - interaction with customers, interaction with staff and as a communication worktool for a shared workspace. It seems that American libraries use them with great success.

I would have liked to learn more about PBwiki but none of the Video Gallery tutorials was working. It was surprising to find out that PBwiki has more pages than Wikipedia. At the end of my journey through thing 17 I added my blog to the Favourite blogs page.

Week 6, Exercise 13 - 15

Had a good look at Del.icio.us and created an account. It is pretty easy to use and is a very useful tool, especially for research. It helps you to organize your bookmarked web pages and by tagging them it helps to retrieve them easier. Tags are casual, so you are not limited to a standard list - choose the tag what suits you. It is also interesting to see what kind of tags other people have used for the same or similar sites.

I used Technocrati before but this exercise helped me to improve my knowledge. Searched other people's blogs and revisited some of the most popular blogs like Boing Boing or Gizmodo, the gadget guide.

As much as I do not want to see the end of the books - what could be more relaxing than sitting in your preferred armchair, cat on your lap, a piano concerto in the background and reading a good book - I have to admit that the world has changed dramatically in the last decade and libraries should shift directions and adopt new technologies. They should enable customers to source information in ways that they use on the web and allow users access wherever they are: home, work, school, in public transport, etc. It is no doubt that the young generation, savvy in all new gadgets and technologies, has a preference for electronic titles. Recently, in Japan, have been sold more than 3 million electronic titles which can be accessed via mobile phones. There are some advantages in all this, you don't need to carry the physical books and remember to return them to the library. I was wondering if somebody thought about the health issues - after sitting eight hours at work in front of your computer (more and more jobs require this), isn't it hard on your eyes and spine to do the same when you arrive home and decide to "relax"? Not everybody can afford to buy the new Kindle type expensive gadgets.

Week 5, Exercise 12

I like Rollyo, it allows you to create your own search roll for your preferred web sites. The instructions for adding your search roll to your blog were excellent so it took me less than a minute to do it.

Week 5, Exercise 10 - 11

Played with the Slide show generator http://www.slide.com/arrange and created a little slide show - click on the button below and see what you get.

It is fun to use the online generators so I went ahead and designed my own plate with the Delftware generator at http://www.royaldelft.com/

Delftware, or Delft pottery, is blue and white pottery traditionally made in and around the city of Delft in the Netherlands. Click on the link above and have fun.

With http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/calendar.php I created a calendar for this month.

These exercises were the most enjoyable since I started.

LibraryThing is a handy tool to keep track of your own library or reading history. After taking the tour, I signed up and added 5 books to my library. Searches for the books under title and ISBN were not working, so I searched mostly under the author, what was more time consuming. My library can be found under http://www.librarything.com/catalog/wildcatnewzealand

Week 4, Exercise 8 - 9

I tried hard, but wasn't able to watch the CNET video. The Palinet and Bloglines tutorials were quite good and gave me all the information I needed. Next, I created a Blogline account and added some RSS feeds. With the Add a page element feature I added 2 feeds to my blog (CNN and one of the newspapers from my country)



Feedster wasn't working and got the message: Feedster is changing, we'll be back up soon with exciting news (frustrating). I quite liked Topix.net which allows you to find your news by keyword, topic, city, state or postal code. Browsed Syndic8.com and Technocrati, found a couple of blogs I wanted to add to my account but Bloglines was down. Technology is wonderful, but sometimes it could be very frustrating from time to time. All this staff is fascinating but very time consuming. I'll definitely want to explore more when I'll have time
Read a bit of standard feed icons and copied them.

Week 3, Exercise 5 - 7

First step was to create a Flickr account and sign in. Had the tour and checked out the Mediazine tutorials. Very helpful staff. What captured me the most were the wonderful photos.

After a lot of browsing (spent hours) decided to download some images from my country - mountains and their vegetation - and create a mosaic with the Flickr mosaic creator.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

Next , I played creating a Trading card with my ginger cat, Rusty, King of our street, loved by humans, hated by the other cats.

I love Flickr - it is a lot of fun and I am sure I'll visit this site many, many times from now on.

I enjoyed trying to Spell with Flickr my blogg's name.




iTunes? ?????

Wikipedia says
iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple on January 10, 2001 for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod digital media players as well as the recently introduced iPhone. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store (provided an internet connection is present) in order to purchase and download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films, and ringtones.

iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Windows XP from Apple's website. It is also bundled with all Macs, and some HP and Dell computers. Older versions are available for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.0-10.2, and Windows 20

Week 2, Exercises 4

Social networking sites are great places to get in touch with people with the same interest, and keep in contact with family and friends. Enjoyed exploring all of them but found the whole exercise very time consuming and do not think I'll use them very often.

Visited Bebo and Bebo in the library, very colourful site but I feel too old to join in.

Created an account in MySpace and joined "The cat lovers group" where from I loaded the kitten's photo. Some of the discussions seemed quite superficial, and surfing around I encountered a lot of advertising. At one stage I ended up on eBay where somebody was selling all kind of cat paraphernalia.

FaceBook - signed in, did the tour and enjoyed it. It seemed to be the fastest.

Week 1, Exercise 1 - 3

Here I am, reluctantly, creating my first blog. It took me a while till I got here. Firstly, it was the so supposed luck of time, secondly, I am a private person and writing about myself or sharing my thoughts with a web-wide community is not my cup of tea.

Despite all these, I was always keen to learn new things and the exercises from this programme give me the opportunity to learn new technologies and keep up with the young ones who are so enthusiastic about blogging.

The start was a little slow, but it was fun to play with templates, colours and images.