Technorati or Bust

I have been known to blog a time or two; on Myspace I have blogged about things in general that have gotten my knickers in a twist.  I even began a blog rating local restaurants, but my blogs come nowhere near the blogs I found on Technorati.  I actually enjoy blogging, but for me one question continued to pop in my head: “Who cares what I’m writing about?”  Yes, my sisters read my blogs and responded appropriately, but on a larger scale, why would anyone care what I have to say?  Although I like it more now because I participate in the Staff Picks blogs.  It’s cool that people write blogs and it’s even cooler that a site like Technorati exists, but it’s not really for me.  There was just too much!  I understand that a lot of professionals and experts in their field write blogs; that’s great!  Would I track them?  Probably not.  I did create an account and I have this blog and the Staff Picks blog on my watchlist; how often will I log in?  <shrug>  Maybe I’ll find a use at some point.  This exercise did give me the opportunity to learn a little more about tagging.  I don’t know why I don’t ever tag my blogs.  I guess I don’t need to.  Someone I don’t even know commented on my previous post about wikis; how did he even find my little ol’ blog?

Wiki-iddy, wiki-iddy, wiki-iddy…not so wack.

Let me start by saying it is great to have my computer up and running again; I missed my baby!  Anyhoo, wikis.  I have to admit, I don’t really know very much about wikis.  That’s weird because I used wikipedia very often; I guess I just never wondered why it exists, its function, or any of that kind of stuff.  When I think about what wikis are, I wonder about all the different sites I visit on a regular basis; are they, too wikis?  Like imdb.com; users can submit information on T.V. shows and celebrities.  That’s collaborative, right?  Well, I explored wikis for libraries and I can see some good uses for them.  As a collaboration between library staff to update everyone on the same committee or to let all staff know about what’s happening on Staff Day.  It would also be useful as a collaboration between library staff and patrons: resources can be listed for genealogy, history, and other subjects.  When I first began reading about wikis, I couldn’t see a reason why I would want to use one.  But then I saw the Simpsons Wiki.  Can I just say, “wow!”  That particular wiki speaks to the television geek in me; a comprehensive source of all things Simpson?  The creator of the Simpsons Wiki is a genius.  I should create a Seinfeld Wiki, or a Battlestar Galactica Wiki…oooh, a Sex and the City Wiki!  The possibilities are endless!

I Am So Glad I Opened Pandora’s Box

A little over a year ago, tired of running down the battery on my mp3 player and impatient with the collection of CDs I had brought to work, I searched Google for an internet radio site.  That is when I found Pandora.  If you’re unfamiliar with how Pandora works, it’s basically like this: you search by artist name or by song title, Pandora will then create a station based on the search and play not only that artist or song, but any other artist or song that have some of the same musical qualities.  I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical about it all, especially after creating my Prince Radio station and hearing hardly any Prince.  But I have to admit, every song that is played on any of my stations relate in some way to the named station.  I first heard The Killers on Prince Radio.  Sounds strange, I know, but it makes since the music of The Killers (especially on “Hot Fuss”) has an ’80s vibe.  At this point, I have 31 stations based on artists I love.  You can also have genre stations, of which I have a few, like Oldies Soul or Funk.  There is also a Quick Mix option, which allows you to select any number of created stations to a list, and then songs are played randomly from each select station.  That’s usually the way I listen to Pandora.  If you have friends on  Pandora, you can also listen to a mix of their created stations.  I have listened to many different types of internet radio, including LastFM and Launchcast (Yahoo!), but I have to say Pandora is my absolute favorite.  There is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system that lets you control (somewhat) what songs will be played on your stations.  There is also an option to ”snooze” a song that you think plays too frequently.  I still bring my mp3 player to work, but for the most part I spend my day jammin’ to Pandora.  I recommend everyone give it a try.

I Love Adding GoodReads to My Shelf(ari)

On any given day, I can be found with my nose in a book.  Sure, I love gaming, listening to music, watching movies, and hanging out with my friends, but there is nothing more satisfying to me than the smell of the pages of a book.  Close your eyes, picture your favorite book, and take a deep breath.  Ummm…(sigh).  Nothing better, I tell ya.  I have read a lot of books; I can’t put a number on it, because I can’t always remember what I’ve read.  Chalk that up to shoddy writing, bizarre plots, and ridiculous characters.  Or, it could be that I have thatmany books.  I can’t say for certain.  Well, this past April, I attended an OLC conference where I sat in on a great reader’s advisory.  The facilitators of this session suggested writing down the titles of the books you read; or better yet, get an account with Shelfari.  I went home that night and created my Shelfari account.   I love it!  I only wish something like this had been created a few years ago, before I got older and a little more forgetful.  I just created an account with Good Reads, so I will use this time to compare the two sites.

Shelfari: I really like the layout of Shelfari: colorful and easy-to-read.  I also like having my books displayed on a shelf (which can be one of a few different types of wood), complete with the actually book art.  Every now and again, I will receive an alert for book recommendations from people who are not even my friends, but who want to know about a particular title on my shelf. 

Good Reads: The list of books I have read is displayed somewhat differently here, but it is not hard to find.  What I really like most about this site is the emphasis put on friends.  I am constantly aware of what my friends are reading and their book reviews.  I also like that their is a forum for creating lists: lists of worse books ever written, best children books, etc.  There is also a way to create a book discussion group.

I haven’t come close to using either site to their full range, but I plan on getting to that very soon.  Until then, I will continue reading and updating my two shelves.  Maybe I should create a list of best books about libraries.

(Online) Games People Play

Not many of you out there know this about me, but I love gaming.  I guess growing up with Atari kinda made me an addict.  This is how bad (not to me, though) it is…one day about a month ago, my fiance was playing the Xbox, my son was on the Gamecube, my daughter was playing games online, and I was on the PS2.  This is a normal occurrence! We just love gaming.  My kids never even have to ask if they can play; they just have to make sure they have done their chores and homework first.  Yeah, we’ve got it bad.  I really enjoy online games, because there is so much variety to choose from.  I usually go to Pogo Games or Yahoo! Games.  My sisters and I will chat with the Yahoo! Messenger, and play dominoes while catching up.  My daughter has a knack for finding games online; to be honest I don’t have enough patience to search.  So, I explored more online gaming sites using the Innovations Team’s suggestions.  JigZone is my favorite, because I loooove jigsaw puzzles.  It’s also cool that I can upload my own pics and create puzzles; of course, you have to a member to do that.  What I like most about the sites that I explored (JigZone, Free Arcade, Candystand) is that you don’t have to be a member to play and the games are free.  And free is  always good.  The fact that you don’t necessarily have to download games is also a plus.  The only thing I don’t really care for is all the ads, but that’s the price you pay for free games.

Mashups Are Smashing!

I am loving Flickr!  I think it’s great there are so many applications in which to use your personal photos.  I went hog wild on this one.  I used the Mosaic Maker, the Trip Planner from Yahoo!, the Flickr Color Pickr, and the FD Toys’ Trading Card Maker.  I didn’t really get the point of the Mosaic Maker; maybe I did something wrong, or maybe I just don’t mosaics, I don’t know.  The Trip Planner wasn’t to my liking either, because I haven’t really been anywhere.  I did, however, like the fact that you could use it to highlight places you would like to go.  The Flickr Color Pickr, I thought, was awesome!  All those colors to choose from; so many different shades of red!  I was in heaven.  (If you haven’t guessed, red is my favorite color.)  Although, I wasn’t quite sure what to do after seeing the different photos.  My absolute favorite is the Trading Card Maker.  I made one, and I have to say, I feel like a superhero now.  Who knew a simple digital picture and self-promotion could give me a whole new outlook? Big Huge Labs had quite a few photo applications to choose from.  At some point, I would like to create a jigsaw puzzle from a picture of my kids.  Or maybe I’ll use the Warholizer, though I sort of do that with my webcam.  The sky’s the limit with digital picture applications.

A Flickr of Excitement

As I have said in a previous post, most of the “newer” things I know about the internet I have learned from my daughter; well, from my sisters, too.  Remember, I’m old-fashioned.  Well, my daughter was the first person to introduce me to slide.com, which I use pretty often.  My older sister introduced me to Photobucekt, which I use often, and my younger sister introduced to me Picasa which I have never used.  As you may have guessed, I have never used Flickr.  I don’t have a reason to use Flickr; I don’t have a digital camera and I very rarely have a reason to borrow one from someone.  I’m not much of a picture person.  After exploring Flickr these past few days, I see why the site is so popular.  It’s amazing to me that people post pictures not only to show friends and family thier vacation pics, but also as a way of communicating with the world at large.  I wasn’t quite sure where to start, but wouldn’t you know, Flickr has a link for exploring the photostreams on the site.  I found a handy tool for finding pics called “geotagging”.  Simply type in a location, and you can find pictures about or of the location.  I typed in Hong Kong.  There were several pictures to choose from, but I chose one from a great photographer who goes by the name of Stuck in Customs.  From what I can gather, Stuck is a world-traveler, and he takes pictures of sunsets around the world.  He doesn’t do sunsets exclusively, but he has a fair amount of fans who love his sunset pics, so he posts quite a lot of them.  As a side note, Stuck takes great pictures, period.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00/953669278

I wanted to put the picture in my blog, but I couldn’t get it to work right.

I chose this picture because I have a thing for Hong Kong; I really want to visit some day.  This picture is quite breathtaking, in its beauty.  It looks almost surreal.  One person even commented on Stuck’s page that it looks like the trees and mountains are moving in on the city.  I love how the clouds seem almost ghostly. The lights of the city against the darkness of the sky….it’s remarkable.  This makes me want to visit Hong Kong even more.

Subscriptions, please.

Okay, at last press, I had subscribed to 26 feeds!  And I’m still hungry!  Innovations Team, I think you created a monster.  As of today, after a little fine-tuning, I subscribe to 32.  Of course, I haven’t exhausted all of the possibilities out there.  I’m sure with a few (free) moments to really think about it, I will find more things that pique my interest.  I did, however, find it hard to find feeds about libraries.  Well, I guess I should say, it was hard to find feeds that were not about a single library/library system.  I stumbled upon a couple of good ones, though.  There are some great feeds on our website(of course!) and I have subscribed to a couple.  The other one is about libraries in general.  It’s a weblog by Steven Cohen that I found on librarystuff.net.  Mr. Cohen writes for Information Today magazine and he posts his blogs about, you guessed it…all things library.  I don’t know about anybody else, but that kinda rocks to me.  Of course my other feeds are cool, too.  New music, new movies, new HK films(!), food and drink…gotta love it!  The only thing I don’t like about this is that there is so much information and it never leaves.  Does anyone know how to make the articles I’ve read go away?  Help!

Correction!  I just read Dewey the Decimal Smasher’s blog, and I now subscribe to A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette.  Thanks, Dewey!!

RSS…Feed ME!!!!

Let me preface this blog by saying that I will probably talk about my kids a lot in these blogs.  I can’t help it, they’re great!  Plus, they know their way around a computer, let me tell ya. 

Last August I attended a Web 2.0 presentation by the wonderfully informative Laura Solomon.  Needless to say, I walked away with a fair amount of basic knowledge and a thirst for more.  I learned about Library 2.0, podcasts (I even starred in one!), Second Life, and much more.  One of the great things I learned about that day was RSS Feeders.  I had wondered for a while what that strange orange block was at the top of my yahoo! homepage.  I even noticed that we had one on the library’s website.  I remember one day I clicked on it and was met with a load of mumble-jumble.  I was happy to find out from Laura that I had not broken the Internet, I just needed a special “reader” to view the information.  I learned about bloglines and how helpful it can be to people who like to be in the know.  After the presentation, I did my own research, scoping out bloglines and such.  I guess I wasn’t too impressed because I didn’t create an account.  Even then I could see the use for such a thing, I just didn’t think I needed to be that connected.  Well, Thing 5 has let me see the error of my ways.  I now have an RSS reader, through Google, though not bloglines.  It’s better this way; I don’t have to remember yet another password, since I can just sign in through my gmail account.  I have set up my reader, and I have subscribed to so many things.  Music, movies, games, food…I’m getting it all and in one great place!  I can’t wait to tell my daughter about it; maybe she can anime and manga news.  Gee, I sound like a commercial or something.  I love this!  It’s neat to have all that information right at my fingertips; even stuff I didn’t know I wanted!  Wait, maybe that’s a little crazy.  You tell me.

Tech-savvy? Not really.

Thank God for teenagers!  I honestly don’t know where I would be if I didn’t have a high-schooler at home.  She is constantly on the computer, showing me more new and wonderful things.  She’s the reason I have a myspace and a facebook.  She’s also the reason I have a playlist on both of them.  She introduced me to Slide, wikipedia, and blogthings.  Under her influence, I no longer use dictionaries or thesauri; I simply go to dictionary.com or m-w.com.  In short (no pun intended), I wouldn’t know about half of the 23 Things if it weren’t for my teen.  That being said, I have made it my mission to learn more about all of the things that have had such a profound effect on our lives and our world’s pop culture.  I took the Innovations Team’s advice and visited some of the sites listed for this entry.  I have to say, for the most part it was like reading Aramaic or something.  The blogs and news(?) on a few of those sites were definitely geared for a certain type of person.  Ahem, not me.  I did, however, find a few articles that peaked my interest:

• wired.com: I didn’t read too much, because of the spoiler alerts, but there was a blurb about the cool gadgets Batman uses in The Dark Knight and how “real-world” they are. 
• I also liked that wired didn’t blog about just gadgets and new technology; there were a couple newsworthy articles about the environment and such.
• makezine.com: Under projects, I found that someone had made a magnetic chess board to hang on their wall.  Why?  Because of the lack of space for any other type of chess board.  I think that’s a pretty cool idea.  I wonder if the inventor will make more to sell.

Well, I learned a few things from those sites; more than anything I learned that I’m just not that into technology.  Not that I don’t appreciate the progress that has been made thus far and what is still to come, but I’m the kind of person who likes to wait to make sure something actually works before hopping on the bandwagon.  I guess I’m kinda old-school that way.