Thing 47 - Evaluation

I tend to be doubtful of the use of things in my posts, but I do really appreciate the 23 Things and the More 23 Things programs, because they force me to actually use the things I read about in the professional literature and in discussions. It makes that someday into today. That's very helpful. Even if our library is not going to use something, I know exactly what it is that we're not going to use from personal experience. And if we do find a place to use these things, I have ideas on how to do it best.

Also, some Web 2.0 things like Facebook have their own time and place. A year ago, there weren't enough Century students using Facebook to make it worthwhile to have a library presence. Today, if our library weren't there, we'd look stupid and would miss out on a lot of good reputation.

Personally, I'll use the lunch finder, the music, possibly Lifestream, and many of the other tools.

I appreciate the time and effort it took to put together this round of 23 Things. Kudos!

Thing 46 - WebJunction Minnesota

I'm glad to see WebJunction featured in the Things. It seems to me that WebJunction Minnesota should be THE place for Minnesota librarians of all stripes. But to this point, it hasn't had enough participation by the types of librarians that would make it useful to me. Now that some of my fellow 23 Thingers are joining, it should be more useful.

I found that some of my friends on WebJunction had joined the Library 2.0 Interest Group, so I joined as well.

I've thought for a few years now that I would take a course or two in my copious amounts of free time. :-) Maybe this summer I'll actually do it now that I'm almost done with the More 23 Things.

Thing 45 - Cloud Computing

The cloud concept is interesting. I do wonder about the long term security of data stored on various proprietary services. After all, it's a pain to transfer my data stored on this computer to another computer, but supposed Google goes bankrupt tomorrow. Who gets my GoogleDocs? Where do they go?

At work, we're using Google calendar, which is an example of cloud computing. Calendar functions are normally run by software on the desktop. We can access our calendar anywhere, even from home when calling in sick. We even track room usage with it. It has been a useful way of sharing information, although it's not as customizable or reliable as we would prefer. As an example of the lack of reliability, we had accounts set up for all staff. Then one day, with no notification, Google combined one employee's gmail account with her work account. All her personal appointments now showed up in the work calendar. We didn't ask for them to be combined, there was no way to separate them, and of course, trying to contact Google for help is fairly futile. In the end, we deleted her work account and reinstated it, but it cost me half a day of troubleshooting. I suppose that software on the desktop could have had similar problems, but then I would have had technical support from IT and the software maker.

Incidents like these, which have happened in other cloud computing situations I've used, make me wonder. There's a lot of data, particularly financial information, that I wouldn't feel comfortable using on websites like Mint.

Thing 44 - The Economy

This is a very helpful Thing!

I checked out eRideShare. No carpools for where I need to go, but I will keep and eye on this and recommend it to others. GasBuddy is equally useful, although I wish a zip code search were available.

The pennypinching blogs aren't that interesting. Post after post about similar things. Believe it or not, I'd rather read hints like these in the print media, where at least an editor has had a stab at them.

I will let one of my colleagues know about the garage sale sites. She will be delighted! And I'm going to bookmark the coupon sites for personal use.

Thing 43 - Online TV and Video

My husband and I love Hulu. I did not know about Joost before doing this thing. Streaming seems to be the future of video media. I wonder how long cable will be around in it's present format.

Our TV at home is actually used as a monitor for a computer, which acts as our Tivo. We use Myth, a Linux based free program, to perform the functions of TV. Thus, when we want to view something on Hulu, we just browse to what we want and make it full screen on our TV. Sometimes it's a little jerky, but it's not bad. The main problem with this setup is that many DVDs will not play on a Linux computer, so we have to have a separate DVD player.

I'm forseeing in the future that libraries will subscribe to services that stream movies and other media and will not have collections. I will be glad, because there will be no more obsolete equipment for obsolete formats.

Thing 42 - Music 2.0

I signed up for Pandora and Last.fm. I find neither intuitive. There are too many options, and when I want to go back or do something again, it seems really hard to figure out. I never know quite where I am or what I'm supposed to be doing, and I had a lot of trouble adding tracks. I kept adding tracks, but they never showed up.

That said, I find these personal radio stations interesting. I did like most of the music they pointed me to.

One thing about the social aspects of these sites and Lifestream and Friendfeed: Unless your friends are also on these sites, they are not very interesting to continue to use. The 23 Things is nice in that way, because I know other librarians who have joined so I can "share" with them.

I don't really see how these music sites relate to libraries, but I may use them personally in the future.

Thing 41 - Mashup Your Life

I signed up for Lifestream. This service makes sense to me, because I post on Twitter when I'm on there for something else, and I also post on Facebook occasionally. My posts rarely overlap in content, so it makes sense to aggregate them somewhere. I also added Delicious to the services I follow. I don't know that a lot of my friends or colleagues are using this service, though. Until it reaches a critical mass of people I know who use it, it's not really helpful to anyone but me.

I added the badge to the sidebar of my Blogger page. I finally had time to figure out how to do this. I think Blogger could make adding javascript a bit more easy.

It will be interesting to see what other people think when they hit this Thing.

Thing 40 - Mashup the Web

I thought the Crime Reports looked interesting, but I was unable to find a city that actually worked until I tried Chicago. I used to work in the Loop, so that was mildly intriguing, but my own neighborhood would have interested me more.

Using Walk Score, my neighborhood scored 83, which is not surprising since one of the reasons we bought a house where we did was the ability to walk to a library, movie theater, grocery store, and lots of restaurants. My parents' old neighborhood scored 78. I guess our family goes for walking. In contrast, my inlaws' house scored 5, which just goes to show that it really is in the middle of nowhere. The small town of 300 where my grandparents lived scored well. I like this mashup!

The Wheel of Lunch was a fun idea, but I don't know how useful it is. Maybe it would be helpful in an office that commonly goes out for lunch but has trouble deciding where to go? I liked Lunchbox as well, although I would have liked to be able to move the map around. The links to reviews were helpful.

Interestingness sure has some beautiful photos. Wish I could take photos that were as good!

Ping.fm looks like the most useful site of the bunch. With Twitter and Facebook, it sure would be nice to update one and update the other at the same time. I've already got our library blog feeding into Twitter via another service. It's good to know that there is more than one option for doing this, since I expect several companies like this to be out of business during the recession.

I searched for mashups and St. Paul and came up with CheaperDrinker: Your Happy Hour Finder. Perhaps this could be useful if I weren't cooking dinner for three other people during every happy hour. Sigh.

I made a Phreeting from Door County. I didn't see a way to embed this, just a link.

Thing 39 - Digital Storytelling

I used VoiceThread. In the examples, the Higher Ed from Della Curtis dealt with information literacy in a way I found intriguing. However, I'm not sure it was a lot more compelling than dealing with this via video or blog. In fact, I often would rather read the comments in linear fashion rather than have this comic book approach. It's easier to find the relevant information and faster, too. But maybe visual learners would find this non-linear approach helpful. I just find it interesting, but slow and annoying. And I find myself hoping it doesn't spread!




Although I would not like a world where the information is presented only in this way, I could see using this as our virtual library tour. (She said grudgingly...)

Thing 38 - Screencasting

I saw screencasts at the Midwest Library Technology conference back in March. At our library, we used Jing to create a library orientation screencast from a Powerpoint. It was tough to get the sound recorded well, and I think it still sounds and looks kind of amateurish. But it compares favorably with other screencasts I've seen from libraries, so what the heck?

Thing 37 - Photo Tales

Ok, this started out as totally frustrating. I had an account last time I was working on the 23 Things as rmadisen. But now, you have to login with your Yahoo ID. I was able to do that, but I can't connect it to the rmadisen account, and I have no idea how to access that account. Sigh. What a pain! Now I've emailed their help to merge the two accounts. How long will that take to resolve?

Days later, I finally have access to my Flickr account. Sigh.

Instead of creating a story, I created a library tour for our library on Flickr and embedded it. Disappointly, the text seems to have vanished. I'll include a link to the tour as well, since that includes the text, although it looks like you have to click on "Show info" to get the text.




I'm going to create a Flickr account for our library, take some more pictures, and post the slide show on our website as a virtual tour, although the lack of text thing is really annoying. Despite that, this was a useful Thing.

Thing 36. Comic Relief: Generate Some Fun

I found this 'toon in Stripgenerator that struck me as funny:



lisabquinn 2009/03/03/ Librarians in the Times

I'm not posting my cartoon. Way, way, way too unfunny!

Then I used Acme Label Maker to make this:




I like the Label Maker. It's nice to preview things before using them, and it sure is easier to use than Photoshop.

I made a magazine cover:


The PDF generators are totally useful, although the newest version of Word allows you to save as PDF. Ditto for the image converters and the citation generators.

The main problem with things like these is finding a good one at the time you need it.

Thing 35 - Books 2.0

I tried What Should I Read Next? I entered my all-time favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, and got back pretty useless results like Dakota: a Spiritual Geography. The reason I like to try sites like this with The Phantom Tollbooth is that it doesn't fit into usual catagories and there are no other books that I know of that are like it. Still, these results aren't very satisfactory. When I try something obvious, like the Warriors series by Erin Hunter, I get great results. Still, for an easily classifiable series like that, I could have figured out what to read next by myself!

I looked at BookGlutton, Overbooked, and BookSprouts. I can see recommending these sites to book clubs.

Librivox is an intriguing idea. We are going to add downloadable audiobooks to our library in the near future. Downloadable seems to be the best format for these, because otherwise the technology constantly changes.

Swaptree is too much work. There's a Half Price Books two blocks from our house, while I would have to drive to mail something. No contest.

BookBrowse is the most intriguing site so far. I like the options, the ability to sort the results, and the results seem to present good choices.

The children's sites are well done. I wish some of these had been available when I had younger children.

I looked at the Facebook apps, but they are just not compelling. I read in the evenings for fun, and I mostly read historical fiction and bubblegum for the mind. Bad scifi, the latest book my kids are reading. I don't read "literature". So I don't really want my reading choices out on my Facebook page where my college president can see that I'm reading Ender's Game or the Ranger's Apprentice series because that's what we happened to borrow from our public library this week. With these social apps, you really have to remember who your audience is and be careful what you share.

These book apps are interesting, but nothing listed here beats LibraryThing. I'm hoping our catalog will become more interactive and more like LibraryThing, which actually makes good recommendations for books that are like the one you are currently reading through the use of tagging.

Thing 34 - Is this Our Competition? Online Answer Sites

Interestingly, I came across WikiAnswers earlier this week when I was trying to find something out for myself using Google. I can't remember what I was looking for, only that the answer on WikiAnswers was obviously wrong. I tried looking for the answer to "How do you remove melted crayons from clothing?" That's a question I have long experience with, my son having sent a blue sparkly crayon through the library. WikiAnswers came up with using wax paper and an iron to remove the crayon, but I know from experience that WD40 works much better. I looked at laundry as a subject and noted that most of their questions still need answers. Maybe this will be like Wikipedia if it takes off, but today I don't find it very helpful.

I had a similar experience with YahooAnswers. Wrong answers, like "You can't remove it". Too many answers to be useful. I think these sites can be helpful, but for this particular question, it's not working well.

People use these sites for the same reason I use them. They may know about other resources like the library, but the effort required to search for terms in an anonymous database is less than that required to ask a stranger for help. Unless you're an extreme extrovert, interacting with strangers requires an effort. As they evolve, these sites have the potential to become a good reference source, although they would need to clean up the wrong answers and redundencies.

I don't know that Slam the Boards is all that interesting. It makes a nice volunteer activity, but are we librarians who are getting paid to provide service or volunteers sharing expertise? Architects are another set of undervalued professionals, where everyone and his brother thinks that they can just use CAD software to draw plans. Should architects search out opportunities to give their services away on the weekends to show how valuable they are? The value comes in intangibles like the fact that living spaces designed by an architect can feel more comfortable and are more usable. Answers from a librarian are hopefully more likely to be correct and provided more efficiently. But that's intangible, too. I don't really know what I'm getting at here, but Slam the Boards just doesn't make sense to me.

Thing 33 - Travel 2.0

Travel 2.0 makes sense. The blogs aren't that interesting unless they are about a trip to a place you happen to be going. But the reviews from sites like TripAdvisor are invaluable. I particularly like that their reviews get into traveling group and age range, since I definitely have different travel needs now than I did when I was 20.

Sites like Vcarious seem aimed at trips that go overseas or to major destinations. Milwaukee or other midwestern destinations are just not very useful. Gotta have some money and time in order to need sites like this.

I looked at several of the mashups. Again, a bit of disappointment. Green Routes doesn't do much for most routes in terms of food, which would be my biggest area of interest. And the FastFoodmaps doesn't include Subway, Culvers, or Arbys. Bummer. We'll be taking a trip this summer out east, so I'll try TripTouch from the award winning mashups. But in general, things like this are not worth the time they take.

We have an AAA membership, and their site has really great maps and routing. I would heartily recommend a AAA membership to everyone, if only for their roadside assistance.

Some of these sites might be useful for our library patrons. I can see recommending TripAdvisor or other review sites.

Thing 32 Google Maps and Mashups

I created a map of my commuting route with start and end points, but it would not let me draw a line. It said, "Click to draw line", but when I clicked, I got the hand that moved the map. Was it Firefox? Was it because the moon is full? Do I need to reboot my computer? Like Aleph, the ways of Google apps are sometimes mysterious.

I'm trying desperately to think of a use for this at our library, but the only thing I can think of is to link photos to our location. Not particularly inspiring.

In general, I think the best mashups are those you can use when you travel, or that public agencies like the police can use to show where particular types of crime are happening. I've seen some cool mashups, but can't really think what need I would fulfill by creating one.

Thing 31 - More Twitter

I added myself and our library to the Tweeter Directory. The directions were not very helpful.
For the "Available tags" thing, you have to know HTML, which I do, but then you have to know what you write is going to be taken as HTML code or as written, and it doesn't tell you which. I hope it all displays properly, but at least today, nothing has shown up yet. Hmmm.

I used Twitterfeed to automatically post our library's blog postings to Twitter. Now this, I find an utter efficiency. More people seem to use Twitter than understand how to subscribe to RSS. So by making our blog posts go to Twitter, we only have to maintain our blog. So cool!

I added BeTwittered to my iGoogle page. That page is really getting crowded. I'll see how it goes. I also added a Twitter widget to display my Twitter posts on my blog. That should be interesting.

On the stages of Twitter, I guess the Twitterfeed means that professionally, I'm at the Dumping stage, although really I'm personally at the Presence stage. We'll see what develops.

I think Twitter is the next Facebook. For some families, it may replace weekly telephone calls. For some ex-college roommates, it may replace reunions. We'll see.

Thing 30 - More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I've used Bloglines for a long time, but since I use Google calendar and have an iGoogle page, I thought it would be interesting to check out Google reader. I'm curious about the feature where you see just the most recent updates from all your subscriptions at once, and I think it would be interesting to run these through my iGoogle page. So I created an OPML file. Everything seems to be working.

I created a Twitter account for our library, then used RSS to Twitter to feed the library's Blogger RSS feed into our Twitter. It's too soon to tell if it's working, but if it does, it will be cool! Talk about efficiency: I'll be using our blog to update both Twitter and our web page news if everything works.

Using Delicious, I added some people to my network, but then I deleted them. The network thing just seems like total information overload to me. My Delicious bookmarks include things like my kids' school and our church. Why would I want those things from other people? Subscribing to tags seems a bit more reasonable. I subscribed to a couple of tags.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to add the code for the button or badge to this blog. I tried sticking it in the HTML in several places, but it did not accept it. It's not a widget that I can add, and it's not listed in any of the widgets for Blogger. What the heck? Ditto for the tagroll. I give up. It's just not worth my time.

Thing 29 - Google Tools

I looked at Google News from the first category. I customized a news page with my zip code and recommended stories, although I would have to use this regularly for the recommendations to be populated and useful. I also added it to my iGoogle page. Then I searched my grandfather in the archives. I remember when the archives first came out and articles were free. That was pretty cool, and I should have printed out what I found then.

In the second category, I played with the calendar. I'm actually familiar with the calendar because we use it for work. We have set up a shared vacation calendar, a sick time calendar, a general calendar, and calendars for each room we schedule. Everyone has read access to these calendars, and certain people can write to them. It certainly facilitates the scheduling of vacations and meetings.

I keep my own calendar on Google as well, synching with both Outlook and my PDA. (I use GooSync for my PDA.) I have to keep Outlook up to date so people outside the library in our institution can schedule meetings with me, and my PDA allows me access to my calendar when I'm away from my desk. The whole system is working fairly well right now, although sometimes the synching fails miserably. I want a PDA with wireless that would let me just use Google calendar.

Thing 28 - Customized Home Pages

I embellished an iGoogle page with my Google calendar, my Delicious bookmarks, the weather, and a Spanish Word a Day. It was pretty easy. I hope the Google calendar continues to work. I know other people who use it in a iGoogle page, and it frequently has to be deleted and readded because the application is very buggy.

As far as using this for the library, it might be interesting. We are currently using Google calendar to keep track of staff meetings, sick time, vacation time, and also for scheduling our conference rooms in the library, and lots of staff keep that open all the time. I don't know that it would display enough information as a widget to be useful. But it's something to think about.

Thing 27 - Twitter

I actually joined Twitter last fall when I needed a screen shot for a class I was teaching. I haven't REALLY used it. Today, I found two people to follow, then tried to upload my picture. I failed miserably. It appeared to load, but never showed up, and now it won't let me try again. Gotta love technology!

Did you know that placing a Twitter badge on your blog or Facebook page requires your updates to be public? That will keep me from doing Number 6. I really don't want the whole world to know when I'm about to drive home from work. Maybe I just have a way smaller ego than most people, but I really don't understand why anyone besides family and close friends would want to follow my every thought and move in 140 characters or less. I think these constant updates are a bit silly. Facebook lets people know what you're doing on a broader time scale, and that I can understand. It's more like the news you would put in a letter to Grandma, if anyone actually still wrote letters. As for Twitter, the only people who would be interested in constantly knowing what I'm doing are my family. Or maybe someone for whom I'm late in providing a ride, but then why don't I just get there sooner rather than take the time to Twitter that I'm late?

I see that the Hibbing Library is trying to post every day, but our library just doesn't have THAT much going on. Facebook would be more our speed. On the other hand, if the critical mass moves to Twitter rather than Facebook, I suppose we'll have to be on Twitter. I wish there were some logic to where the critical mass moves.

Thing 26 - Join the 23 Things Ning

I joined the 23 Things Ning the first time around and haven't used it much since. This time, I joined two groups, MNSCU libraries and CALCO. I suppose I really don't belong in the CALCO group anymore, but it's fun to see what they are doing even though I no longer work in a Capitol Area Library. I added to the discussion, and I also left comments for another member.

I haven't found the 23 Things Ning all that useful, but it's more useful now than it was a year ago when I did the original 23 Things because it has almost a critical mass of people who belong. I don't understand what determines which things become popular and useful. For example, Minnesota WebJunction seems to me to be the place that all Minnesota librarians should be, but very few librarians that I know use it enough to make it worthwhile for me to check it frequently. The people running it promote it frequently, but it just hasn't taken off. Why?

Thing 25 - Blogger's Toolkit

This is an interesting thing. I'm trying to use Site Meter to add a counter to my blog, but I haven't received the email yet. I'm definitely going to add one to our library blog, and probably also to our family blog that I post to for the grandparents. Then I can see if anyone is actually reading these things.

In the meantime, I used Typealyzer and it said this blog is an ESTP - the Doers. That's funny, because I always come up as an I in Meyers-Briggs. I wonder if all blogs come up as E, just because a blog is such an E thing to do and it forces us I's to act like an E.

I resized this photo of our computer classroom. That's a nice feature, because Blogger is not at all nice about the placement of photos, even if you edit the HTML.


I put a Vozme MP3 on my sidebar. I'm not quite sure what the best use is for this. All it does is read the text you put in in a very computerish voice with no inflection. Hmmm.

Thing 24 - Refresh Your Blog

It was fun to check out the new gadgets and create a new avatar for the blog. I have a couple of other blogs, including one for our library, and I may refresh them as well. I find that our family blog is a great way to keep grandparents updated on our kids, since I can post photos and even movies, and I only have to do it once for both sides of the family.

Our library blog is a useful way to post new things we've purchased, highlight new displays, and post photos of events in the library. I really wish we had a counter, though, so we would know how many visitors we have. I've looked at counter gadgets, but they all seem way too complicated. Of course, maybe they have gotten simpler since I last looked.

Along those lines, last year, we created a blog for the MN SLA Chapter, but we had to use the Typepad software hosted by SLA. That software is WAY less user friendly than Blogger. Then we wanted to feed the blog into the chapter web page. Last year about this time, we could not figure out how to do it. Last night, we tried again and found a number of sites that produced code to do it. We ended up with three possible options that we could use. The technology seems to just get more and more accessible.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you can't figure something out now, set it aside for a while and go back to it. It may have gotten easier.