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.