You Tube, an old friend

So I'm in my last week at last! And me and youtube go way back, so I'm flying though this one. I was the one who had to sit my teenagers down (this was awhile ago) and say, "You need to know about this site." Of course, I've lived to regret that, since my 14 year old LIVES on youtube for her evening entertainment. She prefers it to TV, and I'm sure she's seen a lot of trash. But I will say that I've tried to search for kinky videos (NO, just testing as a MOM, not for my own cheap thrills!!!) and it won't let you watch them without registering. But man, it's great for those of us who always miss the "great" moments and need to be able to catch them later. And good for Virginia for making sure that PPLD has a presence there, too.

WEB 2.0 AWARDS - VERY COOL!

Ok I really, really liked this website! This is a keeper! This is the secret (!) place where all the best stuff we've been learning about is kept altogether! So I don't have clutter my brain with all this stuff! At first I looked at the first page of the website and my heart sank because I thought, "oh no... more stuff to wade through and figure out..." I think I was thinking it was a technorati-type site. But having all these cutting edge and BEST websites grouped together was awesome. I looked at bunches and it gave me a new travel website to use and all kinds of other fun stuff. I'll be back!!!

Experimenting

Experimenting with Zoho Writer...

 

Ok, so this is kinda fun.  You write a document and then invite your teammates to help you edit it?  Hmmmmmm....  This has potential for the never ending word smithing that happens on the Diversity Team.  It seems pretty user-friendly, although let's see if I can figure out how to share it. 

 

Hey, guess what?  I posted free old barbed wire fencing on Craigslist to whoever wanted to come to Monument to pick it up and within five minutes I had a response.  Beats going to the dump with it!  People justlive online, don't they?  Ok is this long enough??

 

 

Zoho Writer: for people who play well together....

Potential I guess, if you need to collaborate across distances...which PPLD does.... I played around with it, wrote a little ditty, even imported it to my blog (see above). It's not very pretty, in fact all my little smiley faces didn't transfer. I guess I would need to see how the "share" part works to really appreciate it. Sorry, this gets only a "C" in my grade book, but it is probably due to user-stupidity.

Google Labs, glad to know you!

So now we can actually see into the future and play with tools that Google-people think is cool! I checked out "Google Trends" and found it to have awesome potential. When you put in a search term it brings up a graph that shows how many people have searched that term over time (and/or the news articles that have been written?). It was a little hard to tell what the increments of the axis were, but when I searched "adoption" it gave me a graph that looked like a heart monitor which covered the last several years. You could narrow it to various countries or even states, but it wasn't always clear what the data was that I was looking at. Still, it has definite nifty potential. Glad to make it's acquaintance!

Interacting with our Library: the 2.0 Concept

Until we started this 23 Things I didn't even know what the 2.0 concept meant. Now we're trying to get our heads around whether the library should be more interactive in an electronic sense (the website and catalog, I'm thinking). Rick Anderson says in "Away from Icebergs" that his library circ stats are down,presumably because the information is available elsewhere and people don't need the "just in case" collection. We have not seen that here, and he overlooks the satisfaction many people get from browsing the collection and finding that unexpected item. But his next point is well taken: people should not need to be taught how to use our system to find information. We are at a point with technology that we should be able to provide a system that is easy and intuitive. Our catalog can't find what Amazon does in its sleep. And I think it would be cool to let patrons write, rate, and comment on the books they find in our catalog, as well as keep lists of what they've read and want to read. So I definitely think that our catalog has a long way to go to reach, even 1.1 status, let alone 2.0. But that's a Sirsi issue I think -- THEY are the ones holding us back, and I'm not sure there is any better software out there for libraries or we'd be first in line for it.

Technorati - BlogWorld Headquarters

Well, now I know where the Bloggers live! I always wondered where they hung out and what they did there. You can be assured that I will NOT live there, although I might visit there once in awhile. It really is another world, another planet, another universe even. I want to go back and spend a little more time there (when I'll manage it is anyone's guess). But all these blogs! All these people with opinions and why do we care? ....as I'm blogging... of course I don't know why anyone cares about what I think of Technorati either.