Thing #19

Thing 19 was to look at an award page of Web 2.0 tools, http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0 This one was frightfully fascinating!  Most of the pages had intriguing links.

From Squidoo, I went to a page, a “lens” with everything you could possibly ever want to know about Michelangelo’s David.

Ning had the successor to Brotherhood2.0, the Nerdfighter site.

There was a social networking site for young people called Imbee.com.

There are sites that do feed management, photos, travel… so much.  It looks like a good place to go the next time I want to find something cool on the web.

Shelves made from Books! Too Delightful!

Okay, from a Library list, I just discovered the website www.thisintothat.com.

Click on “Gallery” and then go to “Funniest Shelves.”  Or use this link:  http://www.thisintothat.com/gallery/funniest.html

This artist makes bookshelves–from books!  The titles are part of the fun.  The first “funny” one has a shelf made with “Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty” supported by “All the King’s Men” and “Anatomy of a Murder”–with an eggbeater through it.

This does seem to be a good use for old books that have outlived their traditional usefulness.  He has an entire bookshelf built with an outdated Encyclopedia Britannica set.  I wish I had discovered this site a few weeks ago, when I was still taking Collection Development class.  I would have offered this as a solution for what to do with weeded books!

I did get a pang when I saw a shelf with a carpentry theme.  One of the books, Sawdust in His Shoes, was a children’s book that I loved when I was a kid.  It’s about a circus performer kid who has to leave the circus and can’t stand it–he ends up finding his way back to the circus.  I had forgotten all about that book, but I read it so many times.  I can think of quotations from it even as I write this.  Hmm.  I will get the author off of the picture and see if I can find a used copy.  Or maybe I should buy the shelf!

Thing 18: Zoho Writer

I’m writing this post using Zoho writer.Since I have Microsoft Office on my home computer — I got a discounted program through work — I doubt I will use this a lot.  However, if I should get a new computer and need to upgrade — or if I had heard about this before I got Microsoft office — Zoho looks like a wonderful alternative.

And I do like the idea of having the documents be web-based.  You can access them from anywhere.  This would have been nice for some of my class projects in online classes.  You can give other users the ability to edit.

So–I’m happy to learn about Zoho writer (and other Zoho products) and will keep my eye on it.

Thing 17: PBWiki

On Monday, during Storytime, I read The Cat in the Hat.  So now, talking about the 23 Things of this Learning 2.0 program makes me think of Thing 1 and Thing 2!

PBWiki is great.  In my Resources for Youth class, we used PBWiki to do our group project and make a website of resources for young adults.  It’s nice when all group members can edit the same site.

I wasn’t as impressed with the Learning 2.0 PBwiki, because it’s fairly unorganized and full of clutter.  Maybe someone being in charge to keep things looking alike would help.  Still, it’s an easy way to have lots of people contributing to a finished product.

My co-worker, who started a month later than me, has finished her 23 things.  I need to get busy!  I just finished my Master’s coursework, so now why don’t I finish this up!

Thing 16: Wikis

For Thing #16, we’re supposed to learn about wikis and explore some.

My 13-year-old son, a few years ago, was the one who introduced me to wikipedia.  He loves to have his browser access a random article and read it.  He’ll look at wikipedia to research something specific, and then get snagged into reading about something else.  Since that was a reason people would give for having an encyclopedia set in the home, it seems like a good thing!

Although I do remind him to take Wikipedia information with a grain of salt, I’ve been reminded that the venerable Oxford English Dictionary started life as a wiki.  But compiling the little slips of paper that people used to present definitions of words was a much more tedious process than today’s internet!

We used PBwiki in my Resources for Youth class in order to create a group website.  It was much simpler than what the other groups were using.

Wikis are perfect when you want to have lots of people contributing to a website, and a wonderful way to do a group project.

Thing #15

I’m back to LCPL’s 23 Things program.  Thing #15 is just to read some articles about Library 2.0 and comment on them in your blog.  (That’s what I’m doing!)

I see the lipservice to 23 Things in the official program.  However, I don’t see the library carrying it out.  They’ve set up some things on the official website, but I would like those of us out meeting the public to be encouraged to post about our reading on a blog, or maybe to be able to tag books in our library catalog.

Taking a grad class in Content Representation while looking at Web 2.0 tools is fascinating.  Content Representation talks about metadata–how do we organize information about information?  Tagging is a form of metadata, but on the web in general it’s very nonstandard.  So it’s interesting to see these new tools interacting with libraries, and to think of the possibilities with that interaction.

Meanwhile, I’m making a blog form of my book reviews website, so I can now get comments, and interact more with other people about the books.

A friend of mine talks about limiting her son’s “Screen Time.”  But I think that calling computer time “Screen Time” fails to appreciate that a computer is much, much more than a TV.  Nowadays, computers are about social interaction, about contributing–and getting a response back, about connecting to other people.

And that’s exciting.

Thing #14

The 14th “Thing” in our library’s program to do 23 Web 2.0 activities is to explore www.technorati.com.  It’s a site where you can search blogs.

I had some fun with it, searching for my own posts.  I did not find the Great Falls post I posted most recently, but I did find my goodreads post.  It was fun to look for authors I have recently quoted on Sonderquotes and find other people quoting the same authors.

Then I looked up a title of a book I just checked out, Keturah and Lord Death.  It came highly recommended on the YALSA-Book Listserv, and I thought it would be interesting to find bloggers reading YA literature.

Sure enough, I really like the sound of one of the first blogs I looked at–“Jane on Books,” (http://janeonbooks.edublogs.org/)  with the subtitle–“I Love Kids’ Books.”  I’m going to have to start following that blog….

But wait, there’s more!

The Librarian Soul: http://sonjjjah.wordpress.com/

Talking Teen Books: http://talkingteenbooks.blogspot.com/

Everything Under the Sun: http://everythingunderthesun-booklady.blogspot.com/

The Book Blog: http://anderson8th.blogspot.com/

Book Trail: http://booktrail.blogspot.com/

Pell Mel:  http://melindamorley.com/blog/

So Many Books, So Little Time: http://tannergirl.livejournal.com/

Liz’s Book Buzz: http://lizsbookbuzz.blogspot.com/

Wow!  I was only getting started!  I think I like this method of finding blogs I will enjoy following.  Probably too much.  It’s not like I need more blogs to follow!  But I did want to add to the Blogroll on my site, and I think I’ve hit on a good method.

Oh, by the way, everyone enjoyed the book!

Better than LibraryThing?

I just found another site for cataloging your books–www.goodreads.com.  It is positioned as social networking for readers.

It seems very similar to LibraryThing.com.  However–and this is a big however–it doesn’t seem to charge you after you’ve entered 200 books.  It does allow you to post reviews and rate your books and all that good stuff.

I’m curious–Do people out there have an opinion on www.goodreads.com as opposed to www.librarything.com?  I’m thinking perhaps I should make a goodreads account and post my reviews to that site as well…  But I will probably only go with one of those two sites, and I already know of a few friends who use librarything.  What do you all think?

Thing #13

Our 13th of 23 Things for my library’s “Learning 2.0” program is to explore http://del.icio.us and tagging.

However, they didn’t want us to install del.icio.us buttons on our work computers, so it seemed to me that kind of defeated the purpose.  The idea is to tag your bookmarks–the more easily to find them later.  I’ll have to try it on my computer at home.  I do like the idea.

I was interested in the articles I read about tagging.  Especially so because next week, I’m starting a graduate class called “Content Representation.”  It’s about indexing.  I’ve already started doing a little bit of the reading.  It seems to me that tagging on websites is like a grand indexing project done by laypeople.  You won’t have standard terms used, but the sheer power of hundreds of thousands of people doing it will create some useful links.

It’s going to be interesting to see if my Content Representation class talks about how wildly popular tagging has become.

One of the articles–I can’t seem to find it now–said that the strength of Google’s gmail is that they allow you to tag e-mails rather than assign them to only one folder.

When an item can only be in one folder, that’s hierarchal organization.  But with tags, you don’t have to stick to a hierarchy.  You can assign multiple tags to each file.

I’m loving this aspect of tags with my book reviews.  I still have my main site, www.sonderbooks.com, organized in a hierarchy.  I have reviews divided into groups:  Nonfiction, Fiction, Teen Fiction, Children’s Fiction, Children’s Nonfiction, and Picture Books.  Within those categories, I have the books divided by genre.  But I can only put each book into one genre.  What do I do with the Thursday Next books, which are part Science Fiction, part Fantasy, part Humor, part Mystery, and part Literary Farce?  I think I chose Science Fiction, but it was a tough choice.

Enter tags.  Now I have a blog alongside my site, at www.sonderbooks.com/blog/.  In the blog, I post the reviews as well–but now I can tag them according to multiple characteristics.  Lovely!

Thing # 12

Okay, I just did the 12th “Thing” for my work’s 23 Things program:  Create your own Search Roll.

I made two.  One searches yarn shops.  After all, if there’s a specific yarn I’m looking for, I like to see who has it (or the equivalent) for the lowest price.  That’s at: 

http://rollyo.com/sondysue/my_yarn_shops/
I also did a search for several blogs that cover children’s books.  That search roll is: http://rollyo.com/sondysue/my_childrens_lit_blogs/

Could be useful, but usually I’ll just search the sites individually….