Had a bit of time to fiddle, so changed the look of my blog a little. The other blogs I have been reading looked a lot cooler than mine, so hopefully the changes will help. Made some new colour choices, moved things around a little bit and added a photo of myself. I am also pleased to introduce my first poll. Hope to get lots of votes. The results will be available next week. While I was fiddling, I got a few more ideas, so I hope to add more things soon. In the meantime, I'll be busy thinking of my next polling question. If you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Assignment # 3

Just did a tour of the Flickr site. Seems pretty straight forward. Uploaded a couple of images. No personal photos due to my paranoia of posting things on the internet. I can see how Flickr would be a neat way to sort and organize digital photos. I really like the fact that I can control the privacy levels. Not enough of a tech whiz to know if their different privacy settings really mean anything. (How skilled would someone have to be to hack in, even on the highest privacy setting? I know rationally that it is extremely unlikely that anyone out there really cares about my personal life enough to try to get information about me in this way, but hey, remember I'm the mystery reader and many a plot has been built around someone being careless with their personal information.)

The images I uploaded are done by the artist Mary Engelbreit. She does great work. Lots of prints to do with reading, family, pets and just life in general. She uses bright colours that really catch my eye and I just love looking at her work. Right now at the top of where I am typing, there is a bunch of character lines that mean nothing to me. They appeared right after I uploaded the image. Will be interested to see if the image actually shows up on the blog or if it is just these meaningless (to me!) characters. Just checked and there is the actually picture on the blog page! Yeah! I like how the image looks as part of the blog post and will likely select more to add to future posts.

Just checked out some mashup sites. Pretty funny. I like the Bart Simpson chalkboard one. My kids will get a kick out of that one. Another fun one that I know of is the jibjab site (www.jibjab.com). It is a site that has song videos poking fun at American politics and culture. There are a number of their songs that you can upload photos into so that you (or whomever you choose!) is in the video. Very funny.

I tried the 'add link' function to add a link to the jibjab site but all I got was:

Doesn't look like a link to me. Not sure what I did wrong. A line of characters shows up on my edit page but here on the blog it's just blank. Anyway, it's well worth the effort of getting to the site. Lots of fun stuff there.

Not exactly sure how all this would be useful to me at work. I can't imagine ever having time to actually do to it! Maybe a photo slide show of branch activities? I could envision myself doing a mystery reader blog, giving book reviews of the books i'm reading. Adding a photo of each book cover would be good for all the visual learners out there!

Assignment # 2

So, for assignment number 2, we get to create a blog. I feel so cool! Won't admit to the amount of time it took to decide upon my very uninteresting blog title and signature name.

I think what excites me most about this course is the chance to try out some of things that I've heard about. Blogging would be a good example. I know what it is. I know lots of people blog but I've never even read anyone's blog. I'm already thinking about how neat it would be to blog about the books I read. Titles, authors and a brief summary, including information like 'if you like this author, then try...' would be a neat way of recommending books to patrons.

I think the only thing that makes me nervous about this course is the not knowing exactly what I'm getting into. (That is just the way I am. I would prefer life to be predictable and organized, preferably a few weeks in advance. Haven't figured out how to get the universe to cooperate with me on that one!)

As I look at the course outline, there are a fair number of things on the list that I have never even heard of before. I don't know what an 'RRS' is. My only reference for 'tagging' is playing games with my kids. Only know what Flickr is because I looked it up yesterday after seeing it on the outline! Have heard of Facebook but never gone there. I have a basic knowledge of Wikis and have used Wikipedia quite often. I do know lots about Youtube because I have kids and they spend lots of time showing me all the funny, although sometime completely inappropriate, things that they find there!

Spent a little time adding info to my profile. Didn't use any specific information. Don't like the idea of putting anything that could actually identify myself out there into cyberspace. Maybe I read too many mystery novels but for now my profile will be vague.