Assignment # 6

Whew! What a week. Had a kid-related mini-crisis this week that took up a lot of time. Certainly not a major problem in the grand scheme of the universe but in my tiny corner of the world, enough to stress me out for a few days. Don't you find that even tiny problems can really bug you? OK, enough. Let me try to focus.

Del.icio.us & Technorati. Signed up on both sites. They took the same user name - yeah! Spent some time exploring. Found Del.icio.us easier overall to navigate. Can't help but feel like I don't really get it this week. Not sure how these sites would benefit me in my daily life or work. Why are these better than a google search? I realize that you get comments from others and it is easy to see what links are most popular but that doesn't necessarily give them more credibility for me. I think I need to explore further.

Will watch my classmates' entries with interest this week. Hopefully someone will be super keen on one of these sites and be able to explain to me why it is useful.

My second poll closed. A clear majority of those polled prefer peanut M&Ms. Yum. This topic gave me the munchies. My new question has nothing to do with food.

In honour of the federal election, here are some quotes:

'Vote early and vote often.' - Al Capone

'A vote is like a rifle: it's usefulness depends upon the character of the individual.' - Theodore Roosevelt

(advice to students)'All you need to do is to show up with some official looking mail with your address on it, your student card and your ID. And not your fake ID either, your real one.' - Rick Mercer

Democracy only works when people show up at the polls.
Take the time to vote today. No excuses.

Assignment # 5

Had a lot of fun playing with Library Thing. What a neat website. Sign up process was extremely easy. Quickly added a bunch of books to my list. Not sure that I will keep this up though. I have a good system in place for keeping track of the books I've read on (gasp) paper. In all likelihood, I will continue with my established system for the simple reason that it's quicker and will leave me more time to read. I do plan to spend more time on Library Thing checking out some book reviews.

Now for Facebook. Believe it or not, I had never been on Facebook before. (Perhaps the last human being to venture there?) I have promised myself that I will become a member when one of my kids signs up, so I can keep an eye on them. Had a look at the Green page. Was interesting to read but in my humble opinion it seemed like very few posts actually had anything worthwhile to say. Lots of whining, complaining, swearing, bad grammer and spelling - all things I would like to see less of in the world. From what I have seen this week on Facebook, I don't really think that the library would benefit from having a page there.

The results of my first poll are in. In an even split, it was 50% admitting to liking online polls and 50% claiming to dislike them. My next question is even more exciting, if that is possible. The poll is now open so make your opinion known.

Assignment # 4

Was glad to discover what that little orange box with the curvy lines in it is all about. Had seen the symbol but didn't know what it was for. Find the idea of RSS feeds to be intriguing. Parking sites relevant to me so that I can view them all from one place seems like an efficient way to manage one's quest for knowledge. Had some difficulty getting onto bloglines. The first day I tried, I couldn't get on the site at all (tried on and off for about 2 hours). The next time, I was able to get on the site but it repeatedly froze on the 'sign up now' process (again, this was over a period of more than an hour). Found it quite frustrating. Third time was the charm. Set up an account, subscribed to a bunch of feeds. Once I was actually in the site, it was very easy to understand and to use.

With my frustrating introduction to bloglines in mind, I took a bit of time to make changes to my yahoo homepage. I have customized it and added some rss feeds. For me, this is even more efficient than using bloglines. I check my email account numerous times during the day and while I am doing that, I can scan the feeds that I have selected.

Not exactly sure if RSS feeds would be a helpful tool at the library. Perhaps selecting some feeds for the public computers but I think that generally the patrons using those computers have a specific task or web destination in mind. Seeing as a patron's time is often limited to 30 minutes, that's not much time to read the feeds that we have selected for them and then do whatever it is they actually set out to do.

I added a feed from the 'unshelved' comic to the bottom of my blog. This is a comic strip that takes place in a library. Makes me laugh. Was thinking the feed would display the actual comic but it appears as a link. Hope I did it right. If you like the comic, you can also sign up to have it emailed to you daily. Or, feed it into your blog. Enjoy.

Not much time left for my poll. It's too close to call at this point, so if you haven't voted yet, get to it!

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!