Thing 47: Evaluation

Well, I have finished the More things on a Stick. I have to say that I liked the first round of 23 things on a stick a bit better than this addition. I think that I learned more on the first go but maybe that's because it was all new and this round was more of just additional points and features. There was a lot of things in this round that just didn't really apply to the library setting and I saw them as more of waste of time or something that I would do in my personal time not necessarily for work or on work time. I did, however, really like the economy thing. I think that this was very helpful in the current state of the economy and of my own life. I think that for personal reasons (I am getting married this weekend) I have had other things on my mind and have not really given some of the things my all. I have been in a hurry to finish towards the end and have been kinda doing the bare minimum to get it done. The ending definitely snuck up on me this time. I think that last time, I was a bit more excited and was very interested to do all of the things. This time, I forgot about it for awhile, or got sidetracked and I think that this may have slowed my determination and motivation. Overall, I think that this is an excellent program and its great to get the word out about new things on the internet and the new things that our patrons are interested in. It keeps us on top of things and better equipped to deal with any problems or questions that may arise.

Thing 46: WebJunction Minnesota

The feature that I liked best about MN Webjunction was the everything under the Library Services tab. There were so many interesting and helpful hints and tips that can be implemented into our services here at our library. I especially liked the pieces on Adult Programming and how to do it on a low budget as well as the 25 more ways to serve older adults piece. Its quite easy to find information on how to create programming and get children into the door of the library but not nearly enough information on how to do the same for adults out there. At our library, we have been trying to create programming and incentives to get adults into the library and reading. Not all of them have been successful. I think that with the tips that were given in the materials found on webjunction, we could create something to draw them in and get them to keep coming back.
I am in the Certification Program and wouldn't mind seeing more information pertaining to the program or at least promoting the program. I think that its a great resource that is largely underused in our communities. I liked the information that was given in the different tabs on webjunction. They would help a lot with the homework that has to be done but I wouldn't mind seeing a Certification Program tab or just something about it on the website.

Thing 45: Cloud Computing

I can see the point and why there is a need for such a service on the internet. It is a lot to carry one's own personal computer around with them and it is not always convenient to carry a flash drive or we don't always carry one with us. I could also see why it would not be beneficial. The internet is not the greatest and safest place to store your information. We all know that the internet may not always be working so to rely on that to store and safeguard your information isn't the smartest route. I personally do not really do any computing in "the cloud" other than emails and such. I do rely heavily on those to store important documents or information that I may need in an email. This for me is a "safe" place to keep it but I wouldn't be completely lost if this information were to disappear or if I were not able to access the internet to get it. I think that I would feel differently about this whole "cloud" thing if I were in school or in a setting that I would produce and need to handle a large number of documents or projects. I think that these applications definitely make sense for working on a group or collaborated projects.
I looked at the desktoptwo and the glidedigital websites. They looked cool but I was trying to find out more about them without having to sign up for their service. I would have liked a video or a tutorial on them to see what they offer.
I could see this thing as being a benefit to some people. I don't really see its benefit for the library or for myself.

Thing 44: The Economy

I LOVED this thing. It was great to see something that is very useful in our everyday lives and those of our patrons. I am getting married next week and we would like to buy a house this year. We are trying everything that we can to save money and to get rid of our debt. There were some great tips on the 75 frugal things website and I have been looking for a good coupon website for a long time now. I remember that there seemed to be more coupons available in the Sunday paper than there are now. I used to sit down with my brothers and we would clip coupons for an hour every week. I am glad to see the promotion of growing your own vegetables as well. If we get a house this year, I will be out there next summer with enough vegetables to feed a small army. I was very interested in the cashcrate.com and the potential for extra income that it promises. I liked the websites and videos explaining the financial crisis that we are in, there are too many people on the news blaming everyone else that I was never entirely positive on what actually happened. There isn't necessarily a website that I would like to share, but more of an idea. I think that along the Farmer's Market line, more people should invest in Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA). They offer a ton of local fruits and vegetables to their members throughout the summer at a VERY reasonable price. One near you can be found at localharvest.org. You can also find pick-your-own places on this website wher you can save some money and have some cheap entertainment doing so.

Thing 43: Online TV and Video

I have already been a huge fan of Hulu before this thing. I think that it is a great resource and it is used quite often in our library. Personally, I have DVR at home so I aleady have many of the options and services featured on Hulu. Unfortunately they do not have the daily episodes of Jeopardy on this website so I won't be getting rid of my cable and DVR anytime soon. I think that it has been helpful for other people and for our patrons who may not have cable or televisions at home to access their favorite shows for free in the library. I have always wondered about the copyright infringements and am curious as to how these websites are able to offer the shows free of charge and where they got the rights to do so. I think that with the economy the way that it has been, the free access to these shows has definitely hurt the cable and television companies. At the same time, you can also access news reports and everything else on other websites so it doesn't seem mush different. I think that it is a neat website but I don't see myself switching over to it anytime in the near future.

Thing 42: Music 2.0

I have used and continue to use Pandora.com on a regular basis. I have found that they are quite accurate with their similar artists and I enjoy the variety and mix that I get from them. I don't think that this internet radio is much of a threat to broadcasting because there are still many areas in the United States and throughout the world that do not have internet access. It is also a lot less expensive to buy a radio than it is to buy a computer and internet service. I do think that internet radio is having an effect on broadcasting just the same as the internet is having an effect on virtually everything. It is allowing and providing a more personalized and self-catered service that the broadcasting and other medias are trying to catch up with.
I also played around with the widget that I installed on my blog. I did not agree with the genres that they had tagged to some of their songs and stations. But overall, it was easy to use and easy to install on my blog.

Thing 41: Mashup your Life

I didn't like this thing very much. I like having my separate sites and having the ability to log into them on their own. I use my facebook and twitter sites for different purposes and have a different set of people that I am following or are friends with on either of the sites. I don't necessarily want this two sites to become one nor do I want some people from one to be included on my other site. I think that these are only efficient if you do a lot of instant messaging then this would be a way for you to streamline and do more messaging at once. I do not do instant messaging and do not really want everyone to know everything about me all the time. I will not use these in my everyday life nor do I think that they would be beneficial for the library. I think that something more along the lines of LibraryH3lp would work for the library better than these sites would.

Thing 40: Mashup the Web.

I am kinda confused about mashups they in theory make sense but some things just don't seem like they would be mashups to me. I looked at the booktour mashup, this was an example of something that didn't seem like it belonged and it wasn't the most useful. It seemed just like a database of book tours. I also looked at the lunchtour one and was kinda excited until I saw that there was nothing for our area and then it didn't seem nearly as cool. I was intrigued by the wheel of lunch and may just have to check out this site again. It was very cool but again I am confused as to why this is a mashup. I took a glance at the interestingness website and found some pretty cool pictures. Here is one of my favorites: http://interes.tingness.com/image/3507839564 you should check it out. In theory I thought that the last.fm+youtube sounded cool but it was not working when I tried to use it. The letmegoogleitforyou I thought was just kinda weird and didn't really have a point. I also tried to do the crime reports one and there was nothing for this area. I did the map mashup and made a map of places I have been:

Places I Have Been.

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

I don't really see the use of these things in the library nor in my personal life. They just make things more confusing.

Thing 39: Digital Storytelling

I could possibly see this as a tool to promote library events and to get the word out about past events but other than that, it seems to me to be more of an at home thing. I do like how easy it is to navigate and to create scrapbooks but at the same time, my scrapbook came out looking kinda like a teenager did it. I used Scrapblog and I liked it as w website. It was fairly simple to get my pictures from my photobucket account and very easy to get the scrapbook into my blog. Overall, it was an alright thing but not exactly my cup of tea.

Thing 38: Screencasting

I tried Screentoaster and I think that I made a screencast but when I went to watch it, it didn't go over so well. I let it buffer for 15 minutes before I gave up on teh lack of progress. I am not sure if I actually made a screencast, it was a very confusing site and I pressed the record a screencast button but then I was not really sure what to do. I opened a new internet file to mess around and show something but then when I went back to the Screentoast screen on my computer, it wasn't recording. It did say that I had 45 secs of recorded information but I was not able to see it do to the buffering to figure out what it was. I watched the Jing tutorial but choose not to download it. We have been having issues at our library with downloads and other things that have had viruses attached to them so I didn't want to risk it. I also took a look at Skitch and its tutorial, but it was waaay too girly for me and I was getting a bit annoyed at the continuous misspelled words so I didn't watch the whole thing. I took at look at what SELCO has done with screencasts and was very impressed. I think that this a great tool for the library and wouls be very helpful for patrons to see how to do things without being embarrassed to ask their questions or feel stupid. One of the databases that we provide at our library, NetLibrary would benefit a lot from this tool. If we were able to put a tutorial on our website on how to use NetLibrary, I think that a lot more people would use that service and be comfortable with it.

Thing 37: Photo Tales

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I tried using Flickr since that is what I used before. I was unable to access the website, it was having trouble loading. I decided to start an account with PhotoBucket but in order to more forward with it, I need to get some pictures onto my account. I got some pictures that I had taken recently off of my facebook page and uploaded them onto photobucket. I tried to do the tiltshift thing because I thought that it sounded cool but when I actually went through it and created a miniature model picture, it wasn't nearly as cool as they played it to be. I then looked at One True Media and I used this to create a montage or slideshow of my pictures. I thought that this was pretty neat but very limited to the effects and things that you could do to your photos. I liked that they had music available to add to the montage and there was a large selection to choose from. I could see this being used to create a montage or slideshow of an event at the library to put on the library website and promote the different things that are going on. I could also see using this at home for photos from a vacation to share with friends and family but really for me, it is too much to do, I would rather just show people the actual pictures.

Thing 36: Comic Relief- Generate some fun

Being the huge nerd that I am, I loved the notepad generator and the cornell note taking generator. I got excited to make personalized stationary and could see how it could come in handy if I was still in school or needed such item. There seem to be a lot more things out there, mainly on the internet that allow people to easily organize and keep track of things. These definitely would have come in handy back in the day. I also loved the dewey decimal generator. Trying my full name, I was 189 Medieval Western Philosophy. When I put in just my first and last name, I was 079 Newspapers in other geographic areas. I was very amused by this generator and could see this become an almost addiction for the nerdy librarian in me. I also checked out the braille generator which i thought was neat. I looked at the XtraNormal website where they convert text to movie. I didn't want to create an account so I was not able to view my movie but it was interesting. I liked the ToonDoo and I think that I may just have to check that one out again and make soem cartoons from scratch. I am sure that I am the only one that will find them funny but I will be laughing out loud at my own jokes. I think that it would be neat for the library to have a weekly or daily cartoon created by the staff on the website. I think that patrons would like the personal touch and it would give them a way to get to know their librarians better. Other than this, I don't see how any of these generators could be used in the library but they are good for entertainment.

Thing 35: Books 2.0

In our library, I have not seen much change in the borrowing of books being influenced by kindle or other electronic book type things. I think that people like to have the physical book in their hand. That's part of the whole experience of reading it, feeling and smelling the book. I also think that people find it hard to read on the smaller electronics and it hurts their eyes. Personally, I like the whole process of going to the library, looking through the books, seeing a cover, and actually touching the book. I think that the electronic devices make it seem like you are more of reading a webpage than a book. I think that its not the same experience and because of this, there won't be a mad rush of people switching over. I already have been a member of LibraryThing from the first round and I absolutely love it. I mainly wanted to join so that it would organize my books for me and I would just have to coordinate my shelves. I wish that I would have more time to finish entering all my books but soon, I hope. I looked at a few other sites that were on the list, but I think that I still like LibraryThing the best. I created an account with the Shelfari website. I really liked the look of this site and was excited about it until I joined and got started. There was no organization for my collection and it seemed to be more of a book talk site rather than an organization and collection site. I also looked at the BookLamps site. I joined because once againI thought it looked cool. I was way confused and didn't really figure out what to do on the site. We already use the KDL What's Next site at our library and it has come in handy quite often. The last site that I looked at was the Living Social website. If I spent more time on the internet for entertainment, then I would definitely join this site but it just seemed like one more thing that I wouldn't have time for.

Thing 34: Is this our competition? --Online Answer Sites

I think that a lot of people like the idea that when they ask a question on an online answer site, they are able to do so completely anonymously. They aren't afraid of looking stupid or anyone making fun of them for what they ask because it cannot be tied to them. I also think that to many people, the idea of doing things on the internet gives them the idea that things are being done faster and more efficiently.
I saw a lot of relationship and sex related questions. I think that this is because of the privacy and secrecy that the internet allows them. These are questions that they may be too embarrassed to ask someone in person and perhaps want the opinion of someone who is impartial to the situation. These are questions that they don't necessarily need an expert or a professional to answer, they just want an opinion. So, these are questions that are not really appropriate for a librarian or to be asking in the library.
I did not participate in the slam boards. I think that libraries are coming into this question and answer technology on their own. Using email and instant messaging, people are able to contact and use the resources of the library without even stepping in the door. We are making a virtual library as a place and people are using this place to interact with librarians and get their questions answered in a timely manner. They know that they are getting an expert or professional answer and I think that they value this more than an answer from wikianswers or askville.

Thing 33: Travel 2.0

I have done a lot of looking at travel sites in the past. The last dozen trips or so that I have gone on, I have done all the planning and booking online. I think that it is great that we are able to access this information online and to take care of virtually everything. I only recently have gotten into the sites that go over traveler's reviews and advisory. I checked out a couple of the sites that were on the list. I had been to tripadvisor.com before and i think that it mixes well with the other planning sites such as expedia and travelocity. I have read reviews about hotels on travelocity and expedia and thought that those were helpful but I really liked how tripadvisor.com goes into more detail and seems to be a lot more helpful. I also checked out farecast.com and looked up some flight costs from seattle to fargo. I was a little disappointed that I could not get the cost forecast feature on these destinations but i am sure that is just for the major airports and destinations. I also checked out the blog My Kugelhopf and I absolutely loved this!! I think that I am going to have to live vicariously through this blog. The pictures were amazing and the words were very well written. It was a great advertisement for the areas that she had traveled to. I think that this is the sort of advisory that I would find most helpful. If I had the means to do a big trip, say to Europe again, I would definitely check out this blog or one similar to find places of interest to visit.
At the library, we get questions about traveling and about travel guides. Our library has decided against purchasing more travel guides since they are so expensive and they need to be updated quite often. These are great resources to provide for patrons. In fact, at our library, we are providing a class this summer about travel resources and websites. I think that many of these will come in very handy.

Thing 32: Google Maps and Mashups

I have used Google Maps quite a bit before. In fact, in my Internet Searching class that I have taught here at the library, I also show people how to use this website and a few of the neat things that can be done with it. I have not used the My Maps before. I had a little difficulty with My Maps and finding all the place point describers and the different features but I asked a coworker and she helped me a bit. I created a map of where we will be going on our honeymoon in a week and a half. I created some place markers for places of interest that we will be going to and some things that I like along the way. I looked over the mash-ups and took some time with the local brewery one and found some places of interest along our trip that we may have to check out. I can see adding the google maps feature to the library website to show people where the library is and to perhaps to help them with directions to the library. I can also see it working to show people where important places are in the city such as the post office, city hall, courthouse, etc. An interesting way to also use it for the library would be to create historical walking tours that people would be able to print off and follow throughout our community and find important places in our history. Here is my map that I created:

View Honeymoon in a larger map

Thing 31: More Twitter

What does your Twitter page say about you? How does it reflect your personality? Have you given people enough information about you so they have some sense of who you are as a person?

I had heard about Twitter before I created my account on the previous Twitter thing. I was excited to create an account and to be involved in this online sensation. I now use twitter on a pretty regular basis. I tweet about how i'm feeling, what i'm doing or about something cool that I saw on the internet and want to share. I have started following alot of celebrities and people that I admire. Its cool to become a part of their daily lives (almost) or at least to see a part of their lives that you might not normally have the access to. I have not found a whole lot of my friends and no family that I know of uses twitter so its become kind of a little different and almost a secret thing that I can vent into or use to say things that I might not otherwise say. I would say that I am in the microblogging stage. Although I am not constantly or daily updating my status, I try to as much as possible and I have 1x1 conversations with other peeps. I think that twitter is an excellent way to connect and to get your ideas and thoughts out there. I think that it is connection. Although I may be a little technology phobic when I think of being able to tweet from phones and many other devices. I like my phone to be used for calling people and texting directly to another phone. I don't have internet access on my phone or a full keyboard and I will resist this until its humanly possible. But I do like twitter and I will continue to use and communicate through it.

Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I have been using my RSS reader very sporadically since the first round of 23 things. I have added a few blogs that I have gotten from co-workers and I have added all my co-workers more things on a stick blogs. I really have only organized my feeds into one group ( more things on a stick blogs) and have let the rest go all willy nilly on my reader. It does help me keep up with the more things on a stick group but really I don't check it enough for it to make a big difference. Honestly when I do get around to checking it, I usually just end up scanning and deleting. I have not used Delicious at all since the first round but I was a large fan of it then. I went over a few of the tools that were offered in this thing. I looked at the feed-my-inbox and if I were really to keep track and read my RSS follows on a regular basis, I think that this would be a tool that would come in handy. I don't like having to log into a ton of websites to see updates so this would help streamline that. I also checked out spokentext.net. I found this site to be extremely helpful but not necessarily for the reasons that it should have been. I am getting married in a week and a half (yikes!) and my brother (an ordained minister) have been going over the ceremony and everything. It has mostly been done over email because he is in the Navy and we don't get a chance to talk much. I was able to put a draft of the ceremony into spokentext to create a sound recording of it. It was a lot different and very helpful to hear the words and how they go together rather than just read them. I was very impressed. Another tool that I checked out was simpletracking.com. My husband-to-be is a shipping and receiving manager and this tool made me think of him and how if i were in that situation, this would be a very helpful asset. The last tool that I looked at was SPREED. I liked this one because I tend to read a little faster and it let me test how fast I could read. I was entertained.

Thing 29: Google Tools

I went through and looked at a few of the tools for this thing. I searched the Google Books and read a few pages in various books. I got into Frog and Toad and was a bit disappointed when I was unable to read the entire story. I understand that with copyright laws, they could not have the entire book on there but I do like the ability to search within the books to perhaps find a passage or quote in a particular item.
I also watched the videos and then downloaded Goolge Chrome. It is a new server still in Beta testing. I like it so far. I am a huge supporter of Firefox but also an avid Google user so I am torn as to what server to use. I like that with Google Chrome, it keeps track of all your most often visited sites and creates your homepage to reflect those sites. It might not be the best for privacy on a public computer but I think that for my home computer, this could be very beneficial. There is, of course, always the option to browse incognito and there would be no record of the sites you have visited. I think that I will have to download this onto my home computer and play around with it a bit to get used to what it has to offer and to see if I will have to make the switch permanent.
I also browsed the Patent Search tool. I thought that this was VERY neat. I found patents on a brine shrimp hatchery, swimming goggles, fishing lures, and weatherstripping for doors and windows. I was very impressed, I had no idea that this information was that readily available to the public and I am absolutely delighted that it is.
I learned about a few new tools in this thing and I hope that I can remember to use them when the time comes. I think that the Patent Search will become a good tool to use for reference. I can just imagine someone coming to the desk and wanting to know everything about a certain patent or product.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

I chose to try out the iGoogle service because I already use gmail and google calendar so it seemed like the logical choice for something that I hope to continue to use after I am done with this thing. I am a huge fan of Google and all the services that they offer. I thought that it was pretty easy to set up. I did it on my home computer and plan on using it on a daily basis. I added the weather and news features as well as movie times in my area. These are things that I check on a pretty regular basis so I thought that it made sense to be able to get easy access to them on my homepage when I first get onto the internet. I like the personalization that we can add and looking throught the gadgets and widgets there are some fun games and such that you can add. I chose not to add these to my homepage because they are not exactly the thing that I would like to check on or see when I first get onto the internet.

Thing 27: Twitter

So I finally joined this whole Twitter thing, I have been hearing about it all over the news. It seems that everyone is doing twitter so I was pretty excited to get to this thing. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I created my profile, added a picture and a few friends. I think that it is neat that I can go to one website and get updates not only on my friends but also on my favorite authors, bands, and other people that I find extremely interesting. I also like the fact that there are libraries as well with profiles. I think that it allows people in that area to befriend their library and get caught up on updates or events going on at the library. Its a great way for the library to get in touch with more people and to seem more up-to-date with technologies and what its users are using in their personal lives. It is great to see the library progressing and branching out to different mediums to get the message across and to get users into the doors of the library.
I tend to babble on and get kinda lost in what I am writing so sometimes it is hard to do this whole micro-blogging thing. I always want to say more to convey the right message but I guess I will just have to learn to be more concise. I think that this is also something that I could apply to my daily life, sometimes I think I can be long-winded. I tend to go off on tangents and lose my train of thought on what I am saying. Kinda like how all my blogs tend to turn out.
So in conclusion, I am now on twitter. You can follow me, my username is jabeans.

fringe

Thing 26: Join the 23 things Ning

I joined Ning in the 1st round of 23 things. The first time that I had an experience with it, I just browsed around and didn't do much to my page or add friends or anything. This second time around, I changed the appearance of my page, added a picture, added some friends, and commented on a friend's page. The only group that I joined in Ning was the 23 things group. I don't really see myself using Ning on a regular basis or really getting involved with it at all. To me, there are so many social networking groups that in order to be an active member in all of them, I would have to be on the computer all the time. I could see the forums being a useful thing for connecting with other librarians. I read a post someone had put up about recommendations of books for high school students. They wanted to know if anyone had any other websites that were useful. I could see these forums as a benefit for the workplace especially for smaller libraries that may only have one librarian and so no other way to connect and ask questions.

Thing 25: Blogger's Toolkit

I added the snow effect and the Picasso painting a day widgits to my blog. I also added one of those map things that tells me where the people that look at my blog are from. I am not sure if I installed it right because no one has looked at my blog yet. But I hope it works, we did this same thing when we created a wiki for our Teen Read Week and it was neat to see that for some strange reason, a lot of people in the UK were looking at our site. I am curious to see who will look at my blog but I am sure it will probably just be people in the program.
I am not much of a fan of clutter and it seemed like a lot of the things you could add would be just that. They seemed fun but unnecessary to me. I spent almost an hour and a half looking over all the widgets but honestly, I got bored and thought that there were much better ways to spend my time. Although, they seem fun and cool on blogs or whatever, they don't seem to have much importance to me in the library setting.
I was not as big of a fan of this thing as I have been of other ones. I did add a few things to my blog, but I wouldn't be surprised if I got sick of them and took them off in the future. I do really like the snow effect thing though, I wish the snow would pile up on the bottom of the screen, that would be a neat effect.

Thing 24: Refresh your blog

So, I am back. It's been awhile since I have blogged on here. I have updated a few things so enjoy the new visuals. Since finishing the 23 things, I must admit, I have not done much with the blogging. I have read a couple books based off of blogs if that's any consolation. I have also tried to get into the habit of reading some blogs on a frequent basis but that has not always happened. These have mainly been librarian or library blogs but I don't always seem to find the time to read them. Right now, I have a lot of things on my list to do and once those dwindle down a bit, I think that I will have the time and patience to read up on these blogs. I do enjoy blogging, I think that it is a great way to express oneself and to relay information in a somewhat personal and casual way. I must admit, I have not done much or any commenting on others blogs and I know that that is something that I need to work on. Especially with the more things on a stick starting, I will be able to read my co-workers and other participants' blogs and give them feed back or encouragement throughout the program.