Thing 10

I thought that this thing was very good. I really like the idea of being able to access my bookmarks anywhere and to share them and see what others have found. I think our library district would really benefit from having a Delicious account so all the librarians could share their finds and maybe have a place where patrons could also add their finds. I signed up with Delicious and marked a couple pages. It was all very easy. Then I looked at Furl and they claim "Say "goodbye" to Page Not Found messages and missing pages. When you Save a page with Furl, it's downloaded and saved to your own personal archive - for keeps. You can view your cached copy, at any time. Even if the source website has been down for years. Now that's archival goodness." How cool is this? I don't know how many times I've looked at old bookmarks to find the page gone. I think I'm going to go with Furl instead of Delicious. I also put some tags on my previous post which was very easy too.

Thing 9

Here's a little movie I made with http://www.xtranormal.com/, a really cool 'text to movie' site that I found under 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story or vent frustration. My movie isn't just my frustrations but inspired by some of my co-workers and the complaint of lack of time. I had a lot of fun and even though I had a bit of technical problems, the site has a 'contact us' button and they gave me a patch that worked great. They said the problem was on their end and should be fixed shortly. It was great just watching other peoples movies. I think all of this Thing would be a great way to promote library happenings especially to the younger folk through our website. I was having a really difficult time trying to load this from xtranormal to my blog, the links just didn't work, so I uploaded it to youtube. I'm feeling pretty old when I look at all this new technology and realize how I'm just scratching the surface.

Thing 8

I found this Thing quite interesting. I watched the video of the chat the librarian was having with a patron which was fun to watch. This a very good tool for patrons not in the library.
We use email for a number of different reasons in circ, to notify patron's of reserve items that have come in and overdue items and other things we want to notify them about like you left your cellphone at the library. It's up to the patrons if they want us to notify them in this way. We also use automated and regular phone messages and snailmail.
I used the instant messaging with my husband and I think I could spend too much time using this. It's a lot of fun. I really don't like text messaging and haven't used it. I think it's too impersonal and too hard to read at a glance like a short note would be. I know call me old fashioned.
I listened to the web conference through Opal about the Irish in America. It was interesting and I liked it but it was somewhat distracting with all the instructions going on, 'click this, can you see that?' But it was good and still worth listening to.

Thing 7

This image generator thing was the easiest so far! I used the Image Chef but there were so many to choose from and they all looked like a lot of fun. I couldn't spend a lot of time playing around as I'm trying to catch up this week. I need to start bookmarking these cool sites. http://www.imagechef.com/

Thing 6 movie poster

Thing 6

Well I wasn't very happy to have to use Flickr again and I had problems again. I couldn't get this movie poster I made in the Big Huge Labs to post to my blog using the 'blog it' button so I did it the old fashioned copy and paste way. It was easy and fun to make but when I tried to post it my blog it wouldn't work. I tried several times but I kept getting the same 'failed' message and 'try again later, sometimes websites are finicky'. Does anyone know why it wouldn't post? Anyone else with the same message? This is the second #6 I've made that wouldn't post. It took way too much frustrating time and the help button needs to be more helpful. I'm just worried that this is the easy part and the rest of the Things will be harder. I have to admit I'm not too enthusiastic to go on to #7.

Inverlochy Castle, Fort William Scotland

Thing 5-Flickrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Well I didn't find Flickr very easy to use. I did manage to get some photos up and on my blog but I depended a lot on the links that were given on the NEFLIN page under Thing 5. If I go to Flickr I am lost and have to poke around a while to find what I need. I find it hard to navigate through. There are probably a lot of people who find it easy but I've never used it before. I posted a photo of a library sign I took in Scotland in 2004. I will say it was pretty easy to load the photos to Flickr from my desk top. I don't know if I will use it for myself or not. I'm going to try the Google site Picasa, maybe that will be easier. I'll post on that later.

Library sign in Fort William, Scotland

Library, originally uploaded by andersonvillemichael.

This is me in Scotland!

Dev, originally uploaded by andersonvillemichael.

Thing 4

RSS feed didn't go so well for me. I think I understand what it is pretty well and I set up my Google Reader account. That was easy. And it said to subscribe to some feeds, blogs and websites that I frequent. Ok, but when I went to the websites I had a hard time finding those little feed icons. Actually I didn't find any at all. Then I subscribed to some of those blog bundles that looked interesting and suddenly I had over 200 posts on my reader and I couldn't figure out how to delete them! But a co-worker pointed out the tiny little unsubscribe button and I got it pretty well under control but then I haven't checked today, who knows how much may be lurking there. But my real problem with all this is time. Yeah, I would like to read all those genealogy blogs I subscribed to but I just don't have that kind of time. I can't see how the RSS would serve me personally. I have too much farm work to do to be sitting in front of a computer for hours. I can seen how a library might use it to keep up with required reading book lists from area schools and things like that. But for me no.