Thing 22

What have I learned? When I think at the beginning when I didn't even have a blog and was not very adventurous with the internet and now I've got all these cool 'things' to use, I'm just amazed. I'm not afraid now to go exploring anymore. I've even showed my internet savy husband things he didn't know about. I did have problems with Flickr and I did get help from my co-workers here and there but toward the end I was doing everything myself. I saw this Shelfari bookshelf on another blog and made one for myself all by myself. I just wanted to say a big Thank you for allowing me the chance to learn all this.

Thing 21-Student 2.0 Tools

I think this Assignment Calculator is fantastic! I wish I would've had it when I was in school. Of course it won't help the procrastinator when he/she comes in the day before the project is due, but as others have said in their blogs if the teacher gets them to use it from the beginning...........And I agree that having a link on our teen page is a good idea. I wish there was one to help me organize my life!

Thing 20-Books 2.0

Wow this was a long one. OK so, will people stop reading books? At our library people still check out a lot of books and if they are reading books online that's still reading. The literacy debate was dumb I thought. As far as libraries checking out Kindles, what library has that kind of money?
I really like the Wired for Books and Booksvideo.tv. I like to hear what authors are thinking when they write.
As far as Book Reviews go I've never been fond of critics. Just tell me what it's about and I'll decide if I want to read it or not.
Book Rental: Hey it works for Netflix, why not?
I found Bookcrossing interesting. Release one of your books in the wild. When I lived Boston we had a similar thing on the subway. You would take a book off a shelf at a stop and then return it to any other stop when you were done. You always had something to read on the train then.
Book on my Blackberry? The screen is way too small for me to read, but an audio book would be ok.
I thought that Bookstumpers was very good for the patron who says 'You know that book about that guy.............'. Too bad it costs $2. It's something we could use at the library.
I might sign up for Bookcalender. It gives you an introduction to a different book everyday. I think that would be good for me. It might get me out of the the civil war aisle once in a while.

Thing 19-Other Social Networks

I looked at these but I didn't sign up for any yet. I think I might sign up for Gather though. I liked the genealogy groups they have. I started a page on Catster a little while ago which I think is really fun. I've been getting the third degree from some of my co-workers about my comments on Facebook. So I might take a closer look at that. They said it's a great way to stay connected with friends that are far away. I do have friends in other states I'd like to keep better contact with. Last.fm looks like it might be something I'd like too. I've had a lot of fun looking at the different Youtube videos that others have posted on their blogs.

Thing 18-Facebook/Myspace

I looked at both of these and I think that the library ones are really nice. It's a good way to expose the library to the younger set, on their terms. For personal use I find them a bit scary and sad. Scary in the sense that you can tell any sort of lie you want, like the old perv pretending he's 20 and the 13 yr old pretending she's 20 and meet me at the coffee shop type of thing. And sad that getting together is done online and not at someone's house or the beach etc. But I guess if this is the way young people like to do it what can an oldie like me say. I just hope they all have the other type of friends also. I can see also that it could be a big time eater like my little friends the sock puppets say:

Thing 17-Podcasts

Wow! is all I can say. This is so cool. With Podcasts I can go and find a specific topic I want to hear and just get that and not all the commercials and all the other yapping that you get on the radio. I liked Podcast.com & Yahoo & Podcastalley.com. I couldn't decide which one I liked best. I listened to Irish & Celtic Music #54 by Marc Gunn on Podcast. It was exactly the kind of music I like. I think the library could use Podcasts in lots of different ways, like book clubs, book reviews, author interviews etc. I am definitely going to use Podcasts myself from now on. But one thing I wanted to mention is the really scary advertisement that Podcast.com had. The "I Cured My Yellow Teeth!" one. Those are Dinosaur teeth! The biggest teeth I've ever seen on a human!

Thing 16-Again for the musical fun of it

Awww! Now you got me started on Youtube. I think the uses for Youtube are endless. Whatever you want to learn to do is on Youtube. I learned how to load my Xtranormal movie from Xtranormal to Youtube by watching a Youtube video made by a little kid. This is a very wonderful video with Martyn Bennett who died in 2005.

Thing 16-Youtube just for the fun of it

Thing 15

Rollyo is a funny little thing. I don't know how we could use it at the library but I could see how a teacher might find it useful. I think I'm going to explore it a bit to see if there are any civil war sites I don't know about. There's my little red button up there. I actually put it there without help. I'm getting better at this stuff.

THING 14

I decided to use Igoogle because the lay out seemed a lot less busy and easy to see at a glance. I really like this because I can put up whatever I want and I'm not overrun with stuff like on bloglines. The gadgets are endless it seems, at least I didn't get through all the pages. I put up the weather and jokes and quotes from Confucius, NPR news and a moving hand showing the ASL alphabet. And google let me put up one for my Yahoo mail. Oh yeah and Youtube. I'll be using this page a lot at home. I made it my internet homepage. The calenders I don't think I'll use myself and yeah the to do lists are too much work. I'm not a manager or someone with big projects so I couldn't see myself using the project management things so I don't really have much to say about that. If you have an Iphone with Remember-the-milk you can put your to do list on your phone which I think is handy.

Thing 13- Library Thing and Update

Update: I decided to change this to just a button because I thought having some of my book titles floating around was just to messy looking.

Well I did get a Library Thing gadget up on my blog but it wasn't my own doing. I tried and tried but kept getting an error message when I tried editing my html like the Library Thing said. My co-worker the saved the day and now it's up there. What he did wasn't what was directed. He went to my blog's layout page and then 'add a gadget' and then scrolled to HTML/Javascript and pasted it into there. I guess. Anyway I really like this Library Thing thing. It's exactly what I need for myself and I think our patrons could really use it for their read-it-already lists. Some are very disappointed that we can't keep track of what they've brought back. I really liked the Library Thing for Libraries. I think our patrons would like to be able to add input into our catalog. Library Thing Local would be very good to replace our paper program guide and include other places around town that we don't know about.

Thing 12- Wiki

I liked this Wiki stuff even though I think it's a little weird to be able to go in and edit something when you may not know what you're talking about. But if you do, I think it's great. I really liked the Albany Library staff wiki and think we should have one for Circ at ACLD. I think it would be a quick way to update info and stay in touch with each other. Info gets emailed but then it's hard to find sometimes. I added an entry on the NEFLIN wiki and that was very easy. I can see why teachers would ban Wikipedia because if anyone can edit it then, what is fact?

Thing 11

I looked at the different social media news things and signed up for Digg. I looked at the others and liked this one the best. I found these news sites interesting in that you can add news you like and vote on the ones you like. BUT as I don't really have faith that all the news is all the truth (and this goes for TV, newspapers, etc) I'll take it all with a grain of salt. I don't know if our library would have any use for this type of thing. It seems to be a big waster of time and some of the articles were a bit hateful. I looked at Diggs tools and they have what's called the Diggwidget which allows you to display news on your site like this blog if I wanted to, which I don't. It seemed quite easy to do. I clicked on a news item under Stumbleupon that I wanted to email to someone and it asked me for my email address. When I put it in my whole contact list came up, even some contacts I have deleted from my list at home. I really liked how you can get these freaky news bits about all types of topics but I don't think I should get into this myself as I don't have the time. I mean I'd have to cut down on my Youtube time, you know?

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.

Thing 3

The statistics on Technorati are inconceivable to me. I knew there were a lot of blogs out there but that many? Whew. And I was pleased to note that our new president is a blogger. Anyway when I searched on Technorati for Flogging Molly, which is one of my favorite bands and a little obscure so I thought they might make a good search, it only came up with 269 hits and some of those seemed sort of off the point. Then I searched Blog-plus and it came up with 5542 and I don't really understand why. I guess I need to cruise around these different sites because I don't understand the differences. It seemed that Blog-plus was easier for me to navigate through but I did like the display of videos on Technorati.

Thing 2

It seems that most of Thing 2 was about convincing us that 2.0 was well on it's way and we had all better wake up and get going. I personally don't need to be convinced as the library I work at is well on it's way with online database access through our web page, internet and laptop check out at the library and YA gaming days (not the killer stuff as mentioned). The branch I work at right now has very nice places for small children with computers just for them with games and stories with education as the goal and a room for the teens where they can socialize and look at the internet in groups for school or play (mostly play it seems but at least they're in a safe place).
I really liked the idea of *meeting our users in engaging spaces online* that sounds intriguing- and using the library web page as a tool where *people can make connections and talk to each other*-cool too. I liked the librarian who makes himself available through Myspace.
As far as making ourselves essential to the community-I think we're doing that pretty well at least with the young folk. We're their place to go after school. But not that we can't improve I hope to see that soon and it's all kind of exciting.
As far as having the time to do the 23 things, well if they can still give me some time at work I should be ok.

More of Thing 1

Hey the picture came through. For a non-techie such as myself this is good.

I'm off..........

Thing 1
Ok, I actually created my own blog. How about that? It wasn't hard either. I've never thought about doing one of my own before. Now I just need to fix it up a bit. Maybe add a photo of one of the 23 cows. Maybe the rest won't be so hard.