Week 6 - Thing 15 - Library 2.0

I've had a read through a number of the articles about Libraries 2.0 and watched some videos on youtube about Web 2.0. They are quite interesting and thought provoking.
I think that the future of academic libraries and non-fiction collections will be affected greatly by the ever-developing information technologies. Even now many people are looking to the net for information rather than books. If I'm looking for a few facts or quick info I'll do a google search. Books are good for more indepth research but with time this may change. In many cases, for academic research it is already easier to look at online journal databases rather than try and track down the journals themselves.
One big area that I don't think will change much (except to become a bigger part of libraries) is the entertainment side of books and library collections. People wanting to read for pleasure are still going to want books to read, since reading screens is just not the same. DVD collections may disappear when downloading technologies become the predominant way of renting or buying movies, but I don't see paper and ink books disappearing any time soon.
I think it is a real possibly that libraries collections will change their focus to being more about entertainment reading, with bigger fiction and biography sections and smaller non-fiction sections supplemented by electronic info databases.

In any case, it will be interesting to see what the future brings for our industry.

Week 6 - Thing 14 - Technorati

I've had a look around Technorati and I'm so not keen on it. It might be good for finding blogs you are interested in, but I already waste too much web without finding more blogs that I want to ready.
I looked at searching and at the popular blogs. It was interesting to see in one of the popular blogs that you can make money from this blogging thing, and that some people are making a living from it as full time bloggers. Now there is something to aspire to. ;-)
Don't think I'll quit my day job just yet though.

I set up a technorati account and "claimed" my blog, so it is now listed on technorati.

Claiming My blog with technorati

Technorati Profile

Week 6 - Thing 13 - Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. I'm definitely learning some new terms doing this Web 2.0 training. I hadn't heard of social bookmarking before. I have had a look around this website and it looks interesting. You can do searches for stuff you are intersted in and get a list of sites bookmarked and tagged by others. You can see how many people have bookmarked the sites giving an indication of its popularity.

To get the best benefits of this site you need to register; then you can save your own bookmarks and access them on any computer. I tried to do this, but it wants to add buttons to your web browser, and since I was using a work computer at the time I decided not to go ahead with this. The site doesn't have buttons set up for adding to Opera, the web browser that I use at home but I did a search and found a site that has made some Opera buttons. Here it is: http://erlang.no/?p=14. I haven't tried them yet, but I'll get it a go at some point.

I think I'll go ahead and start using this site to store some bookmarks. I think I'll mostly just use my normal bookmarks on my browser, but occasionally I do use other peoples computers and it will be useful to have my bookmarks available. So this is another site that I think I will continue to use.

Week 5 - Thing 12 - Rolling My Own Rollyo

I have rolled my own Rollyo at http://www.rollyo.com/ and added a widget to my blog.
The search roll I created was for New Zealand News and will search the NZ Herald site and stuff.co.nz and a few other nz sites.
I can definitely see the use of this online tool. If you want to do searches but limit the results to sites that you like, this is the tool for you. There are tons of searches on the site that have already been created and it is reasonable easy to create you own. However, I did find managing my account and editing searches to be a bit tricky. Some of the features are not self-explanatory and confusing. I think I have got if figure out now but I took a few attempts.

LibraryThing Catalogue

My LibraryThing catalogue can be found at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/geeklibraryguy

Week 5 - Thing 11 - Librarything

I have set up an account at http://www.librarything.com/ and have had a little play around with it.

I think LibraryThing is a good idea; it could be fun to list all your books you own or like, and find online people to discuss them with. I don't really want to share my reading interests with the world at large, but I might share them with my friends. So I am more likely to use one of the similar applications on Facebook rather than LibraryThing.

I didn't like the fact that LibraryThing cost money after the first 200 books. Another thing that I found frustrating was that there is so much variety in the way some of the authors names are entered. For example, I first tried to find books by George R. R. Martin. Depending on whether you put a space between the Rs and/or include the dots, you get different results. Same problem with J.R.R. Tolkien and Raymond E Feist. I guess the moral is don't read books by authors that use initials in their names. :-)
(Can you guess what genre of books I prefer?)

Week 5 - Thing 10 - Online Image Generators

I had some fun playing around with some Online Image Generators this week. There are heaps of them to choose from. I like several at http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ and I'm going to go back and look at more of them later.

I made two pictures of myself.

The first one I made with DoppelMe Avatar Generator which can be found at http://www.doppelme.com/. This one was make with the limited options available without registering for the site. There are tons more options if you do register.

The image on the right is a South Park version of me. I created this at http://www.sp-studio.de/. I like that one better than the DoppelMe image, it looks cooler, but both are close for cartoon images of myself. Both generators are easy to use, although the South Park Character Generator requires you to use some other program to cut the image out of a screen capture. The site has instructions on how to do the first step of capturing the screen shot and pasting it into you image program (they give you the instructions when you click on the save button).

Week 4 - Thing 9 - Locating Library and News Feeds

I have had a look at bloglines search tool and at the other feed searching/collecting websites. I did a search for some library related searches and added a few to my bloglines account. I also did searches on some personal interests and found some blogs, but none of them were as interesting as the online forums that I already look at. Because the online forums I use are high use, I find they are better than reading a few blogs that are infrequently updated.

I have decided that I don't really like the feed searching sites much. I guess that have their uses, but I don't think they are for me. I think I'll stick to googling subjects when I'm looking for info, rather than looking for feeds about the stuff I am interested in.
However, since learning about RSS feeds, I now take notice of the orange "RSS" icons (and other feed icons) on sites and will add them to my bloglines account if the sites/feeds are interesting.