So now I shall engage the warp drive and speed through weeks three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine with the grace of a rhinocerous!
Week Three: Online Meetings
As a part time library employee who works entirely at public desks, I don't attend many, or any, meetings. And even the occasional class I take part in is in person, so video conferencing is new territory for me. I did watch a webinar, to my credit, from the BCR website called Books on the Net: The Mass Digitization Projects of Google Book and Internet Archive. I found it pretty interesting, it covered a lot of information on Google Book Search, which I've used for the last couple years fairly cluelessly as to how it functioned or came about. I'm a supporter of organizations like Project Gutenberg, they offer over 30,000 books for download! Even though I'm in a library almost daily, it's very handy to be able to pull up a book online whenever the mood strikes me. In the future, I'm going to try and keep webinars in mind for educational purposes at work or at home and look into attending a live one sometime.
Week Four: Photo Sharing
I like to think of myself as an amateur photographer, when really I just snap pictures of my niece or our cats or whatever I can and haven't weaned myself off the 'automatic' settings on my camera. I've been using Flickr for a year or two now, and I've had a pro account for about half that time which I got when I ran out of space for all my pictures. It works wonderfully, maintains the quality of my shots and is a great place to meet other photographers, local and otherwise.
Larger, higher quality versions of all the following pictures, plus many more, can be seen on my Photostream.
This is one of the eagles nesting here in Wichita, I spotted it on my way to work
flying around over the Arkansas river!
Our christmas tree solution to having numerous cats who like to knock things
over was to wrap a shelf with pre-lit garland and hang our ornaments on it.
I am actually a fairly skilled user of RSS (RSSes?), or at least I'm familiar with them and am very thankful for the wonders they did for my 'Blogs' favorites folder. Google Reader is my RSS organizer of choice, because of the clean interface and easy access to my gmail account and google calendar.
I have to admit I'm never all the way up to date with the blogs I follow, the current total is 49 and grows every week. I catch up on a few of them at a time, whichever ones strike my mood, and some will build up to a pretty rediculous amount before I feel like reading them. But having them all in one place in one clean format is a life saver and saves me time and clicks.
Week Six: Tagging and Social Bookmarking
I was looking through the list of links in this week's entry and almost all the sites sounded vaguely familiar, but were generally unknown to me until I saw StumbleUpon. I love StumbleUpon, it's just a great way to utilize the internet! Whenever I find myself staring blankly at a page, wondering where to go next, StumbleUpon is there to rescue me and take me on an information adventure. :)
I've found hundreds of interesting sites, informative articles and useful web tools through StumbleUpon since I started using it a year or so ago. I love getting the most out of my internet and I feel like SU really opens up what I see online. Instead of traversing the same old sites I can flit off to something new and unseen at the drop of a hat. With the highly customizable list of interests, I rarely stumble to something I don't like and even then it's just another click to find something I do.
Social tagging in general is something I've never really tried, it seems useful and after reading this week's entry I'm considering opening a Diigo account. Having my bookmarks online where I can access them anywhere would be super handy.
Week Seven: Microblogging
I am just plain old-fashioned when it comes to 'microblogging'. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the days of hideous personal websites via geocities, bursting with personality in the form of midi background music, repeating background images, flashing text, pixelly animated gifs and moving cursors, but posts on sites like Twitter ring hollow to me. There's no discernable way to stay updated on Twitter, short of monitoring the site 24-7, when you follow any more than 20 people it becomes nigh on impossible to read every tweet, retweet or response that clutters your page, and you get the feeling that your own 'tweets' are being similarly buried on your friend's pages. Also, I have no desire to know every mundane detail of my aquaintences lives, like when they eat lunch, brush their teeth or go to the grocery store.
On that note, I found this site to be pretty hilarious: pleaserobme.com
Week Eight: Cloud Computing
I love cloud computing. I use it daily in the form of Google Docs, where I keep track of finances, everyday tasks, shopping lists and random thoughts that pop into my head. Google Docs is my virtual corkboard, covered with post-its, business cards and receipts. I highly recommend it for streamlining the way you manage your documents and spreadsheets.
Also on the subject of cloud computing, I'm currently reading a book that covers the subject, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. It theorizes that "group thought", the idea that a large group of people would be better than an individual at finding the best solution to a problem, is damaging to our society and the freedom of the individual. Like Wikipedia, where you're trusting information to be more accurate because lots of people edited and wrote an article rather than seeking the knowledge of a specialized individual. To once again quote Despair Inc., "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
Week Nine: Instant Messaging
Okay, I'm on the cusp of being caught up here, and the final subject is Instant Messaging. I'll give it to you straight, I am not a fan of instant messaging. I actually find email writing to be much more comfortable in that it's a digital form of old-fashioned letter writing. Instant messaging is too quick, too sharp, and seeing grammar, punctuation and capitalization being thrown to the wind is disheartening to me. But I do see how it could be helpful in business situations and I'm merely against it as an effective way to communicate personally.
I would like to see it used in the library though, it would be a very handy way to quickly contact staff on different floors or sections without having to tie up our phone lines. Most instant messenger services are easy to use and having a library-wide and/or system-wide channel set up could be a great way to share information. Just leave the chat speak at home, please.
