Thing #13 Tagging is Del.icio.us.

This is another great tool. I decided to import my “favourites” into del.icio.us, along with a few new links to web 2.0 tools. I can tag each one with my own meaningful terms, see who else has also bookmarked them as useful (if any) and how they have classified them. This tool also means I can access my links wherever I am. I can see how this would be in valuable if people were undertaking research and wanted to keep track of all relevant weblinks in one place. Or a course co-ordinator could set up a profile that contained all the recommended web resources students would need, and students could also add to this themselves. Similarly, it could be used as an alternative traditional library subject guides.

My del.icio.us links are at http://del.icio.us/e70976.

It will be interesting to research more about tagging, social bookmarking and folksonomies in preparation to write the content (blogpost) on this for our 21 lunges program.

I really like the blog post by Elyssa Kronski, The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging about the benefits and flaws of user-based tagging/folksonomies for classification purposes.

Thing #12. Rollyo - The customised search engine

What an interesting tool – creating a search engine that only searches the sites you want and trust. I think it is a niche application, rather than wide-ranging, but I can see an application for it in libraries/academia.

It would be another way to help students in their research – putting together a search of websites that the librarian (or course co-ordinator) considers valuable on a particular subject – an extension of the subject guide. The student could include the search widget on their browser (which I had trouble doing, by the way. I have included a search box on the blog though).

I created “My Library Essentials” searchroll, which searches the Librarian’s Internet Index, BUBL Link, and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), which I think are good general web resources to help start a researching any topic – good for us and the patrons we serve. Now I can search them all in one place: it will encourage me to use them more (if only I get the search widget on a browser!!!).

Rollyo - http://www.rollyo.com/

LibraryThing is my Thing!

I just love this thing! Perhaps, because I have an interest in catalogue, indexing and a good personal collection of books. I had heard good things about LibraryThing, and the opportunity to try it out initially came when I was doing some research on catalogues for a friend last October. I was impressed, and determined to come back and explore it more later. 23 things has allowed me to do this. I now have eighteen books in my library, ones that I have really enjoyed, such as Bryce Courtenay’s Four Fires, and ones that I have been wanting to read for ages, but haven’t yet, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (I know, shock horror!) Of course, I hope to have time to add more. You’ll notice I have a leaning towards Australian authors’ too. I have embedded an LT widget into the blog. Another triumph for me!

LT is great because it does a lot of the hard work for you. You can enter details of a book manually if you want, or do a search within Amazon, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Australia or 252 other sources/catalogues to find item information and populate a record . You can choose to add your own personal tags to describe the book, give it a rating and review it. You can see who has recently added the book to their collection, see other’s reviews of it, blurbs from Amazon and choose from a collection of cover art if available. The Recommendations page connected to each book is interesting. Data is mined from other LibraryThingers and Amazon to list similar books to the one chosen, also books with similar tags, books with similar subjects, and people with this book in their library also have…

The Zeitgeist aspect of LT, shows you the vital stats for the social site. There are 343, 131 members as of today, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the top book, (in the most member libraries) and fiction is the top tag. I have joined the Australian LibraryThingers and Librarians who LibraryThing groups, to allow me to participate in discussion threads, and added more info to my profile.

Books are a great way to connect with people, so that there is a tool that facilitates this interaction is great. My library catalogue is available at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/daniel82.

P.S. The Free Range Librarian blogged this week about a LibraryThing project, which aims to catalogue the libraries of great people, such as Thomas Jefferson. It’s called “I See Dead People[’s Books]" . This is something I want to explore. Maybe tomorrow…

Thing #10 Image Generators. Great fun?

That’s exactly what I thought I’d have with Thing #9 but I wasn’t as “into it” as I thought I might be. I’m not saying I wasn’t intrigued by what I found. I think some of the poster generators would be good for marketing. I did enjoy creating a movie poster with Poster Forge (see below). And the Garfield Comic Strip Generator. But some of the generators really don’t have a widespread application or none at all – just created because they can be, or for curiosities sake alone. Like the Nightingale Song Generator, where you type in a word and it is translated into nightingale for you, or the similar R2D2 Language Generator. The Chinese Name Generator is another, or the HairMixer, where you can pick two photos of celebrities, or upload your own, and mix one person’s face with the other’s hair. As a final example of the not so great, you can create your own Oscars’ speech by filling in the blanks.

I mainly checked out The Generator Blog to see what is out there. And of course fd’s Flickr toys are great (see previous post). Looking forward to reacquainting with LibraryThing next.

Below are some of the results I created.

Smiley Generator

Chocolate Bar Generator

Poster Forge

Thing #9 Finding Feeds

Thing #9 required that we use some feed search tools to find some feeds of interest to subscribe to. I already subscribe to a few, as you can see from my blogroll. But I do have professional interests in library marketing and information literacy, so I focussed mainly on those in my searches. I am a bit of a Neighbours fan too, but couldn’t find anything that really caught my eye. The new feeds I added to Bloglines are, 2c Worth, and EDUCAUSE CONNECT’s Information Literacy and Fluency Blog, which relate to information literacy, and Bronwyn’s Library Blog, (an Australian) and Pimp My Library, which I thought would give some marketing ideas. I also subscribed to Library Podcast! on how to create podcasts, for future reference if my library chooses to create a podcast to complement our self-guided tour.

Of the search tools used, the only one I found difficult/hard to understand was Syndic8, because it still appears to be in its early stages, and has no real structure. It is a community effort, and people submit their own feeds to the site.
Topix searches news and media outlet RSS feeds for recent coverage of stories. For example, I did a search on Harbajhan Singh, to see how the Australia/India cricket controversy was being reported throughout the world. I think this is a great tool.
Technorati is interesting. And I think it is something you would have to use a few times to understand what it offers. Of particular note, not only can you search for blogs and blog posts, you can see what is the most popular/becoming popular out in the blogosphere in categories such as Lifestyle, Sport and Entertainment. I can also see who has commented/linked to particular posts I find (giving it ‘authority’).
The search capability within Bloglines is very easy to use, as is the Google Blog Search Engine (like its parent), which I tried in place of Feedster, which is undergoing changes and is not available at the moment.

Generally, I think tools like this are good idea, as blogs and news sites are becoming “many and millions”, on a variety of topics. They are a valuable, current, constantly changing source of information that should be tapped.

The magic of RSS and creating a Bloglines account… finally!

What a hot day today! Good for staying inside and learning about RSS and newsreaders.

Thing # 8 required that we get to know a little bit about RSS feeds or Really Simple Syndication, create a Bloglines newsreader account and subscribe to a few feeds.

I’m not completely new to RSS, because I have a list of feeds that I access through Internet Explorer 7, so I check those everyday. I like that I don’t have to go to all the different websites to get the news I want, instead the content has been aggregated in one place thanks to RSS. How did we ever live without it (and I truly mean that!).

There were one or two feeds that I couldn’t subscribe to with IE, so I had looked briefly at freely available newsreaders a while ago, Bloglines being one. I soon got bogged down with other things. However, I was determined to return! And I’m glad 23 things has given me the opportunity to. My reaction to Bloglines, is that it is easy to sign up, subscribe to
and organise feeds. It’s great that you can subscribe to flickr photo sets and news sites (I added ninemsn news and ABC news) along with blogs, which you can’t do with Internet Explorer’s functionality.

I may end up deleting most of my blog feeds in Bloglines though, because I find IE convenient for this, but certainly for other types of news, I would use it.

I think libraries would find RSS useful, to keep clients updated on the latest news, new materials, and as a way for clients to create profiles of their interests, favourite books, subjects and authors so that when relevant information becomes available, this can be pushed to them.

I have made my blogroll publicly available at http://www.bloglines.com/public/Dan-G.

#7 Post about anything technology related – Web 2.0 subject guides

In preparing to write this post, I found lots of little gems.

Creating Web 2.0 subject guides is an interesting idea, that first came to my attention a while ago through a post on Stephen’s Lighthouse. In this post, Stephen Abram pointed to a post by iLibrarian, who writes about some of the new ways to create library subject guides and provides some examples. So now I have the chance to blog a few lines about it myself.

Libraries create subject guides or pathfinders as a starting point to help their community find resources on particular topics of interest to them. So it is not surprising that we should be starting to look at ways to embed/include Web 2.0 tools to improve them, because these too also have ‘community’ behind them. I think having community elements within guides, gives those interested in the particular subject a sense of ownership, that they are helping those with similar interests by voting, tagging, commenting on resources that benefited them, a real sense of collegiality. Subject guides that include Web 2.0 ideas would be very worthwhile for academic libraries.

Also, Web 2.0 has given us YouTube, flickr, blogs… so we can use these as other resources point for finding relevant resources, not just what is in print, or on websites. It also means that by including RSS technology, tagging or voting features, guides become more relevant, because they would be updated more regularly. And this is not a bad thing.

Of the new subject guide tools suggested, I really liked Squidoo (although each guide does have some ads included, based on the content – I’m noticing that there is a commercial element to Web 2.0 tools). The example guides provided by iLibrarian relate to getting started with Web/Library 2.0, so there is a benefit of exploring this that I wasn’t expecting!

LibGuides is also good. I was actually going to say how good this was to some colleagues a while back, and found that my Library is actually going to trial it with some of their guides this year! I think the way you can organise information on the page is very clear. Tabs across the top allow you to navigate to different parts of a guide. The subject librarian’s contact information can be included (not just e-mail, IM too if applicable). It will be interesting to see how we use it.

Koonji didn’t seem to work for me when I clicked on the link this time around. I have played with it briefly before and from what I remember I didn’t think this would easily be transferable to a library context. iLibrarian says it is a “…how-to or resource guide for a particular subject which is broken down into steps. Each step describes a process and can include narrative, recommended links lists, tips, videos, and images. Users can add and recommend links, vote for and add tips, discuss guides in forums, and rate koonji guides’.

I also had my first real introduction to del.icio.us. RSS feeds and linkrolls can be added into existing subject guides to add another dimension. I can see how del.icio.us may be useful in helping me keep track of interesting links related to my work, and I can’t wait to explore it more later in 23 things.

Something else I explored thanks to Helene Blowers’ post on thing #7 was SitePal. She had created an avatar to introduce the requirements for this thing, rather than a podcast, but it is no longer active. So I thought, why not try and create one myself, to see how it works. SitePals can be placed on websites and blogs, used as marketing tools, ways to attract traffic to websites. I used the demo to create a rather suave guy (!!), but when I tried to enable the free 15-day-trial to show you my result, I had to include all my details, including credit card to do so (in readiness for later purchase if I wanted). I wasn’t comfortable with this, so I abandoned it. But I can see a benefit in using this or something similar for libraries. The face of a virtual reference service, anyone?

Thing #6 flickr fun

Do you like the fancy heading? I created it with the flickr logo makr, one of the cool things I have been exploring to help me complete thing no. 6 on mashups, web apps and third party tools.

In a nutshell, a “mashup” is a web application that has taken data from two or more sources and used it to create something new (a hybrid), giving it a value that it didn’t have before. The term originated from the hip-hop music scene, where two or more pieces of music are mixed together to create a new song (Wikipedia, 2008. Helene Blowers is right, there are some good resources on this page to help understand mashups).

It could be said that a mashup is like a value-added application, and libraries/librarians are good at adding value to things; maybe mashups should be the major Web 2.0 area libraries should be exploring, creating content and tools their users want by combining different elements. Have they already been doing this, and it is only now with more tools and technology at our disposal, that it can be fully appreciated?

One of the first mashups created (according to Sherif, 2007) was a website that maps Chicago crime stats (using Google Maps and police crime statistics). Click here. Map mashups appear to be very common. flickr lets you create a map to show where your photos were taken.

I had so much fun with this exercise, I could go on playing forever. Of the things suggested on the 23 things blog, I really liked the Flickr Color Pickr, which lets you choose a colour from the colour wheel and public images from flickr are found that match the colour. And not just any images. You can choose from categories like Flowers and Doors and Windows if you like. I would really like to create one of these myself. Montagr is great too. By typing in and searching for a flickr tag a really cool montage is generated of one of the random images found (by default), using the smaller images. I did try out a lot of FD’s Flickr toys. I created my own trading card (as suggested) and magazine poster. See?

I also liked the Warholizer. dumpr is similar to FD’s in fun factor is well. I really liked Make Photos Look Old and Photo to Sketch of these tools.

Note that you don’t have to use flickr images for FD’s or dumpr. You can see the effects just by downloading photos you have on your computer, which is what I did, because I don’t have a big enough flickr library yet.

Of course, there are some applications where you would need to be heavily into flickr to try them, such as creating widgets for your blog, toolbars, screensavers. And then there are those that meet very niche needs, or are very similar to others.

I also tried some games that use data from flickr. There is fastr, which I really enjoyed. You have to guess which tag is shared by ten images that appear on the screen. If you guess right, you get points. You have six minutes to guess as many as you can. TagMan is based on HangMan, except you have to guess the flickr tag before it’s too late. The only thing I didn’t like about this, was that it didn’t show you the answer if you were hung.

So I had lots of fun today and over the weekend with mashups. And I’m sure I will return to this again. There are a couple of ideas I’d like to try…

PS. I had a look at some other photo-managing/sharing sites and Webshots looked really good as an alternative to flickr.

dumpr's Photo to Sketch