Okay maybe not quite done

I saw a post last week of someone else who was still working on their 23 things. Now that person is on vacation so I'm not sure if she will finish or not. She was up to #20 the last I saw. Overall, I think at one point there were 47 people listed on the Moodle site. Some never got started, some got started but didn't get far. Many got halfway through. Only a few made it to the end. I did a quick count last week and saw that 6 were done completely. Only 1 or 2 people I couldn't identify. "Smile4" is a mystery to me. I have no idea who that blogger is. Others were easier to spot, and probably weren't trying to be anonymous anyway.

Oh well. I hope I can remember some of what I learned. I was working on one of my other blogs the other day and trying to remember how to put an image into my blog.It took a few tries but I finally got it. That was something I learned here.

Probably the most useful thing for me is the RSS feeds. I am reading a lot about other libraries, books, things in the "business" etc. from these feeds. Definitely educational. I am also trying Twitter occasionally and I know I could do more with it. I'm getting better with Facebook too.

Just did a little test

I currently have 3 blogs floating about on blogger under various accounts. I just went into Google and searched for them. I only found one of them, and that was because I knew a very specific keyword to use to find it. Searching by my name is useless. There are just too many people out there who I share a name with, a great way to stay anonymous, but a lousy way to do a search.

Just musing on what everyone else is doing..

I just took a peek at some of the blogs and noticed that some folks are up to #16 and others are still back on #3 or #4. I think it's a good thing about this class how everyone can just work on this when it's convenient and be at different places. I am surprised at how many people are not going to complete it, some have just given up. I thought it was fun, and I thought everyone else would think so too. Shows you what I know!

Farewell to Lucinda. From reading her blog I can guess that she is not sad to be leaving. Today is her last day I believe. I hope she enjoys that garden and feels better soon.

Misc. plans right now

I took out the image in the banner. It was just so big that I felt like it was a waste of space. Maybe I'll find something smaller to put in later.

Yeah, I blew right through a few assignments and got the first 15 done pretty quickly, but I didn't do every SINGLE thing that you can do. I explored Flickr but I didn't do all the mash-up stuff. I just got the idea of some of it and moved on. Now some folks are asking me how to do certain stuff and I haven't got a clue. So I think I will be doing a little back tracking, especially with Flickr. I'm also going to see if I can figure out how to get a tag cloud for my labels on here. I saw some "hacks", but when I tried to do it, it didn't work. Eventually I'll be on to assignment #17- trying to get a YouTube video to show up in the blog. That should be interesting.

Looks like there are still about a half dozen people who haven't even logged into the Moodle site yet, so I know there are still some blogs out there that haven't been created or registered yet. I'm looking forward to seeing them. I think it's great how everyone is finding different angles to learn on these assignments. We're all doing the same work but coming up with different answers so to speak. Very cool! Reading the other blogs is a lot of fun. I hope Erin likes her job. :-)

Week 7, Assignment #14 Add an entry to a Wiki, etc.

I am not going to create a Wiki, because I really don't need to. We do have a Wiki at the library that several of us post on and use. I have contributed to this one--
http://wws.library.umass.edu/wikis/acp/doku.php

I did add my blog to the blogroll on the NELINET site, but I didn't post any favorites. Just didn't appeal to me. Not much to say on this since most of the comments about Wikis were on #13.

Week 6, Assignment 11- Technorati & tags

Bleh! There are a lot of numbers out there, aren't there? Personally, for the most part, I don't care if anyone is reading my blog. I'm not doing it for the money etc. However, if I was doing a blog for the library, or for a business, etc, I definitely WOULD care. It is definitely helpful for the reference and research librarians to know which sites are popular, and for the appropriate staff to know how to market our libraries, and engage our users. Outreach is essential for our organization or else we won't reach our patrons. So these statistics about how many hits libraries are getting, and learning about how to tag the posts, etc. are important from that point of view.

I did the Discovery exercise. My first time through I was very unimpressed by Technorati. It looked boring. IceRocket seemed much cooler, and drew me in faster. It took me a while to find what I was looking for on Yahoo and Google. In fact on Google, I never did find "Collaborative" and "Library and Information Science". I gave up after a while. After going through all of the material for this assignment, I did go back and go the Challenge. I signed up with Technorati, and submitted my blog to be claimed. I didn't set up a WatchList though.

One thing that is frustrating is that even with RSS feeds, there is still so many places and so many sites to use. Lots of resources, and some of them do different things, but there are some overlaps too. It wasn't mentioned, but I also like Google Analytics, and I think that might cover some of the same material that these sites had as well. At least with Google, all the different appls are under one account. I don't have to go from site to site, trying to remember user names and passwords for each one etc.

Numbers are really not my thing though, and although I'd love to make money at this stuff, I know it's not going to happen. I'm not writing a Disney blog, with paid sponsers, I'm not writing a booksellers blog and selling books. I'm just blogging here about these 23 things. Nothing commercial about it, and it really doesn't matter how many visitors I get or anything else.

Okay, enough. Onwards to a lighter assignment in #12 I think.

Week 5, PLAY!!!

Rolling right along, I almost missed this! It's not a numbered assignment, and didn't show up on my nicely printed to-do list.

Okay, I've spent a couple of hours playing now. I messed around with the Avatars on Yahoo. Not sure if I am allowed to use the Yahoo Avatars on Facebook, but I tried. I also found an Avatar thing called DoppleMe, not nearly as good. Tried to put that on Facebook but failed I think. Oh well.

Checked out Rollyo. It's just not for me. What can I say? It's too much work and I don't like it.

LibraryThing- hey, we're already there! I think this could be very useful for the serious reader, someone who is organized, etc. I see UMass Libraries is on it, Maxine S is there, and maybe some others too. Cool!... but I don't need it for anything. I'm too much of a peon. If I need a book review I go to Amazon or the New York Times Books. Oh well.

-Nice to see more and more blogs coming along too. I just saw a nice one done on WordPress that I liked. Seems like people are slowly coming around and getting going. I'm sure more than a few of us skipped ahead a little and set up Facebook accounts too. :-)

Week 4, Assignment #9 Useful blogs and feeds

1. Explore the search tools
2. Blog about it

Well there are a lot of ways to look for blogs! I used Bloglines and ended up with too many, and had to narrow it down. I used the Yahoo directory and that worked okay, but I kept going. The LIS Wiki Article was a little overwhelming. Too much! No way to get through them all. I totally did not understand the Open Directory Project, and gave up on that pretty quickly.

Moving on to the Google Blog Search I found an ISEL update blog, SCUA, and some cool kid stuff. This was definitely my favorite, and of course I can link these blogs to my Dashboard on Blogger, and follow them when I am in the mood to be posting to my own blog etc.

I checked out Syndic8.com, but again was overwhelmed. Way too much information for my purposes. Technorati looked well organized, but I already felt like I had found my comfort zone with Bloglines and Google Blog Search so I think I'm done with this now.

On an unrelated topic, I'm going to go back now and see if I can separate my personal blog from this work related blog.

Week 3, #7 Create a blog post about technology

I'm still messing with the format of this thing I think. Nice to see what other people have started doing. I spent a lot of time yesterday on Flickr stuff, and after all of that, I'm still not a fan of it. I thought I'd like it better once I understood it, but so far I haven't been converted.

Technology.. most people haven't done this assignment on their blogs yet. I did post some comments on the blogs of Sarah, Carol, and AireTales, but they weren't specifically in response to this assignment. I guess I'll have to come back to that later once others have put up their posts. It's quiet in my department this week so it's a good time for me to be working on this stuff.

Technology has always interested me. In the early 1980s when personal computers were just coming out, I begged my father for months and months for a computer. I did tons of research, saved my money, and pleaded for a long time. I finally got a second-hand Apple ][e+. I kept it for years until the monitor didn't survive a move, and I couldn't afford to replace it. As a teenager I was online on "BBSes", before the Internet was accessible to most people. I took computer classes at G.C.C. during the summer, and I had boyfriends who were interested in electronics and were building their own computers and video games in their basement or their father's workshop.

When I first came to UMass as a freshman in 1989 I wanted to be a COINS major- I think that's what the computer science degree has morphed into. Unfortunately, I was lousy at Calculus, and not very good at Pascal- the computer language we needed to learn for one of my classes. I realized that I was not meant to be a computer programmer, even if I could write a video game in BASIC.

Years pass, and computers and technology still interest me. Privacy issues in the cyber world can get very political, and watching how the pendulum swings between people wanting easy access to things, and yet still wanting to be free of bureaucracy is interesting. National ID cards? No thanks! Too reminiscent of Germany during WW2 etc, and yet we seem to be gravitating towards that slowly. Sure I'd like to be able to copy whatever I see into my own blog or whatever, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be very happy if a photo of myself or my daughter showed up as an ad for a Czech grocery store-- http://www.neatorama.com/2009/06/11/missouri-family-christmas-photo-turns-up-in-czech-ad/ . There are lots of things to consider here, and the issue of privacy is a broad one, and very complex.

On a less complex scale, I do get emails from Slashdot which I generally archive to read later. Lots of tech related stuff is there, and I like to skim it all over, and have a general sense of what is going on, even if some of it is over my head.

I set up iGoogle for myself a long time ago, but I don't check it very often anymore. They have changed the formatting more than once, and I got tired of having to reset my RSS feeds for the news all the time etc. At one point I had several comic strips that I liked to follow, but I just don't have time anymore. I like Google though. I don't know if their applications are "2.0" or "1.0", but I find it to be user-friendly, and I have no difficulty using Google Maps, Google Documents, and other applications.

I especially like the Internet when I am traveling or planning a vacation. Trip Advisor can be very useful for finding hotels, or finding which hotels to stay away from. There are a couple of good road trip planners out there, and of course planning a Disney itinerary would have been impossible without access to all the Disney stuff out there. It's amazing at how much is available these days. Sometimes too much!

Library catalogs of course are online, and my local town library recently joined the CW MARS thing so I can renew my daughter's library books if we forget to bring them back on time. This is very convenient. I wish all small town libraries had this feature (Wendell doesn't) since their library hours can be somewhat limited. I also like being able to search for a title and then having it held for me either at UMass or my local library. Even my dad uses this feature. I don't consider my dad to be very tech-smart, but even he has figured this one out.

What does surprise me these days is how much is still NOT available. Every once in a while I'll look for something like the hours for a local business, or a good price on furniture, and I won't be able to find it. It seems a lot of places simply have not set up decent websites or don't want to list their prices online.

I do a lot of online shopping, especially for the library. I prefer vendors that list their inventory online. That way I know they have it in stock and can provide it. When I have to send a "paper order" off to someone I am always wondering whether the vendor will be able to fill it or not. Phone calls can work too, but sometimes the person on the other end of the phone forgets to input the order. At least online or with an email I have proof of what I ordered and when.

Security and privacy are potential issues when shopping online. For work related purposes I want the vendor to keep records of what I bought and when, but for personal shopping I'd probably prefer that they didn't. Of course in either case, I don't want that information to be given or sold to other marketers.

Okay, this is far too long now, and I've covered a lot of territory. I know that's not good blog-etiquette. Technology is a very broad subject though, and there are a lot of different directions you can go with this assignment. I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say.