Week 5 Task # 10

Well I said I would turn off the PC, but this is just too much fun (yes, I'm serious!)

Made my own romance novel cover at http://www.glassgiant.com/romance/ , also made a snowglobe and did my own makeover (hah hah hah).

Love my little avatar, made at http://www.doppelme.com/

And put a message for you in coffee at http://www.imagechef.com/

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

incredibly apt - look at this

Week 4 Task #9

OK, more on RSS feeds! First thing I did was to visit a couple of sites I already know about and see if I could subscribe - http://taste.com.au has a great feed - if you live in Australia and love to cook, you should already know about this website, so no more information! Found a couple of others using stumbleupon (recommends websites according to your preferences and does a pretty good job at picking interesting ones) and subscribed to those - once the novelty of this wears off I am really going to have to prune these subscriptions, as there is no way I will ever have time to read them all!!
Visited feedster to have a look for information on public libraries - initially received a lot of irrelevancies, tried a phrase search which returned more of the same. Hmmm. The topic search was more interesting. Found a travel website which sounded OK. Overall, not incredibly impressed.
HINT! For those of you working on IE 7, I have a very nifty little button in my toolbar that tells me where a site has feeds.
I added Melbourne news to my bloglines via Topix - wonder how it knows where I live? Also added some Offbeat news (who can resist a good brain-eating amoeba story?) Found that they have a Libraries news section and subscribed to that too. Using "Dandenong" was too specific for a Topic search.
Google blog search made me sigh a little with relief - nothing like a little familiarity sometimes when you're off exploring new worlds. Lots of blogs that mention public libraries, including some belonging to Learning 2.0 participants. Seems as though a lot of public libraries have new books blogs - unfortunately not us, though (as yet). All so easy when you know how! Monash has events listed (love the lovely Google) but mainly American stuff. A search on "Dandenong Library" revealed a blog written by one of our customers - (an "ah ha!" moment for anyone who questions why we are doing this program!) and another - (including a photo of the library! OK, maybe we are only barely visible in the corner of the photo, but still!) and another! right, moving on....
(sooo easy to get sidetracked!) Technorati picked up quite a bit on Dandenong and some incredibly vile racist stuff about the Sudanese. A reminder to me that the net has it's dark side. I also learnt that people are ripping pages out of our manga books (there's that dark side again!). OOo, found Natalie's blog!
Fed up now :-) One last thing before I turn off this computer ... checked out the ANZ Ref Centre and have discovered that it lets you feed searches - which seems like great way of tracking what's going on in the media. I've fed in "Dandenong Library" and have found an article by one of our talented staff and (in some ways thankfully) that's it. *yawn*

Week 4 Task #8

Well after some very entertaining times, we have discovered that it's actually not us doing something WRONG with Bloglines that's creating the problem - it's our blessed security software at work! Thus the fact that it is now some ridiculous hour at home and I am busy playing with feeds. Oh well. Bloglines is very interesting and I'm very pleased that I can pop RSS links into my own Blogger blog also. I couldn't see the tab to make it public, so have included a small screenshot of the feeds I have subscribed to.

Plenty of applications for this technology in a public library - people can subscribe to our blogs (for instance, latest events or new items in the library), we can set up feeds to sites we think people might want to check out, etc. etc. For myself, I've subscribed to a large number of extremely frivolous sites. So for right now, it seems like a new way to spend even more time online doing frivolous things, but now that I actually know what that RSS button does, I will see where it takes me!

Week 3 Task # 7

OK, well blogging about technology ... first, I can barely remember what it was like NOT to own a PC, my first PC was a Mac with an unbelievably tiny monitor, black and white like the picture. Awwww shucks, ain't it sweet? Bit different from the flat-screen wonders of today, yes? I like to think that I am something of a techno-holic - love the lovely toys produced to make life easier/prettier/more fun! My iPod is a wonderful thing and it's been a long time since I've bought a CD anywhere but iTunes. Another "toy" I adore is my GPS nav system, which means I can actually find my way from Hampton to Ascot Vale without needing to do a "quick" detour via Niddrie or over to the airport!
As for the online world... I live on the net and my current addiction is facebook, though I think it's giving me a complex about how many friends I've got in comparison to some of my other friends! I do pretty much everything online, from paying bills to finding out about anything I need to know.
I am hoping that at work we will be able to work some of this Web 2 stuff into our daily tasks, as I truly believe that if we put our heads together we can produce something new and interesting, which we can use to help our patrons. I can see possibilities for ELLA, for readers' advisory, for adult events, youth, reference, you name it!
Cheers,
Donna