Week three - All a Twitter!

Been a while since I have been able to work on this, but I have been busily learning about our wonderful new E-Audiobooks and E-books in the interim, exciting stuff to be sure....makes me want an I-Pad even more, lol! Meanwhile, at home I began lurking in my Twitter account once more (comicbookgal), vicariously enjoying the celebrity gossip first hand (love how twitter makes my favourite authors and celebs feel like besties, LOL!) I even began tweeting a little here and there too :) The most fabulous thing is seeing that a great wee network is being built for librarians and professionalism, really nice to discover it and see all the amazing things happening around the world (and sadly, the less amazing and frankly rather distressing things that are happening in libraries overseas...boo hoo!) I will be continuing to twitter and tweet for sure...especially now I have deleted some of my overwordy and slightly boring celeb tweeters (sorry Kevin Smith, love your movies...but not a hockey fan :) Is it easy to use? I think so - my account is pretty basic, I just access it via my PC, I don't have it running through my phone...works ok for me though :) Would customers find it simple? Again, I think so.....was talking to someone about it the other day, and they said they liked it much better than facebook, because it was all just simple statuses, without any of the other guff (personally, I like the other guff, but each to their own :) Twitter is a fantastic tool for reaching our tweeting customers - we can tell them all about upcoming events as they are about to happen, promote website updates and the like, its such a great way to make libraries accessible and raise our profile.

Week 2 : Zamzar - converting file formats

This exercise featured http://zamzar.com/ which is a fantastically useful site that I wish I had known about already :)
It is a fairly simple site to use, and I think customers would also find it so (although I would still expect staff to help guide a first time user through how to use it).
We can definitely use this on both staff and learn.net pcs, as it doesn't require software to be downloaded...fantastic! I did have to convert two documents as the first didn't work, but I suspect it may have had difficulty with it as it was a mix of Word/excel rather than just a word.doc.
I would very much recommend this site to customers (and anticipate using it myself in the future), as there have been many a time I have wanted to convert something to PDF, and this was one very easy way to do it.
The only downside I could see with recommending it to customers is that it is not instant and they do have to wait for their file conversion....but I think the wait is worth being able to open a file you cannot!
Can't wait to play with this at home to test out the ability to convert PDF into word because that would be soooo handy!

Week 1 : Blogger

My web 2.0 expectations for round two - to explore more interesting 2.0 technologies and to have fun doing it! We are so lucky to get to do this as a part of our jobs, so I have no fears....let the playing and learning commence! How can libraries use blogs? As a tool to stay in touch with their community, particularly those online...staff could share favourite book reviews posted on the website - promote local events happening in both the library or their local community - the possibilities go on and on! blogs could also really useful for certain programmes - for example there could be a Summer Reading Programme blog to keep all the summer readers up with the play about how the programme was going, and what events were coming up.

We're back baby!

Back at work that is......after a one year break looking after the new little person in our household. And how saddened I was to find out that I had missed out on some most awesome Web 2.0 training in my absence (thats what you get for taking a year off I guess).
So feeling rather deprived...I wrote into my PDR for this year that I NEEDED to do this training and be up with the Web 2.0 play, so Eating kittens for breakfast lives once more...hurrah!!

Official post 21, Thing 23....my learning journey

The end is here!

Wow, this has been an excellent programme, and I really learnt so much along the way. I've just completed my survey, where I mentioned that I really surprised myself. I thought I was pretty savvy when it came to Web 2.0, but there was so much I didn't know about.

Highlights would have to be the fun stuff (surprise surprise!), generators are AWESOME! I had so much fun with these, and have continued to do so at home. (I'm constantly looking at photos I have taken with a LOLcat eye, how can I caption that?)
It was also really nice to pick up lots of new facebook friends :) I was already a facebook addict as it was...lol.

The most challenging thing to get my head around was RSS (I know, I know, we WERE warned). But once I did, it was totally worth it, a great way to keep up with all the blogs I like to read etc etc. The wiki topic was also a bit of a yawn, but they really are a useful source of info, and I know I use Wikipedia all the time at home.

I'd like to say thanks to our fabulous Manager (yes you!) for booking in some time for us to work on our blogs, without those two half days, I'd never have got here - doing this when working one day a week was pretty daunting at times, lucky there were so many fun things I didn't mind doing at home :)

I'm looking forward to taking some time now to reflect on everything, and play some more - now that I'm done theres time to explore a little further without feeling guilty for not getting on with finishing my 'things'.

I think I may keep on adding the odd post here, dunno if anyone at all is reading this, but I wanna make some more generator goodies, and this is as good a place as any to share em :)

Over and out from comicbookgal

Official post 20 - thing 22 E-books

Wow, this was a really enlightening 'thing' for me, I had no idea what was out there in the way of E-books. Personally, I prefer to have a real book in front of me, but my husband is a real fan of non-fiction e-books, and even has some saved to his phone to read in deseperate times of need.

I looked at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page where you can access free e-books, and found that you can get many 'classic' titles and authors, such as Jane Austen, and my fav author as a child L.M Montgomery (and her Anne series). I realised this is a great resource for us to promote to our customers, and in particular to students studying. Just last week I had a girl looking for Pride and Prejudice, and our copy was out (and she of course wanted it yesterday). If I had realised then, I could have shown her this free e-book version! So, really great for classics, but not so much for more modern or popular stuff, or for NZ authors either.

I then explored http://www.ebooks.com/ and was amazed at the HUGE range of e-books for sale there, and they really did have heaps and heaps of great authors (lots of my favs anyhow) and really recent new titles. Again, not really any NZ authors, but a great overseas range for sure. I thought this might be something I could recommend to my sister, as she lives in a small town down south, and sometimes has to buy out of town - this could be a great way to access the latest Dean Koontz for instance. (though I suspect like me, shes a fan of real books...not sure, have to ask her :)

Lastly I read up on amazon's kindle - I have heard lots about them before, but if anything this just confirmed for me that theres nothing like a real book. Yes, its really convenient to have 200 on hand at any one time, but at least you don't have to worry about batteries running out, or ongoing charges for subsciption.

hmmm, all very interesting stuff, and it will be scary to see where we are on this subject in 10 years time.........

One for fun

I told my husband that I had to embed a Youtube video today, and he was all disappointed that I didn't pick this one. I wanted to use this one, but couldn't remember what it was called - another great reason to use Youtube, cute animal vids :)

Official post 19, thing 21 - Podcasts

Well, I knew about podcasts before, I just never thought there would be very much that would interest me enought to subscribe to one. However, when I explored the podcasts listed at http://podcastalley.com/ I discovered http://www.comixtreme.com/ which has cool regular podcasts,with reviews of the latest comics and a bunch of cool sci-fi and tv shows. Turns out its super easy to add the rss feed for this to my bloglines, so thats all done and tested and indeedy, I can now listen to the cool geekdom to my hearts content :)

I should mention that I have once before subscribed to a series of podcasts on an American book publishing site (just can't remember which one, started with B and wasn't Borders). They were done by author Dean Koontz, and they were pretty cool, he answered fan questions via podcast, and then a real community formed commenting on his casts. He also used podcasting to promote a recent Odd Thomas title, he had a cool 4 part mini movie series that kind of acted as a trailer for the book, very cool stuff....Mr Koontz is well good at web 2.0 :)

Official post 18, thing 20 - Youtube

Ahhh, Youtube - it just doesn't get any better. I already use this in a myriad of ways at home currently. I check out the latest music vids - much quicker than waiting to see them on tv. Before the Twilight movie actually came out, all us fans of the books scoured Youtube obessively for news and clips from the movie,(and it turns out we should have had a little faith - we were all not so keen on the Edward to be, and he ended up being pretty fabulous!)
I think its an amazing tool for making the world more of a shared community - my sister put me on to this cool Estonian singer called Kerli after catching her video on Youtube.

For your enjoyment I have embedded a trailer for the hilarious on-line series Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. You can actually watch most of the songs from this on youtube as well (I recommend Freeze Ray, Laundry Day, A Mans gotta do and On the rise) This was an online series made when the writers strike happened last year, by the very clever Joss Whedon (buffy, firefly etc etc) and stars Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.

Official post 17, thing 19 - online productivity tools

Would you believe this is the 2nd time I'm typing this 'thing' up, just hit the wrong key and wiped everything, and sadly my last draft save seems to be blank, grrr!

Anyways, I have been a long time coming with this post, as I tried to access the last few 'things' at work to complete my web 2.0 training, and they had been blocked, and usually when I've been free to do it, all the learn.nets have been busy too, so here I am at home finally finishing up. I have also taken a wee while, cause every time I start exploring the tools from the site, I start playing, and then I haven't been happy with a single result to post about. So I've decided to talk about the tools I have explored, otherwise I may never get through this thing!

Firstly, from the Fun Stuff category, I checked out HairMixer, where you can upload a photo of yourself and try on celebrity hair styles. After much playing and testing, I was horrified at ALL the results - it would seem that I am not meant for a celebrity hairdo, so much so that I refuse to show you my result here...it was just scary!

Next I thought Galaxiki sounded kinda cool (from the Games and entertainment section - well, I am doing this at home in my own time now...tee hee) From the blurb in the awards, I thought I was exploring some sort of cool Sci-fi/fantasy on-line world...perhaps about books/games/movies/tv - turns out its an ACTUAL galaxy, where you can register and have your own star in a solar system. Whilst I am very much admittedly a geek, this was way way beyond me! (but big ups to all those in the Galaxiki community!)

Lastly I went to Last.FM from the music category. This was pretty cool - you can register and make a list of your favourite artists, and then the site recommends other artists you might like. This is something I'm coming back to explore in full, I kept getting waylaid looking for new stuff from older favourite bands. You can also listen to 'channels' based on a favourite artist, eg, I had Lily Allen, and I could listen to a Lily channel, which played her music, but also other artists similar to her like Kate Nash.

None of these are particularly relevant in a library setting, but many of the other tools on the awards list that we have already explored could be (google.docs, PBwikis, bloglines and so on) I just wanted to look at some new stuff this thing round.

FOOTNOTE...

I can now say I have found an excellent use for google.docs - another staff member and myself were a part of the step challenge late last year, and we wanted to find a way to keep it going. So I have made us a spreadsheet in google.docs that we can both access from home. Its set up so we can each enter our steps, and then they translate into a graph that shows our progress against each other - the competition keeps us motivated...YAY!