Summary of 23 Things exercise

I began this learning process wondering how I was going to ever find the time to complete it. It has not been a quick learning exercise, some weeks have required a lot more time than others but each week has been a struggle to complete the required exercises. I think it helped that I was already familiar with some of the technologies, I already have my own personal blog and that really helped me to get through some weeks much faster. Also, being the first participant was very motivational, I felt the pressure to get through and test the exercises so that others could follow.

I’ve enjoyed this activity immensely. It’s so interesting to see the interactions that are possible between these different new technologies, and play with them. I think that has been the best part actually, playing with them. It’s my favourite learning style after all…

Looking back at my blog, it looks like I’ve meandered a little off topic, there’s pictures of cars and dolls and a meme in there amongst the exercises. Not very library of me. But very me. I hope you don’t mind these occasional excursions, I think they very much assisted my learning process.

It’s hard to pick a favourite exercise – I was quite rapt with the Flickr tools, and very keen on Library Thing. It’s just been so great to see what is out there. I very much enjoyed customising my blog and playing with all the features.

I hope that all the other participants are able to soldier on and get through. It's so very worthwhile once you get there.

NetLibrary e-audiobooks

I registered with NetLibrary and searched for audiobooks. There are a lot of interesting titles, both professionally and personally. Sadly though, because UniSA doesn't purchase audiobooks from NetLibrary, we won't have any to download and play with!

I located a list created by East Baton Rouge Parish Library of free e-audiobooks. I was particularly keen on the Project Gutenberg audiobook titles which are available, there's heaps of great literature there and with so many download options.

Podcasts

Today I visited Podcast Alley. I didn't really like it to start with, mostly because the podcasts that interested me hadn't been updated in a while. That is usually something that kills my enthusiasm. Then I found one called Library Geeks and I decided perhaps it wasn't so bad after all.

I ask you, given the description of the Library Geeks podcast - 'Welcome to Library Geeks, where librarians, geeks, and geek librarians geek out about libraries.' - what's not to like!

I also found one for collectors of Blythe dolls and added both to my Bloglines account.

The Yahoo podcast link from 23 Things didn't work, so I went to Yahoo and searched for it and it appears to have disappeared.

Time for YouTube

There's such a variety of videos available on YouTube. Some are clever and informative, others seem to be the result of a drunken night out!

I've played with YouTube before, but not embedded video in a blog before. It was hard to know what to embed, so I've gone with two very different options.

Firstly, the new ad from UniSA (because I saw it on telly this morning and thought it was a bit groovy)



and secondly, James May's expedition in a Bugatti Veyron at 253MPH. Because I like it!



Annoyingly some of the videos I really liked and wanted to embed were restricted. So you could watch them on YouTube, but couldn't embed them anywhere.

Web 2.0 Award Winners

I was quite excited about this list of winners, there looked like some interesting names and categories. In actual fact, it wasn't really exciting at all. There were some familiar names like Delicious and CitySearch, but I thought some of the others were a bit dull.

I liked Biblio - very much like Abebooks but a site with much greater functionality. I particularly liked the browsing function and that they have created lists of author biographies and bibliographies. I love VuFind, it's being worked on here at UniSA Library at the moment and it's an exciting piece of software. The example of VuFind in action at the National Library of Australia looks great! It will be wonderful having that kind of flexibility in our catalogue. I was sorry that Library Thing only got an honourable mention - that site is a lot of fun. I don't know why I'm so interested in cataloguing my books at home. It's a little sad, I admit, but I think it would be heaps of fun :-)

Zoho Writer

I enjoyed playing with Zoho writer. It's quite an odd tool in some ways.

Really when you think about it, Microsoft Office has been becoming more and more webified so it should be a more natural progression than it feels. I do think it could be quite useful though so I'm adding it to my Delicious

I'm curious though. What if my network connection crashes and I lose my internet partway through a document. Autosave perhaps? Might have to explore that more...

I attempted to publish the document directly into my blog, but I kept getting error messages. There were also some times where I'd click on a button to change font, or even the publish button, and nothing would happen for some minutes. I suspect being dependent on internet access could actually be quite problematic. A cute and nifty tool - but I think there could be problems.