I've Made it to the End!

The end is in sight. I certainly didn't think I would manage to finish everything in the time given. Fortunately having broadband now has definitely made a difference. No more frustration waiting for things to load.


Did I enjoy doing this? Some exercises were interesting to do and maybe one day I will look through the notes and decide to go back to some of the sites and have a further look at them.
It was interesting to see what won/got placed in the Web 2.0 awards and I enjoyed looking at Zoho, Library Thing and Del.ico.us.

What have I gained? Apart from knowing now that such sites exist it hasn't made me any keener to use the internet than before, exept if I am looking for something specific. However, for people doing research then the information on the internet is amazing and I can see why so many people spend so much time on it.

What have I learned? The art of personal communication (face to face) seems to be taking a back step in favour of internet communication, which is a real shame. Teenagers, especially, and a lot of adults mostly seem to want to communicate by technology, either by social networking on the internet or by texting on mobile phones. How are they going to manage later when they have to personally communicate with work colleagues and the general public.

Will the internet take over from the printed copy eventually? I do hope not.

Social Networking

Having read some of the articles I can see that there could be an advantage for the libraries to use social networking. It was interesting, though, as it all seemed to be geared to teenagers. One article suggested asking for ideas of books and videos to order (we have 'suggestions to purchase' on our web-site) and asking for ideas re hours and layout. It seems to me that if social networking is to be introduced than far more staff will be needed, to answer questions, make comments and keep the information up to date. Will that mean deploying some of the regular staff to fill this role?

21 - The Coming of Age in my Time

Call me old-fashioned but I cannot understand why people feel they need to tell the world what they are thinking, doing etc etc.

I have been invited to be a 'friend' on Facebook previously but have never accepted the invitation. Nothing has changed after looking at these social sites. If they only want named 'friends' to see the information, what is wrong with a personal email. This can have a rebound effect as one member of family found out some information, concerning another member of family, that had been posted on a friend's facebook site that she passed onto me, before I had heard personally from the person concerned. I was not impressed!

Same goes for the Library Bebo site. What is the difference between that and having a good website which gives all the information.

ebooks

Found several Shakespeare plays and one Jane Austen book on the website 'ask Sam', http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/default.asp but didn't try and download them. I find it hard enough and also not very comfortable to read anything at the computer so downloading an ebook for enjoyment reading would not be anything I would do. However for anyone doing research of some kind and needing a book that is no longer in print, then I think being able to access it on-line (if available) would be of great help.

Another site I looked at was http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Literature/

One site I was impressed with was for elderly and slightly impaired readers. It states 'Are your eyes tired? Are the letters too small? Have a particular sight condition? This digital library has been designed to provide you an adaptive reading experience! Just click above on "set display" and select the font size, font color and background color. The color combinations were carefully selected from the latest research information available on the reading needs of the partially sighted and old age readers. For the blind or visually impaired every book has been formatted into HTML code, avoiding proprietary formats that are not friendly with Text to Speech Software.' The link is http://www.readeasily.com/

Podcasts in Travel Tools

While checking out stuff on the internet for our next holiday I managed to get on a site called Travel Tools that had podcasts and an RSS feed. Marvellous I thought! I can do this week's exercise at the same time as I am doing something that is for my own benefit as well. I have now added the RSS feed to my bloglines.

The website also had information about RSS feeds - What is an RSS feed-
How do I start using RSS - How do I subscribe to RSS. Then it gives a list and small explanation of various RSS readers. Links are below:


http://www.queenslandholidays.com.au/travel-tools/rss/how-do-i-start-using-rss.cfm

RSS http://www.queenslandholidays.com.au/rss/qh-rss.xml

Food, Glorious Food.

As I enjoy looking at recipes, iFoods, which won 3rd place in the Food section of the Web 2.0 awards list, was a website I could spend (waste) a lot of time looking at. There are iFoods recipes, members recipes and recipe categories. http://ifoods.tv/web/

I also looked at I'm Cooked, the first place winner, but that site didn't appeal. That seemed to be home made videos of people cooking sent to the web. Urbanspoon, the 2nd place winner, was quite different. That gives details of places to eat around the world, though it mainly covers the USA and Canada. London is covered and also Melbourne and Sydney. I looked at the Sydney site and that covers inner and outer areas of Sydney, gives price ranges and also types of food. The sidebar includes recent restaurant reviews from the Sydney Morning Herald.
http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/70/Sydney-restaurants.html

As I was still looking for the track 'A Long Black Veil' I thought I would also check out a couple of the Music winners. I couldn't figure out Mog, though. It said one could download for free but I couldn't see how it was done.

I also checked out Picasa, as we have that on our home PC and learnt about the new upgrade, so next time the message comes up to upgrade I shall say 'yes'. http://picasa.google.com/

You Tube

It is fascinating to see all the different videos on 'You Tube'. Broadband is wonderful. I can now download them in seconds, whereas before they stopped and started and my server usually cut me off before they had fully loaded. I went looking for Joan Baez singing 'A Long Black Veil' and got lots of videos of her singing, but not that song. Then I found a variety of artists singing the song, but not the version I like. What amazed me was that some of the videos were made long before the Web and You Tube. I eventually settled on one from the BBC announcing the forthcoming contestants for the upcoming programme 'Strictly Come Dancing' as a friend and I had recently been discussing it. Here is the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQ1LTxHFjg

I couldn't embed it, but I was able to send it to my email and then I copied and pasted the link.

I looked at some of the Library videos and thought the one of the race around the library, finding information, was a good idea, especially as a way of children/young adults learning how to use the resources.