delicious

i can see the potential for someone doing research, or else someone who is very interested in a particular subject. seems it would make it convenient to find more info. of course, if there aren't appropriate tags then you might miss out on an article.

one of the points raised in the article "7 things you should know about social bookmarking" was that viewpoints might be skewed on a particular topic considering that the tagging might be somewhat subjective. i suppose you'd be safe if you were searching something innocuous like "gardening."

seems like an interesting way to search for info. this is one of the few things so far on learning 2.0 that i might just use on my own.

friends and such

i did it. got through creating a myspace account, adding kcls as a friend. i hope that took care of everything. still can't say i'm drawn into the online community as other people might be, but i understand its use at least.

all in all it shouldn't have taken as long as it did for me to get everything set up, but it did, and i'm very embarrassed for it. i won't go into details. anyway, the deed is done and i hope the next lesson isn't too involved because i feel guilty for sometimes taking a long time to get through them. oh well. it's all in the interest of learning. and the free mp3 player.

myspace, among other things

i remember the days of myspace, when i had an account and thought it was really cool to post weird pix of myself and get added on as a "friend" of people i'd never met. seems so long ago now. but then it started to get annoying, the idea of this whole community of people who were really just "collectors" of other peoples profiles just seemed ridiculous.

that said, i don't know how successful kcls's myspace launch has been, as far as "collecting" the teens that it seeks, especially now that myspace isn't quite the hot ticket anymore with the advent of facebook. it was interesting that in the podcast, dawn mentioned that she got more response from authors than teens, which really makes sense. not to be down on the teens these days (i've got one of my own) but i would imagine that they'd be more interested in scoping out their peers than the library's profile. i understand the idea behind getting out there where our patrons are, but if the main target is the teens, i wouldn't hold my breath. but who knows, i could be wrong. wouldn't be the first time.

facebook and second life are new to me, so i don't have much to say about them, but with the library extending its reach into these various communities, i'm sure it's interesting to the older (and i use the term loosely too include those who have only recently left their teen years) folks who inhabit these communities. it's a good vehicle to get out there anyway.

rss feeds--lessons 7 & 8

so i did the bare minimum of subscribing to various rss feeds, not because i feel like slacking, although, that's what seems to be happening considering how far behind i am currently, but rather, because i don't find them particularly useful. i only say this because the sites i tend to frequent add new info daily, and because i don't check them every day, there's always something new to see when i finally get there. this type of thing seems more useful for someone who has many websites that he/she needs to keep up on. i don't have very many that i need to visit every day, so like i said, having an rss feed hardly seems worth it to me.

i feel like the only place i'll need to use this is if a patron has a question about it. at least i'll have some sort of indication about what they're talking about. as far as the library using this technology, it might be a neat thing to use for book alerts or something of that sort. on one of the sites that i subscribed to in bloglines, they had many different areas/categories to choose from, so that you didn't get too much information at one time. makes sense when you're only interested in one particular thing on a website, and since the kcls website doesn't change too often, barring the different events on the home page, i just thought that something as dynamic as the changes occuring in our catalog might be a place where this would be useful.

as far as using the search tools, i didn't find them any better than doing a google search and taking my chances. i did a search for pacific northwest gardening and among the sites that i wasn't interested in anyway, there were also ones that had nothing to do with gardening in the pacific northwest coming up because of the keywords in the articles. anyway, i don't think i'd use this tool often or at all since it isn't any better than what i usually do. it's just easier going to the sites i like than using the search tool.

so i thought i'd try using the image tool on blogger again, and this time it worked. don't know why it didn't work with the flickr lesson. in any case, i wanted to make sure that i wasn't quite the idiot i thought i was. also, being the bebop fan that i am, and since i am the bebop girl, i guess it would be appropriate to introduce the people to my left. starting at the far end is spike, the super cool, kick-butt bounty hunter who takes no guff from no one. next to him is jet, his sexy partner and owner of the bebop ship upon which they travel the galaxies searching for bounties. next to him is the lovely and extremely dangerous faye valentine, who is actually in her seventies because she was in a coma for many years, and who despite wearing only a superbly cropped top and short-shorts that can only stay up with the help of suspenders, still manages to kick a**! next in line is ed who is a strange little girl and a genius of the technical sort--probably one who would yawn at the problems i've been having with this project. second to last is the evil vicious, spike's arch nemesis, and lastly (yawn) is julia, spike's former girlfriend whom he can't seem to get over. can you see why i'm so obsessed?

mashups

okay, i did the one where you sketch something and it pulls up different pictures that match the sketch. it's an interesting idea, but i wasn't really sure what the purpose of it was. i guess if i had something in mind that i wanted to post as far as a picture corresponding to a shape, but i didn't.

also tried the montagr, which was neat, but couldn't figure out how or if i could post that onto my blog. probably not since it has that feature where the image pops out at you when you mouse over it. or maybe i'm just not technically oriented to figure that part out.

lastly, i made a trading card, but somehow lost in on the way to putting it onto my blog. i'd like to find it again so i can put it up. like i said, maybe all this is a little beyond me. in any case, they are neat tools to know about.

what the...

snow caught on branches
Originally uploaded by mutantgirl13.

i only say this because it took a heck of a long time to get through this lesson. i don't know why i couldn't blog this pic through blogger and had to go through all the hassle of figuring it out through flickr, but i did--with outside help of course. i don't know if i could have done it without other people, and i guess that's what's so frustrating, bec i'm generally the type of person who likes to do things without help from other people. i know that the point of all this is to be have fun, and that it's ok to ask other people, but i just was thinking that i was savvy enough to get through at least this much by myself. it's not like i've never blogged before, or that i've never uploaded pix before. i guess my whole experience this lesson was soured because i forgot what my user name and password were, and it seemed to take me forever to get past that initial stage that i felt like a total idiot. ugh!!!

hopefully i'll get through the next lesson with less frustration and more fun. in any case, look at the pretty picture.

oh, and what's with the sun coming out today? i thought we were supposed to be having a stormy week? i sure do miss the snow.