Hecuba's story

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 Who is Hecuba and what is she to me?

2012-01-03T21:07:00.003+11:00

This is about Web 2.0 although it may not appear so at first. There has been a bit of discussion in the last day or so about how one decides on Twitter handles and such like. @shewgirl did a blogpost on it and @bonitoclub forwarded a post he had done a while ago about the historical origins of his name. I commented on this and made an aside about the banality of my Twitter name. I thought it was so obvious! But apparently not! I thought there were lots of clues in this blog and even in my current Twitter avatar. Maybe my #secretsanta this year knew?

Like @shewgirl my name has its origins back in 2007 when we were all doing the 23things project in Victoria. To this day I don't understand why anonymity was required but it was and like @shewgirl I spent ages tossing around trying to find a Google identity so that I could set up the required blog. It was just too hard! Then suddenly like a flash it hit me! I was going to be Polyxena and my blog was going to be Hecuba's Story.

To this day, I am not really sure why I came up with those two names. I do know that they were called after my cats, Polyxena and her daughter Hecuba. But why I came up with them in that order or at all is a mystery. I think one of the reasons was some wise advice given to me a few years earlier by an online friend. I was mourning the death of my much adored cat, Messalina, who had been there for me throughout my cancer treatment - and lots of other things. My friend from the BreastCancerList told me that one thing he had done to celebrate his cats who had died was to call new email addresses etc after them so that he remembered and celebrated them every time he used the account.

Once I had my Google identity as Polyxena, I started using it elsewhere and when I started up my Twitter account later on, well of course I was going to try for that moniker and it was available. So that is where Polyxena comes from. My white Xena's name and her ginger girl, Hecuba, form most of my online identity. And where did the feline Polyxena's name come from? Well, as some of you know that was a sheer mistake :)

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird

#blog12daysxmas Day 10 Flickr challenges

2012-01-02T10:57:00.003+11:00

In with the new! Out with the old? 366/2 52/1/1, a photo by Hecuba's Story on Flickr.

The year has started off for me with two Flickr photographic challenges: #2012PAD and #fp2012 to use their Twitter monikers. Last year I completed the #2011PAD (PAD equals Photo A Day) with 365 photos and really enjoyed doing it. The photos could be of anything and I certainly had a range of topics at the end.

It certainly honed up my Flickr skills and it also gave me a whole new Web 2.0 community to be part of. There were only three of us initially from Melbourne with the rest of the 50 from the UK mainly (if not entirely). So it was great to get to know this community through their photos. Being in the southern hemisphere where the seasons were the opposite made for some interesting comparative photos too.

At the end I took the opportunity to make a Pummelvision video of the photos and posted about that experience here the other day. It was fun to see quite a few of my Twitter friends reflecting on similar 2011 projects and in some cases to see the resulting video. I really enjoyed the whole process and am so glad that I have done the video and have it as a memory of the highs and lows of 2011. Thanks @sarahgb for setting up and administering the group!!

In 2012, I am taking part in two such projects. #2012PAD is on Flickr and essentially the same as #2011PAD and a continuation though a new beginning for those of us who did it last year. That started yesterday and my photo above is 366/2 for today. This year I have resolved to number them from the start very clearly so that I won't be flapping around in the last few days doing a comparison of what's in my set and what's in the group. Well, I suppose I might still be doing that but it will be a lot easier.

The #fp2012 project is slightly different but a variation as the photographs are themed rather than just PADs. This project, also a Flickr group, was dreamed up by @sarahgb and @csmramsden. #fp2012 stands for Friday Photos 2012 and the idea is that we will have 52 themes over the year and can post up to three photos a week with the Friday of each week being the deadline. The theme for this week is Beginnings (not surprisingly for the first one and for the beginning of a new year) and I just posted my first one today: 52/1/1. Again I am determined to get the numbering right from the start! Opportunistically, I used the same photo that I used for my PAD today. I hope to do the two projects in tandem though it remains to be seen whether I will always do that.

So, if you are looking for a 2012 challenge and want to hone up on your Flickr, do a bit of photography or meet a new community, why don't you come on over to Flickr and join up for either or both of the groups? I have given you the links above so how easy is that? We have also signed up the City of Boroondara Library Service for the #fp2012 challenge and will be interested to see how it works with a library. It would be great if some of you got your libraries on board too.

So happy Flickring in 2012! I am sure that I will be talking more about these projects as the year progresses and certainly at year's end.

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 Tumblr

2012-01-01T21:52:00.005+11:00

One of the challenges for me when I participate in these blogging challenges is that although I have three blogs they really have quite narrow parameters i.e. technology, reading and cooking. I am not complaining about that and it is exactly how I want those blogs to be. However, if I want to put up a photo (apart from Flickr), jot down a paragraph about the photo, or just make some general comments I really can't do it on my existing blogs.

One of the tasks I set myself for this #blog12daysxmas was to explore possibilities. In fact I didn't get very far with my exploring. For Day 3 of #blog12daysxmas I set myself up a Tumblr account. I know lots of people have been using Tumblr for ages but I guess I am just a bit slow. It was easy to set up a template and I experimented with a few of the free ones until I ended up which one I liked. It looks like an old-fashioned airmail letter and seemed appropriate for my Tumblr which is called Hecuba's Reflections: virtual comments winging their way to you. This automatically provided a link to my Twitter feed, my Tumblr likes and the Tumblr accounts I am following. I haven't explored if I can customize it myself but I should do that.

I like the way you can quickly insert a range of things from the top of the dashboard - text, photos, quotes, links, chat, audio and video. And I quickly discovered that I could link back from Flickr with my photos there or from Youtube with video. It took me a little while to work out what happened on the dashboard apart from composing as I had some difficulty working out how to follow people. But now that I am following a few I can see how everyone's post scroll through there and you can see the history of the posts and who has favorited/reblogged yours. Exploring Tumblr found me some really interesting visual sites to follow.

So I am sold on Tumblr. I think it is a great little tool for communicating and that there is some really interesting and creative stuff on there that is quite different from the regular blogpost. My main issue is that I can find very few friends on there. Maybe it is because very few are on Tumblr but I doubt it somehow. If you are on Tumblr and you want to visit me or follow me I am there as Hecuba's reflections .

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 Pummelvision 2011PAD

2012-01-01T12:58:00.007+11:00

For the last year I have been submitting photos to the Flickr group #2011 PAD or photo a day. There have been about 50 of us doing this: I say about 50 as people have come and gone over the year and started in midstream. These have mainly been UK library people with three or four of us from Australia, well Melbourne really.

This was quite a challenge for me that I got into because of my online friends @sarahgb in Wales and @csmramsden in Melbourne. I found it quite hard to get into the habit of remembering to take a photo and remembering to upload it. My tactic for the days I missed ended up being to look at which of my Flickr photos had been viewed by someone on the missing day. That led to some quite interesting inclusions and I often pondered and ponder why anyone had been looking at them. You can see my set here with its 365 photos. That was a learning too: number the photos!

I had been using Flickr for quite a while - since I learned and posted about it in this blog when I was doing 23things all those years back - but I found I learned so much about the possibilities of Flickr by doing this challenge. Previously I really hadn't explored groups and now am amazed at what is on there. I didn't know how to load directly to Twitter and Facebook. Duh! I was copying and pasting the url. Or into groups. I initially went to the group to do it and finally the penny dropped and I realized that I could do it from the image. I am sure there is so much more there to learn.

So yesterday was the end of the challenge and I wondered how I could review my life in photos in 2011. Fortunately my Twitter friend @jobeaz had finished another 365 project herself and had been experimenting with various ways to present them when our US friend @pollyalida stepped in and suggested Pummelvision. So I thought I would give it a go too as my other favorite, Animoto, wasn't going to let me do 365 images - well, at least not in the free version.

Pummelvision was simple and easy to use. Once I had opened the url, it asked me where my photos were to be fetched from (Flickr) and where I wanted the resulting video to be posted (Youtube). I had to do permissions for both of them, decide on one of two music options, indicate which photos I wanted included and their order, provide an email address, and press go! It took a while for the video to be made so don't be disheartened at that. Then the url appeared on the Pummelvision site and I was also sent an email with the url.

Here is the resulting video. You will find some things a little out of order as I discovered yesterday that some photos hadn't been added to the set but just to the group and vice versa. That is a big learning for next year when hopefully I will keep better track.

Well, what do you think? I was surprised yesterday to discover that only 11/365 photos related to books and blogged about it over on Hecuba Reads. It has been fascinating to look back at themes of flowers, streetscapes, buildings, landscapes, friends, family and colleagues, food and cooking, family and local history and above all my photogenic kitteh, Polyxena.

We had decided to do a different challenge in 2012: Friday Photos 2012 which will involve themed photos. I was excited to join up that challenge and we have joined up the City of Boroondara Library Service as well. So please join in if you wish. We will have fun getting to know each other through our photos.

But yesterday I was feeling rather wistful about not doing the PAD any more, particularly as I felt I had just started to get into it. I found myself telling Xena that she would not have as many photos for people to admire in 2012! However, fortunately a few others felt the same and in the middle of the night here (1/1) and on New Year's eve in Wales @sarahgb set up the new group at the eleventh hour! I have already posted my first 2012PAD and guess who is in it?

#blogjune Boroondara challenge

2011-07-03T17:48:00.007+10:00

We set ourselves another challenge at the City of Boroondara during the month of June, and that was to complete #blogjune for our library blogs. Well, when I say WE set ourselves the challenge I really mean that @tapsister set us the challenge to do #blogjune for the City of Boroondara Library Service by one or other of us doing a Boroondara blog-post a day.

We have four library blogs: Library News which covers general stuff, Bookends which is devoted to adult books and reading, About the books which has a youth focus and Telling Tales which is our family and local history blog. Having set us all the challenge, Tapsister did a beautiful colour co-ordinated roster for blogging during the month of June and we were away! I am not going to comment on how the Boroondara challenge worked generally as that is Tapsister's prerogative. I just want to focus on the posts that I aka Polyxena did for Boroondara during that time.

Apart from a couple of posts I did as normal business during June (and I don't think I even tagged as #blogjune), Telling Tales was my baby and we were rostered by Tapsister to do seven blogposts. Bookwoman did four of them focusing on our current celebrations on 150 years of public library service in Boroondara. They were on Camberwell Library, Camberwell Library and the Bookmobile, Camberwell Central Library and Balwyn Library. As we were about the celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Camberwell Central Library there were no surprises there.

Polyxena was rostered to do three. I moved away from the history of the library service for mine. My first was on the 1988 Kew Urban Conservation Study and the usefulness it has for family and local historians despite its unprepossessing cover. My second one was on the City of Hawthorn Centenary 1860 to 1960 and featured a video by Swinburne.

As I normally try to reframe and recycle my personal Hecuba Reads for one of the library blogs, I also did nine unscheduled #blogjunes on Bookends and once we put them into the equation decided that enough was enough. So I did a total of 11 blogposts for Boroondara in June. These included the two local history ones as well as ones for Bookends on Dorothy L Sayers, More Peter Wimsey, Striding Folly, In the teeth of the evidence, Last gift of time, In tearing haste, Manhattan dreaming, Lord Peter: the end, and finally Franklin and Eleanor.

So 11 Boroondara blogposts and 30 personal blogposts! A total of 41 for June for Polyxena! Yes, I know that nine of these were recycled and reframed and on the same topics but I am really very pleased with myself. I am also very pleased with the Boroondara challenge and look forward to Tapsister's analysis of it. Well done to Tapsister for giving us this challenge! I wonder how many posts we all did at Boroondara for June covering both Boroondara and personal ones?

#blogjune 30 Reflection drinking Gorgeous Geisha

2011-07-03T16:22:00.006+10:00

Well, the end of June has come and a few days later I have finally come to the end of my 30 personal #blogjune posts, or rather I will be when I get to the end of this one and press the publish button. So I sit in Melbin's cold eating cake, drinking T2 Gorgeous Geisha tea and reflecting on what #blogjune meant for me.

Was I absolutely mad to take up the challenge? I had already taken up the #2011PAD challenge on 1 January and that involves a photo and sometimes a comment every day. I find with #2011PAD that I simply don't do it every day. But I basically do keep up to date by posting every few days. And yay! 30 June must have been the halfway mark for that as well as the end of #blogjune.

With #blogjune I decided that I wouldn't stick to one blog for my posts but I would spread the blogs over my three active (er semi-active?) blogs depending on how the mood took me. This meant that I would be focusing on technology (Hecuba's Story), books reading and writing (Hecuba Reads) and food (The Librarian and the Kitchen). This also meant that the focus of my blogging was restrained and not limited to random reflections. So what did I actually post about and what was the spread of topics?

I started off with Hecuba's Story as I needed to blog about the death of my feline Hecuba and the barriers her death had given me to writing in that blog. After the struggle of writing that one I didn't get back to Hecuba's Story for a while but did eventually do eight other posts there: 16 paper-li, 17 paper-li reprise, 18 Martyn Wyndham-Read, 20 Neighbourgoods, 21 Rouxbe, 24 Keepmeout, 26 Google+, and, of course, I am now doing 30. So that meant I did a total of ten posts on the general theme of technology - be it exploring new sites or commenting on the value of others. There probably were at least another 30 posts I could have written on this all-absorbing topic :)

After my initial post, I moved quickly to the comfort zone of books and writing and did a total of 14 posts on my blog Hecuba Reads. These basically focused on what I was reading during the month of June: 2 Macrobertsonland, 3 Dorothy L Sayers, 4 More Peter Wimsey, 5 Beyond the Ladies Lounge, 8 Striding folly, 9 Vale Patrick Leigh Fermor, 10 In the teeth of the evidence, 11 Last gift of time, 14 In tearing haste, 18 Manhattan dreaming, 22 Five books meme, 23 First Merchant Venturers, 25 Lord Peter: the end, and 27 Franklin and Eleanor. On looking back I am fascinated to see that what I read and thought about serendipitously in relation to recreational reading in June held no surprises: crime fiction, biography, local history, Greece, feminism, archaeology. Yes, these are always my key reading interests.

Another key interest is food and cooking and this was reflected in the six blogposts I did in The Librarian and the Kitchen. They were: 6 Chicken coriander and mushroom pie, 7 Mackerel and vegetable pie, 12 Turkey and coriander balls, 13 Turkey and coriander balls in tomato sauce, 15 The Flavour Thesaurus and 28 Sweet chilli prawn pies. There were no surprises there either. I love reading cook books and books about food and in terms of actual cooking I have been going through a phase of cooking different pies recently. And the meatballs? Well, meatballs are simply one of my favourite meals so again I am always trying out variants. During June I was so pleased that one of the other bloggers actually cooked one of my recipes and another friend whipped out a camera to take a photo of a pie I cooked her! Cooking and reading and writing about it is always fun and a constant in my life.

So would I do #blogjune again? I certainly would take up the challenge again as it provided me with a framework and a discipline. That being said the only topic discipline was provided by the actual blogs and I am really interested to reflect back on what I actually blogged about and how reflective it was of me. Will I blog more as a result or heave a sigh of relief? Well, probably the answer is yes to both.

This post is, of course, only my comments on my own personal blog challenge. I was also absolutely blown away by the volume of blogposts and the wide range of topics my fellow #blogjune bloggers came up with. To review my reactions to all of that would just take a lot more space than a blogpost. And I don't need to anyway as my colleagues provided regular updates for us on Libraries Interact.

#blogjune 29 Google+

2011-07-03T13:28:00.004+10:00

Yes I know that it is 3 July and I should have finished my 30 #blogjune posts by now. But on Thursday evening I did one and still had two to finish. Exhaustion got the better of me - as did a website and app I was wanting to comment on and which got into a loop when I tried to signin. I'll pursue that another time as it may just have been my tiredness and not the site.

The end of June of course coincided with the launch of Google+. I was annoyed to get onto it just as I was in the midst of end of year financial transactions and really haven't looked at it properly until this morning. Here's a link to a good Youtube introduction to it that I found when I was searching Google+ in my Sparks section.

At this point of time it is not possible to get a perfect prediction from the crystal ball, but I really like lots of things about it. I like the clean interface. I like the Circles and the ease with which you can add and take away people and the ease in which you can limit or broadcast your posts and Sparks. I really like the Sparks function which is, of course, building on the integral strengths of Google. And I like the way it is all part of a Google package: if I am using it I also have immediate access to Googledocs, Blogger, Youtube, Mail, Reader, Calendar, Picasa, etc. I don't use all of these regularly and some hardly ever but this is a strength of Google+. I haven't tried a Hangout yet and my experience with the mobile site on iTouch/iPad is that I prefer the web much more. Hopefully there will be an app soon.

At the moment with such a limited number of people participating my circles are only in the 80s and the majority are librarians with a few IT geeks thrown in for good measure. Maybe that has a lot to do with my limited range of acquaintance but I do know that the range of my followers and those I follow on both Facebook and Twitter is much broader than this. Will it have common appeal to say my extensive group of breast cancer friends on Facebook?

#blogjune 26 Geoloqi

2011-06-26T11:49:00.002+10:00

I have been puzzling for a while how to share local historical data and photos via apps, i.e. if someone is walking down the street they will get a push saying this is the Leinster Arms, it has been a hotel since blah and blah and a link to old photo. Recently I had an email (yes it was the Webbys again) telling me about Geoloqi. This is a mobile and web platform for location sharing. I'm rather cynical about location sharing but what got me to check this one out was the suggestion in the email that you can use Geoloqi to create a virtual guided walking tour if you have friends visiting.

It was easy to sign on as you can just do that with Twitter and there is a free app for iPhone4/iTouch though not for iPad. Unfortunately there are no Australian timezones either. You track where you have been as well as where you are going.

The function I am interested in is about leaving geonotes for your future self which you can have emailed, texted or pushed to you when you get to the location. So you can leave a note at the supermarket to buy cat litter, leave a note at work about an important task, or leave an historical comment at a site. As far as I can see you can't add a photo as part of your Geonote but presumably could add a link to a photo (e.g. on Flickr or Picture Australia). And each Geonote only works once so that is not really want we want.

There are "layers" that you can subscribe to which are said to to be such that you could have information about the street as you walk down it. Yay! And you will be able to make your own layers soon but now you need to build by using Geoloqi api. It does seem to me that this is the type of tool I have been looking for but as it's in beta maybe more exploration is necessary and a bit of patience.

#blogjune 24 KeepMeOut

2011-06-25T12:43:00.005+10:00

Here's another one from the Webbys! Are you addicted to certain sites and find them distracting and that they keep you from things you should be doing? Do you find playing with Yoville houses and gardens more entertaining than doing your own housework? Do you want to curb your use of various sites?

Well, in that case KeepMeOut is the tool for you. You can enter various urls that cause you angst, and set up KeepMeOut to warn you if you go there more than the times allocated. You can spell out frequency, limit your usage every day or just on weekdays, and specify times for the limits to be effective. You bookmark the site and store it on your browser. There's a list of most popular bookmarks that you can choose from. These not surprisingly include my favourites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube but also a number I never use. Partly this is because you can set the language of the site to eight European languages or Chinese and some of the bookmarks relate to that.

I entered Facebook as a site whose use I want to limit to once in 60 minutes every day between 9am and 5pm. It was easy to make a bookmark and drag it to the browser or favourite it. You can then easily change the settings if you want. I changed my settings to weekdays only easily. KeepMeOut keeps usage stats for hits - both blocked and allowed. There are various testimonials on the site such as "KMO saved my degree". The idea is that you use the KeepMeOut bookmark to access any limited site, so you need to keep up that discipline yourself. It won't work if you just sign on directly to the url.

I'm not sure that I will use it but if you are in the middle of exams or other deadlines and want a tool to help with some self-discipline it's a neat little thing. Of course, you have to want the discipline and sometimes I just need Facebook to provide distraction from my housework :)

#blogjune 21 Rouxbe

2011-06-21T17:42:00.004+10:00

Another site I was introduced to by the Webbys is Rouxbe. Rouxbe is an online cooking school which has over 65 online lessons. The lessons are very comprehensive and each has a series of video steps, practice, quizzes and discussion. The lessons vary from Sharpening knives, making stock, knife handling and many more. It is iPad and iTouch compatible and looks fabulous.

Of course, the catch is that it is a business and there is a price tag. The options are US$29.95 for a monthly membership or US$239.95 for an annual membership (works out at $20 a month). If you want to do cooking school stuff online it certainly is something to consider.

#blogjune 20 Neighbourgoods

2011-06-21T17:00:00.003+10:00

I've been inundated with Webbys emails telling me about various sites I might try. I saved them up intending to use them to explore during #blogjune. I am not sure how it has got to day 20 of #blogjune before I have explored any of these though. But a start is good.

One site that fascinated me was Neighbourgoods which is a site where you join up to borrow or lend goods to your friends or connections. So instead of buying a drill or a ladder or a tool that you will only want to use once, you can search here and borrow. You can limit who you lend to if you feel uncomfortable about strangers and you can charge if you want.

Signing up is easy as you can do it through Twitter, Facebook or OpenID though you will then be sent a verification code via email. You can either search directly for availability of a particular item or browse or post a request. As there were only four people registered within 100 miles of me and they had no items registered this didn't turn out to be of much immediate use. I also discovered that none of my Facebook or Twitter friends were registered.

Years ago when I and a number of my friends were all renovating houses in inner urban Melbourne we had a collective where we shared tools such as sanders, ladders etc to say nothing of each other's labour. I think that this is potentially a great way to manage such an arrangement.

#blogjune 19 Martyn Wyndham-Read

2011-06-19T22:17:00.005+10:00

I often speculate how we all got along before Web 2.0. Well, I suppose I mean I speculate how I got on as these days I can't imagine my life without many of the tools which didn't even exist a couple of years ago. Youtube is one of the sites that I am constantly finding stuff on that relates to quite long-standing interests of mine, interests that pre-dated Youtube by decades.

Folk music is one of those areas and Martyn Wyndham-Read is one of my favourite folk singers. Well actually, I think he is my very favourite folk singer. He is an English singer but has a strong Australian connection and I have only seen him perform here. I own all his CDs which I have gathered from gigs in Melbourne over many years. In fact I have some cassettes too. Imagine my pleasure when I discovered through a serendipitous search earlier this year that he has been videoed at various folk concerts and festivals in England and that these videos are on Youtube! Joy to the world indeed!

A song that was new to me on his 2011 Australian tour was Farewell to Anzac Cove based on a poem by Cicely Fox Smith. This performance on Youtube was at the Whitby Folk Week in 2010.

It always reminds me of my grandfather, Robert Alexander Leslie Purves, who was at Gallipoli but lucky enough to get gastro-enteritis and be taken offshore to a hospital ship and thence to Malta and then England. I wonder what he must have thought about the comrades he left behind and wonder whether he asked himself the questions that arise from the poem and song. His photo is here on Flickr but also heads this post.

#blogjune 17 paper-li reprise

2011-06-19T15:17:00.004+10:00

Further exploration has meant that I have discovered that indeed previous issues are available under the archive tab, and that the widget does work on one of my other blogs that that doesn't have a black background. It appears that you can change the HTML coding to change the colour of the heading but that still didn't improve things for a black background.

I also changed the title of my newsletter after I produced it and it seems that the widget has embedded in it the original title and I can't work out how to change it.

However, I have explored the newsletter a bit more closely and realize that what I was looking at was really only my headlines! Now I realize that if I click for example on #blogjune the newsletter will give me links for many, presumably all for that day! Wow! this is a very useful tool. I have been reading #blogjune posts in a very scrappy way so this will give me any easy way to get to them and scan them.

#blogjune 16 paper-li Polyxena Press

2011-06-19T14:33:00.007+10:00

I know that for a while I have been vaguely noticing tweets coming into my stream which refer to so and so's Daily News. I know I have noticed Kathryn Greenhill's a few times, looked at it and wondered casually how she did it. But it was only in the last couple of weeks when I got @ messages alerting me to the fact that my posts had appeared in someone's news that I thought I should investigate. And let's face it, the search was also going to give me something to blog about in the #blogjune challenge that I am behind in.

So how did I end up with my tweets (both curiously links to my Librarian and the Kitchen blog) in Punch's Library Place and the Tom Roper Daily? Going to one of their "papers" and a quick hit onto other information on the paper-li site showed me how! SmallRivers is a company focused on facilitating the discovery of relevant content and other people of interest on the web. Their enterprise paper-li allows Twitter and Facebook subscribers to produce the stuff coming through their streams in a newsletter style. You can choose your title, the frequency and them up to five streams of stuff to be featured.

I found the site a bit confusing to navigate. It appears there are ten credits for each title but it is not clear what happens then. Does one just create another title? Or is there then a charge? There is no mention of a paid version that I could find on the site, but who knows? I signed in via Twitter, but can I also sign in via Facebook and create a different paper? There is an ability to embed a widget in your blog. I have done so here on the side panel but it doesn't appear to work very well on a black background. I will try it elsewhere. I am also not quite sure about whether the separate issues are available anywhere but clicking on the archive link sounds like a good move.

Anyway I will be curious to see what comes up in it daily. Is this the essence of my tweetness?

#blogjune End of Hecuba's Story

2011-06-01T19:02:00.004+10:00

Hecuba, a photo by Hecuba's Story on Flickr.

This is going to be the hardest #blogjune for me so I am going to get it over very quickly. This blog, Hecuba's Story, which I used for Web 2.0 and continued to use for general technology posts was named after my cat Hecuba. The reasoning behind it doesn't matter. You will note that the previous post to this one was in October 2010. The end of the feline Hecuba's story came on 3 November 2010 and I haven't been able to post here since. I tried a couple of times to do an Animoto tribute to her to post here but it hasn't quite happened. And maybe during June I will manage to achieve that.

Meanwhile by a very strange coincidence yesterday someone on Flickr accessed twice one of the series of photos I took of her after she had died! How amazing is that! The photo above (not the one viewed) shows her laid out in her shroud with flowers and one of her favourite plastic bag toys to play with in eternity. You can see her other gravegoods in Flickr and the lavender and daisy bushes that mark her spot.

So one Hecuba's story is finished, but the other Hecuba's story which involves the excitement of technological change lives on! And I am glad that the blog bears the name of the feline Hecuba who loved lying between me and my keyboard when I blogged!!

#Octshowntell #5 Dvolver

2010-10-31T14:32:00.004+11:00

For the last day in October I decided to try out another tool for #Octshowntell. So I tried Dvolver as @jobeaz had tried it recently. Like her, my #Octshowntell posts aren't showing up in Twitter search, so I thought I would copy her last tool and tell a pretty poor story about Melbourne weather. The tool was quite easy to use and allowed for three scenes with a variety of backdrops, skies, music and text. I initially chose to do a soliloquy but other options were available such as dialogue. I was a bit confused about how to load it here as you actually had to email the movie to someone befor
re the option was given. But here it is! thanks @jobeaz!

My second go used a couple of characters; they weren't quite right as I had the following person going last but you get the idea!

Now we are all just wondering what we will do in November!!

#Octshowntell #4 Animoto for recipes

2010-10-22T12:13:00.004+11:00

For my fourth #Octshowntell, I went back to Animoto to see if it would work for another type of story: a recipe. there are a number of site where you can upload videos of cooking recipes but I have never really liked them or the result. I thought that Animoto might work. In preparation I took step by step photos while I was making basil chicken balls in tomato sauce. This time I loaded the photos directly from my own drive so that I could select them more easily. I then played around with some different formats and different music. Which one do you like best? Do you think Animoto works for recipes? Would it be better with a full length video as opposed to the free 30 seconds?

The first was done with original Animoto style to Mozart's overture to the Marriage of Figaro.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The second was the same style and music but done with a one click remix.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The third used the original Animoto style but changed the music to another piece of Mozart.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The final version used the Color Fold style and the same piece of Mozart.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

#Octshowntell #3 Storybird

2010-10-10T19:03:00.006+11:00

As Storybird was one of the sites that I played around with today I thought that it was probably useful to do something with it before I forgot. I really think it is unlikely that I would use this site for work or play again but you never know. It is probably quite useful for a children's librarian or a school librarian and would certainly be useful for kids to learn storytelling skills.

Telling stories is not my forte but I created a short one about my cat Polyxena and her names, called the Story of Polyxena. There are informational videos and it is quite easy to choose a theme or art work to use. The facility to embed it in a blog was supposedly available and weirdly I discovered it seemed to be an option with other stories I read on Storybird. Just not mine! I will be interested to see if others get the option when they link through.

PS This morning when I was on a different computer that didn't recognize me on Storybird I managed to get the code to embed the story. Fingers crossed that this works!

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird

#Octshowntell #2 Voki

2010-10-10T17:14:00.006+11:00

I am trying to get up to speed here! I have done my Animoto and I uploaded a couple of Animoto shows to Youtube - a first for me. I have played around with a couple of the other suggested sites but then came across Miss Sophie Mac's Voki and decided to have a go at that. I wasn't particularly creative with it as I just used text to speech and the provided backgrounds. But I had definitely had FUNN playing round and can certainly see it as an eye- and ear- catching thing to put on our library blogs.

The only problem really is that it looks like it hasn't embedded in the blog while doing Preview but then when it is published it is there! You can embed your voki in three sizes: small, medium and large. I have done a medium and a large here.

Get a Voki now!

#Octshowntell Animoto Shanghai April 2010

2010-10-10T16:17:00.002+11:00

I am finally getting my first #Octshowntell posted! I decided that I wanted to do an Animoto of my trip to Shanghai in April this year. Despite my having used Animoto before it ended up taking absolutely ages to do as I uploaded my Shanghai photos from Flickr. That was fine except that I had to upload the whole folder and then gradually delete them until I had about 12 photos for the clip. Maybe a lesson forthe future is to upload directly from my own drive. Nonetheless I am happy with the clip and think that using Animoto for travel shots is a great use. I am also glad I have finally got on with this task!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

#Octshowntell

2010-10-10T14:43:00.003+11:00

The Flexible Understanding Now Network (FUNN) has set us a new challenge for October, that of telling a story using visuals (show) and audio (tell). Ruth's blogpost gives lots of interesting reading and possibilities of sites to use. We are supposed to do four stories over the month of October and I am behind with the task already.

Last weekend I played around with one of the tools I had used before, Animoto, and rediscovered some short video clips I did a couple of years ago. I enjoyed viewing them and posting them to Twitter. I also realized sadly that though a couple had been posted to this blog others were on a now defunct ning network. So before I go any further with this October task I am going to post them here!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Ruth has suggested a number of tools we can use and I have listed them below. I will be trying to explore and use a few over the coming weeks. But as I am currently in arrears I had better get on with creating something! It will also a good learning for me to upload to my Youtube account as I have never done so before.

Here are some digital storytelling tools which I'll try to explore for a start: Storybird, animoto, xtranormal, glogster, voicethread, animasher, makebelievecomics, vuvox, prezi.

The Atomic Cafe

2010-08-28T14:25:00.001+10:00

This an example of a full length movie I have blogged from Youtube movies.

Youtube launches full length movie section

2010-08-28T14:23:00.001+10:00

In an interesting move Youtube has added a new section for full length movies. There isn't much on it yet but it is there and divided into categories such as Bollywood, Documentaries, Horror etc. Apparently deals have been struck with Lionsgate, MGM and Sony in the US and Blinkbox in the UK. It apparently launched with 400 full-length movies. Matt Brian over at The Next Web has more details. Given the announcement this week also that Blockbuster seems to be bankrupt, this is an interesting development for film watching in the home. It appear that you can do the normal things you can do with a Youtube account: favourite, share on Twitter or Facebook, blog. However, they don't seem to come up in Scribefire under the Add a Youtube video. Well, maybe because they aren't videos.

Hecuba Warholized

2010-08-07T12:57:00.004+10:00

It's been a while since I did #6 where we played with Flickr tools but I just enjoyed finding a couple of photos of Hecuba and Warholizing them. Previously I hadn't done one of her, just me and Xena. So here is Heccie Warholized using Pop Art Poster. Which one do you like best?

Mikis Theodorakis - Romiosini (parts 1, 2 and 3 live)

2010-08-01T16:33:00.004+10:00

I have been very slack with keeping up with my Greek learning but mashing up my Web 2.0 skills again is helping. Today I have been watching live performances of Mikis Theodorakis, particularly the Romiosyni cycle which he composed from the Ritsos poems. I wonder if I own a translation of Ritsos? I know I have the Greek text but that might just be a bit much for my rusty old Greek. Guess I should get back to Livemocha.

Google Social Search demonstration

2010-01-31T12:25:00.001+11:00

This is going to be great fun. I must investigate further.

1960s Australian TV commercials

2010-01-25T13:15:00.001+11:00

This is filled with classics like "Things go better with coke" - all lined up in a metal Esky line the model we had - and Graham Kennedy having a gay old time in Gloweave shirts in Fiji! Apparently these were all from an episode of In Melbourne Tonight.

Beatles 3000

2010-01-10T11:52:00.001+11:00

This is very funny archaeological take on Beatles. One can only reflect on how this take reflects 21st century knowledge of various forms of earlier music.

Real Sophia Vembo on Youtube!

2009-10-04T15:23:00.002+11:00

I have been pretty slack about keeping up with my Greek course on LiveMocha. I know the trigger for that was when the Greek course, like the others, added an oral component that was required to pass. I had been going great guns there until then - and surprising myself by being ok with the aural. However, the oral element was added and I slacked off using as an excuse that I need to get a new microphone for my PC. And I got that weeks and weeks ago but haven't quite got to the Greek again.

Today through a fairly circuitous route which will not add value by description I ended up on Youtube and happened to go to my subscriptions which I am equally slack about checking. And there were two little Greek gems there. They are both quite short scenes from a 1938 film, I prosfugopoula, and show Sophia Vembo actually performing songs, Poso i zoi ine orea, and Zito na se xehaso.

I have long been a fan of Sophia Vembo and have her on many vinyls and one CD but had never seen her perform in the flesh in her prime. There is a bit of footage on Youtube which has her performing in the 1976 which I had seen and favourited before and dates to the time when I first started to know about her and really when she was experiencing a revival. Finding these two clips today makes me realize, as if I hadn't before, just what gems are hidden on Youtube and also continually being added. I need to be vigilant!

Brizzly interface for Twitter

2009-10-03T15:58:00.008+10:00

Thanks to @ladymidnight I have been spending time this afternoon experimenting with Brizzly, yet another interface for Twitter. Brizzly has some cute features: you can view full urls in tweets, see videos and photographs immediately without clicking and can divide your followers into groups. The extended url, and immediacy of photos and videos works well.

I got quite excited about dividing my followers into groups as you can then click the group and get only their feeds. As I have been struggling recently with the number of Twitterers that I am following I thought this would be great. And it is a great feature - but alas one is limited to five groups only! I wish I had known that before I started setting them up and I would have made the groups broader. So it's back to the drawing boards for me now with that feature.

Another interesting feature is that you can temporarily make people you are following "mute". I can see that this could be quite useful when people are live-twittering something that doesn't really grab me. The DM function seems quite useful too as you get threads and can see what you have sent. You can also favourite and retweet and there is an easy interface to allow you to work with more than one Twitter account. No, I don't have multiple Twitter personalities. However, I do post tweets to both my personal account and to the City of Boroondara Library Service one.

There's an introduction to Brizzly on Youtube:

And here's a short grab on the key features:

There is a lot that I really like about Grizzly and I think that Thinglabs have done a great job with this interface. It is interesting to play with all these interfaces and speculate what impact they will have on Twitter future development.

Cat solves printer-problem(with subtitle)

2009-09-12T09:47:00.001+10:00

Now this is much more like Heccy!

Molly the cat, meet the printer...

2009-09-12T09:44:00.001+10:00

This is such a familiar story!! Only Hecuba's paws get into the printer and jam it!

Learning Languages Using Social Media

2009-08-05T14:15:00.008+10:00

People who follow my blog know that I am interested in learning languages and have recently been going back to try and re-learn some of the Greek and earlier the French that I have forgotten. I have been using Web 2.0 skills for that and primarily have focused on Livemocha, though I do feel some inadequacies in the site which I have described elsewhere.

Laura Gomez over at Mashable recently did a guide to learning languages using social media. She looks at three categories of sites: Community, Video/interactive, Blogs and Twitter. Most of the examples she gives for Blogs are really general stuff about language quizzes, language learning and not really about intensively learning an individual language. The video/interactive category includes a range of things from BBC languages to plain Youtube, with a number of them being paid courses.

Twitter was an interesting newcomer to the field with a range of sites to follow which give words of the day etc. Examples Laura gives are of Linguick, I kinda like languages, Learn Japanese, Learn Spanish, and French language. I have signed up to follow these (excluding the Japanese one) and I'll report back on how I find them.

I am particularly interested in those that fall into the category of Community as I think that that is where social media has its strengths. How good is it to be able to get in touch with native speakers who are happy to help you learn a language in an unthreatening, sharing environment! I already use Livemocha, of course but was keen to explore the other five: Babbel, Busuu, SharedTalk, iTalki, and xLingo.

Babbel is a site where you can learn French, English, German, Italian and Spanish. There are free vocabulary and phrases packages but the actual online courses are charged for. Though this is essentially a business, there is a community element to it with learning partners, chat, messaging etc.

Busuu whose image heads the post also focuses on four main European languages, English, Spanish, French and German and was established as a project of UNESCO's Year of Languages. It is free and provides online interactive courses as well as a learning community. There's vocabulary, dialogues, interactive exams as well as community elements. Check out an introduction to Busuu at Youtube. It looks quite good, so I might give it a burl for my slack French some time, but it's not much help for my Greek given the limited number of languages it offers.

Shared Talk by Rosetta Stone (cool image that if nothing else!) is a place for practising what you have learnt, according to Gomez. It is also an adjunct to paid Rosetta Stone products. There's voice chat, text chat, language partners and all in about 30 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Yiddish with a lot of minority languages in between on the list. Presumably this list is dependent on whether anyone is signed up on the site for a particular language. I checked out Greek and discovered a potential pool of 99 people who were interested in Greek. They were listed by name, native language, practising language, country, and age. I am not sure what relevance age has, but maybe some people only want to form communities with people their own age? I also checked Amharic and found 15 possibilities. This might be a site worth checking out - it is certainly worth knowing about.

iTalki is more of a learning exchange: it helps you find a teacher, find a language exchange partner, ask questions and discuss in groups, and find resources. They seem to cover most languages, though there is more focus on the more populous European languages. Resources seem to be submitted by members as well as by links to other resources. The teacher marketplace puts one in touch with paid tutors. Again I checked out Greek and found resources and nine teachers. Amharic wasn't on offer, so I tried Latin and came up with resources and eight teachers.

The final site, xLingo, is also a language exchange where you can find language partners to chat either one on one or in forums, make resources and share. I checked out what was available in Amharic and came up with three possible language partners: you can choose by age, gender and country. Then I checked out the Greek and found a page and a half of possibilities. I tried Latin for fun and came up with 12 people. So here's another site where I could practise my lost language skills.

Use of social media for language learning is an interesting topic and probably an area that is going to grow. I was interested in a comment I received on my blog about a new site hello-hello.com. It's not up yet but it says it is about learning a new language anytime, anywhere and with language partners and teaching others yourself. There was an offer for pre-launch signups to become VIP members though I don't quite see the benefits of that if it is all free as stated.

It has been interesting to do this survey but I think that I'll stick with LiveMocha for the present. I want to do free, actual online courses specifically in Greek and LiveMocha has that for me. I am happy to participate in the Livemocha community by helping others to learn English, though I don't do much of that. If I want to pursue my French further (and I have done some French on Livemocha too) I can see that there are other options out there for me, as indeed there are if I want to practise Greek rather than doing an actual course.

PCMag's Top 100 websites of 2009

2009-08-05T13:55:00.003+10:00

I've just been browsing through PCMag's Top 100 sites for 2009. They have divided the list up into two sections Classic and Undiscovered, and then divided the Classic into Apps, Fun, Info, News, Shopping and Tech and the Undiscovered into the same categories excluding News. I'm not sure why there's no News category in the Undiscovered as I would certainly be adding a few news sites to their Classic ones.

I was interested to browse them and discover that I regularly use 20+ of them (mostly the Classics like Facebook, Twitter, Picnik, Google apps, Youtube etc but some so-called Undiscovered like the World Digital Library) and I have played with others. There were half a dozen that I will explore personally and also some that I thought might be worth exploring for Web 2.0 classes either for the staff or the public, eg for travel.

However, I must say there were quite a few that I know I will never look at because I don't live in the US. I might be interested in restaurants in NYC if I were travelling there, but I really am not interested in US real estate or where to get a pet from a shelter in US. It would be interesting to see what an Australian list of 100 best websites for 2009 looked like, but maybe it's just too many to be focusing on for anywhere.

A retake on LiveMocha!

2009-06-14T16:49:00.003+10:00

Well, I am still sitting at my PC and I haven't dusted off any of my Greek grammar or poetry books. But I did go back to an earlier post on this blog and check out LiveMocha again. When I tried LiveMocha last time there was a very limited range of languages available and the site was very new. From the choice available I chose French, not because it was new to me but because I feel it was a lost skill.

I worked my way through quite a few lessons but found some of it a bit frustrating. I felt the course needed clearer instructions and some components to the course did not add value for me. There also seemed to me to be mistakes in corrections made to my work but I was too slack to chase these up. A reason for that could well have been the voluntary, social networking type of learning approach and that's fine.

LiveMocha has regularly kept in email contact with me since I slacked off with my French last year so I knew that there were new languages available and somewhere in my head was a memory that Greek was now available. So today I checked it out! Three hours later I have completed the six lessons in Unit 1 of Greek 101, including optional sections and quizzes! I have two more units to go to complete Greek 101.

Greek 101 is for absolute beginners, so given the fact that decades ago I did complete Modern Greek 1 at University level it wasn't too hard for me and it really wasn't until Lesson 6 that I found I had to bother about some vocab. I thought LiveMocha had improved: there were good instructions for each lessons and the components of lessons were useful and clear. It was good to have revision exercises.

I will try to continue with reviving my lost (and never very good) Greek and might even go back to my French. However, I do wonder with Greek how an English first language person with absolutely no knowledge of Greek would go at starting the Greek. There is an assumption that you know the alphabet it seems to me, but maybe I am wrong. One day I will try out a language I know nothing about but for the moment sticking with Greek will be a good learning exercise for my brain.

Mikis Theodorakis in East Berlin 1987: 22 Sto Perigiali (Arnisi)

2009-06-14T13:17:00.003+10:00

My sister tells me that practising another language is a great way to exercise my brain. Today I decided to try to mash up my Web 2.0 skills with language learning to help me with this. And I found this absolutely fabulous little gem on Youtube: it features Mikis Theodorakis himself singing his own composition based on Giorgos Seferis's poem Arnisi (Sto perigiali). As this is one of the few Seferis poems that I understand the words for, I was overjoyed to find it.

I have previously done some Sophia Vembo hunting on Youtube but must remember that Youtube is a great source of assistance for language maintenance and language learning. Now to dust off my Seferis and try to read some of his poems in printed form? And I could see if one of the onlines tools I experimented with earlier in this blog now does Greek? They didn't before.

#69 Postscript to FeedMyInbox

2009-01-13T22:23:00.003+11:00

On Saturday I did the Thing that related to FeedMyInbox. I was fairly frustrated by my attempts but ultimately it all worked out. I am now getting daily feeds from Canberra Times into my inbox, though I will change that to my newspapers folder. The feeds are in one post that is clearly laid out and here is an option at the bottom to stop the service at any time. I'll experiment with getting it for a little while, though I am not sure that I need any more feeds either in Bloglines or in my email inbox. But it is a good little tool that appears to work well.

#69 FeedMyInbox

2009-01-10T14:43:00.005+11:00

FeedMyInbox is a supposedly simple interface to allow RSS feeds to be sent straight to your email inbox. This looked simple enough and I hunted around for something I didn't already subscribe to either by email or via Bloglines. I hit on the Canberra Times, typed in the url of website as specifically asked for and an email address! The site accepted it and said it had sent me a confirmation email that I needed to click to confirm. No email. I tried again a couple of times. I changed my email address to another. Still no email.

I had noticed another bit where it said "create your own form" and clicked to that: there it was clearly stated do not paste the website url, paste the RSS address. So presumably I had been correct in pasting the website address where specified. I went back to my original place and even tried with one of the examples they gave. Again, I was told I was getting a confirmation email. No email.

Maybe I will get a flurry of confirmation emails when the US wakes up? Well, I don't care. I use Bloglines regularly and have enough stuff clogging up my email inboxes. I don't know if the problem is that I didn't use the RSS address. However, it accepted what I typed and made a clear distinction between what it wanted in this place and in the place where the RSS address was asked for.

Well, maybe I should try it with the RSS url. Eventually I found the Canberra Times RSS feed url and tried it again. Again FeedMyInbox accepted what I had put in. I went to one of my email inboxes and lo!! there were three emails from FeedMyInbox: one from Canberra Times from the straight website url, one from Apple from the straight website url and one from the Canberra Times RSS feed url. So obviously the instructions were correct. The emails just aren't very instantaneous. I have confirmed one of the Canberra Times ones and the site accepted it. We'll see what I get. But I still think that I'll stick to Bloglines.

#68 Filtering Flickr

2009-01-10T11:07:00.004+11:00

I don't know how many images Flickr has now or indeed how many are added every day but I am sure that both are quite unbelievable numbers. This Thing provides information about two sites that can be used to help searching for images on a particular topic - FlickrCC and Tag Galaxy.

FlickrCC, as you might guess by the CC, only searches images with Creative Commons licensing and does so by a keyword search. It brings up a window of photographs and you can then click to get the attribution link, editing link etc. Tag Galaxy lets you search Flickr again through a keyword initially but you can narrow down the search through other visual cues. When you decide you are there, the images appear on a sphere and you can rotate and search until you get the one you want.

I explored both of them with the "churches" as had been done by HCPL Technical Trainer. Then I started playing around with some other keywords: Greece, Cats, Polyxena, Xena and Hecuba. Greece always brings up far too many images so with Tag Galaxy I tried narrowing the search by sunset, Athens etc. This narrowing didn't work too well as I got a lot of sunsets on Santorini as well as Athens. I got some very nice cat photos using both and then tried Polyxena, Xena and Hecuba on Tag Galaxy to see if I could get some of my own photos. Sure enough with Polyxena as I spinned the Tag Galaxy sphere around there were my photos of Xena and Hecuba and even Xena Warholized! While searching Xena I was amazed at the number of cats apparently called Xena! Tag Galaxy doesn't limit its photos by Creative Commons so that is something to be wary of if you want to use photos that it throws up. You will need to check copyright.

If the point of using these sites was for something more than curiosity, I thought I should try their practical application and try to load the photos into the blog. I tried FlickrCC first and searched on Hecuba. From this selection I chose a photograph of a performance of Euripides' Hecuba. I was given the Flickr address which I could have posted here as a link and also asked if I wanted to edit it inhouse or using Picnik. I tried inhouse but couldn't work out how to save the changes I had made and ended up losing the image. Then I tried with Picnik, made changes and was given the normal choices of loading to my PC or Facebook or Flickr. I loaded to my PC and then loaded up here.

I think the easiest way to load would have been simply to right click and save a copy in the first instance. But this did allow me to edit first (the text box) and potentially to save in a range of ways.

With Tag Galaxy, I tried again with Polyxena and quickly found some of my photos. I couldn't right click to save, so I went to the Flickr link and was then able to use all the normal Flickr options. I took the embedded code and loaded it here.

As Flickr had immediately recognized me as the owner of this photo, I wondered what would happen if I loaded someone's else's photo. I tried a few but they were in copyright so I haven't uploaded them. Nonetheless I could have imported them. I tried one of mine again, a colour photo of Hec and Xena. I opened it in Flickr and chose to edit it in Picnik. I cropped it and changed it to BW and then saved it on Flickr before grabbing the code and embedding it here.

Both of these sites are potentially useful and allow editing, either directly or once you get to Flickr. Tag Galaxy has the disadvantage that it searches everything regardless of copyright, but its potential usefulness will depend on your reason for searching.

#67 Stress Savers

2009-01-09T19:54:00.005+11:00

Bad Polyxena hasn't done any Learning 2.1 tasks since October! However, fortunately there were only three Things between then and now so hopefully she'll be able to get up to date. Stress savers is the theme for Thing 67 and the idea is to introduce things that will save time.

The Dial A Human site takes one to a list of service providers and gives telephone numbers and tips on how to get to a human being. The site is very US based so I didn't actually try any of the numbers but I noted some of the strategies. For example, the advice on the AMEX number was to press "0" repeatedly to get an operator. I noticed that this was the case with a number of other companies. So it could be worth a try here next time I get stuck on a great long line of possibilities that seem never to end.

Custom Guide is a great little tool. The website provides free computer training tip sheets on a number of programs: Microsoft, Mac, Adobe and a few other extras such as Lotusnotes, Quickbooks and Firefox. We've recently moved to Outlook 7 and there are still some issues with it. So I had a look at that cheat sheet and printed it off for future reference as it seemed a good summary. A double-paged A4 tool is provided. They seem clearly laid out and I can see a great advantage either for staff who have just had training or for printing off and keeping near the public PCs.

Usernamecheck.com is a little site that checks whether your preferred user name is available or in use. The idea is that you can use this to ensure that you lock in your preferred name if it is available. You type in the name and the site immediately checks a range of sites from Blogger to tinyurl, via Stumbleupon, LinkedIn and Delicious. I tried Polyxena, Polyxena2, Hecuba and Hecuba's Story and got very mixed results. Some of the accounts I found were me, some weren't, some were quite inconsistent and some were just plain wrong. It's an interesting concept but I don't think that I really need it. The site also suggested that it was a quick way to get to all the sites without delays: in some cases this was very true but in other cases I found access very slow. Maybe it was a slow day at our end?

So all in all, I come away from Thing 67 with a good tool that I can see real benefit in using with staff and the public. I'll have to see about getting that implemented next week.

#66 Directory 2.0

2008-10-26T16:31:00.008+11:00

Thing 66 brought to us by Baldgeek is about directories to help on the Web 2.0 journey. I first looked at AllMyFaves which presents as a great screen of icons. I found a lot of my faves, but was surprised not to find Picnik amongst the photo sites and not to find Foodbuzz amongst the recipes. These are really two of MyFaves that I use regularly. I was also surprised to see Bloglines under the category "Blog" as I think of it as a management tool for RSS feeds.

I tried two icons I didn't know. All recipes looked pretty useful and immediately asked me if I wanted to go to their .au site. I also clicked on the National Geographic icon under Maps suspiciously thinking it wasn't about maps at all. I was pleasantly surprised to find a link to National Geographic's Mapmachine. It looked pretty US centric, but I popped in Athens Greece and then honed it down to Syngrou. Success! AllMyFaves, nonetheless, is pretty US based particularly in services eg banks, couriers etc.

43Marks is a different concept: it displays names and not icons and the idea is that you set up your own lists of favorites in various categories. I signed up very easily and added and deleted and faved sites, as well as setting up a new category Food into which I popped Foodbuzz. Picnik also was not on the original list for photos but it is in Polyxena's list now. 43Marks also has an embryonic tool for managing RSS feeds but I'll be sticking to Bloglines. The task also mentioned doing the tutorial but when I tried to access it I got a message: Tutorial coming soon! Well, it is a beta site.

In terms of sites I don't use, I tried Lonely Planet which is under Travel. I always think of it as a publishing company but guess that it is fine under Travel. I also tried Fandango under Movies. It's a site for finding movie and theatre showings but very US based. I looked up The Duchess which I happened to see yesterday and got comprehensive info about the film. I could have signed up in order to rate the film or give a review. However, if I wanted to find a session I needed to indicate a US place. I decided that I was interested to see what was showing today at Virginia Beach, VA, as some friends are there this weekend. There were three venues and I could have seen Body of lies (and lots of other things I had no wish to see). I suppose the site is useful for its summary of films but there is a very limited number of films included at any given time, ie showing or about to show, and these aren't necessarily ones on release in Melbourne. I think I'll stick to Yahoo at present as it gives me my local cinemas and their sessions. Curiously, Yahoo isn't a Movie site on 43Marks.

The US based nature of the sites notwithstanding, I think 43Marks is a good little tool for gathering together in one place all the sites one uses and categorizing them. I currently have them in my bookmarks but I can see that the tool could be useful. I just have to find a bit of time to input them all...

#65 It's hard to think about anything else

2008-10-26T15:56:00.003+11:00

I went on a discovery exercise of most of the sources recommended here in the hope that they would help an economically-challenged historian cum librarian get a handle on all this. The Subprime Primer on BusinessPundit.com was my favourite. When I started second-guessing the dialogue I realized how simplified a view it was! It is good to have some clear sources if the public want to have them, but I think I understood the situation reasonably before.

I find it very hard in this environment to understand the huge amount of US$$ being raised for the presidential election campaign, on both sides but particularly Obama's. And as for the amount of money being spent on Palin's clothes and makeup, well I think the press has been having a field day on this. Oliver Burkeman's article in the Guardian "How to spend $1.5bn on elections - first lavish $150,000 on Sarah Palin's clothes" is just one comment. Spending to boost the economy? I am glad I live in Australia for many reasons.

#64 One hit wonders

2008-09-23T21:13:00.006+10:00

#64, the return Thing after the summer break is all about one-hit wonders. Some of them might be useful but others: well...

Site: CopyPasteCharacter.com Yep this one could be useful. If you want a £ sign like this, or an accented letter like this ä, or joy of joys a fraction like this ½. Yes, I could use this!

Site: Kuku Klok This online alarm clock might be useful I suppose if you happened to have pc or laptop around and no phone or clock. Of course, it might force bad risers to get up and go to the pc. The only sound I liked was the Cockerel which set a rooster crowing to herald the dawn but I don't think I would hear it in the bedroom. The Slayer guitar I would hear but it would drive me bonkers and get me up in a very bad mood. I am going to stick to the alarm on my phone and Classic FM on the radio.

Site: Stormpulse This site is for hurricane watching and I am sure that it would be very useful to track the progress of a hurricane. There were no hurricanes active when I looked at it but I tracked a couple of recent ones like Gustav and Ike. As far as I could see it covered only North America and particularly the East coast, so it is of limited local use in Australia. but it is a site that is good to know about.

Site: Pixdaus I had difficulty yesterday loading this social ranking for pictures site as the link always returned an error message. Tonight it is ok. The photos on the front page were fabulous. I didn't do any ranking but I did a subject search on Athens and came up with a few great photographs. You can get rss feeds so I subscribed through Bloglines.

Site: FakeNameGenerator I am not sure what I would use this for, though the Learning 2.1 blog suggests a use when wanting multiple email addresses or signing up for lots of things online. Well, Learning 2.0 and Learning 2.1 certainly lead to this need. Following on from my Athens search in Pixdaus, I wanted to be Greek but the closest was to be English based in the Greek part of Cyprus. I came out with the following:

Alicia L. Doherty
Πατησίων 27
2863 ΚΑΜΠΟΣ

Website: Blogndu.com
It looks like Blogndu.com is available! Click here to register it!

Email Address: AliciaLDoherty@missiongossip.com
This is a real email address. Click here to use it!

Phone: 2165139
Mother's maiden name: Fraser
Birthday: April 17, 1962

Visa: 4716 5595 3080 1051
Expires: 8/2011

UPS Tracking Number: 1Z 42A 73A 60 7301 811 1

Site: PicApp Creative or news related photographs can be found here under a variety of topics and they are all available for use in your blog or elsewhere. I found a couple of photos of the Acropolis under snow a few years ago and some historical ones of the Parthenon. You can email these photos or share them with a large number of places such as Facebook. The photo above is an example of an historic photo from PicApp. I emailed one to me and attempted to post one to Facebook. You could also get rss feeds from this site, so I signed up for that.

Site: Regator This site was offered as a place to find some more useful sites that could be investigated. Regator calls itself "a bite of the blogosphere's best" and has bites from blogs ordered in subject categories. I found a couple of sites randomly but there were lots of others to explore.

Site: PrintWhatYouLike.com is a simple point-and-click element removal tool to make printing sites and pages without printer-friendly links much easier, and without any software. Lifehacker was my source for this and much of the description in this paragraph comes from that blog. You paste in the URL of a site, and you'll get a left-hand sidebar that lets you click and and remove pictures, headlines, and other page elements. You can pull out the background image, isolate selected parts of the page, and even resize individual elements, change fonts, add and remove and put back elements, all in the name of reducing ink usage and improving readability. Better still, you can copy a link to the page you've just hacked to bits, giving web site owners with popular pages a free resource for printer-friendly versions. It seemed pretty easy and use-friendly for me.

Site: Crawlanime Downloadsquad drew attention to Crawlanime, a sort of Youtube that specializes in free Anime online. There seemed to be quite range of titles, and I looked at one with English sub-titles and another with Spanish sub-titles. I don't really like anime much, but can see that this is a useful source for those who like it. It is also a useful source of Japanese language material if your library has Japanese users, or Spanish for that matter if you go for the sub-titles.

I have been feeling rather jaded with Learning 2.1, maybe because of the break, or maybe because of the topics recently. However, I found this Thing great fun.

#63 PDF Form-Topia: PDF Form Filler Freeware

2008-09-22T22:33:00.006+10:00

I found the Foxit Reader very confusing to load and to use. I went to the site and seemed always to be getting to places where I was being asked to pay or to use Trialpay to get Pro edition for a year. When I finally loaded a free version I didn't find it very easy to use. Yes, I know the instructions said to look at a video but I only realized that later. I opened a PDF and tried to edit it. When I clicked to Tools, Typewriter etc I got a message saying that this function was a Pro function and if I used it I would get marks. I persevered but really couldn't work out how to get it to type properly.

I don't think I'll be using it, though maybe I haven't tried hard enough as it is the end of a long and tiring day. The critical thing for me, however, is if we had this installed on public PCs how would the public work out how to use it? I don't think it is very intuitive and people would be put off by the messages about needing to pay for Pro to get the proper use. It's also easier to use a tool that doesn't require loading. I've tried de-install this from my PC and still seem to have the toolbar in Firefox. So I suppose now I need to play around with Firefox plugins....

#62 PDF Form-Topia: PDFEscape.com

2008-09-22T21:36:00.003+10:00

After my challenges with PDF conversion last week, I was keen to look at some other options. So this was stimulus enough to get me back to Learning 2.1. I have been very slack and stuck at #61 for a couple of months. Of course, the US crowd have been on summer vacation so why shouldn't I take a winter one as well?

PDFEscape.com is a free online PDF reader, editor, form-filler and designer we are told. You can open PDF documents from a URL or open a saved PDF. I opened the PDFEscape.com url and decided not to register, though it said it was free, contrary to what I had thought. I immediately browsed my PC and selected a PDF version of the enduring power of attorney document that caused me grief on Friday. It loaded pretty quickly and then once I had worked out how to write and install the text it was all pretty easy. I then saved it as a PDF to my PC. I didn't get a message warning me that there would be a logo or anything and there wasn't. I opened the PDF to print and again no logo or anything. Have they changed it since #62 was posted?

Anyway, I found it a very useful tool and could imagine that I could use it with PDF forms. Conversion tools like Zamzar convert into another format and always lose something along the way. They have their place, of course. But this tool does what it says: it allows you to fill in and save a PDF in its own format.

Wordle

2008-09-22T18:53:00.004+10:00

Michelle over at Connecting Librarian has been posting about Wordle.net which creates lovely clouds from words. And now it can do whole blogs! I thought I would give it a whirl for a couple of my blogs and see what words I obsess about. This is the result for this blog Hecuba's story. The big featured words are not surprising given my addiction to Facebook and Boroondara and library.

My food blog, the Librarian and the Kitchen, came out thus. Yes, I understand most of the words. Greek food is something I am very interested in. And so fetta etc.

This was fun to do. You can change the colours and layout. I did find trying to load them into the blog a bit frustrating. You had to save to the Gallery to get the code and then it pasted strangely so that you had to edit it to get the HTML to work.

youconvertit.com: the new Zamzar?

2008-09-19T23:32:00.005+10:00

Wah! How sad am I? I quickly wanted to convert into Word a pdf of a financial enduring power of attorney that I want for tomorrow. Yes, I know it is 11.34 pm. BUT I did save the document and believed I had converted it on Zamzar this morning. The email response hadn't come by the time I left for work. Later on webmail I saw that it had come but I didn't try to open it at work. Mistake! What a pity! I might have been able to get the converted document via the Explorer browser at work. It sure doesn't work at home on the latest version of Firefox. It looks like it will but then there is no hyperlink to collect the document

What to do? Well, I know I could have looked at some of the more recent Things that I haven't completed. But I also looked back at my post in January when I was doing Thing #24. Zamzar certainly worked with Firefox then. But the interesting thing was that someone posted a comment directing me to www.youconvertit.com. So I tried that. It's the same deal. You go to the site; type in your email address, browse on your PC for the file to convert, select the format to convert to, and it converts it and sends the result to your email.

It all seemed to work fine until I downloaded the conversion and got gobbledegook with whatever encoding I accepted. Obviously I am not going to get a Word version of my PDF very easily for tomorrow. Well, maybe tomorrow I will get back to Learning 2.1 and finish some of the later Things. But I am VERY disappointed that Zamzar doesn't seem to work for me any more.

Posting from ScribeFire!

2008-06-06T16:17:00.005+10:00

I am posting this from ScribeFire! I will be interested to see how it turns out as this is the first time I have used ScribeFire.

ScribeFire which is an add-on to Firefox seems to work well. Once you have installed and set all the links to your blogs up, they are all there at your fingertips. You can blog on a screen that pops up or you can right-click (or left-click in many people's cases) on a page and select the blog option from ScribeFire. That will post your heading and url as a blog post to the selected blog. This is a fun discovery that I made quite serendipitously via Kat Clancy's wall on Facebook. Thanks for posting to my wall, Kat, and leading me to respond to you! The one downside seems to be that if you want to insert labels to the post you need to go to blogger to do that.

Except that you don't! You click on the categories tag, and either choose an existing category or add a new one! Remember: category = label!

Postscript: this doesn't seem to tinyurl properly. I have never had a problem before with my link to Twitter from blogger. I can only assume that the ScribeFire interface is causing a glitch. As I feed all my blog posts to Twitter, that is not going to work very well. I'll have to experiment more with this add-on. I suspect it may be causing a problem with my blogfeeds to Facebook as well. Sigh!!

#61 Library Apps on and for Facebook

2008-06-01T17:55:00.006+10:00

I'm one librarian who thinks that Facebook is great. I've done the "library" search before and become fans of library pages, and I've also checked Boroondara. From that search I reached a lot of library staff as well as staff in other Council departments.

We have a City of Boroondara Library Service page and have had it for a while. Today we had 56 fans and the reality is that we haven't really advertised it anywhere. These people have just found us by word of mouth. Well, hey that's what Facebook is all about: social networking. Some people aren't aware that there are profiles (for individuals), groups, and pages on Facebook and these all have different standard components and different applications that can be added. On pages, you can monitor your usage, the demographics of fans etc.

On the City of Boroondara Library Service Facebook page, we have general info about the library service and links to our website, bebo site and blog. We have a couple of FBML applications which currently talk about Chinese computer classes and links to our catalogue on Bookjetty. We feed our blog into the site and through Notes we also feed in the Boroondara Town Hall Gallery blog. We have loaded photos, we have Artshare which loads random works of art from selected galleries and museums and we have a recipe of the day from Epicurious.

We have Worldcat and we are just waiting for our vendor to finalize a link to libraries on our system. We have a series of maps giving our locations - this is done using Google maps. And we have the standard discussion board and wall. But most importantly we use the events function to advertise all of our library events. Come and visit us on Facebook! Tell us what you think.

#60 Facebook!

2008-05-15T21:21:00.004+10:00

Facebook, well where do I start? I am absolutely addicted to Facebook and don't need to join up or do any of the suggested tasks ;>). I first came across Facebook in the 23 Things at #19 Web 2.0 Awards where we could choose our own thing. I chose to look at MySpace and Facebook and because it was Australian election day I looked around at Kevin 07 and my local member Lindsay Tanner's presence on both sites.

It took me a while to really get into Facebook but now I am addicted and get into it daily. I have 118 friends as I write and they increase regularly as different parts of my life get connected. I feed my blogs into Facebook, and my Twitter updates my status. I have set up a City of Boroondara page and we are gradually getting fans - 46 as of today. We feed the library blog into this Facebook and I have just linked the Town Hall Gallery in via the notes section as well. We mainly use it to promote our events and they are regularly updated by a team of library staff.

I use Facebook to communicate with friends and family both locally and overseas and have managed to catch up with some people I was quite out of contact with. My friends vary substantially in age and generation, and cover all aspects of my life. The majority of people who are my friends are people that I actually know physically but I have also linked up people I only know virtually or only have linked up with through Facebook. Yep, I love Facebook! I think that it is a fantastic example of community engagement and social networking. And that is what libraries are all about!

#59 a reprise - Fantastic Fiction

2008-05-03T17:53:00.006+10:00

Thanks to Tapsister for pointing out the Fantastic Fiction website! It is truly fantastic. I tested it out for all the authors that I couldn't find on AuthorsOnTheWeb and found an extensive list of stuff (including pseudonyms, photo, list of series, dates, who writes like, forthcoming titles, audio-books, author and fan websites, links to UK and US bookstores) about Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Paul Collins and Sean McMullen, all of whom I couldn't find in the previous post.

Now I know these four authors are not the be-all and end-all of fiction writing but they happen to be the ones that came into my head when I was doing the work for #59. They cover a range of genres and a large time range, two are famous world-wide and the other two are known more locally, in Melbourne to be precise. What they all have in common is that they are NOT US authors and I think that that is truly why they are not on the previous website.

Thanks, Tapsister! Fantastic Fiction is a winner for me!

#59 Authors on the web

2008-05-02T13:24:00.005+10:00

Authors on The Web is an interesting book site with lots of stuff about authors on it. There are sections on the front page about forthcoming titles, and author news. A link takes one through to AuthorYellowPages which is a directory of author websites, though limited by the fact that these aren't collected but dependent on authors taking the initiative. Another link through featured crime/thrillers took one to a mass of info on bookreporter.com where there are reviews (organized by title which I found slightly irritating), a section on books into movies (and DVDs), lists of complete works by authors (rather limited and didn't include Georgette Heyer or Agatha Christie), searching by genre (a try at Science Fiction & Fantasy didn't find Sean McMullen or Paul Collins) and ReadingGroupGuides.

There is a wealth of information about authors here but there did seem to me to be a decidedly U.S. bias to the authors featured. As a U.S. site that is not very surprising. However, I think that as a site it is probably more useful to U.S. public libraries than to Australian ones. But it is good to know about.

#58 Being Green

2008-04-26T13:16:00.010+10:00

Being green was quite an appropriate Thing for me this week. I spent most of the week in bed with the worst sinusitis/throat infection that I have had for years. And the cause of it? Melbourne was covered by a smoky haze emanating from scheduled forestry burnoffs in other parts of the state. There's nothing wrong with burnoffs - we don't want bush fires - but presumably some meteorological idiosyncrasy led to the smoke being stuck over Melbourne. Yuk!

I was amused when I got back to my PC today after days away from it (I was really, really sick) to receive a link to this video which has a section about cats and greenhouse gas ;>). It's not a very serious approach to take to Being Green I know, but my laughing was detrimental to my recovering cough though not my spirits and my cats came from the other end of the house to discover what was happening to the cats I had hidden here.

On a more serious and relevant note, I was also interested to learn about Earth Day on 22 April as it isn't something that we celebrate here, at least not in my circle. I was feeling quite confused as I thought I had just celebrated Earth Day on 29 March when we all turned our lights off for an hour. But I'd seen stuff on Facebook about 22 April (in Li'l Green Garden) and then Sandy's Thing mentioned it. I hit Google and an article in Wikipedia soon told me why. There are two Earth Days: the UN celebrates Earth Day annually around the March equinox and there is a second one mainly in the US on 22 April.

I had a browse at all the sites mentioned including the Going Green Matters blog where there were a couple of posts on tips for being green. These included sensible things like insulating houses, not heating and cooling places when you aren't there, and scraping not rinsing dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. There were also quite a few tips around reducing your "gas" consumption in cars. That was well and good but I would have had using public transport or walking or cycling up there in the tips well above these.

The strongest message I got from these tips was one about turning off things when you are not using them. This really reinforced the message I got on 29 March when I went to turn the lights off for an hour. I couldn't believe how many lights there were turned on all around the house! I really only focused on lights that night but I know others looked at everything they had on standby and not turned off at the wall. I still need to get better at both of these.

And what is the learning from this for libraries? We need to build (and renovate to) more energy-efficient buildings. We have a very energy conscious Council and are in the forefront of initiatives in this area. For example, we have waterless urinals in some libraries; we trialled motion and photo-sensitive lights in parts of one of our libraries but it wasn't very satisfactory; we are installing tanks linked to the downpipes at Camberwell and Balwyn Libraries this year; we are very conscious of recycling; we encourage people to travel to meetings and between branches on public transport by giving people free Metcards for this. As I am lucky enough to have a large external window in my office, I rarely turn the lights on: this does lead to useful discussion when people ask me why I am sitting in the dark when dusk is coming on and I haven't noticed how dark it is ;>).

These are only the physical things we can do in library buildings, but there are many other things we can do in terms of user education, of providing access to sites and databases etc. I like the cry: "Save a tree, borrow a book!" But wonder if an even better one mightn't be "Save a tree, read an ebook!"? Both of these are services that our public libraries offer and between them they do save trees.

#57 TasteSpotting - yum!

2008-04-18T14:16:00.007+10:00

How yummy is this! I'm in heaven. I had a quick look at TasteSpotting just before lunch but had to stop and get my lunch cooked very smartly. This site is one for me. Though someone who loves cooking and reading about it, I just couldn't get interested in I'm Cooked, the focus of Thing 50, where people post videos of themselves cooking.

But TasteSpotting is another thing. When you go to the url you are immediately faced with a sea of luscious-looking food set out as on recipe cards. You can star them and search. Click on one of the recipes and you are taken to the source. I found a whole swag of foodie blogs from all around the world - Australia, New Zealand, U.S., U.K. and even one in Greek, the Saffron-gatherer.

I used the same terms to search as I had with I'm Cooked. Taramasalata still wasn't successful, and plum sauce only gave me a link to a recipe where you served it on the side. So I guess I'll stick with Maggie Beer for the plum sauce and either buy the taramasalata ready made or use one of the many recipes I already have. However, I got a hit for moussaka and hit gold (or meringue) with pavlova where I got eight hits, all of which I wanted to eat. Excited by this I just keyed in "lentils" as I was thinking of making a lentil salad for lunch on Sunday. Voila! There were 47 posts.

I was quite over-excited by all the food blogs I discovered and can see a whole new Bloglines addiction coming on. If I am not careful, I shall overtake Batgirl and Tapsister in the number of feeds I am monitoring. I also can see a personal organizational and de-cluttering application. One of my foibles is collecting and not sorting recipes. In fact, I have a very large folder of them in the dining room at present awaiting weeding (aka reading and throwing out). These are all paper ones or scribbled notes, but, of course, these days I also see them online and want them. If I set up my own food blog, I could store and label them there. I'd be able to search by label. I'd be able to post online recipes there using Clipmarks or other sources. The Librarian and the Kitchen blog is born and I have found yet another way to organize my life through Learning 2.1

Oh, and of course there is the library aspect. This is a great site to use if someone wants a recipe.

PS I didn't ever find the widget from the TasteSpotting web-site. However, I remembered that Tapsister had loaded it. So I grabbed it from her blog and easily loaded it here and on my Facebook profile, and other options were available. Someone please tell me where it is on the website!

#56 Smilebox - smile in a box?

2008-04-09T18:07:00.004+10:00

Smilebox was fun and easy to join up. It provides a large number of templates for slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, postcards and photobooks. Like many of these programs, there is a basic free version and a tempting one with frills that costs. You did have to install the program on your PC and from what I could see execute it every time you logged in.

I signed up and was quite spooked to discover a swag of my recently uploaded photos displaying along the side panel. I tried a few designs and had a bit of trouble with landscape versus portrait as the photos weren't very easily manipulable if they were portrait and the templates mainly wanted landscape. Finally, as funerals were on my mind, I did a floatings photos tribute to Elizabeth Moisidis. I emailed it to myself, I loaded a link to it on my Facebook profile and here it is below in my blog. It was quite slow to load up the link from Facebook and I also found that with Jamie's one included on the Learning 2.1 blog. This may be to do with the speed of my connection?

Smilebox is fun and useful and something that we could have loaded on our public PCs. I wonder if it would be worthwhile having a Click goes the library session on a number of these photograph tools? I could see it as something that could be quite useful to prepare a presentation of someone's life for a funeral or retirement event, and Jamie's example showed that it could also be useful for local or family history.

Make a postcard - it's easy!

#55 Slideshare - Presentations online!

2008-04-06T21:52:00.003+10:00

Slideshare claims to be the Youtube of Powerpoint and it certainly does provide a great community of online presentations. You can upload presentations and search and view presentations (without joining up) or you can join up for free and set up an account. I had viewed presentations there before but I hadn't actually joined up.

So as part of the work for #55 I joined up and loaded up a few fairly banal presentations. They did seem to lose some definition in the conversion to Slideshare format, but I suppose that is not really surprising as conversion always seems to lead to some change. I was able to share these slide-shows publicly or with my friends or not at all. So I chose to make some private and some public. You tag the presentations to allow for searching. You also deal with copyright through Creative commons. There are also a number of communities e.g Web 2.0, Second life, Web 2.0 tools for effective teaching.

As I was researching my ill-fated VALA talk on Facebook and public libraries while I was experimenting with Slideshare, I did a search on Facebook and came up with a number of useful presentations. When I had completed my presentation I loaded it up on Slideshare so that I could, er, share it with the other presenter and the person chairing the meeting. That worked well except that it seemed to truncate some of the urls in my presentation. As the others didn't comment and one of them uploaded a link, I need to discover if this is a Firefox issue. I'll check out my Slideshare account at work on IE and see if the urls are truncated there. The other advantage of having the presentation on Slideshare is that you can present from there so long as internet access is available, thus obviating the need for uploading the presentation onto the PC in use or bringing along a PC.

I have already found uses for Slideshare in my work, in terms of searching for presentations I would like to read and also in uploading a presentation of my own that I wanted to share. In the lead up to the VALA talk there were several enquiries about where the presentations would be available, and I was able to reply that mine was available on Slideshare and to suggest that VALA set up a Slideshare account where they could either load presentations given at their meetings or at least fave them.

As I found it a useful presentation, I am uploading here Laurie M Bridges Facebook 101 for librarians (2008). Uploading was easy as any presentation that is freely available has a code for embedding. You can also share to Facebook, reddit and all the normal suspects. So I also tried sharing it on Facebook where a link was posted on my profile to the presentation and its url. This is a great tool.

| View | Upload your own

#54 Bookjetty - your books, your libraries!

2008-03-28T14:49:00.005+11:00

I became familiar with Bookjetty at the VALA conference this year when Singapore's Schubert Foo mentioned this home-grown tool in his keynote address. I was immediately struck by the difference between Bookjetty and other book sites, namely that you could search library catalogues as well as bookshops. I set myself the post-conference task of looking into it properly and seeing if we could get Boroondara's catalogue up on the site. Well, we succeeded in that and our users can now use Bookjetty to search our library catalogue (along with others) and easily link to the site to place a reservation.

LibraryThing also now has access to library catalogues for searching. They weren't able to do this last time I used them, but I did say they were going from strength to strength! Thanks to Casey from LibraryThing for pointing this out to me. However, the standout thing for me about Bookjetty from the minute I saw it demonstrated by Dr Foo was the federated searching capability. At Bookjetty, you select your favourite libraries from a list and your item will be searched for on these simultaneously, rather than you having to go to each catalogue. As three of Boroondara's neighbouring libraries, Stonnington, Monash and Darebin, are now accessible via Bookjetty, this provides a useful local federated search facility. It will be interesting to see how Bookjetty continues to develop.

#53 Litlovers - a well read online community

2008-03-28T13:04:00.002+11:00

Litlovers is a fun site, and one that I can see being useful not just for providing information for people wanting to set up a bookclub but also of general use for personal book knowledge and for readers' advising.

I wasn't feeling very creative so I checked out the site's suggested books for the month. There were three and I chose Geraldine Brooks' People of the book as I had been talking about it over Easter and want to read it. From there, a quick look at the resources section showed that four of her books have notes: March, Nine parts of desire, People of the book, and Year of Wonders. Thus the reader was provided with info about a number of titles to allow a more detailed study of her work. I looked at People of the book in detail and was provided with a summary of the book, biographical data about Geraldine Brooks and links to an interview and lots of critics' remarks about the work. All of this seemed to provide me with a good start for a discussion - now I just need to reserve the book!

I also checked out the LitCourse section and enrolled in the first course which was about romantic fiction, not because I was particularly interested, but because I like starting at the beginning! It provided a useful introduction and discussion points about the two extracts being looked at. One criticism I had was that the course seemed a bit black and white about the answers, whereas I was more interested in being discursive and could easily argue pros and cons of situations. From this you can see that I got some "wrong" and disagree. There are ten courses covering characterization, plot, setting (important for the romance novel - I learnt that!!), irony, symbolism, and other topics.

I could probably live without the produce available at the LitShop and a lot of the LitFun, but I liked the idea of looking up recipes to suit the setting you were reading in. That is a clever idea. I checked out the Greek page and found a few favourites (much more than in the I'm cooked site previously discussed, though the US names for Greek favourites in Litlovers made me wonder whether another search on I'm cooked mightn't find some?). These recipes appeared to be linked to countries, so if I wanted an accompaniment to Ellis Peters' Cadfael series or Georgette Heyer's regency novels I'd be pushing my luck. But maybe historical recipes will come later. Likewise the film adaptations list was pretty short but calling for input.

This is a great site and will, no doubt, continue to grow in strength!

#52 Clip the highlights with Clipmarks!

2008-03-28T12:06:00.003+11:00

While it is still just March it is good to be getting onto the March Things and feeling like I will soon catch up with the PLCMC people. It is particularly special to be doing the Australian March things that we have written ourselves! How exciting it has been for Fiona and me to participate in this program from afar! That really brings out the universality of the web and how it makes everyone closer. Only one more thing to go for us! I do hope they let us have another go later ;>)

As stated in the Learning 2.1 blog, Clipmarks really, really is my current favourite Web 2.0 tool. It is so great to be able to save all those articles that come my way through Bloglines and also any websites that catch my eye. They are all saved in full text (or abridged as it takes my fancy) rather than just with a url which will require me to open it before reading. And who knows whether the url will still be current?

I have used Bloglines for a while to clip stuff, and while you can sort into subject folders it is just the url. Likewise I have played with Furl and eSnips (which I was really looking at in relation to online File storage and as a replacement for the ill-fated Omnidrive). The good thing about Bloglines snipping is that you can stay in Bloglines to do it and when you have finished you are taken right back to where you were. However, I like the full text potential of Clipmarks.

I have had Clipmarks linked to my Facebook profile and access to my Clipcasts there since I first started using it. Yesterday because I wanted also to place some news clips on the Boroondara Facebook page (and you can't add news clips to Facebook pages, only to profiles), I set up a new blog, From the news desk, linked my Clipmarks to that blog in Blogger (you have the choice of inputting multiple blogs and can select which you want to send particular clips to), and then fed the blog into the My blogs feed on the Boroondara Facebook page. Voila! Newsclips there! And I love Clipmarks even more! It's a slightly circuitous work-around but it works for me!

#51 Libraries and the social web a hot topic

2008-03-27T14:21:00.004+11:00

Libraries and the social web is certainly a hot topic. If for example you do a browse through Facebook pages (ie not personal profiles but organizational pages) you will get over 500 hits with the word library in the name! There are also groups on Facebook which are library-based.

It was interesting to run through Jessica Hupp's 25 useful social networking tools for librarians and to realize that, whilst I don't use all of them, there were very few that I was not aware of. I took the opportunity to look at a few that I wasn't aware of: LinkedIn (a site for linking professionals), TeacherTube (a YouTube for teachers), Footnote (a history site which is very US based), Community Walk (a mapping tool for history talks etc), and DaftDoggy. Of these, Community Walk was one that I felt could be useful for family and local history and I made a mental note to go back and try it.

If I think about the City of Boroondara Library Service in relation to the tools mentioned and how we are using them. I do think that we are starting to get somewhere. We made a decision to set up profiles/pages on Facebook, Bebo (not mentioned here but very big in the UK), and MySpace in an effort to cover most bases in terms of age groups. The Facebook has been up and running for a while and the challenge there seems to be to work out ways of linking the page into other applications, Web 2.0 or otherwise, as it seems very different from how you do it on a personal profile. We have just set up Bebo, and MySpace is still a work in progress. We have been focussing in these sites on general information and news about the library service and particularly in promoting events. The next stage needs to be putting the links on the website, and adding applications that will encourage interaction such as reviewing.

Number three is Ning and at Boroondara we have three nings: a general staff ning, a training ning for learning 2.1 and an embryonic local history one focussing on Hawthorn's history. I belong to a number of other nings as do a number of Boroondara staff. With nings, I am coming to the conclusion that they are great for staff but I am not sure that they provide the tool I want for community interaction, hence the stagnation of the Hawthorn history ning.

Four is blogging. The City of Boroondara Library Service has had a staff blog for some time, though a limited number of people use it and we have found that more seem to be attracted to the nings. We have also finally got a library blog developed for the public and this is fed into our Facebook page and hopefully the link will be on the website soon. The Town Gallery and Art Nerds blogs are linked now, so hopefully ours will be soon. At present we only have the one library blog that covers the whole spectrum of library services, though we will probably develop a local history specific one. Outside work I have been working on a blog for the Collingwood Historical Society and this one is integrated in the website. I have also set up another blog, From the news desk, which enables me to post clippings relating to books and libraries to the blog and thence to the Facebook page.

Meebo is five and we have done some experimentation about using this for enquiry in wikis; it could be installed on the blog(s), Facebook, Bebo, on wikis and hopefully in Spydus on the "no hits" page. Before that can be achieved however work will need to be done with the organization about the ability to load such tools on the Council network.

Twittering is number seven: a number of staff Twitter, follow each other's tweets, have links from blogs to Twitter, links from Facebook etc. We have been following some libraries and their Twittering and will shortly set up a library Twitter account which in the first instance will be linked to the library blogs via Twitterfeed. This is another way of getting out into people's spaces.

We have an embryonic Flickr account for the City of Boroondara Library Service (tool 8) and need to do some serious work loading images on to it. Whilst we are using Wetpaint as the platform and not PBwiki as favoured by tool 13, we do have two experimental wikis, one general one and another specifically relating to the Hotels of Boroondara.

Many of the other tools mentioned in the list (or related ones) are used by City of Boroondara Library Service staff, either in their work or play. It is certainly an exciting time to be working in public libraries with all these possibilities for interacting with our users.

#50 I'm cooked!

2008-03-16T18:46:00.009+11:00

Imcooked (cook it, film, share it) is a web community for sharing recipes. But it isn't just about sharing recipes: you videotape yourself cooking the recipe and share it on the site! It's like Youtube for cooks, they say. There are the usual social networking elements as well as other elements: groups (not too many yet), friends, information on how to make and upload a video, a range of channels (we would call them subject groupings perhaps?) e.g. cakes/pies, desserts, bread.

I did a search for some favourites: taramasalata (no luck), plum sauce (no luck - I'll have to stick with Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander), moussaka (no luck) and then pushed my luck with pavlova (not surprisingly, no luck). So as instructed, I clicked the Video tab and explored the Top Favorites. There I found "Cheap and evil guacamole" which I fancied would be good for Tapsister, but I thought "why would one bother?" and she would prefer to shop. Guacamole is readily obtainable in a variety of very good brands (guacamole with lime is to die for). I used to make my tzatziki from scratch, starting out with straining the yoghurt. But I haven't done that for years, i.e. since really good tzatziki has become readily available.

I also saw there was a video of How to clone a Big Mac. ROFL. Why, why, why? Paul McCartney, Sir to you, making mashed potatoes had its amusement value. I was interested that he peels his potatoes with a knife.

Well, what of the site? It's a creative idea and takes the sharing of recipes into the social networking realms of Web 2.0. But is it for me? I love cooking and I love reading recipe books. I love creating recipes and find that Stephanie's bible is so good for reminding one of what goes well with what. I always like the fact that Stephanie is both a trained and experienced librarian and also a local Boroondara (even Hawthorn) author. But do I want to emulate Geraldine Dillon (that's dating me but her programme was really important in stimulating my love of cooking) or Maggie Beer or Jamie? I don't think so. I don't even want to be a new librarian/cook, like Stephanie. I actually don't really even want to watch someone cooking most of these recipes; the site seems very American, ie US, based, and I guess that the type of cooking covered here is not what I am interested in.

And the library application? Well, I didn't find an historical section so I guess it is about knowing that the site exists if library users are interested in this sort of thing.

#49 So many great music sites, so little time!

2008-03-16T18:28:00.003+11:00

What an absolutely amazing site is Soundsnap!

I know there is music on it, but I was more interested in some of the other categories like a hissing cat or a baaing sheep or a roaring lion! I am glad that creator Tasos Frantzolas decided to create the site as he needed it himself! Again,it's a good one for tarting up presentations or adding to your slideshow or video click or wiki. These sounds are certainly not just for musicians to use!

#48 Is there any free AND legal music out there?

2008-03-16T16:36:00.005+11:00

It looks like there is free and legal music out there, though it is rather limited in scope on this site for the types of music I am interested in. There were 111,052 free MP3s here on music.download today: that's quite a few since January 16 when Jennifer posted that there were 110,462. The Thing #48 instructions warned that it was mainly top 40 stuff, but, ever perverse, I hunted around through some other categories like Folk which has 2790 items.

I had been to a Peggy Seeger concert during the week and hunted unsuccessfully for her, not minding as I know there are some songs on her MySpace profile. There were quite a few subheadings in Folk but a lot of them with rather sparse entries. This was also the case for World music where I got excited by the headings Dimotiko and Nissiotiko only to find them empty.

I uploaded an MP3 of an early mediaeval Georgian Alleluia which will be topical next week. The file was easy to upload to my PC and then to play. Use for the library? Well, I can't see much use for my avowed aim of usefulness for local and family history, but the site could be used to provide music for a slide show or video clip. And it would also be useful generally in case library users ask for such a site.

#47 For the musically inclined or Not!

2008-03-16T15:57:00.006+11:00

I signed up to Jamstudio and using first the 1,2,3 demonstration and then Help I played with creating chords, adding instruments, changing tempo and changing type of music. I created a song called "What!" but I have not managed to get any sounds out of Jamstudio yet! I also went to Tapsister's post on Thing 47 and linked in through that connection. Voila! Still no sound when you press play! I saved the song and tried emailing it to a couple of addresses: I got the link to the song there and pasted it above. Maybe I am just not letting it have enough time to load? Maybe it's jammed?

I am not into musical composition, nor particularly into the type of music featured here, but I can see that it could be fun to play with. We could use it to create background music for podcasts or other such things. But why can't I get any sound?

#46 Updates!

2008-03-03T21:19:00.004+11:00

Thing 46 is a chance to review the changes made with a number of Things since they were first written up almost a year before this task #46. As the Victorian public libraries Learning 2.0 was happening about the time or just before these updates were being written up, I didn't find that there was all that much that was new for me here. The Things that were updated and/or commented upon were #3 Blogger, #5 Flickr, #8 Bloglines, #9 RSS feeds, #10 Generator, #11 LibraryThing, #12 Rollyo, #13 De.licio.us and #14 Technorati. However, it is useful to have these updates for when we want to roll out the original 23 things to the next group of staff.

Interestingly the majority of these are ones that I still use daily or at least on a regular basis and many the ones that Michael Stephens talked about in his talk last week. These have all become pretty mainstream now, it appears. It's hard to believe it, but it is really so. Tempus fugit.

I was interested in Flickr's partnership with Picnik which I must have passed over (though it should have come up in the Picnik thing), and the fact that LibraryThing offer a facility to scan titles not on their database. That sounds good to me as I find it very frustrating not being able to add new items in Bookjetty (they say next release....). It was also interesting to see the comment about the role of Facebook in social cataloguing. I guess I had noticed it with the various books and reading applications but I hadn't really thought it out.

#45 Go with the flow - Flowcharts & Mindmaps

2008-03-03T20:36:00.003+11:00

I was quite looking forward to doing mindmaps and flowcharts, but when it came to the point it took a while to get into it.I signed up with Gliffy for the flowchart example. It provided examples and possibilities for flowcharts, organizational charts, network diagrams, floorplans, SWOTs and technical drawings. It seemed to take me quite a while to get the hang of it and I didn't find it very intuitive. I think the trick would have been to have had a flowchart mapped out and just to input it rather than being free-flowing as I was. However, I did think that it was rather light on instructions and with a the floorplan layout for example I never found out how to rotate an item. I wasn't really sure how much better it was than Word.

For the mindmap example, I tried both Bubbl.us and mindmeister. With Bubbl.us it took me a while to get the hang of how to do it (it hadn't made it clear that I had to sign up before I did anything) and I then got rather a jumble with boxes covering each other as I expanded the brainstorm. Mindmeister, however, was a program I went for immediately. The demonstration video produced on camtasia was pretty clear and the draft prototype clarified remaining queries. I really enjoyed using mindmeister, but think that perhaps I like doing mindmaps in that linear way. In fact I actually like drawing them with marker pens and butcher's paper ;>).

Mindmeister was the standout application for me from this group. The site also provided a forum for online discussion, the facility to publish to web or blog, and the facility to set up notifications if others were working on and amended the mindmap. This could be done through Twitter and a link through Skype allowed people working together on the map to communicate. I liked the way it used third party software such as Skype and Twitter to improve functionality.

And the differences between mindmaps and flowcharts? Well, flow charts provide a logical flow and map out a process, while mindmaps are about brainstorming everything to do with the key issue.

#44 Nag yourself

2008-02-28T12:16:00.002+11:00

This task is about using Jott to nag yourself. Jott uses your mobile phone to convert your voice to emails, SMS, reminders, lists and appointments, You can Jott to yourself, or you can link to other web services e.g. Google calendar, Blogger and Twitter to name a few. You can investigate more about Jott at their website, but it was created for the US market and isn't available in Australia.

Would I use it, if it were available? It could be useful for those things that pop into your mind suddenly when you are out on a walk or in bed and have to grope for a pen and paper - a sort of automated nagging list. As it isn't available, I'll have to rely on my memory and the odd pen and scrap paper.

#43 Midi Files

2008-02-28T11:46:00.003+11:00

Ho hum! I have had this Thing sitting here awaiting my attention for weeks and weeks, while I have been playing with other potential Things and other Things that I already use. Well, MIDIs. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and was apparently first standardized in the 1980s. I read the wiki article and that was quite informative - maybe more information than I felt I needed.

MDIs allows all sorts of media control devices to talk to each other and computers - that's the theory and I'm sure it is probably the practice too (though not in Polyxena's life as we know it). MDI was also a major factor in getting rid of the walls of synthesizers in 1970s and 1980s rock concerts. Another result was the development of hardware and computer based sequencers, which can be used to record, edit and playback performances. These are used for mobile phone rings, and can be used for composition.

I had great difficulty with the task and didn't complete it. I thought that I downloaded the jazzmidi sequencer from www.midimart.net, but then it wouldn't install. I thought it was a free download but Tapsister thought she had to join up so maybe that was my problem. I did manage to access and save the Hallelujah chorus from Alamo5's midipage though the instructions were different to those in the discovery exercise. It was amazing to see how many midi files are around.

But, of course, as I couldn't load the sequencer I couldn't do the next part of the exercise. Ho hum! Do I care? I am glad for curiosity's sake to know of the existence of midis and midi sequencers but don't believe that I would ever use this knowledge theoretically or practically. In terms of applicability to libraries, I suppose that these files could be used in making film clips etc, but I didn't explore the copyright issues and am not sure whether this is all free for all to use.

Guess what? Omnidrive

2008-02-28T10:03:00.003+11:00

I have made another attempt today to sign up to Omnidrive. The register page is still giving an error message. I have had no response from my communications with them. I sure hope that this is fixed before we have the whole swag of Boroondara Learning 2.1 staff wanting to access it. The one other Boroondara person aside from me who has done this Thing (and wasn't previously using Omnidrive) couldn't sign up either, so it can't just be me ;>(

It's a few weeks to go before Thing 32 for Boroondara, so I will keep checking the website. Sigh! I suppose I can explore some of the other sites in this category and use them as options when I post the tasks to the Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning.

Omnidrive again!

2008-02-17T14:45:00.004+11:00

Well the Omnidrive server apparently crashed a couple of days ago, according to their blog. Everything is supposedly back up and working but not the "Register users" page! I'm not getting the same error message as yesterday, just nothing happens. Maybe it is the old IE/Firefox problem. Anyway, I left a comment on the blog. Meanwhile, I was cruising through the Web 2.0 winners and noticed that Omnidrive won in their category...

Another go at #32 Omnidrive!

2008-02-16T14:12:00.004+11:00

Having been enthused by being told by my friend Tapsister that the signup option was working properly now on Firefox, I decided to have another go at using Omnidrive. Well, it was not to be. I got onto the main page, and then clicked Signup! "Unable to connect". I tried getting in going through a range of different sneaky approaches. "Unable to connect". This time I can't even get to the signup page. Sigh! I think this product would be so good - if I could sign up!

Animoto - postscript

2008-01-21T19:09:00.000+11:00

Needless to say I did go back to Animoto. I wanted to put together some photos for the family (or for me) of an uncle who died in recent times. Now that was frustrating. I had photographs scanned on my hard drive and it took me ages to work out why I couldn't see all of them when I was trying to upload from Animoto. Duh! I finally worked out the difference: these are .tif and the ones I was able to load were all .jpg. So it looks to me that this tool can only be used with .jpg files. Anyway, I was glad to have worked out what was happening. Meanwhile, as I have posted a couple of my video clips over at the City of Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning, I can look at them there to my heart's content.

More Animoto - a family history tool

2008-01-20T14:54:00.001+11:00

This is positively the last play I am having with Animoto this afternoon! Note that that leaves this evening, of course. This one, with great originality labeled La vita, is an attempt to see how family history photographs could be used to create a video clip. I know I am quite transparently playing with this to avoid housework so I had better get on with it!

Agatha Christie in Egypt - without Murder at the Vicarage ;>)

2008-01-20T13:31:00.001+11:00

I've had great fun playing with Animoto, remixing and reloading things for this video clip of Agatha Christie. I ended up going back to the original one and just exchanging the Murder at the Vicarage cover with one for Death comes at the end.

Rereprise of #32

2008-01-19T23:10:00.000+11:00

I thought while I was still in Learning 2.1 mode that I would go back to Omnidrive. I did - and with exactly the same result. There is still a problem registering. I sent them a screen dump of my problem when I first encountered it over Xmas and New Year and have simply not heard a word since - brilliant customer service! Other Boroondara staff doing Learning 2.1 have also not been able to access registration. These sites sound wonderful and an answer to one's dreams, but if one can't register....

#42: Google Groups/Usenet

2008-01-19T22:58:00.000+11:00

Like RA Meyer who was composing task 42, I was pretty amazed to discover that newsgroups were still around as these electronic bulletin boards seemed a thing of the past. But they are obviously still there, if not quite getting the same use as they did before Google took off. I clicked on the Society.libraries.talk site and had a look at the usage, i.e. it was great in the early days of the internet but has decreased greatly in recent years. Surprising? I don't think so.

I then did a search in Google Groups for breast cancer and came up with 6,690,000 groups!! I hunted through a couple of the lists for their postings and wondered where a newly diagnosed person would start? Well, probably they wouldn't start with Google Groups but with Google, and the question of what he or she might find there is another one.

#41: Live Mocha - learn a new language and make friends along the way

2008-01-19T21:02:00.000+11:00

Like many people I know, I have the desire LATER, like when I retire, to go back to languages I have learned in the past and try to revive those competencies, or to start new languages. I know that to some extent this will always be a dream. I have never had any trouble learning the grammar of a language or reading it, but when it comes to oral competency just forget it! I do not have the ear for it. So, I am interested to see how this site works. I really want to brush up my grammar and reading skills in a couple of languages and think that I am capable of doing so, but do I still dream of the oral competency?

I was interested to notice recently on Facebook an ad for another social networking language learning program, My happy planet. This program also talked of connecting with others to learn, though it was closed down for production when I sourced it. However, it seems that the idea is not limited to LiveMocha.

So I logged in and joined LiveMocha. It seems that one can learn, practice and return the favour there,i.e.help people who are learning your native language. A whole list of languages was offered initially and I chose French because I'd like to revive my competency in that. I did study it for six years at school and for a year at University so I am hoping that I can get into this reasonably easily. Louise and I, however, were quite challenged a couple of years ago when we thought we might get back to French at Alliance and were freaked out by the induction test.

Once I had chosen French, I discovered that despite the long list of languages being offered, in fact the only ones really offered were English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi and Mandarin. Others are "coming soon". There were a few people who were learning French whom I asked to be my friends, though I think that for this program to be effective there would need to be a greater network.

I then embarked on French 101 (I was offered 101, 102, 201 and 202) and completed the first lesson. The course (French 101) is supposed to take a total of 50 hours but as yet I haven't any sense about how long it will take me. I found it quite confusing in each section as there were no instructions and I had to play about trying to work out what to do. I lost scores while playing around and felt that with clear instructions I would not have, as absolutely none of the language was new. I wondered what it would have been like to start a course with absolutely no knowledge, and maybe that is really what I need to do to test the usefulness of the site.

It's an interesting concept and maybe an area where social networking can really help one's learning. I think from my experience of LiveMocha and MyHappyPlanet that this is still very much in an embryonic phase but I'll continue with the French and maybe later when I have time to ponder it I will have access to the other languages I am interested in.

#40: Retroland - reminisce about the good old days

2008-01-19T20:29:00.000+11:00

When I am not being a librarian or a manager, I'm an historian. In fact, I started the day today surfing around the online MMBW maps at the State Library of Victoria for some guy in the UK who is trying to trace some information about a family member who was in Collingwood in the 1860s-1870s.

I love the past, but I don't find that that makes me a fan of Retroland. It's a site where you can reconnect with things you liked in the past and, as it also has a social networking role, you can connect with people who are interested in reminiscing about the same things that you are. I found a lot of the stuff, such as food and music, very U.S. based and didn't connect with it a lot. However, it is good to know that this site exists in case I want to find out some information about clothing, food etc from a particular era. So I can see that application for local and family history. It just needs to be taken with a grain of salt and a bit of awareness that things might not have been quite the same in Boroondara.

#39 - Another bit of fun

2008-01-19T19:25:00.001+11:00

#39 Animoto - make video clips like pros!

2008-01-19T17:39:00.001+11:00

Animoto is absolutely cool! After my lack of skill and enthusiasm about the comic relief topic, it was great to get into Animoto and let them create a professional video for me. I continued on the theme of Agatha Christie and Egypt that I started in Photobucket a number of things ago and also carried on with in Scrapblog. Animoto was easy to join up to.

The first glitch came when loading from Photobucket was not available as an option, even though it was listed as one and they had apparently promised that it was coming in September 2007. But as I had loaded some of the Agatha Christie and Egypt photos onto my hard drive, I loaded them from there. That was pretty straightforward though it took a bit of time. I could then spotlight photos I wanted highlighted and reorder them or delete them. Then I needed to choose music. I could have uploaded some from elsewhere but chose to use some of theirs. The range was not great - Electronica,Indie rock, hip hop, Latin and Singer/songwriter - and none of it probably suited my archaeology and sleuth theme.

Animoto then analyzes the images and the music and pieces it together into a video clip. It took a while for this process to happen, but they warned you and offered some entertainment. Once the video clip is produced you can then remix it or tweak it yourself. I was happy and easily uploaded it here to my blog and also onto the Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning. You can do 30 seconds clips for free and these take about 10-15 photographs, or you can join up and pay for longer videos.

I was so excited I decided to start another one based on some photographs of Polyxena and Hecuba. Those photographs are higher resolution and took quite a time to load. I also remixed them and changed the photos. It all takes time but it is fine. Some of them turned out quite grainy in the application and I'm not sure why. With this one, I also uploaded it to the blog (see next post), to the Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning and also to Facebook. It all worked fine, though I am now wondering about the automatic start here on the blog as both want to start in conflict. Sigh! The challenges of technology.

#38 Comic relief

2008-01-19T16:50:00.000+11:00

I am afraid that this topic didn't do much for me. I got onto ToonDoo and looked at the comic strips linked to library in the cloud of tags. Some of the Self Check ones were good, and I liked Library 1 and Library 2 about the implications of not talking in the library. However, when I signed up I didn't become instantly creative. I played around for a while on the theme of trying to encourage people to become computer savvy seniors at the library and experimented with a witch and a Santa who looked like they could do with some computer skills. But I'm happy to keep my results private.

I can see that such a tool could be used in a public library to promote events and activities. I like reading comic strips and get an RSS of Unshelved regularly so I like the library theme. But I don't think I have it in me to create them.

#37 Music to our ears

2008-01-13T10:43:00.000+11:00

Task 37 is about expanding musical horizons by using online radio stations where the user tells the station what they like listening to. We were given two options, Pandora or LastFM. Fortunately Fiona had done this task before me, so I knew that Pandora wasn't available in Australia, so that left me with LastFM. You can join up and listen, select music, link it together in albums, and then embed the link to your blog or to other social networking sites - I used Facebook.

I focussed on folk music, though there did seem to be some classical music there as well. Judy Small was unknown, but Martyn Wyndham Read and A.L. Lloyd already had "stations" and I uploaded them to the side bar of my blog, though I later put them in this post as my sidebar seems to be getting widgeted-out.

I could also have contributed information about these artists to LastFM as neither of them had any, taken part in discussions, found friends with similar tastes, journalled and found out about nad posted events. I could also have uploaded a software link that would have enabled LastFM to track what I was playing and link to my profile, what they call "scrobbling".

This is an interesting concept in social networking based on musical tastes and again the assumption that one wants to link to other tools such as blogs and Facebook. I can't see a great deal of use for this in terms of family and local history but it is obviously yet another tool that could be of use to publicize events. This seems to work something like Facebook events and there were certainly events in Melbourne.

#36 Dressing up your photos

2008-01-13T09:22:00.001+11:00

Xmas Xena
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

This task is looking at sites which will allow you to play around with photos - crop, resize, recolour, fix red eye and add features. We were given a couple of options Picnik, Fauxto now called Splashup, Pixenate and Snapfish as well as some other less well-known ones.

I chose to sign up with Picnik and found it very easy to use, though I did keep on getting tantalized by the Premium components which I would have for US$24.95 a year. You can upload photos from your computer, do web searches or link to various sites. I easily linked to my Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook accounts but ended up loading a couple of very familiar photos from my PC - they are the ones featured in this blog for Polyxena and Hecuba.

I played around with colour options (B/W, sepia etc), adding text and stickers and borders, and cropping and resizing. In both cases I added the vignette tool to highlist the cat, though this is not quite so clear with the Xmas trappings added. Then I saved my photos. Initially I thought I could only save back to the source where I had uploaded, but with the second one I discovered that by clicking on the Flickr tab I could easily save to Flickr.

I don't know what the other tools are like, but this is a great one. I can see great use for it both for staff who don't have access to Photoshop and also for use on public PCs.

Reprise on #32

2008-01-07T13:40:00.000+11:00

Well, I have had another go at Omnidrive at work using IE and I still get the same error message when trying to sign up. So I think it is something wrong with the Omnidrive site at present. I sent them the details on the weekend, so hopefully I will hear back. The good news is that I successfully signed up for Zoho at work without crashing the PC as it continually does at home on Firefox. The test will be whether I can login ok at home and work on stuff. If I can't, the value of the tool will not exist.

#35 Mini or micro blogging

2008-01-05T23:13:00.000+11:00

Back in #19, I remember Jonathan deciding to explore Twitter and there it is still on his blog (s). It is easy to see how these short messages started life as SMS messages, but perhaps less obvious how useful they can be outside SMS. They remind me of the quick takes in Facebook where people tell you what they are doing at this minute and indeed that is one use for the tweets. And so I suppose that if these tweets are coming through on blogs and other network applications, people will know where you are and where you are heading, and whether you can be at Brunetti's for a coffee in ten. I am obviously working this through in my head as I go.

So this is possible, but do I want to be reporting on my actions every minute? I looked at Twitter when Jonathan was experimenting with it in #19 and my reaction then was that I didn't. However, despite yesterday deciding that I wasn't going to bother, today I have enrolled and have linked Twitter up to this blog, Hecuba's Story, and also to my Facebook profile. Doing both of these connections was simple as and just a really good example of how interconnected all these applications are and how interconnected people expect them to be.

I can see the usefulness of it, but don't seem to have many friends who use it. Surprise, surprise - I found two colleagues, Jonathan and Fiona. It certainly could be useful if friends were online and wanted to catch up. Maybe having it up on my Facebook profile will make people more aware of Twitter and encourage them to join in. Like many Web 2.0 things it is good to know that they are possible and to know how to sign up and operate them. Again, in terms of my specific personal learning goal, I am not clear what I could use this for in relation to local and family history. In the library generally, however, Twitter could used to tell people where you are and what you are doing, e.g. at a meeting. VOIP should enable us to do this when installed but in the meanwhile maybe this is an option.

#34 Using the web for better health

2008-01-05T21:21:00.000+11:00

As with the previous thing, thing #34 doesn't have too many applications for local and family history in public libraries. The only, but a fairly loose, connection is about the health and well-being of staff. Again, I tried both FitDay and Nutridiary but I found both of them fairly frustrating to use. One of them allowed one to build up a standard meal and then repeat it, and that was useful but mostly I found the food they had listed didn't seem to relate to food that I wanted to report - that went for both of them as they seemed to focus on a limited range of processed food. It was good to have the various reports, particularly those about the calories consumed versus calories burned, and also the nutrient requirements.

Nutridiary also had a community element and this may be useful for people who need to be part of a community to manage their weight. It, like many other online tools, seems to be capitalizing on the value of social networking. I see ads often about WeightWatchers having an online program and I wonder where this paid program fits into the general scenario about weightwatching which is indeed what this topic is about. I imagine that the infrastructure of Weighwatchers would be able to provide a much more comprehensive food database.

#33 Express yourself through online art

2008-01-05T20:42:00.000+11:00

This topic was just about having a bit of fun and it was, of course, hard to fit into my avowed aim of finding stuff that is potentially relevant to local and family history. I tried all the sites, Falling sand, Mr Picassohead, Snowflakemaker, and String Spin. Falling sand was very engaging to watch and it was fun to interact with as well as to seeh the inevitability of things coming together and then the changes that could occur with a flick of the mouse. Mr Picassohead was a fun application and one that I can see application for in youth services, but I found the Snowflakemaker fairly boring. String Spin in the version one was also a bit basic but I enjoyed version two where I could draw and it would create an increasingly amazing structure around what I had drawn. It was certainly fun to see some of the potential of the web.

#32 Online file storage with Omnidrive

2008-01-05T20:00:00.000+11:00

Omnidrive sounds like it would be the answer to this woman's prayers! How often do I find myself at home wanting a file from work or vice versa? And 1 gb of free memory in a web-based application sounds wonderful. I email backwards and forwards but that doesn't always get through firewalls, and I carry stuff on my "message-sticks". I am attracted by the SnipShot facility for editing images and the ability to use Zoho for editing material. But maybe that's where the warning bells should have started out in my dream. In #18 I never managed to register for Zoho and it hung my Firefox several times until I gave up and used Google for the exercise instead.

So what happened to my Omnidrive dream? I got into the website easily enough and proceeded to sign up. My email id was accepted as available as was my username, but every time I tried to sign up I got an error message and that was that. I seemed to be able to everything else I wanted on the site, just not sign up! I have sent the error message to Omnidrive help so we'll see how we go. BTW I also went back to Zoho and the website came up with a signin for me but said the password that they had on the screen didn't match my id. I tried to do the forgot password scenario and guess what! My Firefox hung and I had to reboot. Is this about ME and my PC, or is it that these applications don't work with Firefox? I can pursue them further at work with Explorer but that will be no use to me at home with Firefox.

#31 Get organized with Plaxo

2008-01-03T17:53:00.000+11:00

One of the growth areas seems to be sites where you can set up organizational calendars, task lists etc for free. Remember the milk, Jotlet and Plaxo are ones mentioned in the learning notes and Yahoo and Google also offer options. I registered with Plaxo which seems to have the benefit of syncing with other programs such as Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. It also provides links and feeds to other places where you are a member, such as Flickr, Facebook. You can access your account through multiple PCs and get auto updates from the synced contacts. Although its origins may lie in being an address book and calendar, Plaxo seems now to be trying to become a social networking tool and I'm not sure it has a clear identity.

I signed up and immediately had my (not very many) contacts from Hotmail loaded. When I tried to get further contacts from Outlook I was told this was only supported by Explorer (I use Firefox). My links to Flickr etc worked fine. I moved on to the calendar and created a work calendar and a home calendar. It was good to be able to display both superimposed, though the functionality didn't seem as good as Lotusnotes or Outlook. One downside was that if you put something in the wrong calendar, you couldn't just change the calendar, you had to trash the entry and start again in the other calendar even those both were open at the time.

Syncing with Outlook for calendar and contacts then became a clear option, though I had to do a download and there were dire warnings about saving backup files so I didn't proceed. I am not sure why this didn't come up as an option earlier when I was trying to load contacts. I added and completed tasks. I searched icalshare.com and with difficulty found something I wanted to load: a list of Australian holidays. But then I couldn't do anything with it. Icalshare.com doesn't appear to be a site whose link is supported by Plaxo and Firefox didn't want to upload the link anyway.

Whilst I am sure that this is a good idea in theory, I don't fancy this as being much use to me or my colleagues. I need to use Lotusnotes as my electronic calendar at work as this is the calendar on which the organization operates. I already use Outlook at home and share my personal events with my work calendar by inviting my work persona to those events. And sometimes I do it the other way when something from work will impinge on the private. This usually works, though Lotusnotes can be a bit funny with accepting multiple day events from Outlook. If they all synced it would be fine, but I don't really want yet another calendar and address book, even if it is available via the web.

#30 I'm in UR Library, Readin UR books, oops in UR fridge

2008-01-01T23:32:00.001+11:00

Feeling a bit hot today?
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

Despite being very fond of cats (the furry type), I find this LOLcat phenomenon a bit strange. It has apparently been around since 2005 and there are heaps of examples of these strange cats supposedly speaking strange English. I trawled around the sites and finally captioned one of my own photographs using the I can has cheezburger site. I couldn't quite bring myself to use the LOLcat speak, so I guess this really isn't a proper example of a LOLcat.

#29 Scrapblog - I'm in love?

2008-01-01T22:37:00.000+11:00

Well, I am not totally in love with this as I seemed to have all sorts of problems with Scrapblog. Firstly, and I have no one else to blame for this I didn't do the quick tour and was a bit mystified about stuff. I didn't find help very useful as I appeared to have had to register first, and I only found the FAQ after I had resolved my confusion. I also hadn't obeyed instructions in #27 and had saved a bunch of photos about Egypt with Agatha Christie in mind but no Agatha Christie. Sooo, I had to go back and save a few more.

Then once I had chosen a template and wanted to upload photos from Photobucket, the link wasn't working and I was told to try again later - several times. I don't know where the problem lay but I copied the photos I needed to my hard drive and uploaded them successfully from there. Then I was ready and I published! This was taking quite a while and I left the room. Mistake! When I came back, Scrapblog was back at the home page. Gulp! Had I lost it all?

I logged in and found my Agatha Christie Scrapblog but do you think I could work out how to share it with Flickr? The FAQ which I had discovered by that time said to go to the "share" option up the top, but that was only there in the creation section. I assume that once a Scrapblog is published you don't get another option to share. I gave up at this point and was closing down Scrapblog when I discovered another page open. That page was the end of the publishing process and gave me the option to share with Flickr. Phew!! It had been sitting there all along. Duh! Anyway, my Agatha Christie scrapblog is now saved on Flickr. I am sure it will be easier next time ;>), but I do worry about the slowness particularly if we are wanting to use it at work.

#28 Well we're big rock singers...

2008-01-01T19:07:00.000+11:00

I checked out all of the sites mentioned in the Learning 2.1 blog and decided that as I didn't aspire to be on a cover myself that I would use my big hero, Hawthorn Library which is going to celebrate 150 years of continuous service to the community in 2010. Using Hawthorn Library as a tourist target would be a good promotion, never mind that the building photographed was demolished in the 1990s. It was very easy to upload a photo and I can see that we could use this sort of thing for promotion. I just had a slight moment of reflection about the copyright of the covers?

Egypt instant photo slideshow

2008-01-01T18:29:00.001+11:00

Egypt photoalbum from Photobucket

2008-01-01T18:21:00.001+11:00

Photobucket Album

#27 Photobucket

2008-01-01T18:15:00.000+11:00

I hadn't used Photobucket before so I was keen to give it a go. I signed up fairly easily (except that there is another Polyxena who had taken my name). Then I got a bit waylaid by playing around with atavars and dressing and redressing them. Are atavars the 21st century version of the cutout dolls of my youth, I wondered?

After playing with the avatar palled, I created an album of photographs about Egypt and loaded up a link to my blog. I did the same with a slideshow I created, and was really impressed by the ease of creating the slideshow and the number of possible formats. Again like with my widgets the sizing does not look perfect and I am not sure how to change it.

One of the things that I like about Flickr is the ability to add favourites and make friends and send messages. If this is possible in Photobucket, it passed me by. I also found the ads very, very intrusive. And then there is the copyright issue. Flickr has made a very clear stand on this with Creative Commons, but with Photobucket it seems to be open slather. I think that I will be staying with Flickr for the present but like many things that I have touched on in Learning 2.0 and Learning 2.1 I know that my knowledge of Photobucket is fairly superficial at this stage.

#26 Little bits of the Internet, on your desktop

2008-01-01T13:35:00.000+11:00

This was a bit of fun - the instructions for yourminis are a bit different now from when the #26 post was done in June 2007, but it was all straightforward. I had been playing around with widgets on various Ning sites in the last few weeks so I was familiar with them. Yourminis offered a fairly small range of widgets or gadgets as Windows call them.

My problem arose when I selected and tried to copy them to my blog. It was all right if I posted in a normal post, but when I tried to add them to my sidebar I simply could not work out a way to resize. I attempted to do this with a couple and finally ended up with a weather one which can mostly be seen. In fact, if the ad for Weather Channel which was not visible in yourminis were not there, all of it could be viewed.

I tried changing the measurements and alignment in the HTML but that didn't seem to make any difference - I always had a bit on the right side chopped off. I wonder whether it would look all right if viewed in Explorer - I'll check that out when I'm at work. I've left it there for the minute, imperfect as it is, and note that the current Melbourne weather brought to me here by Weather Channel is different to the current weather brought to me on my browser by accuweather. Who is right? My thermometer says something different again. All I know is that it is HOT particularly for Hecuba with her long coat. This task has also been a trigger for me to go back to one of my pages on Ning and successfully load the weather widget.

#25 Newsletters in a Pop!

2008-01-01T12:14:00.000+11:00

It may be today's heat in Melbourne, but I can't get very enthused over LetterPop. LetterPop is an email newsletter site that provides templates and enables you to store and distribute your newsletters and announcements by email. There are charging versions that are focused towards business as well as personal or community. The free, basic version allows for the publication of up to 10 newsletters and the uploading of 25 photographs/images. Images can be uploaded from your own hard-drive or you can make a very easy link to your Flickr account - you can't upload from any other Flickr account. You can keep up to 25 email contacts and use this address book to create individual mailing lists. This doesn't seem a very large number of contacts even if you just want to invite people to social events. And 25 images would leave you with a total of 2.5 per newsletter/announcement.

I created a one-pager announcing the 150th birthday of library services in Boroondara in 2010, called Hawthorn Library Turns 150! I wasn't particularly attracted by the templates, but I chose a fairly simple template with only one photo and various columns of text. I easily uploaded a photo of Hawthorn Library from my hard drive and checked the Flickr link which looked like it would have worked if I had a relevant photo there. Once I had uploaded the photo and saved it, I couldn't work out any way to manipulate the photo or indeed to delete it. Maybe I was missing something, but the only option seemed to be to trash the whole thing and start again! That's one of the reasons I didn't explore the Flickr option fully.

When typing the text columns, I was constantly irritated when starting a new paragraph as all previous formatting fell off. There did appear to be an option to upload from Word but I didn't try that. I edited and saved the document a couple of times and finally "published" it. I then listed a few contacts in the address book and created a mailing list for my announcement. This was all very straight-forward. I mailed the announcement at 12.33 pm and was told it was queued for sending. The site warned that the sending may not be immediate but the email link arrived about ten minutes later.

The main advantage of LetterPop is that it combines provision of a range of fairly easily-usable templates for various occasions with the facility to keep an address book and create focussed mailing lists. I can imagine that it might be useful to individuals who want to circulate things to family and friends and maybe for small business. It could also be useful for people who use public access PCs and, therefore, can't store their own address books. And, of course, because the email provides a link to a url rather than an attachment, the tool does obviate the necessity of adding attachments which are the bane of some firewalls.

In terms of my own use, I think that I will stick to Word which now provides most of what one once had to buy Publisher for and to Outlook which allows me to set up mailing groups for specific purposes. But in terms of Boroondara there could be some use because of the firewalls and for public access PCs.

#24 Zamzar reprise

2008-01-01T10:37:00.000+11:00

Now that I am on my own computer, I have looked a bit further at Zamzar. I've looked at the URL conversion possibilities and I've installed the Zamzar convert button on my browser. This was incredibly easy with Firefox. It all seems straightforward and useful.

I know there are often PDF files in websites that I would like to have in a more manipulable file type. Indeed on our own intranet there are many forms that I would like to convert so that I can fill them in on the PC, rather than having to print them off and handwrite responses. I can see that Zamzar will be my friend too!

#24 Got file conversion issues?

2007-12-31T13:35:00.000+11:00

Well, here it is not yet New Year and I am starting on Learning 2.1. So thing number 24 here I come. I can imagine why the people at Learning 2.1 could consider Zamzar.com a new friend. Unless you want to convert mega files or deal with file storage issues, you don't even have to register or signup for a program. In a simple four step process you browse for the file you want to convert, choose the file type you want to convert it to, type in your email address and press convert. Voila! You get an email with a link to enable you to download the converted file. As the link only remains there for a day (for free users anyway), you would want to be doing this as a pretty instant process.

There's a tool that you can add to your browser toolbar to facilitate the process for urls - I haven't tried that yet as I'm using someone else's PC while Hawthorn Library is being painted. There seems to be a very comprehensive list of text, image, video, and audio formats (including compressed types). I was particularly impressed by being able to convert to and from PDF as this is something I often want to do. My one gripe was that when you browse for the file it doesn't show the link in the box and you, therefore, don't know that it was selected it. I will install the link to my browser toolbar once I am back there and am sure that this will come in handy. It would also come in handy for the public PCs, I'm sure.

A change in the wind for public library managers?

2007-12-30T20:42:00.001+11:00

SLCPL Director application instructions
Originally uploaded by hblowers

I was surprised recently to see this ad featured in Helene Blowers' Librarybytes blog. She was also surprised to see the ad! It looks like a change is in the air. I might have to start looking at key selection criteria for jobs. Helene's post had a comment from someone who thought she/he wouldn't want prospective employers reading the blog. What do you think?