#57 TasteSpotting - yum!

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!

#52 Clip the highlights with Clipmarks!

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!

Life after #23?

I think that I have been having withdrawal symptoms since the end of Learning 2.0. I have missed the intensity of learning and the excitement of experimenting with new things. I haven't been wasting my time, however. I have spent quite a bit of time going back and exploring things that we touched on in the course. I have explored Flickr, its emailing, and its networks and in the course of this have found some great photos and struck up a correspondence with someone about Collingwood's history, as well as communicating with people I know virtually and physically. I have explored LibraryThing a bit more and signed up for some of the book discussions. I am still monitoring them via Bloglines but I don't really think that it is for me. I use Bloglines and del.icio.us regularly still and occasionally glance at Technorati. I have also been intending to get on with setting up some wikis on some historical topics, starting with Boroondara's hotels, but I haven't quite got there yet.

But the really exciting thing I have been spending my time on is Ning. Fiona introduced me to this and we have set up a Ning network for City of Boroondara Library Service. You can see the link to it on the side panel. To date, the network is pretty embryonic with Fiona, Jonathan and me rattling around in it. However, we have had some good discussions particularly around Christmas books and will no doubt have more as we encourage more people to join in the New Year. Today I have been experimenting with setting up a Ning network for Hawthorn's history - again the link to it is in the badge on the side bar.

One side effect of poking around in Ning was that I discovered the Learning 2.1 Ning network and discovered that indeed there is life after Learning 2.0. It is Learning 2.1 and there are many more things to learn. Apart from the Learning 2.1 Ning network, there is also a Learning 2.1 blog as well as a Learning 2.1 wiki which I notice several Australians have already registered on. I have been spending too much time on Ning today, but my brave new world will start soon and I will embark on #24! How exciting! Helene Blowers may have moved on to Ohio, but this program continues and continues to have an amazing world-wide effect on libraries of all types.

#23 Is this really the end? No, it's a new beginning...

I started off on this journey with the avowed aim of exploring Web 2.0 particularly in relation to my private and public passion, local and family history. As I progressed through the course I was diverted into more general applications for Web 2.0 in libraries. I was familiar with a lot of the Web 2.0 tools but only as a passive user. E.g. I have been looking at other people's blogs, other people's MySpace accounts, Youtube, and other people's Flickr collections for ages. The key thing that the Learning 2.0 program did for me was make me become an active user, rather than a passive one.

However, as the course progressed I also became so much more aware of the huge number of possibilities out there. This course for me has definitely been the beginning of a journey. I feel that what I have done so far is like the tip of the iceberg. It will take me a long time to reach down underwater into the lowest crevices, particularly as parts will melt, and new bits will freeze up as time goes by.

What were the specific highlights for me?

• Bloglines is something that I am now using every day. It has been particularly interesting to use it to chart the progress of Boroondara staff in the Learning 2.0 course, but I also use it for a number of library and book related feeds and as well as for news links, ABC podcasts, new and programming links, and Flickr sites and friend's and family's blogs. I can't imagine not using Bloglines! Firefox makes it so simple to add to these feeds. You can find the link to my Bloglines on the side of this blog.
  
• Del.icio.us is another tool that I can not imagine not continuing to use. I am not at this stage using it to its fullest extent, but simply to keep track of my own tags. So there is room for further advances there. I was pretty cynical about Technorati when I first used it but have since found the need to use it, and have signed up and claimed my blog on it. I also installed the Technorati link on my blog so that people can add Hecuba's story to their favourites.
• Wikis also offered a range of prospects for use in public libraries and for local and family history. I had used Wikipedia for ages and am not in the least worried about the "unauthorized" nature of the information in it as some people are. However, I had not thought about using a wiki for a reference desk manual or creating my own wikis for various topics I am researching in local and family history. There is a lot of food for personal thought and action here.
  
• The web-based applications, such as Google docs and Zoho, seem a fabulous concept and I will explore them further. I have put up a biggish spreadsheet about Collingwood hotels and invited someone else to add material. At this point in time I must say that I think the software is a bit clunky, though the idea is a great one. Someone told me the other day that there is even a translation tool in Google docs - this would assist in getting feedback from people who read a range of languages.
• One exciting finding for me related to e-audiobooks and the implications for LOTE users. I was very excited to find Chinese, French, Portuguese and a multilingual site at a very cursory glance. Alas, Greek does not seem available. I did a search on Kazantzakis and came up with his work in many translations but none in the original.
  
• Other tools such as Librarything, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, podcasts and Youtube were useful and fun but not things that were unfamiliar to me, except in that I had not previously joined them.

During the course, I have regularly read the blogs of my Boroondara colleagues and those of some of my colleagues from other libraries and have tried to comment where appropriate. I have been amazed by the excitement out there and by the possibilities that are being thought of in terms of Web 2.0 and public libraries. Some staff have fully embraced this program, while others have had difficulties getting started or difficulties keeping on with it. We set up a system of mentors in each Boroondara library using people who had finished early and this peer support has helped many Boroondara staff on their journeys. One library is rumored to be using chocolate bribes (aka encouragements) so we will see if that affects their completion rate ;>).

The real issue is where to now? I know for myself what my learnings are and I can identify tasks that I need to pursue. What I am really interested in at this point is the "where to now" of this Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 program. I hope that the course blog will stay up and that our staff can continue to access the training after next Monday. I am sure that Boroondara will have some staff who have not quite finished and who would like to continue. I am very happy to take over registering their blogs and doing the staff tracking. I am sure that other staff, particularly those who have been mentors, would also be happy to help with the monitoring.

Now that the program has been set up, I would also like to encourage into the program other Boroondara staff who for whatever reason could not participate within the existing time-frames or parameters. Some of this course could easily be incorporated into our induction program, and it would also be useful if staff could just access particular modules. E.g. when we are working on developing podcasts, it will be useful for staff who have done Learning 2.0 to go back to that module as a refresher and for staff who have not done the course to do that module. There are many ways that we can use this program in Victorian public libraries in the future.

#17 Playing around with PBwiki

I've just been playing in the PLCMC sandbox for a while. Before that I checked out www.pbwiki.com and www.wetpaint.com as sites which provide for wiki creators. I also had a reference from #16 to a site called www.wikispace.com but it appears not to exist. I played around and looked at various things, corrected some spelling, added a few restaurants and with the new editing tool adding a url to one of them was easy. With the new edit features the instruction for adding my blog url had changed and it was much more straightforward. Fortunately I had seen some posts by colleagues who had been there before me so it was easy. What was confusing was that the Victorian public libraries weren't in alphabetical order. Maybe I need to go back and put them in order ;>).

I can really see a benefit in setting up wikis for local history. I am currently working on a couple of projects researching hotels. I can see great benefit in setting up a trial wiki for the smaller of the projects and seeing how it goes. I am starting to see lots of tangible evidence of benefits of this course. Bloglines is really useful as is Del.icio.us, both of which I am now using regularly.

#9 Finding feeds

In this section I reflected a bit upon my previous post about RSS. Yes, I am a convert but I really need to work out how I want to do it. I note that Firefox facilitates the use of Bloglines and I really should be exploring the possibilities of that. I explored the various search tools. Feedster was down for work on the website. I found Topix very US based and newsy though did manage to pull up some articles from the Age so maybe I wasn't giving it much of a chance. Bloglines search and Googleblog were quite accessible. And Technorati actually found this blog, Hecuba's story! I think that my knowledge of RSS feeds is still on a learning curve. Maybe it always will be with the current rate of change in technology and access to information! What an exciting time this is to be a librarian!

#8 Using RSS to make life simple? Convert?

I had seen and heard of RSS feeds before I tried this module, but I wasn't sure that I needed them. I already subscribe to a mass of email news feeds and they don't clog up my inbox as described in one of the training videos. I have them organized so they go to separate folders so that I know when they come in and I read them when I want to.

However, I have set up a Bloglines account and I have subscribed to a number of blogs and Flickr sites as well as the BBC and some book and library sites. I had a hunt around some of my colleagues' blogs and have linked a couple of those in. I made the list public and have published the link to that on my blog. Though it shows the proper link in Explorer, it doesn't seem to show the whole link in Firefox, although it links properly. Now that I have worked through this module, I think that it will be a useful tool for keeping up with blogs and Flickr sites for example. Before I was always having to search for them. So I am a convert!

I have also played around with the template and put Hecuba's photo on the blog. I hadn't worked out how to do that before.