#66 Directory 2.0

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...

#46 Updates!

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.

#36 Dressing up your photos

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.