Marie's Biblioblog

So I'm really pleased at how many of the award winners' sites that I already recognize! I already use Craigslist, Zillow, Technorati, google docs, google maps, Flikr, Rollyo, facebook, youtube, and pbwiki (most thanks to this 23 things program!). So this time I tried out Yelp , a city directory service where you can read and post reviews of local businesses. Frederick doesn't have much on there. It looks like the listings are there, perhaps taken from the phone book, but there aren't enough reviews to be really useful yet. So I logged on and tried to review my dentist, and I kept getting an error message! So I guess I'll have to try again later and hope the link glitch has cleared. But I am excited about web tools that allow us to see the "softer side" of a place; the facts and stats are easy to come by, but the personal feel of a place is hard to derive without talking to folks who are in the know. So that's it for my 23 things--how very exciting. (

1. Google and yahoo are behemoth 2. I finally feel like I'm conversant with the possibilities of Web 2.0 3. I'm excited that many of my colleagues are now familiar with these technologies, too. Now when someone puts a Rollyo search engine for legal research on the desktop, we'll know what the heck is going on. (Boy, I hope some of us do actually start applying these things at work!) 4. Sometimes knowing how much IS out there and possible, I get frustrated when I CAN'T find what I'm looking for! Hasn't anyone already pulled together all relevant links and research on locating the best graveyards in the Rhone Valley in France (complete with data on number of coniferous trees, plot sizes, vistas, the quality of upkeep, character of grave markers, etc)? Shouldn't our every quirky curiosity be able to be satisfied on the Internet?!? Ah, maybe someday... 5. Still not really clear on what widgets are and how to use them. (Guess that'll be my lifelong learning h

I didn't know Gutenberg had audio titles! Very excellent to know. I'd much rather listen to Beowulf than read it (I think so anyway...) I'd like to see more plays there, though. The list is pretty skimpy right now. But since audiobooks aren't loaned through ILL, it's nice to discover another resource (because I'm pretty sure that all the Overdrive and NetLibrary books are already listed in Sirsi, right?) later amendment: obviously NetLibrary books AREN'T in Sirsi. When I do a general search for "ebook" I only bring up 649 items, and the first dozen are all from Overdrive, so I'm deducing that only Overdrive's books show up in Sirsi so far. So I did a search for the book I'm reading, Sons and Lovers , and found it in NetLibrary. Now I remember why I haven't ever tried doing the download: I have the lowest DSL, not cable, so to download this book so that I could put in on my MP3 player, it would take me HOURS! Then I'd have to tra

I see, so you can have a podcast reader, just like your blog reader? Or you can just have it sent to your email. Or just click on it wherever it is embedded (which is what we've been doing with 23 things). I listen to podcasts of Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" all the time. In fact, I love getting up early, before the children have stirred, and sipping my coffee while listening to the poem of the day. A good way to start off! This site is very cool: Johnson County Library podcasts its Writer's Place Poetry Reading Series What a good way to get extra bang for your programming buck, and generate buzz for the next series! Every Thursday night, they have poets come read, then record the podcast and post on their website Interestingly enough, though, you can't just click on old episodes; you must subscribe. I haven't tried doing that yet, but I need to try it out. p.s. I attended a program on blogging and podcasting at MLA so I already have my feet

I've known about YouTube for awhile--my husband loves the political satire and humor (esp. Will Farrell). In fact, one of Farrell's most popular clips "The Landlord" stars his agent's 2-year-old daughter as a drunken, abusive landlord. It is probably borderline child abuse to make a toddler talk that way, but it is *very funny*, esp. to this mom who hears everything parroted out of her son's mouth these days. Anyhow, when I searched for the video today, I came across tons of spin-offs posted by people who made mashups of the video. So now there is a proliferation of fan-fiction type stories using Pearl and Will's heads on cartoon bodies! Okay, but back to work--applications for the library? Sure, why not? I think we should have Vcasts on our website--how about booktalks from our patrons? How about snippets of our programming? What about ads for upcoming events?

I was looking for something like this not too long ago as a way to group edit a doc. I ended up using Word and posting it on the R drive, but this would have been a way for group members to access it from any computer--home or work. And the way it keeps track of edits looks interesting, too. I've only used Word's track edits once, so I'm not saavy enough to know which is better. And it's a little tough to judge how Google docs will work since I don't know if anyone that I shared the doc with is likely to play with it at all. (And if they do, will Google docs send the revision to that bizarre email address they assigned to me?) The assignment should have been to send the doc to someone else in 23 things and have them edit it so we could see what happens. I may never know...

So very cool that you can set up a wiki with a specific template: class syllabus, team project, etc. We talked about setting up a wiki for a team I'm on; in the end we did a Yahoo Group, but a wiki might have been more helpful with some aspects. I'll have to try in out in the future...

I got very excited reading the article on creating community with wikis . Wouldn't it be great to have the library webpage function as a community page with restaurant and mechanic reviews, etc? And I'll be interested to see if OCLC adding wiki to its catalog can make it more Amazonian. Our intranet helps us do some things wikis are so good for, such as group discussions, but it has some serious flaws. I like the idea of being able to document share...

I think I now understand where the authority rating comes from: it's from how many times the blog is linked to by other sites. I think I remember Chris Anderson at MLA talking about this a bit. He blogged about his upcoming book for two years--essentially writing it on-line. When the book came out, he asked his blog subscribers for reviews. He got 740 reviews on the 800 free copies he sent out; these linked to Amazon and drove sales of his book. So the power of a blog is in how many times it's linked to.

This tool has some great reference applications! At LATI we had units on a variety of subjects--medical, legal, etc.--and we got recommended websites along with that training. Unfortunately, it's too easy to bury those notes so that it's hard to unearth them when you finally get asked that legal question where you can make use of them! We could create rollyos on the various subjects and have them on the ref desk. I notice some overlap here with Del.icio.us. I'm using Delicious this way: I tag my favorite sites so that I can type in "poetry" and find all of them. As a result, it was really simple and quick to build a Rollyo search engine on poetry . But then again, from Delicious I would have to replicate the same search in a number of sites to have the same result that Rollyo can give me in one search. So while I'd be duplicating a bit during the set-up phase, I'd actually use them differently. Great tool! p.s. As more quality content moves to the deep web

I'm trying to make a widget show up here so you can search my library. Now this is a fun thing for me--way more fun than creating an avatar. Hmm, this doesn't seem to be working... Well, I got a chicklet over there ---> but I don't know how to do a widget (to be quite honest, not really sure what a widget IS!)

So far, I've put in James' blog for 23 things, along with blogs from Merlin, ALA's Public Programs Office, and the LOC's poetry events. Feedster frustrated me because it kept telling me to create a widget, but I just wanted to see the results of my search. Technorati: I'm curious about how "authority" gets established, and I was amused when I saw what I thought to be an irreverent "WTF" section. It stands for "Where's the fire" (hot sites), but I read it, in my confused state, as a much more edgy WtF?!@ I know that we are slowly organizing all web content with our tags, but it still is a challenge to search well for these things! I tried in vain to find some good library adult programming sites, and I brought up so much junk! I would have thought that ALA's PPO feed would come up, but it certainly wasn't in the early results! Maybe the best way to find appropriate links is to go to established blogs on the topic and see what

I actually chose to set up a Google newsreader on the recommendation of a presenter at MLA's annual conference. He found Google's was easier to manage because the old posts stay there in case you want to reference them, whereas on Bloglines the old ones "drop off." So even if you haven't read them yet, if you log on to your Bloglines reader, you might end up having entries marked as read and dropped in the cyber corbeille. Maybe if I get a chance I'll set up one in Bloglines, too, so I can compare.