My colleague, Dean Giustini, wrote an interesting blog post yesterday, asking the question “why aren’t more Canadian librarians on Twitter?” I wonder this myself. I find Twitter to be a useful tool to share some of what I’m reading and a bit about what I’m thinking, to connect with current colleagues and friends and to meet new ones, and in general to keep abreast of new things and thoughts about technology and social networking. I follow tweeple from the library/information science world, online education world, and other worlds of interest (art, dogs, creativity, news).

Like Dean, I talk about Twitter with friends, and usually get the response that it seems like a waste of time and effort. I’m surprised, too, that Dean’s health information and librarianship students were so unenthusiastic about it. The students I’ve met are young and I would have thought they’d adopt this web 2.0 application with gusto.

To Dean’s list of Canadian library/librarian tweeple, I would add several who work in non-traditional settings, but with a focus on health. Tamara Durec is an independent information professional with a pharmacy background and Shelley Hourston is a program director in a disability advocacy organization, as well as a creativity coach. Other Canadian librarians/information professionals include Stephen Abram and Tim Tripp. I know of numerous others who have Twitter accounts, but don’t post. Perhaps Dean and I can convince them to rev up in this new year. (And thanks, Dean, for the heads up about the Vancouver Public Library Twitter feed; it’s new to me.)

Youtube – I have favourite Youtube videos categoried as music (by artist for some of my favourite musicians), dogs (by activity for some), humour, and more). I’ve been using Youtube mostly for leisure activities, but lately have been finding news and instructional videos to be very useful. I haven’t yet uploaded any of my own videos. I have a few I’ve taken with my camera and more recently with an inexpensive camcorder, but I doubt they’d be of interest to anyone but my family (think videos of my dogs…).

I haven’t spent much time exploring other video sites, though I find I’m taken to these at times when I’m viewing a video I’ve found during a search, or when I get emails from friends with links to videos. Sites in this week’s exercise to check out in the future (since if I start looking now, I’ll wind up frittering away a few hours):

• VideoJug – lots of “how to” videos from site users.
• Metacafe – a site which pays creators once the number of views of popular videos reach and exceed a critical mass

Meta search engines for videos include Metatube, searchforvideo, and blinx. I tested all of them using “rally obedience” or “rally obedience” (a dog sport). Adding in terms for boxer or dog doesn’t help with the search. I’ve been looking for examples of boxers doing Rally O, with little success, since my boxer, Freckle, and I have just started competing. I did find a Boerboel (a mastiff-family relative of the boxer) doing a fun match, though, using blinx: Sebastion the Boerbol to add to my small collection. One of a boxer I already had saved in my Youtube playlist is Bounce competing in Rally O at AKC.

Podcast search tools

I checked out the podcast services which won Web 2.0 Awards as suggested in this week’s exercises.
Odeo – searches for both podcasts and videos. Here, I searched for and found a long list of CBC podcasts. I also searched for dog treats and found one from Good Dog Podcast on cutting pet care costs, which is an interview with a veterinarian. I did a search on “author reading” and found two items, one being an 8-episode reading of “And She Was.” There wasn’t any information on this publication, but a quick Google search led me to Cindy Dyson’s website, which lists the novel, which is set in Alaska. I also browsed the Science, which has 201 channels and is further divided into Medicine, Natural, and Social.

PodShow – searches for both podcasts and videos.  The search function wasn’t working when I tried it; an error message offered up choices from the hosts from 4 channels: meviotech, meviowomen, meviomen and meviomusic. Even though I clicked on the Audio tab, much of the page was taken up by videos offerings – navigation isn’t very sophisticated. Clicking through to various channels (Going Green, Hot Gadgets) was exceeding slow and accompanied by the irritating sound of a music video from what appeared to be the Xtreme Sports channel. Short of turning down or shutting off the volume on my computer, there was no peaceful way to navigate this site.

PodOmatic – searches for both podcasts and videos. Searches can be limited to either or both media types. Podcasts play in a pop-up window. Searching for CBC found only 4 items. A featured site when I checked this site was DJ Floyed’s music stream, featuring some wonderful digital music. Also featured on the homepage is Chin Stroker VS Punter, subtitled Irreverent and Irrelevent Film talk out of England. These are lengthy discussions about movies (not necessarily current ones – examples are Dark Knight, Citizen Kane, This Is England). Navigation on this site isn’t very intuitive.

I browsed the Technology>Gadgets of each of the above podcast search sites as a test of the channels or categories available (simply Hot Gadgets in PodShow). For ease of navigation and searching, I recommend Odeo over the other two. With the exception of Odeo, these sites are lacking in description of specific podcasts, so it was necessary to listen to a bit of each to get a sense of it. It seems you need to know about the podcaster or the series from other sources before you head to these sites to do your searching. An example of the description available through Odeo is The Tech Night Owl Live program.

One of the uses I can see for podcast search engines is finding audio files in other languages to practice listening skills and hear how native speakers use the language and what they sound like.

NetLibrary: online eBooks, eAudiobooks and eJournals

I watched the demo videos at NetLibrary to get a sense of the service, which I can access through a subscription at Vancouver Public Libary through the electronic databases menu. This requires users to have a VPL library card number. I created a free account through the NetLibrary interface. I discovered that the VPL subscription to NetLibary includes only eBooks, not eAudiobooks as well. There doesn’t appear to be a way to download the eBooks for reading later or transferring to an iPod or MP3 player. I’ll have to contact VPL to find out if there’s a way to do this.

Thoughts on SLA 23 Things

This week marks the end of SLA 23 Things, but not the end of my exploration of web 2.0 applications. It’s been a great program for me personally. I’ve learned much during my work on the program – and most of this work was more like play. My favourite applications are the image and photo tools and sharing sites. I also enjoyed getting a blog up and running, and am hoping I’ll continue it. I do want to change the template I’m using – but that’s for down the road. I’m also looking forward to creating a personal wiki as a project management tool for my business and possibly creating ones for projects with other consultants. I already have friends and colleagues asking me about various tools I use in my work and play, and now I have even more to show them. Finally, since I didn’t fully explore each and every application suggested in SLA 23 Things, I still have more magic to discover myself!

As part of this week’s tasks, I read the About.com article Top Ten Productivity Web Sites. Of these 10 tools, I already use:

• TinyURL – I use this site when I’m not on my own computer. I have the FireFox add-on TinyURL Creator on my own machine.
• Gmail – I forward all of my email from other accounts to Gmail. One of the things I use it for (often) is searching old emails and also for subject searching (all the listserves I belong to).
• Bloglines – I use this for all my RSS/news feeds.
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets – I use this primarily for storing (non-sensitive) documents I might want to access when I don’t have my own computer with me.

Of the others mentioned, I’ve considered installing Google Desktop but worry a bit about security issues. Several others that look interesting include:

• MyStickies – I’m intrigued by the ability to leave small notes on websites to point out the important spots or text passages. They are planning to add to ability to share notes with other people, something that might come in handy when pointing out web resources to friends and family.
• Remember the Milk – a “to do” list and reminder service. It can be integrated with Gmail or added as a Firefox extension.

(I dislike the fact that About.com doesn’t date their articles. I’ve noticed this in the past – it’s frustrating not to have a sense of the currency of the information.)

I subscribe to the Lifehacker blog and read it when I have time to digest it. It’s a great site with lots of technology and productivity discussion. Looking at the blog site for this week’s tasks, I found a “cool tool” that looks great – a mechanical pencil whose lead rotates slowly to prevent flattening, which leads to broader lines than wanted. I happen to really love mechanical pencils and do most of my writing and note-taking with one.

Nifty mechanical pencils with rotating leads

The Getting Things Done video on YouTube sounds as if it would be a worthwhile watch (45 minutes). I own the book, however, so unless I find an hour with nothing to do, and that’s pretty rare, I won’t be viewing it. The GTD bookmarks on Delicious are worth a second look, though.

Reviewing Lifehacker’s 2007 Guide to Free Software and Webbapps will take some time. It was published Dec 17, so perhaps I’ll wait until the 2008 edition comes out (assuming it’s an annual post).

Other applications suggested in this week’s tasks (focussing on free applications only):

• Mindomo – mindmapping application. I do occassional mindmapping exercises on paper. I’ve looked at other online mindmapping apps and in general, I feel very constrained by the screen size. I may check this application out in the future.
• 43Things – I have friends who use this site. I haven’t started yet, but it’s on my “to do” list. I looked at some of the “inspiration” categories for newbies (Creativity and self-expression, Travel, Popular goals). To my list, I would add: take more photos, learn how to use my video editing/creation software, spend more time in my studio painting and drawing, stop procrastinating, go through my piles of paper and file or recycle. Those are just for starters.
• Diigo – allows you to highlight passages on webpages and save and share them. There’s a demo Youtube video worth watching.
• Sticky Notes – desktop program allowing you to paste stickies to your desktop. Sticker Lite is the free version.

Productivity tools I’ve tried:

• Google Docs and spreadsheets – I’ve used these for group projects, but in general, it hasn’t been a success. Though I’ve uploaded documents for collaboration, the other people in the group haven’t gotten onboard. The only person using the collaborative functions was me!
• iGoogle and MyYahoo – I’ve had these set up for years, but haven’t done much with them. I did more customization and blogged about these during Week 5 of SLA 23 Things.
• CutePDF – a great tool that lets you create PDF documents as one of your print options from within your applications (I use it with MS Word and Excel).
• PDF converter – a web-based application that allows conversion from a variety of applications. There’s a script you can add to your own website that lets visitors print pages with a single click.

Exploration of a site from the Web 2.0 awards list

This task involved looking at seomoz’s 174 Web 2.0 Sites in 41 Categories list. This site has a cornucopia of both fun and work-related sites and applications – lots to explore in the future.

Categories I quickly checked:

• Health – hoping to find some interesting new sites to use in my work. The winners focus on consumer health, though, so they aren’t very useful to my professional life. All focus on community building among people looking for health information or sharing their stories on specific conditions or treatments.
• Hosted Wikis – curious to see which were included, I see that both pbwiki and wikispaces have won awards (these I looked at during Week 7 of SLA 23 Things). The other winner was wetpaint – another free wiki option I might test drive in the future.
• Social News – Smaller and Niche Sites – NowPublic is a news site, with the tagline “Crowd Powered Media” – worth a close look later.
• Visual Arts – This is one of my main interests in life, so I checked one of these as my site to explore in more detail. Two of the 3 award winners deal with the visual representation of numeric data (Swivel preview and visualcomplexity). Though I don’t do much work with primary data these days, I love to see the creative way other researchers represent their findings visually.

The One Million Masterpiece
This site won an honourable mention. Its tagline reads “Officially the World’s largest collaborative arts project and online drawing community.” The artistic vision of this collaborative art site summarized is:

• to celebrate individual creativity through collaboration
• to test the limits of artistic collaboration on a massive scale
• to reconnect people with art

As someone who has felt the synergistic effects of working with other artists (on individual pieces, rather than a colloboration, during life drawing sessions), I find it really interesting that this experiment is taking place. I know of artists who do work collaboratively and they love the experience. The composite picture being created can be zoomed in and out and is clickable so you can see larger versions and the details of the artists who created specific tiles in it. Though I haven’t joined the community yet, I probably will – and I’ll be sending the URL to friends, for sure.

TheBroth is another collaborative art site that won an honourable mention – an additional site to explore in the future.

Section of collaborative picture from The One Million Masterpiece, with detail

It wasn’t until after I’d viewed the wonderful short video “Wikis in Plain English” that I found myself quite excited about wiki possibilities for my work as an independent info pro. I don’t do many projects that require group input, other than report generation. Generally, we’re an ad hoc group of consultants and researchers brought together for a specific project. Each new project is a different topic, not requiring an ongoing collaborative effort. I’m thinking the next time I have a receptive group working on a project with me, I’ll create a wiki and see if it’s adopted as a useful productivity tool.

Several uses of wikis in non-classroom environments that intrigued me are project management and email reduction. More information about wiki use can be found on the Future Changes blog.

I wonder, after looking at the suggested resources for this week, if a private wiki with various apps and widgets could make my life easier. As an example, I used Google maps a while ago to check on where a Rally Obedience trial was being held just outside of Vancouver. If there’s another trial there in a year or two, I’ll have to look it up again – but if I had a personal wiki, I could save the file there and not have to do the search again. I could add a calendar, task list, etc. But – I’m not quite convinced yet.

A few items of interest to health librarians:

• A 2007 article published in the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association by two Vancouver health librarians, Eugene Barsky and Dean Giustini outlines some of the issues of concern for health libraries considering wiki development (Introducing Web 2.0: Wikis for Health Librarians).
• The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies has a wiki set up for their health librarianship course. The table of contents gives an overview of the wiki’s focus and breadth. I especially like the biographies of Canadian health librarians section.
• Gafyd is a medical wiki which is readable by anyone and to which any registered medical practitioner can contribute.
• The McGill Library Global Health Resource Guide is a collaboration of the McGill University faculty, clinicians, researchers and students who are working the area of global health.

Of the wikis mentioned in the SLA’s 23 Things page, the ones I found most interesting include:

• WikiHow – a wiki of “how tos” which includes such topics as removing red wine stains, overcoming procrastination with self talk, descaling a kettle, and suppressing the gag reflex
• Art Tutorials Wiki – the Anatomy & People Linkshttp://artwiki.wikidot.com/ page leads to many examples of anime, manga and fine art drawing instruction

I also found the wikipatterns.com site interesting to explore. This site talks about wiki development, use and adoption – ways to make a wiki successful. They provide a “how to” starting at “Grassroots is best.”

Lastly, several wiki directories to explore further:

• List of wikis – a wikipedia entry listing a small number of notable wikis (worth further exploration)
• Wiki index – a searchable directory in wiki format

Next step for SLA 23 Things is to create a wiki.

Since then, I’ve been exploring image sites further and learning more about mashups, of which I’ve had a general idea for a while. The 7 Cool “Mashup” Websites – What Are Mashup Websites? YouTube video was very helpful. Some mashups covered that look interesting:

• Map Your Buddies – creates a mashup of Facebook, GoogleMaps and Amazon
• twittervision – a world map with dialog bubbles popping up in real time as people tweet
• Cloudme Search – an application for simultaneous search of Yahoo, YouTube, and flickr
• tuneglue – a mashup of last.fm & amazon ecommerce; the interactive maps are fun and it’s interesting to see the connections between artists
• vDiddy – shows random video clips from a number of sites; unfortunately, this site isn’t searchable

I explored the mashup awards photo category, which has lots of really interesting and fun things to see. Probably my favourite is Multicolr Search Lab, which allows searches of creative commons photos by colour and colour combinations. Once a set is created, clicking on individual photo tiles takes you to Flickr to see the full size photo. Also very interesting is Tag Galaxy. Below is one of the tag galaxies I created using this utility, as well as a Flickr set created by Multicolr Search Lab.

Image created by Tag Galaxy search on

Flickr set created by Multicolr Search Lab

I created a Flickr badge and have code to plug into my blog or website – now I just need to figure out how to add it to one of the side bars. I tried to make an e-card with delivr but it wasn’t working at the time. I notice that someone else working on SLA23Things had the same experience.

I checked out other tools briefly – enough to know which ones I’ll go back to and explore in depth:

• Captioner for creating captions on Flickr photos
• Flickr Color Pick
• Created a map of a couple of the groups I belong to using the Flickr map function
• Created a Flickr montage for the tag “boxer” using Montager – lots of beautiful dog photos popped up on mouse-over
• Looked at Slide – slide creating site
• Looked at Animoto – analyses your photos and music and creates a video
• Looked too briefly at Mosaic Maker – site to create mosaics from your flickr or uploaded photos
• Flickr Graph – fun and interactive way to explore photos of your friends/contacts and their friends/contacts
• Big Huge Labs – some fun-looking Flickr toys

programmableweb has a mashups directory to explore (as well as How-Tos, APIs and other resources) and warrants a return visit when I have a lot more time.

My photosets on Flickr

I’ve been using Flickr for some time – I’m not quite sure when I created my account and starting uploading photos. I have a Pro account because I wanted to create multiple sets and not be limited by maximum allowable uploads in any given month. I have both private and public sets. I figured most of my family wouldn’t want their photos on the Internet, so I’ve protected those only. I’ve geotagged most of my photos.

Things I’ve done during this week’s exercises:

• Explored Flickr more fully – created several collections (The Dogs, Travel, Family, Lost Pets) in my account
• Joined several Flickr groups (Rescued Boxers, Funny BoXers, That’s my Boxer)
• Added a photo to the group Photos of Fairchild at the invitation from the group administrator, joined the group and added a few more photos
• Explored some of the photos from other Flickr members on my maps (created by my geotagged photos)
• Blogged a photo from my Flickr photostream to Freckle & Ceilidh’s Blog (a blog devoted to our boxer and pug)
• Explored very briefly some of the other photo-sharing sites: Fotki, Photbucket, Picasa (using my Google ID), Share on Ovi, Smugmug, Shutterfly, Webshots
• Used some visual search tools: Pixsy, Retriever, Riya, Xcavator

One of my favourite sites not mentioned in this week’s SLA 23 Things is Earthshots, a photo site with amazing photos of the world we live in. I get an email from this site every morning and it’s a great way to start my day on the computer.

Things I still plan to do, at a later date:

• Figure out how to subscribe to my “recent comments” feed on Flickr.
• Continue with the remainder of Week 4 tasks.

I have a much bigger project, barely started – retrospectively scanning of my slides and negatives, and old photos from family albums. This project will take years, I’m sure.

delicious

I’ve had a delicious account for a while. I’ve made a start at organizing my many bookmarks into categories, though this is going slowly. I have yet to go through my uploaded bookmarks file, which I’ve left as private for the time-being, so I can go through and review them and check for broken links. All of this takes time, so in the mean time, I use the search function to find what I know, or at least think, is in the mishmash.

Some things I need to work on: amalgamate some tags (think “controlled vocabulary”) I’ve applied on the run. Trying to sort out which to use – my cataloguer’s idea of what I think they should be, or be consistent with what others are using. I started out using an underscore between two (or more) word tags, but have now opted for a one-word tag, capitalizing the first letter of each of the multiple words making up the individual tag. Checking out other people’s tags while searching for one of my favourite subjects, boxers [dogs], I find their other tags include: dog, dogs, dog_breeds, boxer_dogs, dog-health, boxers, boxer.

I confess to not using delicious to its full advantage. Though I’ve been diligently adding new sites in addition to my uploaded FireFox bookmarks, I haven’t used it very often as a discovery tool. I’ll be doing that more often now, though.

One thing I’ve noticed: few people have added notes to their delicious bookmarks. I tend to add them (often an excerpt from the web resource itself) to provide  information additional to my tags. This provides context and scope and reminds me why I thought bookmarking the site was worthwhile in the first place.

One of the biggest disadvantages of tagging for me is confusing tags. Reflecting back on my search for “boxers,” there is no way to distinguish the dog breed from the apparel, the athlete or the personal name. Not everyone adds the additional tag “dog” or “dogs” to disambiguate among the three meanings..” As well, some people use the singular form of a tag, while others use the plural form – and delicious doesn’t collapse these into one search results set if you enter only one form of the tag. I was particularly pleased to note that delicious supports Boolean logic. I searched on “(boxer OR boxers) (dog OR dogs)” and was able to get a good selection of sites to check.

Technorati

I found the article by one of my AIIP (and SLA) colleagues, information guru Mary Ellen Bates, “Mining Technorati” to be especially informative, prompting me to explore this excellent blog search resource further. Her suggestion to use the authority search to find influential bloggers in specific fields is an excellent one and I’ll be adding this to my arsenal of research steps.

Recapping, things I’ve done during this week’s session:

• Explored delicious more fully
• Explored and joined Technoratihttp://www.technorati.com/ and registered meldinme
• Joined Library 2.0 on Ning and introduced myself
• Signed up for FriendFeed because several Twitter feeds I wanted to follow pointed me to the community on FriendFeed (IL2008, medlibs)

Things I’d still like to do, at a later date when I have more time:

• Explore other tools I know of already, such as Furl, Spurl, StumbleUpon, 43Things
• Compare tools with similar bibliographic functions, such as CiteULike vs. Connotea
• Explore tools I’ve just found out about through SLA23Things, such as Voo2do, a site that came up when I clicked on Frassle from Tony Hammond et al’s 2005 D-Lib article Social Networking Tools (I)

I’ve been thinking lately about how real the online world is. Saturday night I went to a party and talked at length with one of my real world friends, Dean. It was fun because we keep up with each others’ goings on primarily through Facebook and Twitter, and the occasional email, even though we live and work within the same few square miles of Vancouver. We both have busy lives, and if it weren’t for our online connection, we’d be catching up once a year at the AGM of the Health Libraries Association of BC.

This had me thinking of other such connections in my online world:

• During one of the FOC08 course meetings using Elluminator, I discovered another participant, Daryl, who lives on the other side of the world has a boxer – his a white, mine a fawn.
• I recently read a tweet by the aforementioned real life friend, Dean – “6 Reasons to reject the iPhone” – which turns out to be a blog post by FOC08’s facilitator, Leigh Blackall.
• A few years ago, I was invited to dinner with a Boxer Mailing List friend as she passed through Vancouver on her way to a job in Alaska. One of the other dinner guests turned out to be a real life friend I’d lost touch with and hadn’t seen in about 10 years. We knew Susan from very different circles, both of  which were online communities (boxer lovers; Xena fans). (Susan’s suicide rocked both online communities several years ago.)
• At one of my dog classes a few months ago, I met Dug with whom I’d worked on a research project – all our previous interactions had been online until we met through our dogs in real life.
• Marta, one of my Facebook friends, is someone I met originally online through boxer connections when my partner and I were looking for our first rescue girl, Sassy. We now get together in the real world when she’s in town visiting her mother.

The online world really is converging with my real world – something I’m very happy about – because I’m meeting all kinds of people that I wouldn’t otherwise.

Dug and Spin, Mary-Doug and Freckle - at class

Vancouver Boxer Meetup: subset of the virtual "community" of boxer lovers meeting face-to-face at Vanier Park in Kitsilano last September

I’ve heard it said among some of my friends that an “online” community isn’t really a community at all. This is usually said by friends who are resistant to using their computers for anything other than either for work or for personal research.

Our blog posts for the FOC08 course are to be reflective and personal rather than academic (which is my first instinct!) – a not completely comfortable undertaking on my part. As I think back over my years online and my involvement with various technologies – email, listserves, forums, and now social networking applications – and think about the friends and acquaintances I’ve made along the way, I realize, for me, that community does exist online. The “groups” aren’t much different from my “real” life groups, except that I don’t always know what my online friends and acquaintances look or sound like. We congregate as a group for many of the same reasons we do in “real” life: common interests, shared places of employment, geographic proximity, mutual support, information seeking, etc.

On the personal side, I’ve been involved with the Boxer Mailing List for the last 6  or 7 years. Over time, I’ve made friends with a number of people from this community and have been lucky enough to meet several in “real” life. Our community has been badly shaken by the suicide of one of our members and the early and unexpected deaths of several others. It has rallied to help a rescue worker pay expensive hospital bills after she was badly mauled by one of her rescue dogs (not a boxer, incidentally) – she didn’t have health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. We’ve rejoiced with members who have gotten married, given birth, graduated from school. We’ve cried together when we’ve lost a beloved companion. In short, we’ve interacted in much the same way as we would if we were living in the same neighbourhood, worked for the same company, volunteered in the same organizations, studied in the same schools.

On the professional side, I’m been a member of a number of associations and listserves to do with librarianship and the information world. In our online forums and listserves, we share both our professional and personal lives. Again, there is camaraderie and a willingness to help and be helped by others, just as there would be in the “real” world.

Some of these communities are more “friendly” than others; some are more active, while others have more lurkers than participators. Just as in “real” life, we participate online in diverse communities, interacting and sharing with others as we go about our daily business.

My sense of community is one in which we interact with and touch other people in an emotional or intellectual way – this regardless of the physical environment, geographically close or distant, online or face-to-face. I don’t see my online connections as being all that different from far-away folks with whom I keep in touch by mail or phone. Keeping in touch online provides a different and additional means of connecting and building community. Being online expands my community in a seemingly boundless way, offering me a way to “be” with people I might otherwise never meet. I’ll be reading other FOC08 participants’ blog posting about online community over the next few months, seeing where we agree and differ – again, another commonality between online communities and “real life” ones.

I haven’t been able to identify yet where I can change the text on the right side of the black header bar. I’ve been through every file associated with this theme, as well as examining the page source. Another mystery to solve along the way.

Here’s the comparison of the original theme and my current version. I’ve made quite a few changes, as you can see:

original modernpaper theme

reworked modernpaper theme (first version)

What I still want to do, at a minimum:

• replace the blue header box with an image – I need to go through my photos and find a suitable landscape (probably a Vancouver beach scene, but I’m still pondering this)
• replace the heavy black bar under the blue
• fix the search box header – it’s inconsistent with the other headers
• add tags under the posting date, along with the categories
• find a Tag Cloud widget and replace the list
• find a Flickr widget that shows a randow selection of photos from the site

I’ll just keep tweaking away until I have something I’m happy with – it’s what I do best.