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.)

How to embed YouTube Video in Wordpress:

Bounce competing in Rally O at AKC:

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

I took a look at a few options for free wiki hosting. I decided I wanted to host it at a wiki site rather than using server-based software as a first go-round. I checked out a few options:

WikiSpaces – I took the online video tour starting here. I learned:

• You can use an RRS feed or news reader to keep track of changes to the wiki (useful if it’s a collaborative effort).
• You can “star” a page to remind you that you want to make changes to it.

MediaWiki – This is a server-based option. My ISP provides MediaWiki, so I may take a look at this more carefully in the future.

I decided to create a wiki in Wikispaces rather than within my SLA membership space (this I’ll do later) or using Wikimedia through my ISP, since time is running out to meet the December 15th SLA 23 Things deadline. I figure I can get a feel for wiki principles without the steeper learning curve of all the technical details I’ll need to learn for the other options.

Since I wanted to use the free version of Wikispaces, I couldn’t create a Private wiki, which is viewable and editable by wiki members only. I opted for the Protected option, which means it’s viewable by anyone, but editable by wiki members only. I created a couple of pages, starting with the wiki’s homepage, which gives a bit of information about me (hmmm) and introduces the wiki (Mary-Doug Wright’s SLA 23 Things Practice Wiki). So, I:

• uploaded photos to the Dog Stuff page.
• embedded several widgets (video – a Youtube video; RSS reader – a CBC podcast feed) on the Trying Out Widgets page
• renamed a page (changed Gadgets to Widgets)
• changed the page title paragraph style, font and colour: Heading 1, Comic Sans MS, #0a0e80
• changed section headings paragraph style, font and colour: Heading 2, Verdana
• under Manage Wiki, changed the Look and Feel of the wiki to the theme to “Bubble” from the default “Original”
• checked out other functions under Manage Wiki and decided not to make further changes
• discovered I can’t remove the ads since I’m using a free account
• changed notifications using Tools under Manage Wiki to send an email to me about any changes made to the wiki (but since I’m the only author, this was just for the sake of the exercise)
• looked at the “history” tab to see the changes I’d made over the last two days

I decided not to spend any more time on this exercise as I don’t think I’ll continue with Wikispaces. I discovered pbwiki after I’d started the wiki in Wikispaces and I think it might serve my purposes better. I watched a video on using pbwiki for project management. pbwiki is free for 1-3 users, perfect for small group projects. It may well be a better option for personal project management, since the free accounts can be made private, unlike Wikispace.

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.

Out of curiosity, I searched Google (photos resizing online) and found many options (1,370,000 hits – and no, I didn’t bother narrowing it). Then, I checked flickr to see if I could do it through my account. Sure enough, flickr has a partnership with Seattle-based Picnik, which offers web-based photo editing. After several false starts (Firefox has been crashing a lot over the last several days), I used IE and in no time flat, had resized my profile photo by 50 per cent, saved it to my hard drive, and uploaded it successfully to my identi.ca profile. I don’t see any real difference between the original and the resized image when I compare the thumbnails on several of my social networking profiles, but at the size below, I can see some loss of definition in shadows and highlights.

Original photo (535 KB)

Resized photo (190 KB)

Avatars and online image generators:

First task this week was to create an avatar and/or work with an online image creator.

Meez – an online avatar creator and game site. I didn’t get very far with it. I downloaded and installed Java (still setting up my new computer), and finally got Meez working. Since I had to sign up to save my avatar, I decided to bail at that point.

ImageChef – an online image creator. I wrote in the sand and saved the image below, then shared it on Facebook.

Yahoo! Avatars – online avatar creator. For this site, I had to download and install the latest version of Macromedia Flash Player. Though the Flash Player test at the Adobe site indicates I have it installed properly, Yahoo Avatars keeps telling me I need to install it. On to the next site.

Big Huge Labs – home of Flicker Toys, an online image manipulation site. I created a move poster from one of my images.

Customer Sign Generator – this image generator site was down when I went to it, but lead me to Foto Trix. I have a sense of what it can do, so decided to move on to other things for this week.

Probably the most useful thing about this last exercise was my downloading and installing the various plugins that I hadn’t gotten around to yet.

I created a Second Life avatar some time ago and now need to install SL software on this laptop in preparation for tomorrow’s AIIP webinar on virtual worlds.

LibraryThing:

This week we’re also to look at LibraryThing. Since I’d already started my catalogue on LibraryThing a while ago, I checked out Shelfari and GuruLib. I use WeRead in Facebook and noticed today that this app is having problems with Firefox 3. The appi folks are suggesting we try using a different browser – I’m hoping they sort this out quickly.

Not surprisingly, the group with the largest number of members is Librarians who LibraryThing (5446 members), more than twice as many than the next highest number group, Science Fiction Fans (2697 members).

I’ve suggested to several small non-profit organizations that they check out LibraryThing as a web-accessible catalogue for their constituents. I’m not sure if any of them have taken this direction, but it seems a useful solution for groups with limited funds. There’s a list of libraries that use LibraryThing for Libraries for specific applications such as reviews and catologue enhancement. Libraries thinking about using LibraryThing for Libraries can find information about it here.

A really nifty function in LibraryThing is the Tag Mirror, which shows the tags that other LibraryThing users have applied to books in your collection in their own collections. Read the LibraryThing blog post “Tag Mirror: See your books the way others do” for more information.

A portion of my LibraryThing tag cloud

Tag mirror for a portion of my tag cloud

Rollyo:

Rollyo is a site where users can create their own customized searches by creating Searchrolls comprising websites they visit and search over and over. I signed up and will be creating searchrolls for topics such as dog-related searches, art-related searches, and health research-related searches. These I’ll create the next time I do these searches, along with any others I think I’ll be repeating. One initial thought I have, before actually testing this, is whether I’ll be able to create any useful Searchrolls for my work since so many of the sites I use are deep web sites with different search protocols.

Checking out the Quick Pick Subscriptions, I see there are quite a few that I’m already subscribed to, and others that I’ll check out another time (e.g., Birding News Feed, Art Knowledge News). The Boglines Top 1000 is interesting, especially the graph showing gains and declines in readership of each in the list. Jenny Levine’s blog,  The Shifted Librarian, is in seventh place and holding steady.

I’ve checked out Google Reader, but don’t like the look and feel much. Maybe it’s a coziness thing – I’m comfortable where I am with Bloglines – but I think the Google interface just takes up too much real estate on the screen. Another SLA 23 Things participant had a good point about using Google Reader since she uses many of Google’s other applications. For now, though, I’ll stick with Bloglines.

I poked around iGoogle and did some customizing:

• Edited my Weather settings to set temperatures to display in Celsius.
• Added a few gadgets: Ansel Adams Nature Photo of the Day, Gmail, Top Stories, How to of the Day (today’s is “How to Stretch a Canvas”). [I need to figure out how to align photos in Wordpress.]

I personalized my MyYahoo account a bit more:

• Added Edmonton to the Weather Forecast box so I have up-to-date when I talk to my mom and brothers. For fun, I also added St. Louis, which is where my sister and her family live.
• Moved the “Note to Self” box to the top of the right column.
• Added the Facebook and Flickr applications.
• Deleted Scoreboard and Stock Portfolios (that’s too depressing right now!).
• Changed my page appearance, changing the theme to “The Color Purple” (yummy colour), but decided in the end I like Forest better. The trees at the top are wonderful in their fogginess and the dark green makes my Flickr photos pop.

Whether I actually use iGoogle and/or MyYahoo in the future remains to be seen.

While checking out Netvibes, I discovered my ancient account no longer exists;  I couldn’t log in, at any rate. I created a new one, and although Netvibes knows I live in Canada, it wasn’t smart enough to determine I  live on the west coast andwant Vancouver weather on my page. I do like the Flickr Most Interesting Photos box that is already on the page, though.

Another suggestion for Week 6 was to check out Pageflakes. I had a quick look at this and decided not to spend the time setting it up. Interesting and possibly useful, but I have only so much time to devote to personalizing my Internet experience. All of these tools do essentially the same thing, with minor variations. Best to figure out which ONE I like and work with it – if any at all.

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.