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.