The Order: Play with Flickr.

What can I say? I am thorough. When I first created Flickr and looked at its features, I sort of already explored some of the mashups and third party applications available. However, I did stop to look at the mashups mentioned if I haven’t explored them before.

I wasn’t too impressed with Mappr, since it didn’t look too attractive with photos on a map (unless the map is huge enough) and it would be a bit of work to print off something huge enough to see the photos. I already looked at the Color Pickr for #20 and was amazed at the pictures pulled up in shades I thought would be hard to find. Spell with Flickr had some interesting effects, but I didn’t care for the images of the letters used and I didn’t like being unable to choose the design for the letter. It was fun in the randomness, but a letdown in the lack of personal input.

Mongtagr was pretty cool, pulling photos from Flickr to make a mosaic of a particular picture. Unfortunately, Montagr pulls any pictures of the right color even if it’s not part of the theme. I looked at sunsets and felt the effect was ruined when I saw that some of the photos were of people who made up the right colors for the sunset Montagr put together.

I checked out the Trading Card Maker from FD Toys and had a little trouble because the picture I used was too big. I didn’t realize the size of my picture mattered, and I can’t see how to resize the picture before inserting it. Otherwise, I thought it was a fun way to make our own library-themed cards to use. Hmm, my brain’s whirling with ideas for what we can do with them!

Learning 2.0 is all about discovery and playing around with the internet tools available to us (if we know about them), but I can’t believe we actually need to be assigned to play! Really, what workaholics we are.

Tag! You’re It!

To be perfectly honest I didn’t find much to learn with this lesson, since I already looked at the help menu in Flickr and read up on tags after creating an account. Perhaps Thing 21 was to catch those people who jumped right into Flickr (and maybe created a Flickr account) without looking too deeply into what makes Flickr’s searches work. And that is tags (presumably).

Tagging your pictures allows you to organize your pictures with descriptive tags and to search for particular pictures because of their subject matter (hence, tags). In the bigger context of the Flickr community, tagging allows your pictures to get grouped with other similar pictures based on themes and location. The Flickr community is different from other photosharing websites because members can add tags, comments and descriptions to another’s pictures.

I wasn’t too impressed with the “10 Ways to Use Flickr in Your Library” article, except maybe for the idea of the virtual tour of the library. That would be a way to market the library (and let the VA residents who don’t know the library discover it). The idea of “highlighting new materials” seems like a waste of time, and doesn’t work too well with our procedure of sending new materials to fulfill holds….unless Collection Management or Cataloguing would take the pictures before sending them to all the libraries. My only concern with posting library pictures are any including customers. How would a parent feel knowing that we have a picture of their child posted on the internet for all to see? Flickr would be good for publicity, but not for the resulting headache of jumping through all the privacy hoops.

Capture the Moment…and Then Share It!

I started off my Flickr experience with a groan. I have to create yet another account/profile? With Yahoo this time. At least Flickr makes it easy to upload images from Flickr onto your blog, though you have to set up that between Flickr and your blog account. After grumbling about it some more, I finally sat down to explore Flickr, and I was impressed with the photos I saw there. Then I grew overwhelmed. With all these great photos there, why do I need to add mine?

To avoid the topic of which pictures to upload to my account, I looked around at some of Flickr’s services and features. I stumbled onto Flickr’s Interestingness feature that has highlights of some of the remarkable photos from different dates to look at. And Flickr’s boast that it is easy to loose track of time while looking through these photos was definitely true. (This is how I found my interesting image to share.)

It was exciting (and humbling) to see what other people have used Flickr for in the third party applications of Flickr services. If you want pictures of a certain shade of color, you can pick one from the Color Picker; I was awed by some of the pictures I found matching the colors I selected. You can make motivational posters or customized movie posters by simply selecting a photo from your files, filling in the information blanks and then you get an instant poster! I was tickled by the busy message while your poster is made: “Digitizing your wisdom, great one...Please wait.”

I gave a cursory glance through some of the libraries using Flickr, and it reminded me of the photo archives in our W drive except online. This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to have an online photo archive? This way, all the photo files won’t take up so much room on the W drive. We would also be able to share these photos with other libraries from all over the world!

And the Winner is…

I was surprised to learn that there were lots of awards for Web 2.0 features, and that there were so many different categories (I didn’t know what half of them did!). I ended up looking through the award winners, because the list of nominees was harder to wade through and had a lot of extra links to follow.

Here are a couple of the websites I explored. I looked at all the winning websites under the Books category (the natural place for a bookwyrm to look, right?). I wasn’t too impressed with www.lulu.com, since it was an online publishing company and wouldn’t be very helpful with reader advisory. I thought www.biblio.com was sort of like an Amazon, except limited to books and more for private use than library use.

I was most interested in www.librarything.com, because it is (supposedly) the largest book club in the world! Here you can find people with similar tastes and get recommendations on different books to read, and they aren’t necessarily only new books. You can also tag books and blog about books. Joining Library Thing only requires creating a user ID and password. The major drawback is that they charge for membership.L Sign up is free and you can have up to 200 books in your profile, but if you want to enter unlimited numbers of books it’s 10$ for a yearly membership or 25$ for a lifetime membership.

I looked at a couple of the online word processing websites. I was excited with this discovery, because they could be useful to the customers who need word processing but don’t have Microsoft Word. I was unimpressed with www.writeboard.com for several reasons. I didn’t find it very user friendly—Writeboard required html code to format the document. It is designed to allow for collaboration because all files require separate log-ins to access them and you can share the log-in with your collaborators. It is for people comfortable with the internet; less so for people who are only looking for a word processor to use.

I have signed up for a Google account, and I haven’t looked at all the features available to a user until I saw that Google had won first place in the Collaborative Writing and Word Processing category for http://docs.google.com. I guess it’s no surprise that Google has become the place to go for quick information searches and even for basic word processing and simple spreadsheets, too. The design was more similar to Word and easier to use. Google Docs also had a nice auto save feature that saves what you type every few minutes. Of course, you would have to create a Google account to access all these useful features.

There are many websites with incredible features and options, and we only need to discover what’s out there to take advantage of them.

Technorati, Take Two

I wasn’t impressed with Technorati when it was introduced earlier, and I’m not impressed now. Why do I need a Technorati account so that I can practice tagging? What is so exciting about finding countless blogs about a topic instead of the facts? I considered signing up for a Technorati account, but I wasn’t interested in registering my blog when I might discontinue my blogging after the finish of Leaning 2.0.

I found it ridiculous that Technorati’s most popular movies, celebrity or news is based on the most new subscriber daily instead of the total of subscribers. The bloggers with the most authority are those with the most subscribers. Does that mean I should trust the information found in the blogs? I don’t buy that.

I can’t see myself using Technorati for library work. Perhaps I could use it for personal uses, but not for work. What makes blogs authoritative sources of information? Until I get that answer, I can’t say that Technorati is a particularly useful reference source to the library.

Simply Del.icio.us! Food for the Mind

Wow, this was practically a double (or triple) lesson for me. I’ve rarely bookmarked before (not enough to grasp the usefulness of bookmarking), and now I’m learning to bookmark and jumping to social bookmarking and tagging at the same time! I am on a roll here.

Reading about the articles on social bookmarking left me completely lost. I’ve only bookmarked maybe once or twice before, so I fail to see why social bookmarking is such a big deal, how it could be useful or why people practically swear that it is a lifesaver. I felt more confused, because tagging sounds like it depends on social bookmarking, or it’s a big part of it, at the least.

I figured that the only way to understand social bookmarking was to create a Del.icio.us account for myself. I created one, but that didn’t help my understanding much. After I talked with a co-worker who used Del.icio.us before, and she bookmarked and tagged a website with me, it made more sense. I can see more potential use for social bookmarking now.

A fellow 2.0er raised this point: What if we offer computer classes and we have tons of useful websites to recommend? Instead of giving patrons a long list of complicated URLs, we could just give them the URL of our Del.icio.us account or create one for library use containing all the suggested sites that they can browse at their leisure. If we update it, when the students access the URL, they have the most current information!

If there’s a group doing research, then saving all the links to one Del.icio.us account makes it accessible to all the members and doesn’t take up room on the library’s shared folders. All in all, social bookmarking bears a striking resemblance to RSS readers, sharing a lot of similar features with each other. Uh oh, is the RSS reader, this tool of 2.0, is becoming obsolete already?

I Have a Space on the Internet to Call My Own

MySpace isn’t quite what I expected it to be. It wasn’t the sketchy website full of obscene images and rude opinions that some co-workers visited instead of doing their work. It took me a long time to see MySpace as a social place for many different people, some of them whom I actually knew. The main reason I eventually join was because I found out some family members and friends were on MySpace.

When I first created a MySpace account I found it extremely overwhelming. Fortunately, I had family members who read up on MySpace for Dummies and helped me set up my account. My sister even beat Tom (the MySpace Administrator who is everyone’s first friend) for the privilege of being my first friend!

In the beginning, it was exciting to search for stuff to personalize your page, add some music, fill in some background information, and search for friends. I was amazed by the fact that decorating on MySpace required searching for and copying URLs for graphics and background designs that I wanted.

I was concerned by copyright, but my friends insisted that these files were there to be used and that everyone on MySpace did the same thing. They informed me that if the owner of the designs or music removed them, then I would just look for another file. This borrowing of files to put on my page was mind boggling. Profile names could also be changed as constantly and as easily as the background, music, video clips, etc. Pure Web 2.0 in action, right?

It took me a long time to put up a profile picture or choose my URL, even though uploading the picture wasn’t too hard—just like adding an attachment to an e-mail. Keeping in touch with friends in MySpace could be pretty easy. You can add quick little comments to friends’ pages, sort of a quick message or hello that everyone else can see. For more private messages, you can send a private e-mail through MySpace to the e-mail address in a friend’s profile.

Now that I have MySpace under my belt, maybe I should move onto Facebook, where I have a different network of friends to connect with…