Rolling On and On and On…

Rollyo took some warming up to. Perhaps my topics were too obscure when I tried out the search rolls for e-Books, rare books, photos and quotes from Thing 28. Ironically, most of the photos in Free Photos were from Flickr (I had already created a Flickr account!), so I didn’t find this search roll too useful. I was able to find some interesting quotes in Quick Quote, but the book searches were dissatisfying.

This search tool didn’t thrill me at first, because I had to create yet another profile. Again. I had originally planned to do option 2 where I just checked Rollyo out, but I didn’t find the experience particularly enlightening. So I gritted my teeth and registered for a Rollyo account.

It took me awhile to get the hang of how Rollyo worked. For instance, the searchrolls showed up as a dropdown menu on the top of the screen instead of a new window even when you’re at the bottom of the screen. It was easy enough to create my own searchrolls: I clicked on the tab, chose a title for it, and typed in the URLs. I could have also copied searchrolls from other Rollyo users, but I wanted to create my own searchrolls with websites I’m familiar with. I ran into a little trouble, because I wanted to link back to Rollyo account in the blog, but I found out that I had to make my searchrolls public for anyone to use it. I thought my searchrolls must be simplistic compared to other users’ searchrolls. However, when I searched through some of the searchrolls similar to mine, I was pleasantly surprised to find that mine were comparable, having more websites than some, less than others.

Rollyo wasn’t too exciting until I tried to use them for searches. When I entered a topic in one of my newly created searchrolls, it pulled up results from all the websites I selected. I was thrilled by the ease of searching multiple websites with one search. Rollyo feels like a combination of Google and Del.icio.us, with a search engine searching through sites I’ve added to a list as I did with Del.icio.us. At the worst, if your searchrolls yield no result, you can have Rollyo expand your search to the Web as well.

This Comes from Working in the Library

Who would have thought that so many people would feel the need to categorize all the books they’ve ever read and liked? Clearly, this is a popular hobby because Library Thing has so many members that it can boast about being the largest online book club in the world. Membership is free up to 200 books in your catalog, and then you have to pay for a yearly or lifetime membership. That little tidbit sort of took the fun out of cataloguing my own library; I now have to worry about staying within my limit when I have so many favorite books I want to add. I ran into Library Thing back in Thing 19 and have been slowly adding books into my library since.

The work to get my Visual Shelf from Library Thing to show up was practically another triple lesson for me! In addition to learning about Library Thing, I learned to add links and other page elements to my blog, to make certain text in my blog hyperlinks, and to search for the html code for materials to embed into my blog. For the longest time my blog was extremely plain without any Widgets or decorations, but after all these extra lessons (mostly from other co-workers), I can proudly say my blog isn’t so bland anymore. I went on a slight detour from the discovery exercise to adding hyperlinks in some of my previous blog entries, to find widgets for my blog (I had a slight disaster on my blog when certain widgets were inserted too many times; I also tried to alter the dimensions of a widget to fit it into my blog), including a list of links to some of my fellow bloggers on my page, and adding a cool photo slideshow on my page!

I found the experience overwhelming when I searched for favorite books, because some titles have lots of different editions and I have the option of choosing the edition that I liked. I found some books in my favorite series grouped together, but their pictures rarely appeared while on my bookshelf. I found it slightly confusing how to include and modify tags, especially with the older entries; I still find myself unable to edit the tags on them. Library Thing has the option for you to add favorite authors, but the process sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t (or I fumbled my way onto the correct path the first time and now can’t repeat the steps).

Library Thing clearly offers more to readers who become members than those who just want to browse around. If you’re not a member, you can still get quite a bit out of the experience. Non-members can search Library Thing’s catalog for information about a favorite book, read the posts from discussion groups and look at the statistics for different categories in Library Thing, People can get book recommendations for titles they might like (and even recommendations for books to avoid based on the title they searched for!).

Perhaps, Library Thing is the solution for some of our customer woes. Take for instance those customers who always want to know what the title of that great book they’ve read (and then bemoan the fact that the Library doesn’t keep records of previous checkouts). If they have a Library Thing account, they can save the title in their very own catalog! Those people who want to join book clubs or find others with similar reading tastes? Well, Library Thing has plenty of them—surely there is going to be something for everyone! Now, all we have to do is persuade those same customers to check out Library Thing while making sure they still have reasons to visit the Library.

YouTube—So Easy to Use, So Difficult to Realize That

It’s funny. I hear a lot about YouTube having tons of video clips and see that a lot of friends use it on MySpace and Facebook, but I’ve never really looked around the site before. And when I got on YouTube, I nearly turned around and left. Was this yet another profile to create? Then I looked closer. I only needed to create a profile if I wanted to upload stuff or leave comments. I was saved.

It was easy enough to find videos for particular topics. The hard part was figuring out which video clips are worth watching, since there was usually a lot of results. Adding to the difficulty was the unintuitive steps needed to post a YouTube clip to my blog. Ugh.

Wading through the results can be time consuming, since I wanted to stop and look at so many of them. Some of the videos I found had problems with freezing for moments before resuming. I decided to look for Lion or Dragon Dances, since Chinese New Year is on my mind. It’s funny that a lot of the videos/performers use the folk song "On the General’s Order", used as the theme song for some of the Wong Fei Hung movies.

I checked out the Google Videos and Yahoo Videos. I was amused to find that most of the results in Google and Yahoo were from YouTube! Other than that, I wasn’t too impressed with either of them. If their videos are coming from YouTube, I might as well go to the source for my searches.



And this one had the folk song. I was amazed by how much effort it takes to learn to perform the Lion Dances.

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!

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…

Really Simple—Sure!

Up to this point, this lesson was where my progress came to a screeching halt. It wasn’t really that I found the tasks difficult; it was simply daunting looking at all the explanation, tutorial lessons, and the discovery exercises (some optional, no less!) that I could do. And the warning that this was the most difficult Thing had me putting it off to do another day. And another. Repeat.

When I finally created the RSS reader, the setup was easy enough surprisingly. Certainly simpler than what the copious volumes of Discovery materials led me to believe.
I had created a Google account for the blogging exercise, and imagine my delight when I found that I could set up an RSS reader through the same account. I started adding all the RSS feeds that were recommended in Thing 9, and that was when I ran into some trouble. The most important RSS feed—the one for L2 Chronicles wasn’t working! I was crushed.

I asked around and eventually learned that I could just copy the URL and paste it into my Subscription section. I wanted to add the Ask VBPL andRA Gourmet, too, but I couldn’t find any RSS feeds. However, after the little tip, I copied the URLs and now have one place to go see all the updates from Ask VBPL, RA Gourmet and L2 Chronicles!

Fired up with the success of a Reader, I went ahead and created a Bloglines account for my personal use. Really, the easiest part about RSS readers is setting up the account. The difficulty arises with having too much features that are available, figuring out what they do and how to use them and them struggling to keep from getting overwhelmed with all the available tools.

I was quite curious to see how different the Google Reader and Bloglines were, since I heard contradicting opinions about one being easier than the other. Buoyed by the ease of creating a Reader and finding feeds, I set off to gather the RSS feeds from websites I like to frequent.

Alas, I found to my dismay that most of the websites I wanted to subscribe to had no RSS feeds. These websites usually sent newsletters directly to your inbox after you subscribe your e-mail address to their mailing lists. Oh well, I guess some websites haven’t caught on about including feeds for their new contents.

7.5 Habits to Challege the Procrastinator

I am disturbed to find that I actually have a couple habits that I find difficult to do.

Hmm, what does this say about me (and my chances of success)?

I have trouble with Habit 3. When I have problems or stumble into a challenge in work or in my life, I can’t think of it as a learning moment. Instead, I become frustrated and pull my hair out.

Habit 5 is a hoot! I am not organized enough to put together all the “tools” for my learning tool box.

Let’s talk about Habit 6. I think I'm pretty good with technology, but when a new technology comes around, I find that I am pretty reluctant to try them out. Take MySpace or FaceBook, for example. They've been around for years and I've finally created a profile this year, though I can't muster the energy to maintain my page or add things to it. Even now, I still have no profile picture up yet, I don't post pictures from my life, and I don't write blogs for my page.

I have to say, my favorite habit is 7.5. I like to learn by playing, I am curious about new information, and I enjoy reading (which is probably I’m working in a library).