Delicious, Technorati, LibraryThing

Hi again. Today I reran the Technorati searches on "bookmobile" and "nswpln2008". This time I found 11 blogs with "bookmobile" in them. I tried an advanced search for "nswpln2008" and clicked "find posts tagged" with that term. Although I didn't find any blogs when I selected the "blogs" tab, I found more than seven pages of photos tagged "nswpln2008" under the "photos" tab. Many were by the same person. Thanks for the tip.

Another useful thing I discovered today was the "language" field in the top right hand corner of the Blogger programme. I learnt how to select English as the language when the default language was Korean, at an internet cafe.

I am finding this course very interesting and hope to complete it by the end of the year. I wonder when it will be taken offline?


I will try to add a link to my LibraryThing account. It isn't working - there is a JavaScript error - I will try again later.


This is pmarydu's account on Delicious.

http://delicious.com/pmarydu/money

I tried to add this as a gadget on the right hand side of my blog but when I typed in the URL the system wouldn't accept it. I wonder if there is a way I can add it there with a Delicious icon.

For the Technorati searches this week, I tried as a keyword search and an advanced search and found 268 posts both times. They seemed to be in date order, newest first. Then I tried a "tag search" in advanced search. I got 39 posts.

I couldn't find any results for using any of these 3 methods. Can it be that nswpln2008 blogs are invisible to Technorati? or somehow private because they are training blogs?

Online videos

As part of this week's lesson I searched for on YouTube - there were no results - then on Google video. I found videos of their author talks which are saved on their website. They can be downloaded. I think this could be useful at my library as it hosts many author talks.

I am going to try and paste a video into this blog.



Today I resumed the course after a few weeks off. I searched for some videos on YouTube under "lego" and "liverpool plains". I found a video called "Simpsons intro lego style" with clever lego imitations of Lisa's saxophone and Bart's skateboard and the usual theme music. I thought one called "Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego" was even cleverer because it was choreographed like the musical, with funny actions, not random actions like the Simpson one had. I found a video on sorghum harvesting in NSW with a harvester driver's commentary when I searched "liverpool plains". I also found a video with a Turkish language title which included the words "liverpool" and "song of plains": people were singing and waving scarves, it looked like the stadium at a football match. Another video that came up was of a rock group "Plain white T's" performing in Liverpool: this video was rotated 180 degrees which was distracting. Videos on YouTube showed a name for the creator and the date added. It didn't say if they were from YouTube or another programme.

I searched for the same keywords on Google Video and found some of the YouTube videos I'd already found. It acknowledged them as being from YouTube but didn't show creator name or date added for anything. I looked up "kogarah" and found an eyewitness video from an accident. I couldn't see the date added and I thought it would have benefited from this information to help identify the accident. Another video I found was a Kogarah crash eyewitness video; its first screen contained a warning about images that might distress. I thought this was good to have.

I am getting error messages when I try to save so will publish this post and update it later.

Wikis

Wikis are a popular online collaborative publication like an online encyclopedia.The best known is Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to a wiki. Some say this makes them less authoritative than academic journals and traditional encyclopedias where contributions are written by qualified experts and peer reviewed. Others say wikis are always more up to date than print encyclopedias, e.g. a word like "folksonomies" probably won't appear in any print encyclopedia. It may appear that allowing students to use wikis for research purposes encourages plagiarism and discourages in-depth research. However, students are meant to use more than one source and cite their sources, even if their preferred source is Wikipedia. I was interested to read that in Germany, it is more popular than the revered Brockhaus print encyclopedia: "in 43 articles out of 50, the German language Wikipedia came out on top" according to this week's Learning 2.0 lesson on the website. This applies in a country with a history of extensive funding for research and a large print publishing industry.

For this week's Discovery, I looked at Wisconsin Portal at Wisconsin Heritage Wiki. A search on "movies" yielded 'screenwriting course' without the word "movies" in the text. I wondered if this is because the entry has been tagged somehow with the word "movies".
The Princeton Public Library's "Book Lovers Wiki" was a snapshot in time of a summer reading club, being maintained as an archive using pbwiki. This one has closed membership. It says staff upgraded the library catalogue to include reviews; there is a link to reviews. I think this kind of catalogue upgrade using wiki is a good idea. There is also a link "report an inappropriate review". It's not clear to me how you'd join the wiki.
Wookiepedia at http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, is a star wars wiki. There was a note under "wookiee" that said editing of the site by new or unregistered users was temporarily disabled due to recent vandalism. It appears that wikis do have editorial standards, as this one has "official policy pages". One of these contains a warning about spoilers on the wiki. It says a spoiler is considered and flagged as such till one month after the official release date of a particular product in the US or the country of origin. An "official policy page" has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard.
Another application that might work well within a wiki is an exhibition catalogue, e.g. for a local history collection.

RSS

What I like about RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is that you can subscribe to new content from a favourite website and it will appear in a link on your blog rather than you having to go to the URL of that website and check it for new content. This is Pull Technology versus Push Technology.

To subscribe to news feeds I looked for the Powerhouse Museum Picture of the Day; two topics on the ABC News website (environment and aboriginal); the White House 08 blog on the Sydney Morning Herald's blog website (www.smh.com.au/blogcentral/index.htm); and a blog from the Spooky Men's Chorale, a group of folk-singing comedians based in the Blue Mountains.

Another blog I saw and found interesting was by Helene Blowers who is credited with founding Learning 2.0 (http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com). She said she was asked whether the use,or growth in use, of Web 2.0 may be unsustainable. I found it interesting that she said that is not the point; she suggested we stop focusing on long-term issues and solutions and simply try things out, and think of pilot projects and the value of transience. I am not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, I think some new inventions wouldn't happen if people only thought about the long-term implications. Also libraries are in danger of being left behind as information providers if they don't learn how to use Web 2.0. However I don't think Web 2.0 can necessarily be used to replace long-term solutions that may be outdated unless we think through the implications. I wonder how libraries in other cultures are handling this. In 2001 I asked in Germany whether they had corporate libraries there and was told no, corporations have information portals on the internet.

I wonder if there is some way a public libraries' users can "subscribe" to its continuous catalogue updates, whatever format these might appear in. Another possible use of RSS in a library could be updates of a writer talks program; the library where I work hosts regular talks by writers. Another could be updates of a book club program.

photos

This is an image of cats sleeping. I found it on Flickr by searching on "cats". The creator is tjflex2. I am not sure if this is how I am meant to acknowledge the author. I am a cat lover and had cats as a child, they always lived outside and lay around outside like the cats here.

I looked at one of the pages on Flickr relating to tagging and noticed that sometimes pictures are tagged with variants of a word. E.g. nyc, New York City and New York are all possible tags. This is less sophisticated than a library catalogue where there are cross-references to a "preferred" subject. However, if a browser accepts fuzzy logic this may not matter as the browser may look for variations on a word, so 'nyc' may bring up 'new york' and 'ny'. I'm not sure if this is how it works really.

The idea of Creative Commons is an interesting one, allowing you to set limitations on use of material so it is not "all rights reserved" and not "no rights reserved".

challenges and discovery in Week 3

Today I tried to access this blog from a PC loaded with Windows in Korean at my local internet cafe. I wasn't sure what the labels meant. Then I managed to "get in through the back door" by logging into http://www.blogger.com/. I then selected language=English from the right hand toolbar and logged in. This is useful to know because I use my local internet cafe if I need extra time for a lesson sometimes. Also, I don't have a PC at home. So this is progress. :-)

Hello, I am trying again the next day - at a public access computer in a public library. When I tried to open some links attached to the Week 3 lesson, the browser closed down. I had this problem with the Library of Congress photos link, the FAQ page on Flickr groups and the link at the text "look at this photo" under "Creative Commons". I also couldn't open an image to link it to my blog. As frustrating as this is, it illustrates that public access computers in libraries often have glitches, and library staff often have to assist users with them, especially on the weekend when specialist IT staff may not be there.

I looked at Mosman Library's photos on Flickr and saw many pictures of youth events including "Shoreshocked". I wonder if Mosman Library found it difficult to get permission to publish photos of minors there. When I typed in my community I found several libraries with the same name, some of them in the U.S.

Well, I did discover something else this week. I came across the AquaBrowser at Queens Library in the Borough of Queens, New York. I'm not sure if AquaBrowser or similar technology is covered later in this course, however I found this intriguing. It is a catalogue for a library which seems to have about 60 branch libraries. It uses fuzzy logic and shows a diagram a bit like a star with rays radiating out when you type in a keyword. It shows associations, translations, and spelling variants. I typed in "Josquin" and found a few similar words; you could select the one you wanted. It then brought up a library catalogue display a bit like a Google display. Some records were brief, others more detailed. I was impressed with the fuzzy logic because borrowers often misspell things and then it's hard to find them.

It is good to see that I can access my blog, even though the firewall at work currently won't allow me to view it (I will contact the relevant person about this). I enjoyed viewing the Memoirs of a WWI soldier blog on the SLNSW Learning 2.0 website. His age in the profile was given as 120, and amusingly, he "hadn't got to see a movie yet". He couldn't spell properly -- it seems this isn't a modern phenomenon even though many people complain about literacy standards declining nowadays.