(Week#7) Social networking

Auckland City Bebo site - interesting...it's all I can say really, Hennepin County Library Bebo site - well, that seems to be hitting the market with comments from patrons teeming in.. Myspace and Facebook.. I've recently set up a Facebook account because a close friend who lives in Aussie no longer updates her Bebo site and in order to keep up with what's happening with her and her children, I had to sign up. I have a Bebo site, but rarely have time to go in and update it. I don't chat to many people through it, find that I spend so much time at work in front of a computer, I don't really have the energy to continue sitting in front of a computer for fun.. Well, unless I'm watching a good movie or walking down memory lane watching old school tunes on YouTube. The Zoho online authoring tools (https://accounts.zoho.com/u/h)... an alternative to having documents saved to your hard drive rather than having to email or save them from place to place or in various locations or on portable hard drive items in order to access them. Had heard about these sites, but had never used them until now. I can see the usefulness of this website tool and so created an account. The obvious immediate advantages are that you don't have to carry or send your e-docs, just save them to the website. I created a quick word document, named it test and saved it. Then I imported an existing Word document 2007 and that read OK. Original formatting didn't hold, but it was close enough.. also the "print preview" option is great.. that way, you can reformat with relative ease - although I didn't.

(Week#6) Tagging, folksonomies etc.

Interesting.. downloaded the Delicious bookmark and added to my home Mozilla Firefox browser - a screen capture and slightly doctored image using MSPaint is my thumbnail for this section. Delicious installed an additional item on the menu toolbar between History and Bookmarks.. and seems to act the same way the Bookmarks menu item on a browser does. Also, set up a Delicious account and added one bookmark to it. It is located online at http://delicious.com/WelcomeOneandAll/. I guess I'll have accounts online everywhere using my "bogus" WelcomeOneandAll.. Oh well, hopefully with inactivity they'll get deleted in the future sometime, somehow. Seriously, I've set up so many accounts, I can't remember what I've used as passwords or usernames. I've tried to be consistent though. I'm pretty sure that this isn't the end yet.. still got 4 more modules to finish..Signed up to Technorati and am in the process of "claiming my blog" - this blog. Apparently it takes an hour, so I'll check back later and see. Have put my Technorati code in my profile as this is a permanent feature on the front page of my blog - one of the conditions of claiming my blog through Technorati. Web 2.0 - The Machine is using us by Michael Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University - is a very succinct response to Web 2.0 articulated as, "Web 2.0 is linking people .... people sharing, trading and collaborating ... " hooray!!!

(Week#5) Wikis

Visited the Library Research Guides Wiki, Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, USA (mediawiki) http://library2.norwich.edu/guide/index.php/Main_Page a glorified webpage posing as a wiki.. You can't publish to any of the site except for asking the librarian a question - if offline - then leaving a message for a librarian to respond to you... An initiative of the Norwich University Library... http://www.norwich.edu/academics/library/. Use Wikipedia a lot - I'm afraid to say, perhaps the largest OPEN SOURCE wiki on the web to date. I'm also familiar with a wiki set up for the Maori Subject Headings (now 2) to enable feedback on new terms created for the thesaurus from authorised contributors and browse capabilities from outsiders. However, my log in passwords have never worked - must get back to the person at National Library about that. The idea is that contributors can work on a newly constructed term at their leisure, commenting, amending and finally coming up with a term that all and sundry are happy with. Uploaded my PC jigsaw image (featured at the beginning of this section) to the Manukau Libraries Wiki and added my blog address..plus a few comments.. because I could. I'd say that's enough of wiki's for now...

(Week#4) Flickr & Image Hosting

Used the ManukauLearn account to upload an image of our first family PC (purchased in Jan 03 and recycled at an Auckland PC recycling plant in Apr 2009) to Flickr - 2.58MB, took about well... let's just say, I'm still waiting..and waiting...and waiting - oh, there you go, 28% and waiting.. about 7 minutes in total, for it to upload. Added a description & tag. My photo now sits in the Photostream. Waiting for the upload gave me enough time to play on Picasa Web Albums. My Google account automatically populated the sign in boxes and voila I was logged in! Because I knew it would take an eternity to upload a photo, I decided I would download a pic. and found one posted & named, Africa Slideshow short.. This is the source of my thumbnail at the beginning of this section.. 'tis beautiful and colours match my blog website so well. Also had time to play on a jigsaw generator. So, uploaded the back image of the same PC and generated the image which is the thumbnail on Week#5's post. Went to Flickr Montager and searched for my PC, which was the only imaged tagged with PC, then created a montage at http://www.deviousgelatin.com/montager/image.php - couldn't download that image though and when I bookmarked the generated montage, I tried the link again and it didn't work. Nevermind.. need to play more on the site.

(Week#3) Image Generators, Library Thing & Rollyo

Selected Book Cover link from the left column of The Generator Blog site http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ which took me to http://www.oreillymaker.com/. Started constructing the Invisibility book cover, then realised that the selection of colours weren't to my liking. Decided to locate a colour more in line with those already used on my blog - well, as close as possible to the brown shades used in the other book covers for my posts so far..Found and html colour website http://www.w3schools.com/Html/html_colors.asp.. and selcted "993300" - from the list.. not as exhaustive as I'd have liked, but close enough. The LibraryThing site is interesting... maybe if I wanted to highlight some really cool books on a website( if I was to construct one) I'd find this tool useful.. I found three books on invisibility, added those to my library, then linked it on my gadget page in the right column. Rollyo? Well, I constructed a search engine rolling Te ARA websites into it... quick and easy, reasonably good source of information... perhaps might look into using this again.. perhaps..set it up as a public profile online at: http://www.rollyo.com/welcomeoneandall/

(Week#2) RSS Feeds and Bloglines Account

Okay - set up a bloglines account, using the Bloglines tutorial. RSS Feeds seem a tad redundant for me... but perhaps I don't spend enough time on the Internet. I'm sure some very talented person wrote the script which has helped a myriad of Internet users retrieve regularly updated information from websites of their choice. My Bloglines account with the URL
http://www.bloglines.com/public/welcomeoneandall
was created way back in June 2008 and fortunately I've consistently set up all accounts with the same login and passwords.. oops, mum's the word there. I've also added an RSS feed link below should anyone wish to receive RSS feeds from my blog....yeah right!.