Week 9 - Youtube

For those of you having trouble finding the video I helped put together.


I dare say this demonstrates my familiarity with Youtube, eh?

Week 7/8 - LibraryThing

Oh for crying out loud. Why did you have to link this? WHY. Now I'm addicted. ;___;

At first I thought I was going to be put off by the whole "you have to pay if you want to catalog more than 200 books" thing, but having added stuff to my catalog I can see that I'm in no danger of running out anytime soon.

My only complaint is that properly adding and tagging books can be a bit time-consuming, especially when LibraryThing's servers decide to be absurdly slow.

Now to finish off this entry and work on getting the widget into my sidebar....

Week 5/6 - Flickr

I will be charitable and thus describe myself as.... not photogenic. As a result, I have little use for such internets frippery as uploading pictures of myself for unsuspecting viewers to blind themselves with.

That said, I have used Photobucket (a less useful version of Flickr) before, and the ability to tag images is pretty cool.

Kids in Japan do this obsessively, apparently, since they all have cell phones with cameras in them (and television/radio pickup, and internet connectivity, and particle colliders, etc). They will take pictures of anything and promptly put them up on the internet. As panopticons go, it's better than Britain, I suppose. At least Japan has sushi and ramen.

Also Week 4 - Podcasts

Podcasts are seriously my favorite thing about my iPod. The times when I commute generally have nothing I'm terribly interested in on the radio, so I whip out my iPod, plug it into the car tuner I picked up, and listen to something interesting. Generally it's something like Astronomy Cast or The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, but I also listen to podcasts of talk or news shows that either don't air around here or air at stupid o'clock when nobody who keeps a sane sleep schedule can hear it.

I haven't made any podcasts myself at this point, though ideas for them keep occurring to me. Of course, I generally shoot them down within about 5 seconds for two reasons: 1) nobody cares about the topic 2) I don't feel like paying for the bandwidth if people DO like it.

Week 4 - RSS

RSS is one of those things I love, because I'm a certified news junkie. Once upon a time, I would set my computer up in front of the TV so that I could watch the 24 hour news channels. This was, of course, back when they actually carried news, as opposed to whatever drunken escapades Paris Hilton has recently gotten into. (C-SPAN remains a guilty pleasure.)

My problem, if you can call it that, is that RSS is TOO useful. I wind up biting off more than I can chew in terms of news intake, so entire feeds go unnoticed for days or even weeks on end. Laugh if you want, but this happens with me and podcasts too. There are only so many hours in a day, after all, and in theory I spend at least a third of them sleeping (Half Life 2 says otherwise, of late).

Gamer Trivia Moment: Those of you with a Nintendo Wii console (which is probably a pretty small number, given the likely audience for this blog) will of course know that you have an RSS reader of sorts built right into your Wii, in the form of the Wii News Channel. I probably had way more fun with that than most Wii users did. >__> Oh news junkies. We're so crazy.

Week 3 - Tagging

Ahhh, social bookmarking. You are delicious and wild.

Oh god, I didn't mean to make that pun. I'm sorry.

Anyway, social bookmarking has never been something I've been terribly into simply because, y'know, I have a bookmark folder in Firefox (and Safari, now. Whee, Mac!). But for KRL, social bookmarking could be a nifty tool.

In particular, I'm thinking of a service where patrons could tag a book in a database, and other users could search via tags for whatever interests them. It'd work better than subject searches, which can be a tad vague and and arbitrary in my experience.

You can view the sites I tagged for today at del.icio.us/barcodemissing (I should add that link to the blog, actually...), but to be honest all of them are just sites I visit semi-regularly, and my tastes are, well, a bit out of the ordinary. Sumo is just about the only sport I follow (I'd follow cricket if the dang TV would freakin' show it over here), I read science blogs like popcorn (now there's a metaphor that just doesn't fly), and I'm using PortableApps version of Firefox to post this very blog entry because I can't stand Internet Explorer.

But hey, someone might find it interesting. That's kinda the point, innit?

Oh hey Library stuff

Articles! Rahr! Stuff read for KRL 2.0.

I've been doing the whole 2.0 thing for quite some time. In fact, from before the whole name "web 2.0" got all popular. As a result I'm rather coming at this from a totally different angle, where I already intuitively understand most of the concepts without necessarily having words to put to them.

The Library 2.0 article seems to mostly fit in with what I'd figured 2.0 technology would bring to the library. In particular I am heartened by the statement against proprietary software (I have been a supporter of open source software for many years). There may be a point to the criticism about how the 2.0 ethic is not necessarily new to library operation, but the technology would certainly improve upon and streamline any nascent 2.0 tendancies already extant. (yay big words)

The surge in community involvement experienced by the Ann Arbor District Library through their use of 2.0 shows where these practices and services can take us. Greater access for and responsiveness to the public can only improve service. Of course, it's not a panacea, but interactivity seems to be in high demand, and libraries are no exception.


(I also think it would be super neato to have a KRL podcast or something.)