Thursday, August 30, 2007
Week 11
Podcasts, videos & downloadable audio - Week 10
I liked being able to find book reviews online with podcast.net and yahoo's podcasts. These sites were easy to search. I found one more search result with Yahoo on the search for "children book review". Subscribing was equally easy on both sites.
NetLibrary's site is easy to search for the materials that we have purchased for our library. I have noticed that Netlibrary highlights a book for the month and you are allowed to read the book online. The searching bar is easy to use, and the results are user freindly. I know from using the login with Daniel Boone we could see how many of the results were for ebooks and how many were for eaudiobooks.
Google docs and spreadsheets assignment - Week 9, pt 1
The Zoho spreadsheets look and work just like the MS Excel spreadsheets that I am used to. I think it is great that I can import and export the spreadsheets with MS Excel. It may have been my connection, but it was not as fast as the Excel program I have loaded onto my computer, so the thing that makes this cool is that you can access it anywhere online and not have to carry a memory stick. Think Free is another great software alternative to MS, and I used the power point equivalent. You can share and collaborate the documents you create. This would be great for using if you were working on a presentation with another person and there was limited time to get together on the project. Some of these products did not involve signup to take a test run, but others gave a blurb and asked for sign in information early on in the process.
Online applications and tools - Week 9, pt. 2
I chose to look at Etsy.com for the award winning site. This site has many handmade crafts for sale. I found the bar to the left interesting because they had categories to narrow down your search by: color, treasury, showcase, geolocator, time machine, connections, and last but not least traditional categories for handmade crafts (art, accessories, etc.). The unusaul search techniques were interesting but not very helpful to me. The time machine took a little getting used to so I could figure out how it provided information about things being sold. There was a swirl of images from items being sold. The only way I could see using this in a library setting is to try to figure out the value of handmade crafts for people doing research on an art object they own.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Search Engines Web 2.0, Library 2.0- Week 8
"Into a new world of librarianship" made a great point that the libraries are about making their services user-friendly. I like the idea that by using Library 2.0 products this can be made possible by allowing users to access information from home, work, and just about anywhere else.
Library 2.0 technology is great for sharing information with patrons. I recently went to a workshop for WorldCat technologies that are changing the way we think about library catalogs. They have improved upon the catalog making it a more social tool that searches and retrieves hits much like a web search engine. Their are also tools available to allow patrons to see what libraries close by their home own a copy of a book and give the patron a choice to purchase the book from Amazon and donate a portion of the sale to their local library. I think that the library world is catching on that these advances in technology are to our benefit.
For searching on the Web I choose to look for "pug rescues" and found the following hits from the search engines I chose. Exalead- first three hits were irrelevant (ebay, breeders website, and best-price.com), the next two hits were more related to my search (pugpalace with proceeds going to pug rescues, and a pug rescue adoption listing site). Clusty- all the hits were relevant and had information about pug rescues, along with hits there was a left hand side bar that broke down the hits by category with the number of links. Mooter- visual chart with topical choices to further the search, adoption & rescue being two of the buttons, and after clicking on these links I saw that all the first five hits were precise.
I thought the Clusty and Mooter were better search engines. I found that Clusty was easier for me to look over and retrieve the better search results from and maneuver around the sites.
Play week - Week 7
I was intrigued by the variety of cartoon type generators there were available. It was fun making an avatar myself, but I was bummed by how few choices there were in customizing the character.
Letter James seems to have some interesting products that you can make. Although not everything is free on this site. I am amazed with all of the creative software that is available for free on the Internet today.
The mapping sites were interesting because they provide the percentage of the world or U.S. states one has seen.
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
RSS & Newsreaders - Week 6
All of the mentioned sites were easy to use. Some of the hits I retrieved on Syndic8 for "dog training" were great and some left me wondering if they were actually dog training sites from their titles. Topix had an easy to use tab system for the common searches for news, forums, wires, and classified. There was so much information to take in at each site, that it would take some time to find the most valid hits for my search. I do think this is a great way to find out the information that is out on the web, because the web is even more vast and time consuming in of itself.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Photos and Images - Week 5
Exercise 1:
I looked through several photos from the “interesting – last 7 days” link. I found that most photos listed were of portraits or nature. I liked the photo of sunlight glinting through a tree’s branches. It reminds me of walking through the forest and taking time to notice the beauty of one’s surroundings. The same person took some similar photos that I saw in the “set”, and they were all just as beautiful.
Image Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67513240@N00/924660839/
More Flikr – Mash-ups and 3rd party sites
I liked the tool called “Trip Planner”. I explored the trips that have already been planned on the site. There is a map with image bundle links that tell you where the images are from when you hover over the icon. Below the map are images of the places listed on the map, making it a handy way to pick a trip by the images you enjoyed. You can open the link from the above icon pop up box and view the rest of the images associated with the trip.
API’s listed on class page:
Mappr is a cool tool allowing people to map images. I clicked on the map in the general vicinity of Missouri and images for Route 66 appeared. Mappr bases the location validity from the tags used by the person adding the images to the map.
Flikr Color Pickr was another tool that gave me some interesting results in searching the color chart. This is just what Mike W. ordered for cataloging the collection. Maybe the creator of this product has dreamed of a catalog run by colors too. I digress…. I did find a wonderful picture of a dragon fly wing that was taken very close up, and it was beautiful. As another writer so aptly put “like a stained glass window”. http://www.flickr.com/photos/50835495@N00/33591981/in/pool-colorfields/
Montager was not as fruitful as I thought it would be when I started using the search bar. I found that the searches retrieved 500 images, but only gave me an image at a time on the screen. It was more cumbersome to use then the benefits of finding images.