Thing 15 - Fun & Games

Aargghhh! I'm going fer Puzzle Pirates! Who doesn't like a good pirate!? But I downloaded the files.....and launched the game.....and got a "sorry, the server must be down for maintenance" message! Rats!

I have played a few games online - not the big role-playing ones (I don't have enough time to devote) but other, shorter games. In the iGoogle homepage I set up, there's an online version of Tetris - one of my all-time favorites. And when I was working on a catalog listing of a game my library purchased for use in the library, I found there was an online version. So I tried it. It's addictive! I had to buy my own copy. I have sucked up many hours playing Zuma. And I hear that Bejeweled is also fun. Find them at Pop-Cap Games.

I'm off to try Puzzle Pirates again....

[next day] Well, Puzzle Pirates didn't work when I tried it again yesterday and it didn't work today - on either my Mac or my PC. I tried both playing online and downloading their free client. So then I went to Second Life, registered, downloaded stuff, waited for the email verification.....and it won't play either. It could be there's just too much Internet traffic or - perhaps more likely - our computer systems are blocking these kinds of sites. And my Internet access at home is dialup, so way too slow to do online gaming.

I remember seeing a lot about Second Life a couple years ago, maybe when the Info Island was first set up, and then it really dropped off. I had totally forgotten about it. I was thinking that it was perhaps not as popular as it used to be, and then the Info Island blog talked about a big unveiling that happened two days ago.

We will hopefully be providing some gaming opportunities in our library in the future - first for teens but perhaps expanding to other groups, such as seniors. Gaming for seniors is a big thing now.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I kinda like LibraryThing for Libraries - I wish I'd had enough time at PLA last week to stop at their booth and get some more information. It would be very nice for patrons to be able to quickly get this kind of similar book recommendations - and particularly for fiction where there aren't as many subject headings.

I'm on a listserv of readers where a bunch of people are quite taken with GoodReads, so I need to check that out. (On the other hand, I seem to be creating a huge list of books I want to read very nicely on my own without getting recommendations from outside....I need to live a very long time!)

I've added a few books to my profile on LibraryThing and clicked around a bit. This is a site that probably requires you to spend quite a bit of time on it in order to reap much benefit.

Comments

One unfortunate thing I've noticed is that some of these online applications don't display in Safari. I've done all the reading and exploring on Safari, and nearly all the creation of stuff there as well and that's worked fine. But now for example, in Safari - on the same computer that created the Google Calendar - the Calendar Grid that's linked in the post below this brings up my website's html page with the title, the top navigation bar and a big empty space.

In a real-world application, I've been adding lots of PictureTrail slideshows to our website, showing our library construction project progress. And, foreshadowing of Thing 18, I've included videos of moving bookstacks.

Thing 13 - Online Productivity

The personalized homepage things are way fun! I experimented with each of the three ones mentioned - Google, PageFlakes and Yahoo - and I think I like Google best. I will try it as a personal homepage for a while.

Let's see if the 23 Things coundown widget worked:

Hmmm.....so far, it got the title and the colors right, but the countdown isn't running. Does that give me endless time to complete this??? Didn't think so!

I liked Google Calendar, and created a calendar of events grid for my library:

Calendar of Events Grid  (click ahead to April - that's where I started)

We've had a list of events, 2 months at a time, with links to the webpages describing the events, for several years but people also like to be able to see events plotted out on a grid. One feature I really like about Google Calendar is the ability to have events recur, so the storytime that is on the second Tuesday of each month actually appears on the second Tuesday of every month until you tell it to stop.

I tried the Remember the Milk to do list site. I love To Do lists! (I know, how sad... but it frees up space in my head!) I've used my computer word processor to create To Do lists both at work and at home for a long, long time, so I am a big fan of the concept. I was saying to a colleague that I wasn't sure what the work application of the online to do list is, and she immediately said that it would be great for join projects. So we may try that a little later in the spring on one of our big annual projects.

Backpack looked great! I think that would be very fun to explore if only the free version had more features.

This has been a fun "Thing." I'm looking forward to exploring some of the other sites when I have more time.

Thing 12 - Not Digging It

I looked through all four of the sites (Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Reddit) on a couple different days and looked for the same kinds of information on each site. I liked Newsvine the best, I think, and also Mixx. It seemed to me that you have to work harder at filtering Digg in order to get the good stuff. The homepage list includes so much "junk" that it lessens the credibility of the rest of the stuff for me. Reddit is not visually appealing - it looks like a link farm.

I registered at Newsvine and added a link ("seeded the vine") to a news story from BBC-UK. In the process of clicking through a bunch of pages, I saw a story that later I wanted to go back and read. At that point, I realized you can't search for anything on Newsvine - at least I couldn't find a search box. There are plenty of lists and links and subject-like headings, but no search box. That's unfortunate! I also registered at Mixx and added the same BBC news story. Mixx does have a search box, but it took me a while to find the story I added, and I knew what the keyword tags were!

I'm much more likely to keep up with news by looking at the specific news sites that I like: BBC, NBC, CNN, etc. I'm sure you can find quirky, off-the-beaten-path stories not covered by mainstream press, but you're going to have to spend a lot of time on these sites and look through a lot of junk.

Thing 11 - Delicious!

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of all the various sites someone's interested in, on a variety of subjects. I followed some of the tags around. The usefulness of the sites varies, of course, like everything on the Internet. I also uploaded most of the bookmarks from my office computer; now I need an opportunity to access them from another computer to see what a life-saver it can be.

I see how it can work in an educational setting, but I'm not sure how useful it is for libraries. We keep subject lists of websites as html pages on our website. Do other libraries transfer these to del.icio.us tags? How is this more useful for the patron? I'm going to have to think about this and talk with some of our librarians...

I looked at the library sites mentioned. Some of them have seemingly random lists of bookmarks. Menasha Library does have a subject list, so there's some organization of sites, which seems more useful. San Mateo organized their links by Dewey number - useful to their own library staff, I imagine, and to other librarians but less accessible for the general public.

Thing 10 - Wikis

Well, wikis are kinda cool. I played around with Minnewiki (MN Public Radio's music resource) and Wikipedia, adding some things to both. Interested? Search for Strikepoint under Groups on Minnewiki. And I added a link to a MP3 file in the handbell entry on Wikipedia. What I don't know is how you know something has been changed. For example, in the Common Craft video about the 4 friends going camping, how did each person know when they should look at the wiki and who else had already seen and made changes? [OK, I have seen that there's a tab labeled Watch in some of these wikis, but I haven't -obviously - explored that.]

I expected more from the Library Success/best practices wiki. I thought there would be more narrative in a lot of the categories. The article "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" has a section about using wikis in libraries that has some good ideas. I have seen a library online catalog that includes the ability for patrons to comment on/recommend materials. (Can't remember if that was an example for a Thing or if that was linked in a listserv email....) I really like the idea of doing a staff wiki for communication.

Test Doc

This is a test document for

Zoho Writer.

PA ANNOUNCEMENT

Thursday, November 6

6:45 p.m.

May I have your attention, please? This evening we present a free Library Lecture on the Literature of the Mesabi Range, at 7:00 in the Green Room. Library Lectures are sponsored by the Duluth Public Library  and Duluth Schools Community Education. Thank you.

Thing 9 - Collaboration

Well, Google Docs is not at all intuitive. I finally found the link for "take a guided tour." I can see that if you're starting with a text/Word document, it may be an excellent way for people to edit it and see group changes. I wonder if some of the problems with the Declaration is that we're working with an image rather than a text file?

I uploaded a Word doc and played around with it. Yep, this would be useful, and particularly if you were working on a project with people not in your building - something like an MLA or ALA committee or such. So I took my document and published it to my blog and it worked - it's the post two below this, the PA announcement.

I think I like Zoho Writer better, although trying to edit the Declaration was again frustrating. It must be the image vs. text doc thing. I did another sample doc and published it to the blog. I'd like to find a real-world use and try this out.

Oh, wait. I just published this and looked at it, and it posted this message BELOW the two sample documents from Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Hmmm....

I just looked at my last post. It's unfortunate that in the Flick of the new remodeling photos, the photos that I rotated didn't stay that way. I'm not sure what the problem is - in the photo album, they're rotated the correct way.

The other comment I have is that some of these tools are more browser- and platform-dependant than I expected. Some parts of Blogger even are working differently on my Mac than on my PC. So I'm doing some jumping back and forth between machines to work on these. And using IE, I don't even see the Flick/PictureTrail slideshow in the blog! But it does show up in Firefox.

Thing 8 - Sharing Stuff

We're doing a major remodeling project at my library and I turned a set of "before" photos into a Flickr slideshow and posted that link on our remodeling webpage:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24225477@N08/sets/72157604068579503/show/




And I found a PowerPoint presentation one of our librarians did and uploaded that to Zoho:





Picture Trail. I have a number of friends who use this site regularly, but this is the first time I've tried it. Parts of the process were really frustrating. I uploaded photos in three separate batches, and it was really annoying to have to re-order the photos after each upload. The way to avoid that would be to upload them in the reverse order that you want them to appear....or not to care what the sequence is. I didn't find a way in Flickr to re-order the photos, but at least they showed up in the slideshow in the same order I uploaded them. I should look to see if there's a way to rearrange the order there. There must be. So anyway, here's the Flick of the next batch of construction photos: