Thing 47 - Evaluation

When I think back about this second round of Things, my impressions are that it was not as useful to me as the first round. Then I looked at the list in the evaluation and realized that there are indeed things that I'm going to keep on using. I'm eager to work some more with the screencasting tools and add some tutorials to my library's website.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about making the library website a more interactive experience for patrons, which is a way libraries can remain relevant and appeal to younger users (who are, of course, the future taxpaying supporters of a library).

I'd love to see more programs similar to this as web-based tools and apps continue to evolve. I want to go back and review all the different kinds of available tools from all 46 Things. I've urged a bunch of people to participate, even if they don't do it "for credit."

Thanks very much to everyone who worked on putting all 46 Things together!

Thing 46 - WebJunction

Investigating WebJunction has been on my To Do/Don't Forget list for a long time, so I was glad for an opportunity to explore this site. I was particularly impressed with the course offerings - I don't think I realized they were available. Despite the fact, however, that I was logged in and had clicked in the Remember Me box, the courses kept coming up with a charge. I tried logging out and back in and it was the same. So that was a little disappointing. I'll try it again another time when I may be able to actually do one of the courses.

The groups show potential but there doesn't seem to be a lot of action yet. I was hoping to find a list of groups, and finally did. It's interesting that many of them are not limited to MN libraries.

I found the options listed under some of the top tabs (Technology, Library Services, etc.) to be worth exploring in more depth. It would be nice to find a group for sharing ideas for the summer reading programs or for Teen Read Week. Those kinds of hints/suggestions/ideas would be pretty quick to post and useful for a lot of people.

I just tried registering for a course again and followed the "green box instructions" on the courses page step by step.....and it still wants me to pay $40 with a credit card.

My final take on this is that it's a very nice site with a lot of potential if more people would be using it.

Thing 45 - Up in the clouds

This is just an exhilarating concept! And scary, too. And overwhelming, from a workload POV. I was reading parts of this Thing immediately after reading an article in Computers in Libraries about making your OPAC accessible via smartphones and other handheld devices. And the point is, people want access to everything at all times! The way libraries can remain relevant is to facilitate that access, to make information and collections available online and for a variety of computer-like devices. What a huge undertaking this is! And especially difficult in a time of staff shortages when we're struggling just to keep the doors open.

Thing 44 - Money, money, money

I really liked both the mymoney.gov and the National Endowment for Financial Education sites. There is a ton of information and I plan to go back and explore them further. I'll consider using a site like Mint, but I'm not quite there yet. Feed the Pig does have some useful info, and FuelEconomy.gov as well. The cell phone plan comparison site was very interesting, as I'm thinking about making a change there. The Frugal Dad tips sound a lot like my dad and are the kind of tips found in lots of magazines these days. (BTW, it was good to see him plug using the library!) And Wisebread would have a number of interesting articles for people who take the time to click around. I liked the list of frugal bloggers, but I have a hard time reading all the blogs I have in my reader now! (I know, I know, I'm going back to that page....Subscribing to blogs is so darn easy!) I'm already familiar with some of the coupon code sites.

So, just like nearly everything else, there's a lot about money and how to save it on the Internet. It's interesting to find the various money management tools, though. I have quite the list of sites to go back to.

Thing 43 - Online TV

Hmmm.....just what I need - more TV! 

Hulu was very fun. I'd looked at it a year or so ago after seeing it mentioned somewhere else. This is a great way to see episodes you missed or old TV shows. I watched part of an episode of It Takes a Thief, which I loved as a kid. (Ahh....Robert Wagner!!) And it is not available on DVD.

(It made me laugh to see that when I ran this on my computer, the commercial sponsor was the National Anti-Crime Network. For a show about a jewel thief! Ha!)

The problem for me here again is bandwidth. I don't think my connection at home is fast enough to watch with any continuity, and I'm sure not going to do this at work.

It's fun to know that this is available, but I don't see any library application here and I probably won't use it much at home.  (A colleague just suggested that out-of-copyright films could be shown as a public program.) While I certainly watch *plenty* of TV, I don't think I want to do it in front of my computer screen, even if connection speed weren't an issue.

Still, this to me is one of the marvels of the Internet - the fact that so many programs and specials that are no longer available through "regular" TV can be enjoyed without special charge (except for the high-speed access...) by anyone in the world. Amazing.

Thing 42 - Music

This one is really fun! I mostly work alone in a windowless office surrounded by loads of computer equipment, and therefore am usually playing some music, either through my computer or on a CD player. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same tracks repeatedly. This is where Internet radio is so handy. I signed up for Last.fm, downloaded the app for Mac and let it draw on my iTunes library to create a station of music I'd like. And it's pretty good! Lots of people I haven't heard of but whose music I do like. The listings also indicate similar artists (so I can see what they're basing the choice on) so I can explore further if I want.

The one problem here is that we've been asked (well, all right - told) not to do streaming radio at work because of the bandwidth demands. So I probably can't use this a lot at work. I'll have to see if my connection at home is fast enough.

I also played around a bit with Pandora, which is also very cool. The only problem I found was that the first two search terms I put in in Pandora returned no results. It's been great to have something different to listen to in my office. 

As you can see, I added the Last.fm widget, both here and in the sidebar.

Last.fm, at least, does not seem much like "radio" to me. Well, maybe it's more like MPR than regular commercial radio. When I listen to commercial radio, sometimes it's partly for the local stuff - news, weather, ads, etc. You don't get that with Internet music services. Even the Internet weather, it seems, is not updated as quickly as local radio can give updates.

Thing 41 - Life as a mashup

I signed up for Lifestream. The thing that I found most surprising is the HUGE number of sites it supports. I thought we were seeing lots of sites during this whole Thing process (and we are!) but there are so, so, so many more out there! To say I'd never heard of most of the supported sites should be expected. (And there are some that sound familiar, so I've probably looked at them during the Things and just can't remember them.) 

It's a great idea, to be able to pull all your accounts into one spot. Practically, though, I probably don't use enough of them on an ongoing basis to make this as useful or necessary as some find it. I'll follow it for a while, though, and see.

I added a Lifestream badge to the sidebar. And I found another Minnesota 23 (or 46) Things person to follow.

Thing 40 - Mashups

Wheel of Food is just fun to do! It made me laugh out loud. And the Flickr Memory Game was very fun. Bubblr too.

Here, I tried Bubblr again, with more photos.

I'd forgotten about BigHugeLabs (the trading cards from the first 23 were so cool...). It was fun to play around with those apps again.

The Mashup Awards website lists some fun things - track what's being talked about the most on Twitter, match your Twitter posts with Flickr photos, get a 10-day forecast for cities around the world...

I am continually amazed by the creativity and resourcefulness of the people developing all these tools. Real-world applications aren't leaping out at me right now, but I'll keep thinking about how we could use them.

Back to Thing 37 - Just a comment

I've done most of these Things at work, but because of the problems with the scrapbooking tools, I was working from my computer at home, and I found that one of the two Animoto slideshows is now visible! And I still don't have a gmail account! I don't think I could see it at work earlier. How weird. And if one is visible, why wouldn't the other one be too? Computers really do have minds of their own.

Thing 39 - Digital Storytelling

What could be better - scrapbooking *and* computers?? These tools were lots of fun, and I want to play with them more, both at home and at work. For the page creation, I tried both Scrapblog and Smilebox. With Scrapblog, it wanted me to purchase anything I wanted to use on a page (which I didn't want to do). With Smilebox, I wanted to create just one page, but the template required me to do four (which of course took more time). It's nice to be able to use video in the pages, though, and to add music.

Uploading the file from Smilebox did not go smoothly. The application kept quitting, and then it was unclear as to whether it was actually uploading the file or not.  So I tried it from home, and didn't even get that far. The application would download but not open - kept crashing.

So back I went to Scrapblog and finally found some things I could use without buying them. The page is the post above.

I liked both of these tools, but there are some drawbacks - the fact that I couldn't actually upload the Smilebox set is the biggest one, of course. I'll try it from work again tomorrow and see if the problem has been resolved or if their tech support has any suggestions. I think digital scrapbooking would be really nice to implement on my library website, but it may take a while to get going.

Thing 38 - Screencasting

This is very cool. I can foresee load of library applications for this! I tried several apps - Jing, Skitch, Screencast-o-matic (who wouldn't love the name!) - and I think they all will be useful in various ways.

The screencast I made, using Screencast-o-matic, was on how to renew library materials online. This is something I will use on our website, but will probably re-do it and add some more details. The info in the training screencast on how to embed something into a blog or website doesn't work, however. There isn't an option for getting the widget and an embed code. So I'm not sure how this is going to go....

Worked! I'm really excited about the opportunities here.

Thing 36.1

I thought I saw a pdf-to-Word generator when I was looking at the online pdf generators the other day. Today I needed to manipulate text from a pdf in order to create a booklist we use as part of our Teen Summer Reading Program - the 2009 Teens Top Ten nominees. I've done this in the past with a lot of cutting and pasting, and then a lot of stripping out unwanted formatting.

Just now I downloaded the pdf to my desktop, uploaded it to the pdf-to-Word generator, waited 2 minutes and then downloaded an .rtf file. Easy! Useful! Woo hoo!!

Thing 37 - Photo Tales.....or, A Lesson in Frustration

Several of these items were not very successful....

Here's an Animoto video:

And here's one that I did of a trip to England:

OK - so those didn't post in the body of the blog.  They did post in the sidebar (eventually), but the width is cut off. In order to post videos to Blogger from Animoto, you have to have a Gmail account. With all of the things I've signed up for during this process, why didn't I sign up for a Gmail account? Just stubbornness, I guess. Perhaps I'll do that later and then try re-posting the videos here.

Here's my collage of the photos of Youth Services at the end of our remodeling last year.

Slide's slideshow:

This was really easy to do. I may delete the music, though.

CaptionBubble didn't work for me (a Mac issue??), but I could add a caption with Captioner. It wouldn't post to the blog, though...

How about a Tiltshift photo:

OK, here's my "story," done with Picnik (which I think will have library uses), Tiltshift and Flickr slideshows:

Thing 36 - Generating some fun

I'm thrilled to find the online pdf converters (Publisher files are often a problem), but when I uploaded a file to try it out, I got an error message saying there were server problems. I'll try that again later, because this would provide a real service for us. I think the password generators could be very useful as well ... as long as you remember to write them down somewhere! (My top tip for anyone doing the Things programs is to write down your usernames and passwords!)

I tried out the little READ posters and the newspaper generator, using a clever press release one of our former librarians wrote for a previous summer reading program.

And Wordle is fun - I did several versions for Strikepoint, which I'll post on the Strikepoint blog, but here's one of them.

I've seen these done before but haven't tried it. Just clicking the Randomize button after you get the initial image is fun. I did a Timetoast timeline for last summer's tour. If I had the photos of the churches where we played, I would have included them.

Oh yeah - way too much fun!

Nancy Eaton's Dewey Decimal Section:

585 Gymnosperms; conifers

Nancy Eaton's birthday: 6/28/1957 = 628+1957 = 2585


Class:
500 Science


Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.



What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Thing 35 - Books, Books, Books

I will confess that I have not done anything with LibraryThing since the first 23 Things last spring. It seemed to me like a lot of work to enter what I own or what I was reading or what I want to read, and then to maintain it. That could all be time that I *was* reading! But there are quite a number of people on one of my listservs who love it and get lots of reading suggestions from each other. (On the other hand, I'm not going to live long enough to read the reading suggestions I have now!)

I tried librarious because I thought it would be a good way to keep track of DVDs I own. And it probably would - I'd just need to spend a lot more time entering information. I added Twitterlit to my iGoogle homepage, but my phone plan doesn't support the other services that will send info. Twitterlit could be diverting...

Then I tried both Reading Trails and What Do I Read Next. WDIRN offered some truly bizarre suggestions that were not at all similar to the titles I entered. There were some that *were* similar, but of course the weird ones are the ones that stood out! The BookStumpers site is always fun to surf through. I have a passion for reading series books in order, so the Which Book site may prove to be useful.

I wasn't very impressed with the various online book community sites. The listserv I'm on provides real book discussion, a lot of off-topic discussion and tons of book suggestions, so I'll stick with that. On the other hand, I like the book group resources sites; we have permission to use both the Reading Group ones when putting together our book club in a bag kits, and I'm glad to find out about the Lit Lovers site. I looked at several of the sites in the other categories and played around with Facebook's Visual Bookshelf a bit - that'll probably be the app I'd use the most.

With all of these book-related websites, and all of the people who are passionate enough about the books they're reading to support and maintain those websites, how can people think that the age of the book is passing? There's certainly room for both books and technology!

Thing 34 - Not Really Competition

Several of the answer sites were pretty fun. I liked Ask Metafilter and ChaCha. AllExperts and WikiAnswers required a lot of clicking in order to get to the questions. Yahoo also required a lot of clicking down into subcategories, and there are a lot of pretty useless polls (Chinese or Mexican food? Are you a morning person?) and questions that result in opinions but perhaps not answers (Should food be rationed to all in order to combat global warming?). Amazon's Askville is nice, but I didn't like that the first thing you see on a page is the sponsored ad links.

For me, if I wanted specific information, it would seem quicker and much more direct to ask a librarian (or even to do a specific Internet search). If I had extra time (HA!) and wanted to surf for anything interesting, these sites could be amusing. I'm not likely to spend much more time on them, though.

Where I do see a use for them is for some of the specific requests that the library - or at least my library - can't answer: how can I do this (insert task here) using this piece of software? or What are people's experiences with this particular restaurant or hotel in this location?

Thing 33 - Travel 2.0

There are some fun sites in this Thing. I found another blog to follow (swell - more to read...). I looked at several of the travel sites and searched Clearwater Beach, FL, which is one of my favorite vacation spots.

I tried the Mapness travel journal site, and it would be another way to do a map of Strikepoint's tour routes. It's easier to use than Google Maps, and gives the option of automatically connecting two points by roads, rather than the user having to draw the route on the map. On the other hand, it chooses the roads it will connect by, and there's no editing option.

Vcarious looks like a fun site and could be useful if you're planning a trip to somewhere where its users have posted info. Lots of options for creating online journals with photos and maps, lists of restaurants and sights to see, etc.

I suppose that some of these could be linked on my library's Internet sites by subject Travel list, but other than that I'm not seeing a whole lot of library application.

Thing 32 - Google Maps

This Thing was fun - a little frustrating at times, but fun. And very useful - perhaps mostly in a personal way but also professionally.

I created a map of the Duluth Public Library locations and linked it on my library website. The weird thing is that the first time I clicked on the link on each of my computers, I got a totally different map, of some place in Missouri!! So I'm a little wary of leaving it there.

It worked better on my personal project, which was on a blog for Strikepoint, my handbell ensemble. I embedded a map of a couple upcoming concert locations.

View Pequot Lakes concert sites in a larger map

My next project will be to trace the routes of our annual tours on a map, with placemarks for our concert stops. Our director would like there to be a single map showing all of our tours (for 20 years!), each in a different color, but I don't think Google Maps does that. 

Thing 31 - More Twitter

Twitter is one of those things for which I've had a hard time seeing a library application, but I guess I'm finally finding some interesting library uses for it. Luria Library (is that right?) used their feed to tell their students that first, the Internet was down in the library and then that it was back up. Hennepin County uses theirs to give reminders about programs. (I can only wish that we'd have programs to promote!!)

I've read a lot of the articles linked in the Thing instructions and signed up to follow several more people/organizations. (I've seen somewhere that Queen Elizabeth is on Twitter but haven't found her there yet. That would be fun!) Some of the techie tweeters put out so much that it's just too overwhelming to try to actually follow.

If my library had one or more Facebook pages - and I'd really like to see this happen - then automating a feed into Twitter would be great.

Some of the fun things - I started following the Mac v. PC tweets, looked at the Twittergami bird (very cool) and took the "what punctuation mark are you" quiz (I'm a comma). I didn't post it to either Twitter or Facebook - I've been seeing sooooo many "What (insert noun[s] here) are you" quizzes in the past few days that I just don't feel like extending it! (But I *have* posted results from some others on Facebook. As a children's writer, I'm Beverly Cleary!)

David Lee King's articles were very interesting, and particularly the one about who not to friend on Twitter or Facebook. While it can be interesting and idea-sparking to see what other libraries are doing with these media, I agree that the primary purpose of a library's presence on Twitter/Facebook should be to connect with their patrons.

So right now I guess I'm at the "kinda doubtful but willing to be convinced" stage of Twitter. I'll keep plugging away...

Thing 30 - RSS and Delicious Redux

When I opened my blog just now, I really focused on the Clustr map. My gosh - there are people from all over the world reading this! (And I wonder why???...) That's amazing!

One of my favorite Things from the first round was blogs. I have found a LOT of them that are fun and interesting and pretty and useful. I added a subscribe button to my browser toolbar so it is way too easy to follow a link, read a blog and sign up. Easier to sign up than to keep up. (So I should do some weeding!) It was, therefore, quite heartening to read the Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader article and to see that #1 was...Oversubscribe! I can DO that! 

The same tip was #1 in the article about "wildly successful delicious users." I've recently added several bookmarks to my delicious account (the problem there is remembering what I used for a username & password!). 

I'd like to get more in the habit of using delicious both for home and work, and I want to explore using delicious bookmark lists on my library website. I did add a couple subscriptions to find out when new bookmarks are added in a couple categories.

I also looked at 43marks.com and really liked it. I think it's a much more user-friendly format than delicious. I need to play around with this more too.

Thing 29 - Google Tools

The parts of this Thing that I think are most useful are ones that I'm already doing. I set up a Google Alert some time ago to track references to my library - good for seeing what's being said out there or for seeing media references that I've missed. Our city administration also has an alert set up. As part of this Thing I did go in and try to refine the search terms so that I get more narrowly defined results.

I've also been using the Google Calendar product for some time, and have it linked on my library website. Here's the link to the page where it's embedded, but I see now it doesn't appear to display in Safari. Great - something else to figure out...

I read some of the tips articles and there are certainly lots of cool ways to use Google Calendar for your personal calendar. I will explore some of these for myself later.

Oh, Google 411 is very cool. I am definitely going to try that. I looked briefly at Google Health. I can see that it does useful things - consolidating records, keeping information about medications, diseases/conditions all at hand, etc. - but I don't think that I want to put my health and medical records out on any website. I'm tempted by the Google Desktop....

Thing 28 - Customized homepages

I thought this was fun during the first 23, and it still is. This is something that I've been doing since last spring. I created an iGoogle homepage on one of my work computers and have changed the background and added gadgets to it several times. I have some useful things and some....fun....things on it. There's a little To Do list that looks like a legal pad that I use to narrow down the top things I need to get done. And I've got weather/temperature info from Duluth and from some places I'd rather be (my Florida vacation spot, London...). Just looking through some of the options on Google Gadgets has been really interesting. Every so often (like maybe three or four times in total) I've scrolled through a few pages and added a couple things. Puppy of the Day photos. Times of movies showing in Duluth.

It never occurred to me, though, that you could add other 2.0 tools to the page. I added a Facebook gadget, which might make me remember to check Facebook more often! And I added gadgets for my Flickr photos and delicious bookmarks. I added a sticky note gadget, but it would work essentially the way my legal pad To Do List gadget does, so I deleted that. There are a couple others that I added last year and haven't looked at - hard to remember to scroll all the way down the page... - so I deleted them and moved some others around.

This is a really useful ability - to create your own homepage without having to know any html and to be able to add so many fun and useful things. I may show this to my mother, who would enjoy having things like the current stock market info so readily available.

My Facebook story

I have done more with Facebook in the last six weeks than in the last six months! And for me it's kind of like Twitter - I have a hard time remembering to check it or thinking of anything interesting enough to post.

But a few weeks ago I got a friend request from one of my childhood best friends. This is someone that I haven't heard from since I was entering junior high! She was just enough older than I am that we never went to the same school and as school life became more complicated we drifted apart. She found me on Facebook and sent me a message! If it hadn't been for Facebook, I'm sure I would have never heard from her again.

How cool is this!!

Thing 27

This Thing has taken a long time to do - not because it's hard or complicated but just because I haven't had the time to both explore Twitter and then to write about it. Just too busy at work!

So I found my Twitter login info from the first set of Things and then found a few people or organizations to follow. I have a hard time remembering to check Twitter! Luria Library (in California) looks like they're using Twitter well - one recent tweet was that the campus Internet system was down, followed shortly by one that said it was back up. That's the kind of instant info that people would find useful.

I watched several of the videos mentioned in the Thing instructions and read some articles. One guy said that he devotes 3-4 hours a day to Twitter. THREE TO FOUR HOURS??? Oh my goodness! I don't want to be that kind of person!

I added a photo and changed the background and color settings of my page. I have posted a couple of times (nancye28) but I have a hard time thinking of anything that's interesting enough to say!

Thing 26

I joined the Ning during the first 23 Things....and haven't been back. In fact, I sorta forgot what it was, and went back to the 23 Things website and re-read some information. So today I updated my profile, added a profile picture, uploaded some other photos and left a comment on one of the forum topics. I also read through several of the forums and looked at the groups and photos. 

I can see that this would be a useful tool for projects such as these Things. Someone's having trouble doing something and posts a question. Someone else posts an answer. A way to provide long-distance support. 

Could this be used in a library setting, for library users? Maybe in a reading program that had activities and projects? Or some kind of writing workshops/classes?

This may be a Thing I don't use much, but I can see there are some real-life applications. 

Thing 25.4

Apture and SnapShots look very interesting. I looked at both of the sites and read through the license agreements. I decided to try Apture because SnapShots talks about advertising being one of the things you have to accept with its service. I'm interested in how Apture works both for the library website and for Strikepoint. It would fun to put in a map or add a video or provide some additional context.

I also added a clock on the sidebar.

This Thing has lots of fun stuff to explore but it has taken an IMMENSE amount of time. And there are still several parts of the instructions/linked information that I haven't looked at. I'll keep the information bookmarked, but I've got to move on!

Thing 25.3

I added a photo widget from Good Widgets. Not difficult to do, but kinda time consuming (also interrupted by a desk shift, lunch and creation of some summer reading program materials). 

I did add the ClustrMap to my Strikepoint website. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to see it.

I need to go and do some work now, but I've been thinking about the widgets. They're very fun and slick, but I don't know how useful a lot of them are in a library setting. I know some libraries run their websites entirely through blogs, which seems limiting to me. So far a lot of the widgets I've seen are basically designed to be used on blogs and are maybe more appropriate for personal blogs than for a business (which is what a library is). I am going to look at a Google Map widget and see if it would work on our website to map our locations, so that would be useful. The photo widget I added would be great but the maximum number of photos it sorts is 10. I guess you could put a widget of 10 photos on a bunch of different pages...

Still Thing 25

I'd prefer to have the ClustrMap over in the sidebar, but can't see how to add it there.

OK - as you can see, I eventually got it in the sidebar. But I was looking for a way to add another area of HTML code and then be able to move it around. I had wanted the map down below some of the other gadgets. Oh, well. 

Having worked a bit longer with Blogger, there are some awkward things about it. Two of our librarians are using WordPress for their library blogs (not the 23 Things ones, I think) and I need to talk with them about how flexible that is.

I think I can add a ClustrMap to my Strikepoint website. I've sent the code home and will try it tonight.

Flickrshow will appear here!

Again, not so successful. I have used Flickr slideshows extensively in my library website and really like them, but it's just not working here in the blog.

That's it for today. I've got to go. But this Thing is taking hours and hours and....

Thing 25.1.2 - Not always a good thing

So I have discovered a problem with the mail-to-blogger feature, at least as it works with my email program. If I copy myself with an email, which I often do, our software autofills in the address and it's choosing the "mail-to-blogger" address, so emails which are not public were showing up on the blog. Now I could go in and delete the address from my address book, but the next time I used the mail-to-blogger feature - assuming that I would remember the address! - the problem would be back. So far I've deleted three posts that shouldn't appear here and I'm waiting for something else to show up.

For me the solution will be to disable the mail feature. If I can figure out how...

Thing 25.1 - Just testing....

If you can read this, then I followed the directions correctly! Woo hoo!

Thing 25 - Bloggers' Toolkit

My first impression of these Beyond 23 Things: they're really long! Lots of links to things to explore. I'm betting most of these will take more time than the first 23.

Beyond the 23 - Thing 24

We're back! Time to start the next round.

I haven't done anything with this blog since April, but I did start a different, personal blog a couple weeks ago. Now I should go in and play around with the gadgets, avatar, lists, etc. That one has a specific purpose and I haven't done much with it except set it up and write a couple postings. I remember writing in my blog post for Thing 1 that I felt no compulsion to have a personal blog, to share my life online. I guess that's pretty clear evidence of how time and experiences change your perceptions about things!

So I did update this blog - new look, new avatar, new title. Looking through the avatar sites listed in the Thing 24 directions made me realize that a lot of the 2.0 stuff seems to be "use it or lose it." I need to re-familiarize myself with a lot of what I did last spring.

I read through many of the "Finding the Time" links in the More Things on a Stick instructions. And it seems to be consistent with much of life: everything is a tradeoff. To have enough time to do some thing, you have to give up the time to do something else. This should be nothing new to any of us!

Probably the things that I've enjoyed the most of the first 23 would be blogs - reading them - and Flickr. Flickr was a godsend when we were doing our big remodeling project, right in the middle of my 23 Thing odyssey. I've got hundreds of photos of the whole process up there. And I have continued to post photos for our summer programs and most recently for a Christmas tree sponsored by one of Duluth's sister cities and for various book displays around the Library. Blogs - I have way too many in my reader and should go in and weed out some that I am less interested in. But they're fun! My favorites are not work related (what a surprise!). I'll add some to a sidebar, but I do need to go and get some other work done.