And a happy New Year

Dark is Rising to be filmed

I just listed this as one of my favourite books in the world. I really hope that Susan Cooper is involved in the process because then I have some hope that it will be as wonderful as it should be.
Some details here:http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117952563.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Wikis

As part of the Be a fit Librarian, I've been playing around a bit with a wiki and I will be doing more with a group of people trying to organize a world wide event next June. Wiki's are clearly very useful.
I'm also enjoying reading about people's favourites - or favorites!

I've also discovered that there are certain terms that elicit comments in blogs that are essentially ads for their own website. I deleted the comment but can't delete, it seems, who it is from - and that is really what I want to delete. Hmmm

My favourite sign generator

I love the idea of making a fake newspaper from here:
http://tools.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
I made this one for the Librarian Fit Club.

How does Library 2.0 actually fit in my library?

It doesn't. We can't even get and keep the latest version of Flash. However knowing all this is important because it is where so much of the public lives, even if our online presence doesn't.
Yes, our latest website for kids has blogs but we don't yet know if the kids are reading them. They aren't responding but then Neilsen said they wouldn't. ;-)
I would love it if we supported tagging - hopw cool would it be for kids to find other books on their own - or other kids with similar interests in books but that is a huge leap for a huge library and it will probably be a long time in coming.

Technorati at last

Technorati is one of those things I have heard about for years but never gotten around to getting to. I can see how useful it would be for finding other people's musings on things of interest. Not sure how much elseI would use it though.
And I was very glad to see that "learning 2.0" brought up better results than learning 2.0 without the quotes.

I'm not at all sure I want to tag my posts. I'm not saying anything of import and I was really surprised to find a stranger not involved with this course commenting on one of my posts.
It wasn't bad, just a surprise.
So I'll just leave it for now and not do anything special except for the plcmcl2 tag.
PLCMCL2

Del.icio.us

Just started looking at Delicious and welcome the chance to see more. I've signed up as Frances but I can't download anything to my tool box at work. I'll try at home. I did do a search though and it seems very useful.
More to come as I use it more!

This is new for me

A lot of what we've been doing here has been fun but actually installing a widget on my blog was one step more than I thought I could probably do successfully. And yet, there it is. A link to Library Thing. Now I just have to get something more up there than some of my favourite Dorothy Dunnett books!

Image generators

This week's session (I am weeks behind) came at just the right time because I was going to try the Motivator - which makes motivational signs. I think mine came out quite well.

This can be found at:

http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/motivator.php

I also found one that does barcodes, so this is my homage to The Prisoner

Unfortunately it obscures some of the message. It starts " I am..."

Feedster and Topix

I'm not sure why I need more excuses to spend more time on the internet! Both Feedster and topix (the only 2 I have checked out so far) have links to lots of time-gulping pages. Fascinating! However, I did find a bit of information which I then linked to on a different site and everyone there praised me for being so on top of things!

RSS feeds

I've been using RSS feeds for awhile now. I particularly like how they are done in Opera, where they download them separately and remind me I have them. Firefox's way - rather like Bookmarks, is not as intuitive - or maybe I haven't spent as much time there.
And I forget to go to Bloglines and now, reminded, I have about 200 entries in each feed!

I used to think that you should be publishing new content regularly in order to warrant offering RSS but now I think it is almost more useful for those who don't. If they only update once a month, you don't think to go back and check when the time comes.
The feed does that for me.

And may I just add a whoohoo that I have managed to get to Week 5 in just over a week?

Blogging about technology

Recently I downloaded Audacity at home. That is the software that podcasters often use and it looked as though it might be handy for work.
We have stories online but since they are taken from stories on the phone, they all have a "Please hang up the phone" at the end of the story. With Audacity, I think I can get rid of that phrase, then convert the story from WAV to mp3. What I should also be able to do, but I haven't figured out how yet, is how to make it a smaller mp3 file. It needn't be as good quality as a music file is. I need more time to be able to play around with it.
Isn't that the stories of our lives!

Flickr mashups

This latest thing to do was to check out various flickr mashups. I enjoyed doing fastr - a game where you look at pictures and try to guess what tags they had in common. If anyone else is online at the time, you play against them. The faster you give an accurate guess, the more points you get.. The URL is
http://randomchaos.com/games/fastr/

I can see that you can also get an idea of the types of tags used.

Once I figure out how to adjust my photo, I will make a trading card.

bookshelf

bookshelf
Originally uploaded by chotda.

I liked this heretical idea of shelving by colour. It's very pretty!
And I have learned something new. I had no idea I could put flickr and blogger together like this. Very nice!

Life long learning

I watched an interesting tutorial recently about life long learning. Now, I'm supposed to think about what will be easiest or hardest.
Hardest would be finding someone else to teach. Because first I have to convince them it is neat or cool or will help them. To say nothing of convincing them they can actually learn it!
Easiest......., I have to say that nothing jumps outs being easier than anything else. I'll have to think about that one.

Learning 2.0

I've decided to take part in the online PLCMC project, Learning 2.0. This is one of the tasks.
I actually have created a couple of blogs for other purposes already but it is always useful to do it again.