Week 6, Thing 13 Tagging Del.icio.us

I have tried on 2 separate days (July 16 and 18) to get into the Del.icio.us tutorial only to have the computer screen show that the 12 minute presentation is unavailable. Tagging seems to be an "unstructured, free form" association of keywords to find online content. Flickr and Library Thing were pointed out as being 2 forms of tagging. I checked out Del.icio.us URL, saw its social bookmarking listings, and pulled up the Shifted Librarian site showing user descriptions and commonly used tags. I could see personal use for tagging when looking for particular pictures in photo albums by using keyword descriptions to find certain shots.

Week 5, Thing 12 Rollyo

Rollyo was fun and a site that I plan to use!! I created an account for myself and created a Broadway Shows search roll. For our 30th wedding anniversary next year, Wayne and I were thinking of taking the family to NYC to see either Grease or Mary Poppins. I plugged in ticketmaster.com and rollyo added other addresses. Justbuytickets.com was very informative. I learned that Grease is considered "Hot Broadway" with mega-hefty ticket prices. Mary Poppins is classified as a "Broadway Event" with ticket prices more suited to our kid-in-college budget.

Week 5, Thing 11 Library Thing / Favorite Books

I set up an account with LibraryThing and entered eight of my favorite titles. You can view them here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/scavey. I thought the site was easy to use. It could be of great benefit to the many patrons who frequently ask us if we keep a record of the books they've read. Teaching this skill to the customers could have them manage their own reading history.

Week 5, Thing 10 Online Image Generator

Since I'm not an artist, this was a pretty fun activity. I played around with two image generators. See my blog for the sketch-generated penguin image. It looks like a pencil drawing.
I also went to www.meez.com and created Corkette. You can see her moving image and read her bio on my blog. She is singing because I love to sing (but if you read her bio then you already knew that).

Week 4, Thing 9 MERLIN

Today I explored several news feed search tools. These included Feedster and Technorati. I found them to be a bit confusing, especially Technorati. I then looked at MERLIN. This site was easier to navigate than the other two. I also subscribed to the MERLIN feed in my Bloglines account. Along the way, I found many feeds that were of little interest to me. There were so many, though, that I eventually found some that were more up my alley. Though I've seen MERLIN many times on our CCPL homepage, I never really explored it before today. So now I will check out its information more frequently.

Week 4, Thing 8 RSS Feeds

Finally, some of the navigational fog of blogger.com to blogspot.com to creating/editting posts to transferring the blog post permalink URL to the tracking log is starting to clear. Good Grief!

RSS "really simple syndication" was challenging at times. I created a bloglines account and set up a total of 16 feeds, one of which included MERLIN from Week 4, Thing 9. My feeds included Dogs, Cats, Travel, Home and Garden, USA Today News and Weather, a movie sight, Energy Information, Reader's Club, and two humor sights. I read and added the Shifted Librarian feed. So as to have access to a wider range of feeds, I added the bloglines of two co-workers.

You can view my bloglines here:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/corkyspal

Week 3, Thing 7 Interesting Technology

Playing catch-up here - the past few weeks have been extremely busy at work (summer is our Christmas time) and I'm training for and driving the day care van as a sub in Outreach. Plus multiple family (parental care) issues are using much time, travel,and energy.

So, over these last weeks, I have found the following news reports related to technology to be interesting:

1. CCT, 6/2/07 A new phone system, The Enforcer, is now in place at the CC Detention Center. It makes monitoring inmates' calls easier and can use security cameras to watch inmates while their calls are in progress.

2. CCT, 6/28/07 Robotic cameras have been installed in the Mount Airy Town Hall to air live broadcasts of the town hall meetings on Community Media Center Channel 23.

3. CCT, 6/30/07 The hyped iPhone became available to consumers @ 6 p.m. yesterday. The Apple product which is serviced by AT&T has touch screen, e-mail, Internet, music and video. Base price is $500.

4. CCT, 7/12/07 Pixar's "digital dazzle" animated movie, "Ratatouille" is doing well at the box office.

5. TV news 7/16/07 Pageant winner, Miss New Jersey, is allowed to keep her crown. Controversial photos of her on Facebook almost cost her the title.