Week 6: Thing #13 Tagging and Del.icio.us

I don't think I could manage without my del.icio.us account (del.icio.us/crosenstock). It makes working between home and school on computers with different operating systems and different browsers so easy!

Mostly I have used it for online storage of bookmarks, but it is also a good resource for discovering related websites and related tags. And it is a great way to share websites with others.

Week5: Thing #12 Rollyo

Rollyo is a useful tool for focused searches of preselected sites on a specific topic or of a specific nature (ie research sites). As I explored the Rollyo site, I found several great searchrolls that answered personal needs or interests, including Mr. Fix-It! and Mac Search.

I registered with Rollyo and created a searchroll called Black Gold about composting as it is used for organic gardening. That's a narrow topic, but some of my other ideas were problematic, as for example, the idea to create a searchroll for free cataloging records. I thought that any site where you had to login or select a catagory -- such as title, author, or keyword -- would probably not work well. So I did the topic of composting and called it Black Gold, a phrase which, I understand now, has other dubious meanings on the web. Who knew?

Week 5: Thing #12 Nings II Library 2.0

http://library20.ning.com/

This Ning was more interesting than I expected it to be. At first glance the home page seemed text heavy and confusing and a few of the group names sounded weird (Vegetarian Vegan Librarians, c'mon), but the forums page offered a list of good discussion topics. I enjoyed reading some of the postings in the forum, Defining Web 2.0/Library 2.0.

I am not joining this Ning, but have bookmarked it in Del.icio.us in order to return to it from time to time. I thought I might add this Ning to my list of RSS feeds, but decided not to when I previewed the feeds. The original formatting of the website itself makes navigation and selecting the forums that I'm interested in easier.

Besides, it's one more thing!

Week 5: Thing #12 Nings

Spill.com (http://my.spill.com) is a movie review Ning, with clever, funny, irreverant reviews done with animated characters and actual movie clips. Their review of Spiderwick Chronicles was entertaining and accurate, in my opinion.

I don't want to join one more web thing right now, but I'll visit this Ning again.

Week 5: Thing #11 Web 2.0 award winner Kayak

http://www.kayak.com

Kayak is a travel search engine started by Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia to improve the search experience of folks planning a trip by air. You can also locate a hotel and rent a car through Kayak. You don't actually buy anything on Kayak; Kayak provides links to the vendors, whether it is an airline or a company like Orbitz.

Kayak has many great features. The user is able to modify a search for an airline trip in the following ways:

• number of stops
• by specific airline
• by take off and landing times for both the outgoing and return flights (Useful!!)
  
• whether you need the same airport for leaving and returning
• layover duration
• trip duration (another great feature, especially when the flight crosses multiple time zones)
  

A search for hotels yields results in a separate window. The results can be sorted by price, name of the hotel/motel, number of stars, and distance (from the airport?).

All the ways you can modify an airlines search make Kayak an immensely-useful website. I wish I had been aware of it last Thanksgiving when I was trying to find flight for my son who lives in San Diego and who needed to travel withing tight time parameters.

Week 5: Thing #10 Image Generators III

Make a banner at http://www.imagechef.com.

Week 5: Thing #10 Image Generators II

Poetry message -- "I love my library" -- created on Image Chef.

http://www.imagechef.com

Great site for students to use when creating concrete poetry.

Week 5: Thing #10 Image Generators

I added a caption to this picture of Archie Bunker from the Basic Cartoon Search collection of images in Comic Strip Generator. Fun!

Here's the link: http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/

Couldn't do it using Firefox on my Mac, so I switched to a pc.

Week 4: Thing 9 Adding a Blogroll

So far away...so beautiful.

Did anyone see the amazing lunar eclipse last evening? I dragged my lovely husband out in the cold to photograph it.

I haven't figured out how to add a blogroll from my Bloglines list to this blog. As part of the required html, I need to add my Bloglines username. I guess I do not know my username. A prompt tells me that I can go into my Bloglines profile and edit or create a username, but when I click into the profile, I see only my e-mail address and a place to change my password. I have reentered and confirmed my password, thinking this might help, but no luck. I must have tried fifteen different iterations of various passwords, e-mail addresses, and IDs in an effort to publish my blogroll to my Library 2.0 blog. The help sections of Bloglines and Blogger are a morass. I have tunneled through them for several hours and come up empty handed. I am sure I am missing the obvious, but this is very frustrating. I need to move on to the next Thing for now.

2/23 I finally figured out how to correct the problem. In fact, even though I thought I had a username in Bloglines, I did not actually have one. It took exploring in the various pages of the profile to discover this and publish my RSS feeds to my blog.

Week 4: Thing 9 Library-related Blogs

A comment on a recent posting in Chris Harris' blog, Infomancy:

In a post on 2.0 Job Descriptions Chris Harris refers to a post by Michael Stephens (Tame the Web) for the ALA TechSource blog in which Stephens offers a great definition of play that I need to remember personally and in my role as a teacher librarian.

Harris recounts Stephens' comments:

The team I lead is very flexible and comfortable with change and having to readjust when things don’t work because we aren’t afraid to fail. Failure is an opportunity to learn and make things better. I don’t mean we like to fail, we are all pretty obsessive about success and over-delivery on promises. However, we aren’t paralyzed by the fear of failure to the point of continuing down a safe path (or even a doomed path) just because change brings additional risk. Perhaps this is another way of defining “play” which is one of the verbs that is really critical in this.

Learned for the first time about ed.voicethread.com on Joyce Valenza's NeverendingSearch blog at School Library Journal (a good source for useful blogs). Voicethread is a secure website for k-12 schools to use that allows visual storytelling with images, voice, and text. I want to spend more time there and imagine how it can be used at school.

I don't want to subscribe to many feeds, just a few good ones. Rather than collecting many new ideas, I'd rather explore a few of them well enough so that I could share them and use them at school.

Week4: Thing 8 RSS feeds

In the past, (B 2.0), I often forgot to check Chris Harris' blog, Infomancy, and a number of other great blogs and news sources. When I thought of it, I'd have to hunt for the link just to get there. Now, with my own RSS feed through Bloglines, Chris Harris, Joyce Valenza, and the news sources I enjoy are all in one place. I love it!

Setting up a Bloglines account and adding links was easy. I know I will be adding to the page.

These links so readily at hand give me information and inspiration!

Just tried to add my RSS feeds to my blog page. Oops! When I used what I though was my Bloglines user name to create the script, I got a very long list of blogs -- not the ones I selected for my Bloglines account -- on my own blog. Got to create a new name. There sure are lots of names, passwords, and IDs associated with 2.0 applications!

Week 3 Thing 6 again Trading Cards at FD Toys

I could spend much more time playing with mashups!

Trading cards could be used as part of a display to recognize parent volunteers, or to introduce new staff and their favorite books.

Kids would be able to think of a thousand ways to use trading cards!

Week 3 Thing #7 About technology...

Technology often feels like play. And so these applications can be great learning tools. I want to experiment with cards at the FD Toys site to see what the process and the result is and to think about how I might utilize cards with students.

Week 3 Thing #6 Mashups, etc.

I created this Warholized image with FD Toys.

I would love to experiment with some of the "public" images on Flickr, but don't know how to get them from Flickr into the app.

Can't wait to show this image to the many-colored guy pictured here.

Week 3 Thing #6 Flickr fun, mashups, etc...

Mappr doesn't work with Flickr anymore according to a note on the Mappr website; however, I was able to attach some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account to a Flickr map. It's a neat idea. The privacy setting on these family photos is friends and family. I am guessing that only friends and family can "see" the photos on the map.

There's a lot I still don't know about Flickr, like how to save Flickr images -- those that are "public" images. Is that possible? I'll have to explore the "help" and FAQ areas of Flickr.

Flicker Color Picks was fascinating. This would be a perfect tool for designers of any kind-- graphic, interior, book, etc. I don't know if it is possible to save one of the public images. I found several that I loved and would like to work with.

Using Montager is like looking through a kaleidoscope! Amazing! But I am not sure what to do with it.

I need to spend much more time on these aps that go with Flickr.