I'm baaaaack!

Hey there everyone. I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth. I decided to have the rest of December off from my 23 squared blog....and now it's May. Oops! Sorry.

Apart from the usual demands of work I've been checking out Facebook and MySpace for work purposes naturally. I'm taking part in a Cybersafety seminar series for parents, teachers and teens. We hope to educate parents on these social networking sites and point out to teens some privacy features etc. I've found Facebook to be almost a fulltime job in itself and I don't have a swag of friends.

I've been using some of the sites we visited in Learning 2.0 e.g. Zoho which I love. How about you?

I'll have to catch myself up to Learning 2.1 . Looks like I'll be Twittering next.

Cheers, webgurl

#36 - Image editing at Splashup

Wow! I can't believe I missed this site. Splashup (formerly called Fauxto) is an image editing site and a fairly powerful one at that. It has a lot of features that one might expect from Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. You don't even need to sign up, you can jump right in and edit an image. I'm sure that after editing one image you'll register. I can't wait to tell friends about it.

Some of the features include:

• Tools like crop, lasso, pens and brushes, fill and shapes.
• Filters to sharpen, blur, pixellate, desaturate, adjust hue/saturation or brightness etc.

There's quite a lot to do. I quickly created the following image



You can work with new images as well as existing ones from your computer, Flickr, Picasa or Facebook accounts.

I'll use this site again!

Cheers, webgurl

#35 - Mini-blogging with Twitter

Well I tried joining up to Twitter. I must say I've never really seen the point of Twitter. I'm not really that interested in what people are up to at any point in the day.

Anyhoo, I started filling out the form. At the moment I'm stuck on Stage 2 - Fetching contacts. First up you have to fill out a Yahoo/Hotmail/AOL email address and your password so that Twitter can check your contacts. There is no skip option. So I finally thought oh well I'll add my Yahoo address. Twitter is stuck trying to load the contacts.

In searching the web to see if there were any problems using Twitter in Australia I did find several blog articles that mentioned Twitter via SMS had been suspended because of the high costs.

So I'm done with this. I surfed on over to Jaiku. I had to request an invite - they'll let me know when there's an account available.

Cheers, webgurl

#34 - Better health

Fit day is a website to assist in monitoring your diet and exercise. You can fill out a food and exercise journal, set goals and obtain reports. Once you set up the minimum intake of vitamins, calories, water etc and you regularly fill out the food journal you can get a report to let you know if you are meeting your requirements for all of these nutritional items.

It's great to see the things you need to work on. For example if you need to add more calcium to your diet.

If you have a PC, you can also purchase a copy for your computer.

Cheers, webgurl

#33 - Online Art

Had a lot of fun with this one. I'd already knew Mr Picasso Head so I played with the Falling Sand game. The game involves four main falling particles: sand, water, salt, and oil. Each of these particles have special properties that can be manipulated and combined to model. You can draw shapes on the page to divert the particles. A twirling namekuji can delete anything you draw. Work quickly!

Cheers, webgurl

#32 - Omnidrive

Omnidrive is an online storage site. I could sign up for a free account with 1GB of storage. If I pay for a Pro account I can get up to a Terabyte of storage. The pro accounts also have encryption for extra security.

You tell Omnidrive who you want to share a file with and the file can only be read or edited by those people you share it with.

It's great if you want to do some work at home. You can upload the required files to Omnidrive and work on your home computer. It goes hand in hand with Zoho.

Curious though that I've used up 2.7MB and I haven't uploaded anything yet.

I uploaded a phone manual for work that I had been working on at home. Once uploaded I double-clicked on the file and it opened up in Zoho. I could then edit the document.

This is pretty good. I would probably only use it as temporary storage but it works for me. Of course I would need to use it regularly because if I don't log in for 60 days the account is removed.

I uploaded an image and the procedure for editing wasn't very obvious. You had to right-click on the file and select edit from actions. Could use some icons in a toolbar to make it more obvious. I could resize, rotate, make it greyscale and crop. I might suggest using omnidrive/snipshot for those people needing access to an image editor. Cool!

Cheers, webgurl

Tutorials

I stumbled across the following tutorials site while looking for tutorials on drawing with Adobe Illustrator. Did I mention I came up with an idea for my Threadless t-shirt design?

Anyhoo, Tutorialized has tutorials for creating graphics, websites, Powerpoint presentations and more.

Some other tutorial sites I've had a look at include:

Lynda.com
Subscriptions from $25 a month, also offers volume discounts to groups and organizations. The Online training library contains tutorials on blogging, digital photography, javascript and so much more.

So You Wanna teaches you how to do all of the things nobody taught you in school. Find out how to make French Toast, play Poker or paint a house.

My tutorials has tutorials on business, writing a CV, how to open a coconut, how to fix car brakes (I'm not too sure about this one. I wouldn't like to find out I did a bad job when I was driving down a hill).

Cheers, webgurl

#31 - Plaxo - Just like Facebook but no sheep throwing

I joined up with Plaxo looking for some organisational tools as I'm not the most organised person.

What I found looked suspiciously like Facebook. Plaxo wanted me to list where I worked and where I went to school and wanted me to search for friends in my network.

It does have a calendar and task listing but I don't really want to share that with anyone. I'd keep that private. I share my work calendar with my colleagues using our email program. That's enough for me.

I had a look around to see if there was anything useful on this site but there really wasn't.

Cheers, webgurl

#30 - LOL Cats

Well I don't think I can bring myself to use LOL Cats text speak for this blog but this was a cute site. Basically people upload cute or funny photos of cats with humourous captions.

My faves are:







Cheers, webgurl

#29 - Scrapblog - Stephanie Plum rocks!

I'm a Scrapbooker so I had huge fun with Scrapblog. I used my Stephanie Plum images from Photobucket to create my album. It was easy and very creative.




http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbId=124682

Cheers, webgurl

#28 - I finally made a magazine cover

At Condenet.com you can create your own magazine cover for the tech themed mag Wired. It's a simple 3 step system. Choose the colcour for the header, add the headlines (choosing font size and colour on the way) and adding a photo.

Here's my cover:



Nice bit of fun. Couldn't use it for work of course with copyright and all.

Cheers, webgurl

#27 - Don't kick the photobucket

I've had a Photobucket account for years under another screen name. I love Photobucket. It's a cool place to store and share images to use in forums and websites.

Flickr allows you to store and share photos, however Photobucket allows you to do more. You can add animated images , create a slideshow, remix videos or create an avatar (TizMe has better avatars though).

I did a search for my favourite book. I love Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series so I typed in Stephanie Plum. As well as book covers and a couple of avatars I found and interesting image of someone's casting ideas for the movie - Lauren Graham for Stephanie, Patrick Dempsey for Morelli and The Rock for Ranger. McDreamy and The Rock? - Seriously deluded. Lauren Graham is excellent though, much better than Reese Witherspoon, although I picture Mira Sorvino in the role.



Anyhoo I added it to my album.

Cheers, webgurl

#26 - Little bits of the Internet or widgets

I love widgets. I use them everyday on my Mac. I can click on the dashboard and bring up a clock, calendar, calculator, weather, to do list and a tile game. There are heaps more I can download.



Yourminis has widgets for your desktop, blog or website. Some of the widgets include Moviefone with reviews and trailers for upcoming movies, The Weather Channel and Amazon.

It would be nice to create a desktop widget for the library. With a catalogue login and search box. Hmmm........food for thought. I'll let you know if I come up with anything. I've already been checking out library toolbars to download for your browser.

I created a start page and added some widgets. If I signed up I could publish the page. Below is the page I created.



I'm not sure if I'll revisit yourminis. I'll probably keep downloading widgets from Apple, but this is quite cool.

Cheers, webgurl

#25 - Letterpop to create and deliver newsletters

Letterpop allows you to create your own newsletter. You select from over 50 professional-looking templates. You drag and drop images into the picture boxes and create text with the text editor.

Once you've joined up you can add email addresses to send your newsletter.

The free basic version allows you to create 10 newsletters per year and send to 25 addresses. There are some ads. Upgrading to a premium account allows you to publish 52 newsletters per year to 500 addresses.

I joined up for the free account and created a newsletter in about 7 minutes. It might have been even quicker if I was a better typist :-).

You could use this is a library environment to email Library newsletters. You could set up an email group on your mail server and add this address to send to more than 25 people however you'd have to set it up to be able to send email from Letterpop to the group.

A great little application . Cool use of Ajax.

Cheers, webgurl

Learning 2.1

Now that I've finished the Learning 2.0 program I had a quick look at Learning 2.1. I hadn't realised Zamzar was one of those activities. Cool! Anyhoo I've decided to forge ahead and do L2.1.

For those still struggling to find time to complete 2.0, keep plugging away. Even if you do one exercise a week, it's something. If you need help, please ask.

Cheers, webgurl

Christmas ideas

Well the Christmas decorations are starting to appear in shopping centres so I guess it's time for the organised people to think of gifts (not me of course, I'm not organised).

For those that like to give hampers have you had a look at Berkelouw Book Hampers? They sell hampers containing books, food and leather stationery.

The Literary Feast Hamper contains the following:

• The Gathering by Anne Enright


• The Road by Cormac McCarthy


• Neoma South American Blend coffee (250g)


• Neoma English Breakfast tea (100g)


• Byron Bay shortbread cookies (150g)


• Greeting Card


• Berkelouw Book Box

I'm not too sure about The Gathering - might be a bleak gift to give but this sounds like a wonderful idea.

Do you know any great websites to find that elusive gift?

Cheers, webgurl

#24 - Zamzar file conversion

Zamzar is a fantastic site for converting files. Let's say someone comes into the library with their resume saved as a Works document and they want to open it up in Word.

They can go to Zamzar and follow the 4 steps. There's no need to register and it's totally free.



Step 1 - select the file.

Step 2 - choose the format to convert to

Step 3 - enter your email address

Step 4 - click the convert button.

The converted file is emailed to the email address you supplied.

The following are the examples of the file formats that Zamzar converts:

.doc to .html, .pdf, .txt
.docx to .doc, .pdf, .txt
.wps to .doc, .pdf, .txt

and heaps more, have a look at the conversion types

It's very easy. They've even now added the capability to convert files from video websites such as Youtube and Google Reader so that you can store them.

I created a To do list in Microsoft Word and converted it to a pdf document. It worked beautifully.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 9 - #23 Thats All Folks

A lot of people have asked me through this program,

"Why are you doing this, you do this every day?"

I believe that you never stop learning and it's been fun sharing with others all of the things I've learned over the years. I think it may give people a bit of understanding and appreciation of what I do in this organisation.

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

I set myself a goal at the start to create a podcast for the library's radio show so this has been my favourite exercise. I also had a blast evaluating wikis.

My fave discovery was Zoho. I'm sure i'll use this in the future.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?

I think this program has confirmed that I'm on the right track. I'm happy doing my own thing and learning at my own pace and this program has been great for that. I'm also accustomed to training so helping others out has also worked out well.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I don't think there were any unexpected outcomes. I did everything I set out to do.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

All I could suggest is that there is more support at the libraries. I see some people who are struggling and are stuck on the first few weeks. Perhaps they need some help.

Also, I think there is sometimes a problem with some staff taking up too much time when they should be on desk or shelving. There needs to be a balance. The organisation can't afford to have everyone drop everything to blog. We still need to offer a service to our library members.

While this might be the final post for the program I'll still keep blogging about Web 2.0 and library 2.0 and helping people out with the program. Thanks to everyone reading. Keep checking back.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 9 - #22 - World eBook Fair

I'm not a big audio book borrower, the trip to work isn't long enough and I'm not sure that I'd be able to concentrate on the story and on the road :-). Anyhoo I checked out the World eBook Fair site and decided it's not really for me. Apart from Sherlock Holmes there aren't any books to which I'd be interested listening. I listened to a bit of A Study in Scarlet. I didn't think all that much of it. The chapters weren't clearly marked and it would be great if you could schedule downloading the lot off-peak.

Good luck to them though. I'm sure someone likes it.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 9 #21 - Searching and downloading a podcast

I tend to stumble across podcasts while surfing, so I haven't often done a lot of searches for podcasts. Seeing as though I have iTunes on my Mac I thought I'd download onet from there.

I did a power search and found one called Library Geeks. The following is the description I found on PodcastAlley for this episode:

"Gary Price joins Dan to discuss his work of politely getting in people's faces to share the best of what's on the web at his job at ask.com and through his other sites like ResourceShelf and Docuticker."

I hadn't come across ResourceShelf before so this was interesting. Gary said he made sure not to include the word 'library' into the blog name as this tended to scare people off. The site also goes beyond libraries. It's basically a site where Librarians and researchers share the results of web searches for information requests.

He says the number one thing to get people through the door is to show them how they can save more time. They'll come back to you for other things. He stressed that the main ingredient of a good information librarian is knowing the collection and what make one resource better than another.

Gary also urges library students to take a cataloguing course. It is still relevant. When people ask him what do we need Librarians for, we've got Google, he explains about controlled vocabulary and how this knowledge can improve your search results.

I found the interview really interesting and would probably look at the sites mentioned as well as search for other podcasts to subscribe. I would also encourage my colleagues to subscribe to library-related podcasts as this keeps them up-to-date with what's happening in the library industry.

Cheers, webgurl

Pausing a Youtube video

Youtube videos can eat into your downloads so if you want to stop the embedded video just click on the Pause button II to the left of the player toolbar.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 9 #20 - Youtube stars

Everyone always sends me links to cool Youtube videos so I was familiar with the general layout and playing of videos on the site, however I hadn't embedded any Youtube videos into my blog before.

Working in IT, the medieval helpdesk tickled my fancy so if you haven't seen it here it is.

The introduction of The Book

Cheers, webgurl

p.s. My other faves I'll provide as links:

Stargate Continuum Movie Sneak Peek
Star Wars hands
Daft hands
Zac Selwyn's Atlantis rap (and yes he did get a part on an episode)

As you can see I'm a SciFi fan :-).

OK so how could we use Youtube in a library setting? Well we could record some of the author visits for one and upload them to Youtube or Google Video and link to them on the blog.

Oops it's really late....off to bed.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 8 #19 - Web 2.0 Awards

I was browsing the list of winners and found one of my absolute fave sites - Threadless. Now I'm a jeans and t-shirt girl and I love witty t-shirts and Threadless has them in spades.

OK, to explain the concept to the uninitiated...... Basically creative people around the world come up with cool designs for t-shirts and submit them to Threadless. The Threadless community scores and comments on the submission. You can get paid UP TO $12,500 if your design is selected for printing and sale on the site.

You also don't have to be a graphic designer. You just need a cool concept. I'm still thinking.....

Here are some of my faves:



What would MacGyver do?




Safety in numbers




Loch Ness Imposter




Haikus are easy




Break Dance!

Happy to share the site with you. I'll keep on brainstorming for an idea for a submission. It's use in a library setting? Well there is none but I guess you could use the money you earned to fund some projects for the library.....who am I kidding, it would probably pay for a holiday or a new Plasma :-)

Cheers, webgurl

Week 8 #18 - Web-based Apps

I've tested a few web-based applications like Google docs but haven't used them frequently as I've always had Word or Open Office on my PC. I joined up to Zoho and started off by having a look at the notebook. I grabbed some notes from my uni days and started transcribing some of them.

This would have been great at uni although I think I would have wanted to perfect my touch typing. I could log onto Zoho, create a book for a particular subject and add blank pages. I could add text, images, URLs etc in my notes of the lecture. I could add links for articles from online databases etc. Once finished I could share this with another person and give them read or read/write permission if they wanted to add something to it. It takes studying together one step further. Perhaps lecturers could use this service for the class notes and save a few trees.

Here's a sneak peek at what I created:




Wow that takes me back to the fun days at RMIT <:-D

Zoho Meeting looks interesting as well. I created a Learning 2.0 meeting for tomorrow and invited my sister. Interestingly it said the presenter should be on a Windows PC. How rude :-)

I had a look at the FAQs for Zoho Meeting and it says the service can be used to share the desktop online and provide remote assistance to customers. Working in IT this might be a useful service to assist with web or PC problems.

Google Docs offered a little less. I could create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and share these docs with others.

Hmmm I think Microsoft should be a little worried. Who wants to spend approx $750 for Windows Office 2007 Professional when you have access to these tools?

Lastly I had a look at Google Calendar. I did have a look at this a few months ago, thinking about using it as an organisational calendar for events. I could share the calendar with everyone and embed it into the sidebar of my library blog. Still thinking about this. I don't want things entered multiple times as we already have our events added to the Intranet for the bookings system. Anyhoo it has potential in and organisation and at home. You could set up a private calendar for members of your family and share it with each other.

Cheers, webgurl