I kind of like this Thing, although I don't travel as much as many do. We've done a little more traveling recently as my husband now works for an airline and we can fly standby. I like Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Travel Forum, since I buy Lonely Planet country books for our reference collection (I hope we can get them online soon.) LP books have good cultural information on countries. I was amused by the entry I read in the Travel 2.0 blog (written by two travel industry professionals.) It was about the re-branding of Montana, in a travel sense. As a business librarian, I'm often intrigued by things that re-brand, or feel the need to re-brand. "Montana's redefined brand is all about natural splendor, charming and vibrant towns, and invigorating experiences by day with relaxing hospitality in the evening." It just makes me smile.
I know I've seen various travel review/rating sites as I've done travel planning. Took a quick look at TripAdvisor, and it doesn't look like they list MY favorite hotel in San Francisco (maybe someday I'll remedy that.) Given my recent adventures with Google Maps, Mapness (travel journal plus Google Maps) looks interesting, but feels intimidating (it gets you started at the get-go, but that's how I crashed my browser with Google Maps.) I took a brief look at the Travel Mashup - Mashup Awards; I'm not excited about the Twitter winners, but the others seem worth a visit.
I'll think about adding the Lonely Planet site to our country information guide. My favorite of those I saw is still the Travel 2.0 blog. I seem to remember the Twin Cities was trying to re-brand before the Republicans came to town. I wonder how that turned out?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Thing 32: Google Maps and Mashups
Well, I was a little "anti-Google" when I started this (surprise, surprise.) I'm not a big fan of Google taking a picture of my house and posting it on the internet without my permission. Yeah, I know, I could opt out. But my husband believes in this stuff, so I err on his side. But I ask you, if this had been a government agency going around taking pictures of people's houses, and posting them in a public place, don't you think people would be up in arms? Why is it perfectly fine when a company does it?
Anyway, I've tried to use Google's mapping a bit, since I've gotten mislead a few times by MapQuest (I don't know what it is, but there directions are just plain wrong sometimes. We've gotten lost.) I have never been able to figure out the zoom out/zoom in symbols, much less how to go east, or north, or whatever. It always does what I don't want it to do.
So you won't be surprised when I tell you that my browser crashed while I was making my Google map, will you?
************************
At least when it crashed I didn't lose the whole thing. "Google My Maps is easy to use." Ha! After spending too many minutes trying to get the map to do what I wanted (sometimes there's an "undo" link, sometimes not), I realized that I should have tried my initial thought, "a map of my daily commute." It's easier to make a map of streets that you're very familiar with (at least, I assume it would be.) So I've only got two places marked on my map, but I really can't spend any more time on this today. I'd like to put in a picture, but the pictures must still be on the camera (they don't seem to be on our website yet.)
Let's see if the link to
View
View Mike, Marianne, and Ellie go to San Francisco 2009 in a larger map'>Mike, Marianne, and Ellie go to San Francisco 2009 in a larger map'>our San Francisco trip works. I hope so! (Yeah, I know, it's not displaying correctly. But I've been messing with it for 10 minutes, and I'm fed up.)
Other maps/mashups that I found interesting: the various ZIP code maps, since we get regular questions about ZIP code boundaries (too bad the maps had disclaimers about not necessarily being accurate); the World Bank's mashup of ease of business in different countries. We have Google map things on our library websites. I'd really like to spend more time doing this - it could be fun, for creating work-related things, maps of vacations, etc. But I'll have to do this later - gotta get back to work.
Anyway, I've tried to use Google's mapping a bit, since I've gotten mislead a few times by MapQuest (I don't know what it is, but there directions are just plain wrong sometimes. We've gotten lost.) I have never been able to figure out the zoom out/zoom in symbols, much less how to go east, or north, or whatever. It always does what I don't want it to do.
So you won't be surprised when I tell you that my browser crashed while I was making my Google map, will you?
************************
At least when it crashed I didn't lose the whole thing. "Google My Maps is easy to use." Ha! After spending too many minutes trying to get the map to do what I wanted (sometimes there's an "undo" link, sometimes not), I realized that I should have tried my initial thought, "a map of my daily commute." It's easier to make a map of streets that you're very familiar with (at least, I assume it would be.) So I've only got two places marked on my map, but I really can't spend any more time on this today. I'd like to put in a picture, but the pictures must still be on the camera (they don't seem to be on our website yet.)
Let's see if the link to
View
View Mike, Marianne, and Ellie go to San Francisco 2009 in a larger map'>Mike, Marianne, and Ellie go to San Francisco 2009 in a larger map'>our San Francisco trip works. I hope so! (Yeah, I know, it's not displaying correctly. But I've been messing with it for 10 minutes, and I'm fed up.)
Other maps/mashups that I found interesting: the various ZIP code maps, since we get regular questions about ZIP code boundaries (too bad the maps had disclaimers about not necessarily being accurate); the World Bank's mashup of ease of business in different countries. We have Google map things on our library websites. I'd really like to spend more time doing this - it could be fun, for creating work-related things, maps of vacations, etc. But I'll have to do this later - gotta get back to work.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Thing 31: More Twitter
First, I have to follow up on my last post about Delicious. In the "I have to see somebody doing something before I realize its usefulness" department: just after that post, I went to a meeting of local library colleagues. One of them is developing library subject guides using LibGuides, a newish tool for developing library subject guides (that I wish we'd look at.) In his subject pages, he's using Delicious tag clouds to provide links to useful websites by subtopic (it's not live yet, so I can't link to it.) Now this is an application that makes sense to me. I do have a couple of reservations - I'm not sure I want the "group mind" to prioritize recommended websites (although I'm interested in trying it out), and I don't have too many guides where "websites" is a category. I tend to group things by content (industry overviews, demographics, etc.) But it's an intriguing idea.
Twitter. You know, I'm just not a Twitter person. Maybe if I had more current mobile technology, and/or were online more. I don't have the dexterity to text on my cell phone to begin with (not to mention trying to read the small display.) I don't have an iPhone, or a BlackBerry. My cell phone is a Nokia, no camera, with a font that's about two sizes too small for my eyes. I can't remember where the backspace key is. Maybe this sounds lame, like I'm some klutzy antique who just can't figure things out. But it seems to me than some responsibility for usable interfaces falls on the designers of these technologies, and why do I keep hearing stories about people who hate their cell phones.
I'm not going to do mobile twittering. I could do email, but I'm still a day behind on my recent work email (the price of taking a real day off), and I'm three days behind on my personal email. Doggone it, it's the gardening season! I've been in the garden, not online!
I've looked at some of the Twitter options, and examples. I like the idea of Twilert, that gets you updates on product availability. I can think of several times recently I could have used that (I wonder if I could get to a store in time to get an item before it's sold out?) And TwitterSnooze, which lets you "hit the snooze button on your verbose Twitter friends" (I could something like that in Facebook.) So I'm at the Denial/Presence, "I don't get it, but I have an account" stage of Twitter. What do I think Twitter is? I think it's a scene from the radio play "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where our hero Arthur Dent is vainly trying to communicate something, and no one quite gets what he's saying.
But one thing I can say about these last several weeks of looking at new tools: sometimes the "killer application" has to hit me on the head, by seeing somebody else do it, or by letting it percolate in the back of my head until the connections are made. Sometimes I really do Get It.
Twitter. You know, I'm just not a Twitter person. Maybe if I had more current mobile technology, and/or were online more. I don't have the dexterity to text on my cell phone to begin with (not to mention trying to read the small display.) I don't have an iPhone, or a BlackBerry. My cell phone is a Nokia, no camera, with a font that's about two sizes too small for my eyes. I can't remember where the backspace key is. Maybe this sounds lame, like I'm some klutzy antique who just can't figure things out. But it seems to me than some responsibility for usable interfaces falls on the designers of these technologies, and why do I keep hearing stories about people who hate their cell phones.
I'm not going to do mobile twittering. I could do email, but I'm still a day behind on my recent work email (the price of taking a real day off), and I'm three days behind on my personal email. Doggone it, it's the gardening season! I've been in the garden, not online!
I've looked at some of the Twitter options, and examples. I like the idea of Twilert, that gets you updates on product availability. I can think of several times recently I could have used that (I wonder if I could get to a store in time to get an item before it's sold out?) And TwitterSnooze, which lets you "hit the snooze button on your verbose Twitter friends" (I could something like that in Facebook.) So I'm at the Denial/Presence, "I don't get it, but I have an account" stage of Twitter. What do I think Twitter is? I think it's a scene from the radio play "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where our hero Arthur Dent is vainly trying to communicate something, and no one quite gets what he's saying.
But one thing I can say about these last several weeks of looking at new tools: sometimes the "killer application" has to hit me on the head, by seeing somebody else do it, or by letting it percolate in the back of my head until the connections are made. Sometimes I really do Get It.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious
I've been struggling with this Thing, and I think I know why. One of the things I struggle with is sensory overload: too much coming at me at once to make sense. The more that new things come at me, the more I need to step back and go STOP! Let me make sense of this at my own speed! Another thing I struggle with is that I have LOTS of interests (gardening and books and old movies and old television and library stuff and....), and I struggle with "moderating" the flow of my information so that I don't miss things that might interest me.
I have not been using my Bloglines account for RSS feeds, and have been feeling "guilty" for not using it. Going directly to blogs that interest me and reading them "live" on the web works better for me, partly because I feel more in control. I can read it when I want to, and what I've missed, I don't know about. The idea of using keywords to filter RSS feeds is interesting, but what keywords would I choose? The trick with keywords is that there isn't necessarily standardization (none of that subject heading or descriptor stuff.) I should be interested in Delicious, despite my privacy concerns, since I do use things on multiple computers, and it would be nice to have my bookmarks someplace. But I'm just not there yet. I think it would be handy when planning a trip, for example, to have links to sights to see, to plan with your fellow travelers. And you could share links with your colleagues (we used to do that on our reference desk computer, but they kept getting purged by the tech folks.)
When I first finished doing the 23 Things, I tried to set up a schedule of 2.0 activities (schedules are something that work really well with me.) Doing my blog posting on a schedule worked pretty well (I posted most Friday mornings.) I didn't find a workable schedule for the other things I tried to do. Since we don't have regular schedules at my institution (i.e., I don't have a regular schedule that I'm on the reference desk, it's different every day, every week), that makes scheduling other things more challenging.
I guess I just need to make some time in my schedule to play around in these things, so that they work well for me. What works for me seems to be different than what works for most people.
I have not been using my Bloglines account for RSS feeds, and have been feeling "guilty" for not using it. Going directly to blogs that interest me and reading them "live" on the web works better for me, partly because I feel more in control. I can read it when I want to, and what I've missed, I don't know about. The idea of using keywords to filter RSS feeds is interesting, but what keywords would I choose? The trick with keywords is that there isn't necessarily standardization (none of that subject heading or descriptor stuff.) I should be interested in Delicious, despite my privacy concerns, since I do use things on multiple computers, and it would be nice to have my bookmarks someplace. But I'm just not there yet. I think it would be handy when planning a trip, for example, to have links to sights to see, to plan with your fellow travelers. And you could share links with your colleagues (we used to do that on our reference desk computer, but they kept getting purged by the tech folks.)
When I first finished doing the 23 Things, I tried to set up a schedule of 2.0 activities (schedules are something that work really well with me.) Doing my blog posting on a schedule worked pretty well (I posted most Friday mornings.) I didn't find a workable schedule for the other things I tried to do. Since we don't have regular schedules at my institution (i.e., I don't have a regular schedule that I'm on the reference desk, it's different every day, every week), that makes scheduling other things more challenging.
I guess I just need to make some time in my schedule to play around in these things, so that they work well for me. What works for me seems to be different than what works for most people.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Thing 29: Google Tools
Ah, yes. The World According to Google, again. This things deals with various lesser-known features of Google, with the option to use other, similar tools if you're not a Google fan. I think I've blogged before about my adversion to putting all of my eggs into anyone's basket, including Google's, so I'll be looking non-Google.
News: Google News lets you personalize your news page and get sources by topic. The ProQuest databases are listed as an option, and we get ProQuest Newsstand as part of the ELM database collection. In ProQuest Newsstand you can set up table of contents alerts for new issues of a magazine or newspaper, and search alerts for new articles on a particular topic. ProQuest doesn't make it easy to figure this out, and I can't think of a publication or topic right now, so I changed my mind and moved on to EBSCO databases.
Currently I have one search alert through EBSCO (I used to have more, but I tended not to check them.) I've been meaning to get a family subscription to Newsweek for a long time (we thought we got one last year, but somebody got our money, and no subscription.) So I signed up to get an alert on Newsweek. I guess I'm just used to the odd, library way of doing things, rather than the new-millenium Google way. The search alert I have been using is for Computers in Libraries, and I do like that, and much prefer it to the system of routing paper journals (which I'm really bad at, and should get off all paper routing. Really.)
For the other part of this Thing, I have to choose between Mail, Calendar, and Web Site creation. I'm not keen on corporate America peeking into any of these parts of my life - which is the lesser evil? Sigh. I thought I already had a Google Mail account, since I've had to use Google for other things (this blog, a Google Groups activity at work last year), but no G-Mail, apparently. So I turn to Yahoo Mail, which I know I've used before. And guess what? I'm deactivated (either I turned it off, or I haven't used it for four months.) Grr. Well, poop on this mail stuff. I have two email accounts already (work and personal); I don't need more. What about Calendar?
Calendar: Yahoo Calendar lets me in (even though my email through them is deactivated.) So I've been tweaking settings and so forth. It is nice that you can make your day as long or short as you need. One of the big drawbacks of my paper calendar is that it's a traditional, 8-to-5 calendar, with little room to add details for the evening (and miniscule space for weekends.) It's interesting that you can only set appointments on the "15s" (i.e. 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45.) It would be tricky for our university setting, where we have classes starting at times like 9:40 and 1:35. I DO like the Event Type pull-down, with a LOT of possible settings (anniversary, appoinment, breakfast, interview, movie, etc. - interesting that they have Breakfast and not Brunch. Oh, well.) Much nicer in this than Outlook Calendar. I like that the display of one week seems to be customizable, you can go Friday through the following Thursday, for example. If I didn't have such major privacy concerns about this, it would be an interesting way to set up family calendards, schedule what our daughter is doing which week this summer, etc. I'm not sure this calendar can be embedded in the blog, as suggested in the Thing, but here's the URL: http://calendar.yahoo.com/marianne.hageman.
This calendar thing is worth thinking about.
News: Google News lets you personalize your news page and get sources by topic. The ProQuest databases are listed as an option, and we get ProQuest Newsstand as part of the ELM database collection. In ProQuest Newsstand you can set up table of contents alerts for new issues of a magazine or newspaper, and search alerts for new articles on a particular topic. ProQuest doesn't make it easy to figure this out, and I can't think of a publication or topic right now, so I changed my mind and moved on to EBSCO databases.
Currently I have one search alert through EBSCO (I used to have more, but I tended not to check them.) I've been meaning to get a family subscription to Newsweek for a long time (we thought we got one last year, but somebody got our money, and no subscription.) So I signed up to get an alert on Newsweek. I guess I'm just used to the odd, library way of doing things, rather than the new-millenium Google way. The search alert I have been using is for Computers in Libraries, and I do like that, and much prefer it to the system of routing paper journals (which I'm really bad at, and should get off all paper routing. Really.)
For the other part of this Thing, I have to choose between Mail, Calendar, and Web Site creation. I'm not keen on corporate America peeking into any of these parts of my life - which is the lesser evil? Sigh. I thought I already had a Google Mail account, since I've had to use Google for other things (this blog, a Google Groups activity at work last year), but no G-Mail, apparently. So I turn to Yahoo Mail, which I know I've used before. And guess what? I'm deactivated (either I turned it off, or I haven't used it for four months.) Grr. Well, poop on this mail stuff. I have two email accounts already (work and personal); I don't need more. What about Calendar?
Calendar: Yahoo Calendar lets me in (even though my email through them is deactivated.) So I've been tweaking settings and so forth. It is nice that you can make your day as long or short as you need. One of the big drawbacks of my paper calendar is that it's a traditional, 8-to-5 calendar, with little room to add details for the evening (and miniscule space for weekends.) It's interesting that you can only set appointments on the "15s" (i.e. 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45.) It would be tricky for our university setting, where we have classes starting at times like 9:40 and 1:35. I DO like the Event Type pull-down, with a LOT of possible settings (anniversary, appoinment, breakfast, interview, movie, etc. - interesting that they have Breakfast and not Brunch. Oh, well.) Much nicer in this than Outlook Calendar. I like that the display of one week seems to be customizable, you can go Friday through the following Thursday, for example. If I didn't have such major privacy concerns about this, it would be an interesting way to set up family calendards, schedule what our daughter is doing which week this summer, etc. I'm not sure this calendar can be embedded in the blog, as suggested in the Thing, but here's the URL: http://calendar.yahoo.com/marianne.hageman.
This calendar thing is worth thinking about.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Thing 28: Customized Home Pages
Before I blog about today's topic, I have a Twitter addendum. After I logged off the other day, I listed to more news on the radio about the flu outbreak. A reported noted that MANY people were following the government's public health presence on Twitter, to keep up with the latest information. So for many folks, Twitter is becoming what the radio (or television news) has been for past generations: a way to get current, reliable information where they are. Since I'm not "there" in Twitter very often, no wonder I don't get it!
On to Thing 28, customizing a home page. This covers iGoogle, PageFlakes, My Yahoo!, and other productivity tools. I looked back in my blog, and we first focused on this in Thing 13. I looked at the three, and liked PageFlakes the best, so I opened it up. (I discussed in my earlier post what I liked about PageFlakes over the others, but basically it could tell the difference between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and displayed better.) It took me a minute to remember how to navigate, but it was pretty easy. Had to add that Facebook widget right away! I would like to get more on top of podcasts, but I need to learn more about the relationship between my home laptop, iTunes, and podcasts before I get started. I think I'd like to dink around with it a bit more, but I'm going to do some blogging before fun. ;^)
But wait - this is interesting. I looked at the link to the blog post about PageFlakes, and discovered that there's a teacher edition of PageFlakes that can be customized for educators. How cool is that! I like what's in the example - a to-do list, research link (Google, Google, always Google - funny how it isn't "Link to My Library"), educational bookmarks, etc. When you have your "work" hat on, this makes more sense that all of the entertainment widgets in the regular PageFlakes (I'm not that much into modern entertainment.) I want to look at this more later.
On portals and customized pages: we have been talking at my institution about personalized library experiences for a long time. We'd look around the web and see it done at other institutions; why not here? Either our IT folks didn't get it (for the library experience), or we didn't have the software tools we needed to make it happen, but we made little progress until just recently. This semester the university did a beta trial of a student portal, and over Easter break it was opened up to all students. The library had been consulted on our presence last year, and the subject librarians ranked databases and other content that students could pick. Then, as it came closer to going live, it sounded like we wouldn't have access to it right away (we weren't students, after all!) So our library tech folks made the case that we couldn't help students with library-related portal questions if we couldn't see what they were looking at, so we were given accounts. And I think we're using Google Analytics to get some good data on use. I don't have a good impression yet on how it's going over with students, but I think they'll be comfortable with using it.
Portals for library staff? I think I've pondered in other posts about coming up with a go-to place for my colleagues. We've had Outlook Public Folders, shared network folders, a commercial wiki, a staff presence in the Blackboard course management system. Now we're beginning to talk about Sharepoint, and our tech students are using it already. We need something to get people into the same shared space, which is something of an uphill battle (not all staff seem to be OK with email, for that matter.) We need some big nudges.
On to Thing 28, customizing a home page. This covers iGoogle, PageFlakes, My Yahoo!, and other productivity tools. I looked back in my blog, and we first focused on this in Thing 13. I looked at the three, and liked PageFlakes the best, so I opened it up. (I discussed in my earlier post what I liked about PageFlakes over the others, but basically it could tell the difference between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and displayed better.) It took me a minute to remember how to navigate, but it was pretty easy. Had to add that Facebook widget right away! I would like to get more on top of podcasts, but I need to learn more about the relationship between my home laptop, iTunes, and podcasts before I get started. I think I'd like to dink around with it a bit more, but I'm going to do some blogging before fun. ;^)
But wait - this is interesting. I looked at the link to the blog post about PageFlakes, and discovered that there's a teacher edition of PageFlakes that can be customized for educators. How cool is that! I like what's in the example - a to-do list, research link (Google, Google, always Google - funny how it isn't "Link to My Library"), educational bookmarks, etc. When you have your "work" hat on, this makes more sense that all of the entertainment widgets in the regular PageFlakes (I'm not that much into modern entertainment.) I want to look at this more later.
On portals and customized pages: we have been talking at my institution about personalized library experiences for a long time. We'd look around the web and see it done at other institutions; why not here? Either our IT folks didn't get it (for the library experience), or we didn't have the software tools we needed to make it happen, but we made little progress until just recently. This semester the university did a beta trial of a student portal, and over Easter break it was opened up to all students. The library had been consulted on our presence last year, and the subject librarians ranked databases and other content that students could pick. Then, as it came closer to going live, it sounded like we wouldn't have access to it right away (we weren't students, after all!) So our library tech folks made the case that we couldn't help students with library-related portal questions if we couldn't see what they were looking at, so we were given accounts. And I think we're using Google Analytics to get some good data on use. I don't have a good impression yet on how it's going over with students, but I think they'll be comfortable with using it.
Portals for library staff? I think I've pondered in other posts about coming up with a go-to place for my colleagues. We've had Outlook Public Folders, shared network folders, a commercial wiki, a staff presence in the Blackboard course management system. Now we're beginning to talk about Sharepoint, and our tech students are using it already. We need something to get people into the same shared space, which is something of an uphill battle (not all staff seem to be OK with email, for that matter.) We need some big nudges.
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