Pooh sticks

So I feel like a bear with very little brain today - and meandering around Technorati has not helped. Can someone please explain the point of it all? I get that it ...

• helps you search through some of the 50 million blogs in the world
• allows to to add the 'coolest' blogs to your favourites
• enables you to check the 'ranking' of your own blog(s)
• see how many people are writing blogs about Paris Hilton

And my question to all of that is, why would you want to? Maybe I spend too much of my time reading books and not reading blogs? I don't think so.

Don't get me wrong, I mean, I love the idea that anyone can write their heart out and 'publish' it without going through some critical, opinionated, judgemental editorial/publishing process. But I know that these general ramblings of mine are just that - ramblings and probably of little or no interest to the general reading public or even the general non-reading public (maybe that's why I put pictures in?). I know that there are probably some major gems out there in blogland - really great, interesting writers who choose the blog as their medium - but the amount of dross means that even with Technorati and its brethren, you have about as much chance of finding them as winning lotto and the Booker Prize in the same week.

I did the required searched for Library 2.0 and my conclusion is that some people are cataloguers, some people can learn to be cataloguers and some people wouldn't know what a catalogue was if the entire AACR compendium dropped onto their foot.

Maybe if there was an easier way of finding out what tags you should use or that other people have used or whatever ... it justed seemed too random.

Maybe I should go into cataloguing ....

Delicious but ugly

If it's Thursday then it must be blog time ... and del.icio.us. Whoever designed this website needs to be taken out to the back paddock and given a good talking to. It has to be one of the most hideous websites out there. How much effort would it have taken to make it just a little more visually appealing? I'm not talking uber-stylely here ... just the odd bit of thought given to typography and AWS (aka aesthetic white space).

Any who (as a certain Mt Roskill librarian would say), I like that idea of tagging your bookmarks and being able to locate them linearly rather than using the strict standard hierarchical system. But then again, I'm a closet bookmarker from way back. I did set up my own del.icio.us account and imported my bookmarks into it. It said it may take "a while". I have just found out that "a while" in cyber terms means enough time to do a desk shift, have a cup of coffee, section part of the reference section and rearrange the pens in my top drawer. Told you I had a few bookmarks.

Found this tagging thing very useful for stuff like my family history sites - you're not limited to 'filing' (and therefore finding) a site under just one topic but can tag it all sorts of ways to locate it. So I can find the Cille Choirill churchyard site (picture above - last resting place of my g-g-g-g-grandfather) under scotland, lochaber, cemeteries, cameron, and lots of other tags.

Having a library background and being semi- au fait with subject headings does help though - as I found out when I saw some of the more 'interesting' ways other people had tagged some of my favourite websites. Either they didn't read or understand the instructions or the tagging concept did not reach the requisite part of their cerebral cortext.

BUT it takes one heck of a lot of work to 're-tag' all your bookmarks if you have a whole bunch to start with ... and I'm not sure when/if I'll run out of steam and go back to the old way.

Humble Pie & Raglan Cardigans?

This is a raglan cardigan ...




And this is a pie ...

because, of course, I ended up finding a great use for my rollyo knitting pattern search engine to locate a pattern for a knitted raglan sleeved cardigan for a one-year old girl.

Don't you hate it when that happens ...

Roll, roll, roll your search

Task #12 ... which means that if I do half of this, I've halfway through the 23 things:) Just to be pedantic.


I had a good play with Rollyo - and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread to start with. I mean, how cool is it to be able to make your own search engine!

I found a couple of 'pre-rolled' knitting pattern search engines and edited them to add my own stuff and delete the pages that I didn't like. I also put together another engine which put a whole lot of New Zealand shipping list sites together.

Well, the knitting pattern one worked OK - if you ignore (and it is a tad difficult considering the number of them!) all the ads sprinkled through the results. However there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason about what went first or last and many of the results on the list were the same pattern from different sites (which you would probably get on google as well, but, natch, I'm having a moan here!).


The shipping list one was a total bust - as most of the list pages have a separate search engine to search the list on that particular site - so the rollyo list only searched the main pages - not the embedded data. If I had read all the instructions maybe I would have found that out before I tried it ... but I thought this would be really great if this works and it didn't ... (and I never read all the instructions before I start anything ...which is why I once knitted a jersey with three sleeves)


As for browsing 'celebrity' search rolls ... I'm sorry but no.


So only 5/10 for Rollyo so far - although I like the principle and I'm sure I could find it useful in the future for particular tasks/searches. However, I'm more than happy to stick with Google for now - if it's not broke, then why fix it?

Styley Learning from Unshelved

Just had to share the latest Unshelved strip - for all of you out there who did the the On the Job training workshop and are still wondering about learning styles

If a picture's worth ...

OK - so task #10 - online image generators. Hmmmm. Had a play ... some worked, a lot didn't. I tried the Che Guevara generator - and the instructions were in French. My French is pretty bad - only time I've ever used it was to direct a taxi in Noumea and I ended up in the wrong place.

So I flipped onto the Delft plate generator. It worked but I couldn't save the image - just order a plate. I will admit to trying the fart generator but it didn't have an image I could put on my blog and my workmates kept giving me funny looks (I think the computer volume may have been a little on the loud side maybe?).

Ended up with the Dumbledore generator ... results below.

On the grand scale of things, I probably wouldn't use any of this again. Maybe OK to waste a few idle moments if you've got nothing better to do ...

Liked the mash-ups better as there was more creativity involved and they were generally easier to use.

So I came, I saw, I played ... and if a picture is worth a thousand words then I suppose an online image generator may have its uses ... I suppose it really depends of what the thousand words say.

Wild thing

Task #11 - Library Thing. I've been a good little blogger (that sounds ruder than it is probably) and set up my Librarything account and added my books and played around with the tags and added some ratings ... and thought that this rocked ... and then I read the bit about once you have 200 books on your shelf, they want your moola before you can add any more.

Arghhhhh. Sites like this annoy me. They tantalise and tease you, get you excited with all their cool widgets and stuff ... and then once you are really really hooked - they hit you with "Sorry it's not free anymore" but you can carry on for $$$$$! They have names for people that do things like that.




So the above picture sort of sums up my feelings about Librarything a little. It is a good idea and I like the way you can see what other people have thought of books and you can categorise what you've read and look for suggestions for future reading ... but, after you've invested a lot of time and effort and interest - it can be a tad on the peevish side to them realise that you must pay (a yearly sum) to carry on.

And mucho thanks to the Mad Hamster for the Good reads suggestion ... I'll give that one a try ...

Rock on with Roskill Rocks!

Introducing Roskill Rocks to the world at large.

You see, we're all a kind, caring, sharing bunch at our library and were wondering how to pool our ideas, talent & braincells to help each other out with this Learning 2.0 gamut - which can be a tod on the tricky side when we all work different day etc etc...

And so Roskill Rocks was born ... to spread the joy so to speak ....

And we're not partisan about it ... you are all welcome to add, comment, use (and abuse, as long as you do it nicely)

Oh my ... a blog about blogging ... whatever will the world come to?

Blogging on ...

Task #9 - subscribed to Unshelved and Internet Index and Techessense Info and The Shifted Librarian ...

Found it a bit difficult to find NZ library blogs - mainly due to the overabundance of US material and other totally unrelated stuff whenever you search. Not the most user friendly of search interfaces on Bloglines if you ask me. Mind you, I rather quickly passed over the zillions of other librarians' blogs. I don't really see myself being that interested in the inner ramblings of some semi-incoherent library person I wouldn't recognise if I fell over them in the street. News yes ... ramblings, no.

Found it easier to search for interesting related websites on google and them locate their feeds that way ... possibly not the most efficient way of doing things but it worked for me:)

So have subscribed to a couple of the National Library blogs - including Create Reads which I already knew about but it still counts ... doesn't it?

And ... just because I hope that someone out in Blog World will want to read the incoherent ramblings of a random librarian, I've added a cool Bloglines subscribe button onto my blog - very cool.

And just to show you what my cat Bentley thinks of blogs in general ....

Cabbages

The time has come, the walrus said
to speak of many things
of ships and sacks and sealing wax
of cabbages and kings

Just thought I'd start the week with a bit of poetry - adds a bit o'class like?

Have been mashing-up with a vengeance (or should that mash-upping - which sounds more like a small Somerset village?) and uploading a bunch more photos to the family flickr album.

And have succumbed and bought a scanner/printer finally which does make life a little easier - particularly as it means I don't have to spend the major part of my lunchhour using the library scanner which uses a programme similar to Windows 3.1:)

It also means I get to play around with my photos a bit more - like cropping photos down to make them look better and enlarging some of the older B&W photos. Some family photos are on prints the size of postage stamps - so it is rather cool to be able to re-scan them and have them so normal people can see them without a microscope! Like this rather cool photo of my mum aged three - which was the size of an old 50c piece and really overexposed:)

The wonders of modern technology ... except , of course, I revert back to the Dark Ages at the flick of a whatever, and have carefully cleaned, catalogued, copied and named all the original photos and stuck them into a real, honest to goodness, non-cyber photo album!

Only problem ... (and you can try this at home too!) try going into a stationery shop and asking for photo or stamp hinges - the blank looks you get are quite priceless - particularly from anyone who was born anytime after the last time the All Blacks got past the semi fianls of the World Cup (and that's all I'm going to say about rugby ... so there)

Haere ra

And so to bed ...

So it's the end of my week (ya boo to all those that work Tues - Sat!) - so perhaps time for a little introspective retrospection about the first week (well, official week) of this Web 2.0 thingamigig.

What have I learnt?

• That I'm actually not as much of a web geek as I had thought (Phew!).
• That learning new web stuff is quite fun once the computer starts behaving itself.
• That most instructions for Web 2.0 stuff are not written in the English language as we know it
• That making mash-up magazine covers of all your workmates does not qualify as shelving according to the roster
• That I'm much more of a web geek than most people I know (bugger!)

Farewell, good night and amen

Feed your mind!

Hint: If you only check your bloglines feeds on a daily (or bi-daily) basis, don't subscribe to feeds that refresh hourly (like RadioNZ) otherwise you can be confronted with a rather large number of items to trawl through:) Just a suggestion ...

A few interesting library feeds out there (Go Unshelved! - I really want one of those 'Frequently Asked Questions' T-shirts) If you have not experienced Unshelved yet, check it out! That is an order:) http://www.unshelved.com/ A rather dry comic strip - but also some rather other worldly events like the "Pimp my Bookcart" competition (only in America)

The Librarian's Internet index is rather interesting if very US biased. Maybe, just maybe, once we are all Web 2.0'ed, we could set up our own Internet Index - adding interesting sites, the latest fitches, new books, good reads, study suggestions ... could be a very interesting reference tool n'est ce pas?

Think about it ....

Green Minis

Isn't it strange that when you become aware of something, you suddenly see them everywhere. Try it yourself at home! Think of green Minis. And then you'll see them everywhere and wonder why you never noticed the plethora of leaf-hued small cars before?

Feels like that with this RSS thing - read the latest Web 2.0 assignment, set up my bloglines account and, wham bam, suddenly that little orange logo is everywhere! I open up any website and there is is - lurking in all its orange glory.

So I've subscribed to a few interesting feeds (and found that a lot of the rest of them are entirely strange and wonder why people would feel the necessity of being notified everytime they changed/updated).

Not sure whether I'll be able maintain this. I sort of like the idea of having all the stuff I'm interested in delivered direct without me having to remember to check up on it. Like getting the latest Unshelved strip delivered direct - wahoo! But then again, it could be a huge time waster:)

Mind you, I suppose that this customising and information delivery is all the thing now and what this whole Web 2.0 shebang is all about. I will confess to setting up an iGoogle home page with a few widgets on it - so I suppose a rss feed account is pretty standard operating procedure as well.

Next thing I'll be doing the grocery shopping online and having that delivered as well .... yikes!

Spring is sprung

So now do we have to change the first day of spring until Oct 1? The tree outside the workroom window here at Mt Roskill is covered with beautiful white blossoms, the tuis are singing in the trees and the teenagers are haggling over bebo:) Spring is sprung.

Have been having lots of fun adding comments to other people's blogs and poking people on facebook and other such stuff.

However, I heartily agree with Ms Mad Hamster that technology is very cool when it helps you do something that you wanted to do anyway. It's when it intrudes and interferes and puts wiggly lines under things and pops things up and suggests and tries to predict what I want that I get a tad on the snarly side.

I mean, we would all get rather hacked off if other appliances around the house started suggesting things to us!

Imagine waking up on a sunny weekend morning - nothing to do except peer at the underside of the duvet - and you hear the dull whine of your vacuum cleaner suggesting that you might just want to give the lounge a once over?

Put the bread in the toaster and the toaster suggests that you might want to have crumpets instead?

Open the fridge to get the milk - and five pieces of junk mail pop out of the butter conditioner and hit you on the nose.

Nuff said ...