If a picture paints a thousand words ...

... how many does a widget paint? If a widget can paint that is.

Have dutifully embedded the Bookjetty widget as per instructions from the Power(s) That Be (which, incidentally, is an excellent sci-fi series by Anne McCaffrey - not as good as the Pern series, but not much is)

So that's the end of Week 3 ... and I'm all booked up. Or booked out?

Always look on the bright side of life ...

I am trying to find good things about Bookjetty - really .... it's just not working all that well.

So instead, a small segue ... did you know that Monty Python's Always look on the bright side of life was voted #5 in the list of favourite funeral songs? There, that made you smile didn't it?

Ok , so back to Bookjetty ... umm, positive things to say about Bookjetty ...

Did you know that elephants are the only animals with four knees?

Right, enough of that ... Bookjetty ... well it has a nice font.

Apart from that, not much I can find to like about this site.

• Yes, you can link to Amazon and buy the book - but Amazon is so ubitquitous, you can probably access it from the Foodtown website.


• Yes, you can link to a library catalogue - just not the catalogue for any libraries I belong to.


• Yes, you can "catalogue" your book - but only as read or unread - most other "shelf" sites allow you to categorise by a particular genre/author and add your own shelves.


• I found it hard to search for book by title (i.e. without the ISBN) - until I realised that you could do this using the (unlabelled) search box at the top of the page.

Maybe the final word should go to the Bookjetty website itself - I know how it feels.

Author! Author!

Had a look at Authors on the web and the Author Yellow Pages. I wasn't overly impressed by either site. Authors on the web is a commercial web design service rather than a site that might be useful in any way for readers' advisory. And if there is a search function on the Yellow Pages site, I couldn't find it. And when I want to search, I want to search - NOT browse.

Plus neither sites had listings for the first five authors I browsed for - ok, they were all British authors, but there are some very good books published on the eastern side of the Atlantic ... honest.

There are better options out there to recommend to patrons - here's two

Fantastic Fiction - great range of authors available, searchable, browsable, new books, coming soon, series lists, inks to authors websites, author recommendations, series reading order, soon to be published books, reader recommendations, and so on and so on ...

Overbooked - recommended lists, genre lists, new books, award lists, author sites (includes free webspace for authors)

Book Reporter was slightly better - coverage an issue here also though - the authors I looked for are not obscure - but BR seems to follow very mainstream American lines.

So I'm embedding my favourite book site and one I have recommended to many patrons over the years and will continue to recommend to all and sundry (not that we refer to our patrons as sundry ... honest)

You may say that I'm a dreamer ... but I'm not the only one?

Week 3 - yeah right (back to that parallel universe again!)

I don't think I'm a book club person - and I'm not sure whether I'd ever want to be ... This rash assertion is totally based on trawling through the Litlovers website.

I should have known, I should have read the warnings signs. After all, in the cyberworld of the Carolingian minuscule , they spell Lit with a capital L. Yeah yeah, I know it's abbreviated, gotta be slightly hip after all, but you can't go past that capital L.

It's a massive red flag waving from your monitor, an air raid siren blasting out of the your computer speakers, hands ready to reach out and grasp you around the neck and yell "This site is for Readers (note: capital R), for people who read real books, for people who worry about the subtext in Jane Eyre (I always thought that subtext was pencil notes people had written under the lines in a book), for people that read Literature" (and who probably went to more than the first lecture of English Literature 101)

It might as well also shriek "Anyone who can name more than one Janet Evanovich book does not belong here."

I found this website didn't so much tell me what books I might want to read (possibly based on some rash rationale around what books I have enjoyed in the past) - rather what books I should be reading if I knew what was good for me - in between dropping Tarquin at Rudolf Steiner and volunteering at the Oxfam/Trade Aid shop.

I searched for various books I was remotely interested in reading that I thought might be good to discuss in a book group - and soon realised that either

a) I have very strange taste in books (probably true)
b) People that join book groups have an even stranger taste in books (see note above)
c) I should never join a book group (see above)

Want an example? Under Bridget Jones' Diary - which I defy anyone to categorise as anything other than chick-lit (despite preponderance of P&P references/plot stealing) - are the following suggested "questions/discussion points" from LitLovers

1. How does the media influence women's self-images?
2. Why do women collaborate so energetically in the process?

Arghhhhhh! What about just enjoying the story? What about the jokes? What about the sheer delirium of losing yourself in a book?

So apologies dear autonomous anonymous blog auditors ... but I couldn't really find any appropriate resources for my book group's reading of Bridget Jones Diary on the venerable LitLover website ... here's my suggested list anyway

1. Copy of book (or copy of movie DVD for those that can't be buggered reading the book) - extra points for the odd coffee stain, chocolate biscuit smudge (unless it's a library copy then double points off)
2. Various nibbles, canapes, hors d'ouerves etc (triple points off for anything with Weightwatchers branding)
3. Bottles of cheap wine from supermarket (triple points for under $10 price tag from Foodtown)
4. Many and various forms of chocolate - timtams, Reeses peanut butter cups and Cadbury Tiramisu preferred
5. Never ending supply of coffee (fair trade OK - as long as it's full-leaded)
6. At least two friends who have been dumped by boyfriend that they worked with
7. At least one friend who found boyfriend/lover/husband in bed with (former) best friend

Discussion points

1. Should Bridget have decked Daniel when she found he was cheating on her?
2. Why didn't Daniel & Mark's fight end up on Youtube?
3. Why is it that book heroines who have no job skills always end up in journalism or marketing? (and where can we get a job like that?)
4. Are there more calories in a packet of Timtams or a bottle of house red?

So maybe I'm just a book lover not a LitLover ....

Dead relly digging

Yeah, yeah, I know it's not week 2 already (apart from in some parallel universe where Shakespeare runs the local dairy and Daniel Vettori is prime minister), but I couldn't resist ploughing on with the next task.

You see, I will have to confess - I am a dead relly digger, a granny hunter, an ardent genealogist. I like wandering around cemeteries. I know how to use every microfilm reader between here and Waipukurau. When my doctor asks if there is a history of heart disease/madness/diabetes/etc in my family, I can tell him what my great-great-great-great-grandfather died from (and by the way ... it was none of the above)

So I was really keen to see what new Web 2.0 stuff is out there for family historians and genealogists. I recently printed off a family tree of just three generations which took over 20 A4 pages and thought there must be an easier way. Unfortunately web2.0 ain't it.

Hmmm ... can't say I was overly impressed with either myheritage or geni. Fine for doing a basic tree with cute photos to send to your rellies. But majorly lacking in many features that are standard in other genealogy programs. Neither program had places to add sources which are vital in family history/genealogy research. If you can't locate where you got the information, it becomes a bit useless. Hard to find (and had to trawl through too many windows) places to stick additional information like christening, burial, occupation. Also very little space for notes or other longer information such as cemetery transcriptions, immigration records, education information etc etc.

I added "my tree" (pretending to be Henry VIII - figured if it could cope with 6 wives, it could cope with anything) - and stuck in a couple of photos and embedded in my blog. That all worked fine - it wasn't easy to find out how to sort the wives into the proper order. It was also tricky getting the thing into some viewable format where you could be more than two people at a time. All up, neither was particularly user friendly unless you were somewhat of a cyber-geek to start with and were not afraid of breaking the internet by trawling around through multitudinous windows and pop-ups.

I eventually found the two (or three or four) places needed to enter basic information about a person - but couldn't find a place to add random comments (likes tennis, wrote Greensleeves, had strange taste in codpieces) and notes. Maybe it is there somewhere but I left my speleology equipment behind.

I don't think I'd recommend these sites to customers - they're both pretty 'genealogy lite'. Plus I don't think many people would get far with being only able to add 500 people without paying - mind you my family are Catholic and we can easily get up to 500 in one generation! There are free programs out there like PAF and Legacy which offer far more features. There are also many sites where you can share your tree on the net for free - Rootsweb, World Connect, FTM World Tree, Ancestry, Lost Cousins etc.

These established sites also adhere more strongly to standard genealogy protocol of not including information about living people on internet trees. Even though, these programs are invite only, I would be loath to stick too much personal information about living relatives on an internet based tree.

Maybe sites like these will give people a taste of that mad, bad and dangerous to begin pastime of dead relly hunting.

A funny thing happened on the way to the blog

Another year, another Web 2.0 playtime. So it's back to the blog.





Alas, poor blog, abandoned in the cyber-sphere - left to adrift unattended. Ashamed to show its face at blog parties due to its lack of posts. Apparently size does matter - particularly when it comes to the length of your blogroll.

But now this thing of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy is revived. Ready to shine its bloggish light once more across the realms of web 2.0 land.

Best blog found ...

• Batgirl was a librarian - notably for the Library Cats Map - which includes our own St Helier's Xena who has her own blog.

But seriously folks - now for the real stuff

Your post should contain comments on what you liked.....

I will have to come clean and admit ... I do like blogs. The random ramblings on subjects as diverse as knitting patterns from sweaters seen in movies to my brother's actual ramblings up and down various mountains/hills/bumps across the United Kingdom.

disliked......

For every interesting or mildly amusing blog out there, there is a lot of dross and drivel. Mind you, you could say that about the fiction section of your average library ... So finding the good stuff and forwarding it to your friends and/or adding it to your RSS feed is essential. Otherwise you'll never read the second post about how to knit Cameron Diaz's jacket from The Holiday.

found easy or hard to do.......

Easy to do - find my blog again in my favourites. Hard to do - remember the password I thought up for it last year.

whether you would recommend this to customers....

Probably - have shown customers the library blogs - and have also shown a customer how to set up a blog to record their travel diary.

and how you think you could use these tools in your role.

It is always useful to know where to find a knitting pattern for a Stargate Atlantis insignia