Second life

I was quite excited about second life, its new, it's happening, I can create an avatar, I can fly, I can do anything I want in a virtual environment.

Hey even Hef is there, so the place must be cool

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/05/playboy_does_a_.html

However, it turned out it to be fun for a while and then it wasn't really like a game.
There were adult situations, there were rules, there was interaction with other people.
In short it was like World of Warcraft without the fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft




but even the thought of meeting Hef in the grotto couldn't keep me interested


Still, information is organic.
Expectations of service evolve, grow and branch.
Should we as Librarians be on second life?
It really depends on what you think service is all about, should we be where people need our services, and if so do we need to be everywhere that people need our services?

My only answer is, well, try it, if it works and it's used then we have a benefit.

And along the way we could meet HEF!.




(Ok maybe meeting Hef is enough to keep me interested)

Until next time.

Facbook and Twitter

OK the facts:

I have a Facebook account.
I have played on Facebook for a long time.
I updated every day.
I found some friends on Facebook I hadn't talked to in a long time.
I played some games
I played some more games
I got addicted to plants and eggs
I played texas holdum poker at 2AM with US college students
I did this :)



and then I realised maybe it was time to stop.

Is facebook fun : yes
Is facebook a little addictive : yes
Is facebook a way to catch up with friends and networks: yes
Is facebook a useful tool for librarians : debateable
Do we need to know about it : yes
Should I spend a lot of time here : hell no, I got work to do

As for twitter, in the words of spike milligan.

"The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled. Twit"

I understand the applications for twitter, but really it may work in conferences but why would you want a 140 character IM service?
To me its like taking an IM and removing all the good bits.
I do see that it's like an IM in reverse, if you want to message a lot of people all at once then I guess this would work but hmmm, really set up a conference or an IM group instead.

Hopefully, this goes the way of the laserdisk.

Captain Kirk understands



Until next time

The image stuff (back from week 8)

Images

What can I say, some of this was actually familiar too me already.
With my partners family in the UK and having spent a lifetime on calls with clients saying "whats wrong with you guys, why can't I send a 20MB file through my email. I know that email was onl;y ever designed as a simple text message service but my friend, who is over at a rival internet provider and probably knows what he is doing can send it just fine" OR worse, with "Whats wrong with you guys, my friend sent me a photo of his baby and it takes forever for it to download, I know its 25MB but the kids real small ok?"
Hence, Flickr and also the kodak site:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/Welcome.jsp

Personally, In my situation I found that the older generation like kodak better and they could go to a kodak shop and have them burn a DVD or print the photos off.

but at least you don't have email the things.

Also I found www.mediafire.com a really good way to store anything and then publish it on the web. I could just then email the link to them.

Have a look it's good.

As far as images on the blog, yeah baby, its all about the eye candy.






I'll try the image generator now







The good thing about all these things is that we are by definition visual beings, anything that helps and maybe adds a bit of humor will increase the value of the message.
We should use them more and don't be afraid to make your information a bit more human.

Until next Time

Slideshare and youtube

I already love youtube as an extra tool for learning, see the previous blog for the sort of use you can do.
Imagine doing your instructions for students that way, much easier on the eye and should cut down on the amount of questions you recieve (even i'm going uh huh at this stange LOL ).

Slideshare while fun, could be used the same way I guess but I imagine that the immediate use would be offsite storage for your presentation.

Interestingly, I was searching for monkeys and came accross this on slideshare (apologies to the author)

| View | Upload your own

my apologies about the slideshow, it seems not to like it too much (hang on I'll tweet the author)

In terms of 23 things AND BEYOND! *presenters voice required*

Lastfm is way cool, try it
Meebo rocks, absoulutly the best thing to hit IM in years
mediafire is fantatstic for file storage and sharing files on the net, save it in the format you want and then publish it for a web link, toooooo easy

I also did the test :

BUGGER I got one wrong.............TWICE :)

Oh well, Gwyngie will enjoy getting them all right, (even if it takes all year).

RSS feeds and staying in touch - Special request

Staying in touch with information can be difficult at the best of times, and whilst it's handy to have a newsfeed service such as this, the problem arises knowing when new information becomes available.

In this post we will look at RSS feeds and how they can be used to keep up to date with information as it updates.

RSS feeds basically work like being sent an sms when new information becomes available.
For the more technically minded a full explanation of RSS can be found here or an excellent youtube video is available below:



You can use several ways to read the RSS feeds there are:

Google reader(essential)

and to read your google reader account you can use the following programs:

Outlook
Internet Explorer 7
Firefox
Macintosh (not Windows) programs


Google Reader


Firstly, the base for most of these methods is google reader, to do this sign up to a google email account and it's free.

Create an account for google reader here

A short video on the process and using google reader



Once you have added the feed to your google reader you can then use any of the following to keep up to date:


Outlook

An explanation of how to set up your RSS feeds in Microsoft outlook is available by clicking here.

A short instructional video is available below:


Internet Explorer 7

A short instructional video on adding RSS Feeds to IE7



Firefox

In firefox you can add a feed a few ways you can:

1) add it to the "live bookmarks" section of firefox



or

2) Install an add-on to manage it for you. This add on will create a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of Firefox displaying the number of unread RSS feeds you have.



You can install the add-on here.

Macintosh software

Mac programs are available with instructions here.

A short instructional video for Safari is available below




IN TROUBLE OR INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
Contact me on 08 9555 5555 or email me at aaron@fakeaddress.com.au

Delicious tagging and social bookmarking

I was searching for "Mendicant", no suprises really accross the board, karzoo was quite well set out but not really that easy to use.

Delicious quite frankly scares me a little, having done something similar on music sites, I get these weird tags from really creative people for music, like sexy cool greentea blow baby blow and it really just feels a little w@nky to me LOL.

I do see that you could save tags on the web, so really really cool but in most places where items can be updated you end up with standard nomeclature for naming or it gets wayyyyyyyy messy and illogical BUT hey I have been wrong before.

This is however quite cool:



well, I also may just be a little rushed and not given it enough lovin'.

Only time will tell

Google docs and PBwiki

Ok, up front I need to say this.

I am completely prejudiced against google docs.

I worked in an office where we had the open office/star office as the basic software package.

It made my life hell.

In fact the excel spreadsheet couldn't even add up at one stage.
It was a bad experience, not because we were on the cutting edge but because the boss was effectively cheap.

This is how my return to Microsoft Office felt:




Google docs however, was a more pleasant experience and I can see where you would use it, BUT not enough to swear myself from the dark side AND not comfortable enough with the idea of the document *suddenly* going public through one of the contributors experiencing a PEBKAC
moment.

I do truly believe that the google documents concept is where it's all going eventually, but like any new tech it will meet some resistance.

PbWiki was ok, but i'll be honest I rushed it a bit and I think I would need to see it better used than the blog like/website like thing that I made up.

Anyone with a good example, (other than the holy grail of free information Wikipedia), please let me know.