Week 9, Thing 23 - Summarize your thoughts

That's it! I've explored everything! Well - at least 23 things of everything. I spent lots of time working with all the different technologies. Some were easier to use than others. Some didn't seem to work at all for me. Even though at times I was frustrated, there was always something that proved interesting. I don't believe that I will use my blog or bloglines account as my homepage . Therefore, all the feeds that I incorporated into my account won't be popping out at me unless I go to that account. I want to delve farther into some things to have them become useful to me. My favorite things were the Avatars, generator blogs and YouTube. I had fun working on this and would do something similar again. An unexpected outcome was that I was able to tell my daughters about some technologies that they didn't know about. Our situations were reversed.
While I didn't mind working on this at home (I thought of it as finding out fun things on the Internet), it would have been harder to find the time at work because the summer is so busy. At least for me it would have been difficult to allow the amount of time at work for the amount of time I actually worked on it.

I am glad I did the 23 Things because at least I have a surface knowledge of the kind of things that are out there. I'm sure librarians will be called upon more and more to help patrons with problems they have while working on those sites. The 23 Things project is important to librarians for that very reason. Technology is moving forward fast. We have to be ready and move with it. Libraries have always been a place for people to discover things - whether it is is found in print or non print or on the internet is irrelevant. And we, as librarians, have to be able to help them find what they need.

Week 9, Thing 22 - Learn about Audiobooks

I've taken the Overdrive guided tour and looked at Netlibrary. I've downloaded, upgraded, restarted and whatever else I needed to do. I chose a book to download onto my computer at home but I still need to upgrade. I just did that! So now I have simply removed the book from my bookbag and I will read it in print. I'm sure this is great for someone who wants to transfer it to a portable device and maybe sometime I'll try again.

Week 9, Thing 21 - Discover some useful tools for locating podcasts

My discovery process was not easy. I found some good podcasts but it was difficult finding the RSS feed. I tried to add the feed for young adult book revews and it looks like I will be getting all kinds of info. On the other hand, I did find a nice shortcut to adding any website that I am looking at to my bloglines account - providing it has an RSS feed. I need to look at this further.

Week 9, Thing 20 - YouTube

I loved exploring YouTube. There were lots of informative and fun videos. As soon as I realized I could view commercials, I typed in Coca Cola polar bears. They are my favorite commercials and I just wish I could see them more often. Now I can. I chose this video because it was heartwarming when the young penguin shared his coke with the young polar bear. Gives you the feeling there can be peace on earth. Also, it was set to a Beach Boy song which I also love.
I think using YouTube videos on our library website would be wonderful. We could showcase some of our programs and events.

Week 8, Thing 19 - Discover any site from the Web 2.0 awards list

I scrolled through the list, clicking here and there just to see what it all was. (I did pretty well in Guess the Google.) I've looked at farecast.com before after reading about it in the newspaper. But the site I chose to explore was Yahoo Answers. With a daughter's wedding planned for next year, I think I will use the site to gauge how things are done these days. I liked being able to search a specific aspect of the wedding (e.g. engagement party) and see what people would expect from that. The site was easy to use. It could be used in the library when people ask for advice - not necessarily information.

Week 8, Thing 18 - Online productivity tools

I'm writing this in Zoho writer and I hope to publish this to my blog as my blogpost for Thing 18. I've obviously created an account for myself in Zoho and I read all of the FAQ's. I can see where this might be useful if you don't have Microsoft Office. I looked at what was available in the Template Library but I could not preview anything - so that was disappointing. I also looked at Google Docs and the other online productivity tools.

I have tried to publish and export this to my blog without luck. I've read the directions to do both and it keeps saying " unable to connect to blog". And it takes several minutes to tell me that! Perhaps the connection to blogger is not working, but it is very frustrating when I don't know whether I'm doing it right or not. I've been trying it over and over. At this point - I give up. I'm going to copy and paste.

Week 7, Think 17 - Sandbox Wiki

This wasn't too complicated although the point and click didn't work for me. I've posted my blog to the list of Favorite Blogs.