Week 8 -- the end IS here!!!

APIs were mentioned in one article, too. They are the way software programmers enable others to make use of the software. I liked the lawn mowing neighbor examples.

I separated my mashup comments and the Rollyo assignment post for my ease of future use.

Thank you SO much to all the teachers who coordinated this exercise. While it took MANY more hours than an in class 8 hour credit CE course would have taken, I have no doubtedly absorbed much more by doing.

Rollyo

At Rollyo I found a searchroll on knowledge management by Ahren Lehnert. Something to investigate further.

However, our assignment was to study the librarianblog by Gabe and use the search term "privacy." That led me to a post from June 26, 2002, by the Shifted Librarian who mentioned she had seen something that says "Baby Boomers are worried about their privacy and being tracked, while Net Gens want to be found and "seen." So they don't have the same privacy concerns the rest of us do, mainly because they don't understand the issues yet and they're so used to switching identities online."

Week 8 -- the end is near! Mashups

Assignment -- find a mashup and write about it.

I located one through the most popular listing on ProgrammableWeb (you know it would be nice if these websites standardized their names, sometimes TheyAreCamelCase and other times not). The one I chose first was "Where's Tim Hibbard?" -- he carries a phone with GPS and the location data plots on a Google Map. Then I found a more interesting one linked: Dog Coats -- using eBay and ? but when I went back to find that one the link had already changed, so I guess it is somewhat random. I then searched "dog" and found one that shows "dog friendly hotels" -- but here is the dog coats one. "This site offers discounted dog clothing from eBay, and Google Maps of local dog shelters and pet adoption agencies."

Week 7 comments -- podcasting and YouTube

YouTube has many humorous videos relating to libraries and to other topics, but it is also a useful tool for freely sharing valuable educational information. I have enjoyed the many YouTube sessions included in this CE course, particularly those by Lee LeFever of Commoncraft (and thanks for the intro, Bart!). I can see that providing links to quality podcasts and YouTube videos would be a way to enhance the educational value of your site if you find relevant ones. People simply enjoy watching videos! Plus the iPod is so common now you do have a chance of conveying information if your users choose to download podcasts to listen to at a convenient time. I would like to actually learn how to make a broadcast, but thank you for not requiring THAT this time!

Quality is certainly a consideration. Some videos look professionally done, others look like home videos. Some podcasts have good sound quality, others are harsh or difficult to understand (sometimes due to accents). I think the quality would reflect on your service. If it is difficult to understand or poor quality but you still think it is worth including then perhaps there should be an explanation.

Here is an example of a well photographed (although boring, not making as entertaining a use of the medium as Lee LeFever does) session and an opportunity to learn from an hour long conference they are sharing freely -- Building Academic Library 2.0, from the University of California, Berkeley.

Below is an example of embedding the same Berkeley YouTube video rather than just adding the link as I did above. To do this I copied the "embed" code (easily found on the YouTube page) while in the "edit html" frame of Blogger.

Week 7 - Podcasting and Online hosted videos

on to Week 7! Here's what they say about podcasting:
"Podcasting is a method of publishing audio (and sometimes video) files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a RSS feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost." So you need something to listen to podcasts with and the location of the podcast (the RSS feed). They say that iTunes is the most popular "podcatcher" but Odeo is a free online service that is useable from multiple computers.

Photo sharing -- Week 6

This image is important because it was made by my son to serve as the computer wall paper for my library computers. The furniture is orange and teal so this is a perfect background. I have to keep it posted online because occasionally the background disappears and I have to have an easy way to recover it quickly.

I am working on the week 6 assignment by posting this image to my blog. For the Facebook part of the assignment I am using my college "facebook" equivalent and started a library group branded with a photo of my own library that I uploaded there.

Photo sharing is a great tool, but I think it is important to focus on one system if possible to minimize confusion. I use Picasa frequently but have not investigated its sharing tools. However, my intern recently took photos of my library and shared them using Picasa, so I can see that will be useful. It would be nice to link to library photos on my library website. I do see that if we include photos of any library customers we should ask permission to post the photo.

I encountered a trick when I tried logging on to Flickr today after setting up my account almost a month ago. It is connected with Yahoo, and I have one account name for Yahoo and another for Flickr. It was confusing because I went to Flickr to log in but I actually had to first enter my Yahoo name to reach the right account. I have had the same problem with multiple Google accounts. So confusing to keep track of it all.

Back to work

Well, it has been almost a month since I could work on this. A very hard month of helping various family members.

Anyway, I plan to finish this course now. Thank goodness we have a couple of extra weeks.