Free Book

One of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, has made one of his books free for the next month or so to read online, which marks the very first time a major publishing house has made their books free on the web. If you click here, you can read American Gods.

Thing 6 cont.

I had problems posting this picture, but I'm pretty sure that I just used the wrong code. Now the picture is bigger than I wanted, but I can't seem to make it any smaller. Grr at the confusing computers.

Thing 6 - Online image generators

For a lot of the image generators, it required you to sign in to a Flickr account. I didn't create a one, so it really limited what I could do. I do see how most of these could be used in the library. I love the trading card idea (especially for authors rather than the librarians themselves).

I also took a look at toondoo, but I don't think I'm quite creative enough to create comics :) The other image I made was pretty much to experiment with the animation. It said that it would show up moving on my blog, but I had my doubts. Again, I am not really that creative and we show movies at my library, so if we do end up creating a blog or a myspace page, I'm interested in what would and would not work. Oh shoot, I'm supposed to be out at the desk right now. Gotta go...

Thing 5 - More Flickr

Most of the extras that I looked at this week seemed just to be a waste of time. You were able to find interesting looking pictures, but that's about it. If we were to use Flickr in our library, I think we would use it as a place to post pictures from our events etc. I don't know what the use would be to spell your name in blocks or sign letters. The one mash-up I looked at that would be cool for personal use was Jigsaw where you could turn your pictures into puzzles. The best part was the fact that you could order an actual puzzle made out of your photo. It would be good for gifts. I used Retrievr to find pictures that kind-of went together and then made a Mosaic of them. Interestingly - what I drew didn't look anything like what the site pulled up. I'm really not sure how that whole thing works. I also had some problems with the size of my type in my previous post, but I think I got it fixed.

Random Article not having to do with any(thing)

This is an article that was in Library Journal last week. I thought I would share.

Blatant Berry: The Vanishing Librarian

The library becomes a dehumanized supermarket or a chaotic bookstore

Thing 4 Addn

YES!!!! IT WORKED!!!

Thing 4: Photosharing

I had more fun with Fickr than I was expecting. I'm not really a picture person - in fact I tend to run away whenever cameras come out, so signing up for a Flickr account really didn't make sense for me. I did enjoy looking at pictures that other people had uploaded.
When I watched the CommonCraft video I was a bit concerned about the whole public/private thing, but once I was looking around Flickr I found that you don't have to make all your photos public, you can pick and choose. There are some pictures that just shouldn't be shared with the world.
The picture that I decided to upload looked really cool, like the guy was in a raindrop or something. It was originally posted by Lawrence Whittemore. I didn't have too much trouble posting the picture to my blog. (At least, I don't think I did.) We'll see if the picture actually shows up when I publish this post.

Thing 3: RSS

I had set up an aggregator account through Bloglines right after MLA in October, but hadn't used it since...until this week. I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to get into it, but amazingly I remembered which password I had used and I was in! When I first set it up, I only put in 2 feeds which I learned wasn't enough of an incentive to use it.

Half the time when I'm on the internet, I'm trying to procrastinate or pass some time. Going to individual blogs was really good for that. I fear that with the aggregator may make me too efficient! I added the main 23 things blog and the blog for my region as well as 3 other participants' blogs. I found this creepy in a stalkery way. I felt like I was spying into their lives (especially the people that I know [so it doesn't count as stalking if its a stranger?]). I let myself experiment with it for a few days before I posted and I learned that not everything is good for RSS. There is one site that I visit frequently that deals with new and upcoming musical acts, but the site itself is somewhat like an aggregator, so when I added the feed to mine, I was getting over 100 updates a day. That had to be taken out. Right now I have 10 feeds. Over the next few weeks I may pare that down or add more, who knows? I do plan on adding a few more of the 23 things participants, but other than that I think I have as much as I need. We'll see.