Wiki What?

I'm quite completely lost with Wickis. I had a look at the suggested wickis with my favourite being Wookipedia - it would have been helpful when one of our staff was asked to answer how tall one of the Star Wars characters was and then how tall that would be with heels on!
I get Wikepedia where you can add to the information but I get lost a bit with some of the fancier wickis. They must be staff only wickis and if that's the case why would you use this medium for that information such as the Mint Museum wicki. Weren't there any Australian based wickis? The Library Success wicki was all American and hard to relate to. I could look for wickis with Australian content but I can't tell with some of the listed examples whether I'm looking at a wicki or what?

If I can work this out a bit more I think a wicki would be a great way of a group working over distance to keep in touch. At the moment I am involved with a group that includes people from outside the library and this would be a great way of everyone keeping up to date. I'm not sure I really like the thought of everyone in the group being able to change my ideas though. If it's changed I might forget what the original thought was especially if its changed by someone who has missed the point of what I was trying to say.

Real Simple Syndication

How cool is RSS! I love it. Finally a way of using the internet in a way that totally suits me. I often get on the net and just traul through pages adding them to my favourites as I go. Invariably I forget to go back these pages or I go back a couple of times, find nothing new, and stop visiting.

I wouldn't use my Bloglines account. It's very annoying to have to constantly log into several different sites to keep up to date with email, blog, bloglines, Flickr, and so on. I like the ability to have everything in the one place, I can log on once and get all of the information I want. I can't see myself being a mad blogger after this course has finished so I would probably connect my RSS feeds to my email account.

What a great tool for work. Instead of being directed to 'an interesting website' and individually copy and pasting the web address an RSS feed could be added to our staff homepage. One aspect of my job requires me to be up to date with what's happening on certain websites - what a great way to cut down useless trawling time.

I still don't really get how RSS feeds work exactly. I wish that the feeds that I have would take me to the entire page so I can see the item in context instead of just pulling up the one item.

Library

Library, originally uploaded by Gloria?.

Finally my pictures have come up in Flickr and I exist! It took ages for the pictures to post publicly once I changed their privacy settings. It's funny that you expect things to be so immediate on the internet and surely something has to be wrong when it's not.
The slowness would be irritating when you were trying to post pictures of an event at the library that you were trying to maintain some momentum and immediacy for.

Mystery images of Flickr

I'm still getting used to my posts appearing UP the page!

I've had a good look around Flickr, I've opened an account and posted some pictures, however, I've been unable to find them anywhere on the public pages. I've checked my tags, flags, security settings, etc and can find no obvious reason for the not to come up in the nswpln2008 search. I also can't find my screen name listed anywhere. Maybe there is a time delay in posting?

The other intersesting thing I noticed when I was searching in Flickr is that there were a lot of users with no photos. What are they doing with a Flickr account????

Falls in Lamington National Park

Falls in Lamington National Park, originally uploaded by brentbat.

Flicking through week 2

After having a look around Flickr there are some things I like and some things I find really annoying. I loved searching Lamington and all of the pictures of one of my favourite National Parks were a lot of time was spent camping as a child came up. It would have been funny if you didn't know the National Park was called Lamington wouldn't it?

I could envisage myself using this site to share photos with family as we all have the technology now but tend to share it in a different way. We all take our camera or photo CDs to each others houses and use the computer or TV there to view them or share them. Flickr would be great as there would be no need to wait to see someone to share the photos or make sure that you remembered to bring the right connection cable or disc.

As for work it could be a way of interacting with other staff and patrons. Photo competitions, special event, etc could easily have images that we already take but only use for reports etc uploaded to Flickr for everyone to enjoy. You would need to be cautious about the comments other people added to your site. With links to a free comment site anyone could say anything and this would seem like your organisation endorsed it as it was your link and your photos. I would be concerned about the kinds of comments people might leave - can you moderate the coments like in a Blog? I have had the experience where a very professional site linked to a site like Flickr and the first thing you saw was not what was intended but the highly inappropriate comment left by someone else. You would have to make sure someone checked this regularly.



By the way if you're reading this please leave a comment, anyone, I'm not desperate or anything

It all BEGINS

Welcome to Blog-A-Log, my very first blog!

Although I've come across blogs and blogging I've never created or had the desire to create one. Will anyone ever read this message in a bottle? I've no desire to finish work (on a computer all day) and go home to read about what other people have been doing all day so why would anyone want to read this?. I'd rather interact with the real people I cohabitate with. I've created this blog thanks to the 2.0 program I'm participating in. I'm hoping to become more internet savvy and understand clients and my children when they talk about downloading and uploading, RSS feeds, etc. Maybe I'll even get to like blogging and reading and commenting on others.

I've been looking at a few blogs that organisations (particularly libraries) have created and have found them a good way of getting information across. I like how some libraries use thier blogs to post information and photos of their events. I don't like how some of these blogs try to use it as a way of interacting with youth in particular. It doesn't seem succesful as it's rare to find a blog created for youth that has any comments on it. Also staff time to moderate such a system must be quite taxing.

For communicating over our region (over 10 libraries) I think that a blog would be very useful. It would be a quick way to exchange ideas. All staff would have access to comments no matter if they were part time or casual. It would also be a great way of advertising upcoming events to the public, posting photos and articles about past events and general information that sometimes doesn't seem to have any place on a non blog website.

As for lifelong learning we live in an age where knowledge isn't enough - there's just too much to remember, however, being information literate is extremely important. The ability to find out information as it's required is imperitave to surving in todays information age. As Stephen Fry said you no longer miss moments in time - the internet will let you recapture time. This can be both good and bad. Maybe we feel so stressed out and never switch off as we struggle to squeeze moments past into other moments.

Can't wait for Flickr next week.