Flickr Ahoy!

Hi Everyone,

I love pictures and am quite a visual person, so loved this week's topic. I was inspired by everyone's arty looking blogs so decided to jazz mine up a bit. I uploaded a picture I created last year of myself as a Simpsons character (Dom will remember this well -- it was quite a craze among SCA staff!) So this is me: Kate Simpson.

Back on topic, I use Flickr a lot and could lose myself in it for hours if I allowed myself. I use the Creative Commons limit to find images to include in PowerPoint presentations, and recently used it to find a profile picture for my LibGuides account.

One thing that really annoys me about Flickr, however, is the random way people assign tags to their own photos. Sometimes the tags bear a tenuous relation to their subject, which makes it difficult to get relevant results! (I guess this is the 'control freak' librarian coming out in me). It is still fun browsing photos even if they aren't relevant, however.

Mashups look very cool. I think the library could use mashups in a number of ingenious ways. For instance, you could combine images of the library and its contents with Google Maps to give library users a virtual tour of the campus (I actually stole this idea from an article I read a few months ago -- I can't remember the author unfortunately... I guess that constitutes plagiarism...)

Anyway, I think it's great that people can legally share, reuse and remix creative material. It makes for a more interesting cyberworld.

Cheers,
Kate

RSS (or saving time)

Hi All,

I just completed this week's activity, which involved creating (is that the right term?) an RSS Reader and subscribing to various blogs which took our fancy.

The uTube clip summed it up quite nicely -- instead of going to the information source, it essentially comes to you. I think this application would be useful in a library setting for advertising classes or new books etc.

I found the process of creating the RSS Reader pretty simple. The Google interface was pretty straightforward. When searching for blogs to which to subscribe, I accidentally typed keywords into the 'posts' field rather than the 'blog' field -- d'oh! Luckily I twigged to this pretty quickly.

I decided to go very 'non-library' when searching for blogs. I ended up subscribing to blogs about US politics, alternative film, travel, celebrities with bad fashion sense, and of course The 23 Things blog.

Cheers,
Kate

Blogs r a breez

That probably sounded somewhat conceited, but I actually found it really easy to set up this blog. I guess that's the whole point :)

I must confess, I have blogged before, so this was not a "brave new world" experience for me. I think newcomers would find it similarly straightforward, however.

I liked being able to customise my profile since this adds a bit of "flavour" to the blog. I think you need to give a bit of yourself to a blog -- otherwise you probably come across as being pretty mundane!

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Kate

Welcome to my blog!

Greetings Devoted Readers,

Welcome to my blog entitled 'Gettin jiggy with technology!' As the title suggests, this is my attempt to transform myself from a nerd to a geek!

In all seriousness I hope to learn more about Web 2.0 technologies over the course of this... course and hope to be able to cater to clients more effectively as a result.

Feel free to reply to this post, which I'm sure has you all transfixed and salivating for more thoughtful insights :)

Cheers,
Kate