#11 Mashups: trading cards

cat image as a trading card



And another lovely puddy with a caption


Also had a go at creating wallpaper using a Flikr image of, you guessed it, cats!

Think it's time to stop playing around with Flikr and move on but Flikr's possibilities seem to be endless - I'll be back!

#10 Flikr

This is the rather cute outcome of my diligently carrying out the first exercise under Flikr.

I really like Flikr - I'd encountered it before, of course, including through Picture Australia and its projects encouraging people to add their own images: I did a search under Maldon and the hit list included some really good images from Flikr. I get the impression that Flikr contributions are carefully vetted so that quality images only are added to the Picture Australia database.
I'm thinking, also, on a personal level, that Flikr could be a really effective way of sharing one's own photos with (selected) others, better, perhaps than attaching them to emails which can be a dodgy process at times. My partner's nephew who has been living in Thailand for the last few years uses a similar photo sharing facility called Ringo (ringo.com) allowing us view his various high jinks (mostly comprising running in marathons followed by celebratory drinking sessions with friends!)

I carried out, with some misgivings, the exercise on uploading one's own images onto flicker using our SLV Learning 2.0 login. The two pictures of Byron Bay which I recently posted on my blog are now hanging around somewhere on Flikr - hopefully no-one will ever be able to trace them back to me, just to that mysterious individual 'slvlearning'.

#8/9 LibraryThing booklist

Have just started looking at LibraryThing - this one is most promising: at the moment I keep a running list of the books I've been reading over the year as at my age one tends to forget what one has read all too soon. Maybe LibraryThing is the way to go as far as keeping tabs on my reading is concerned. I've signed up and have started adding titles:

#8/9 Tagging, folksomonies ....

Had a nodding aquaintance with del.icio.us before now via slvchat which I'm still in training for, so haven't actually used del.icio.us as a reference resource yet, However, my Workplan 2007/08 has a task flagged which will have me moving all the sites in the current Australiana bookmarks on Backflip over to del.icio.us so I'll have to skill up starting now. SLV bookmarks on del.icio.us is a resource we would certainly want to make available to the public, I would think.

After reading the recommended articles, the first of which I found a bit turgid, being too techie and detailed for me at this early stage, I then went onto have a look at the Yarra Plenty Library and Danbury Library catalogues for examples of tagged catalogue records. Handy, I guess, but my immediate reaction was that the effectiveness and usefulness of tagging depends on the quality of the tags themselves. For example, with the suggested Kite Runner e.g., there were no tags covering the theme of the immigrant experience in the U.S. which was an important part of the story. Similarly, I looked up books by Charles Dickens on the Danbury Library catalogue such as Bleak House and Oliver Twist but found the tags to be pretty feeble and general: for example english and literature of themselves don't tell us much about these particular books, especially when they are repeated many times in the list of tags. Perhaps I'm just a control freak but the thought of the contents of the SLV's online catalogue being thrown open to tagging makes me feel a tad uneasy. On the other hand, given that our users don't always avail themselves of the powerful search options provided by Voyager, such as Subject List searches, perhaps tagging is a way of moving them onto other useful related resources. Could also be a way of further opening up the Pictures Catalogue. Tagging in the context of social bookmarking in del.icio.us is another matter. Here, the freewheeling, open ended nature of this facility can really work to one's advantage when you're looking for online resources on an unfamiliar subject area in, say, a chat session where you're just looking for relevant keywords rather than structured headings.

As far as Technorati is concerned, I've had a look, but sorry, I'm not putting my blog out there by "claiming" it, tagging it etc.- I tried searching for it though, and found the same problem as oscar8 who said "I'm having trouble with Technorati via Mozilla Firefox - whenever I try to do a search, I get a dialogue box asking me to select a program to open an application/octet-stream with. I'll try it on IE6 later..." I did, and unfortunately found my blog but hopefully no-one else will!

#6/7 RSS and Newsfeeders

After checking out and adding a few recommended feeds to my blog, I was beginning to feel that these weren't for me. The BBC & ABC news sites and The Age were among the feeds I added but I actually prefer to go directly into these sorts of websites and fossick around, following my fancy as it were. However, I dutifully subscribed to five feeds as instructed. Then I did the optional exercise and identified some journal titles I'm interested in on the ANZ Reference Centre database. It was then I realised how useful this facility could be to me in my work. In an ideal world I would be across the content of the latest journals in my subject areas - Australian history, literature and cultural studies; in the real world it just doesn't happen. Now I can get the contents pages of relevant titles availaible on the ANZ Reference Centre fed to me for skimming, thus enabling me to keep up with who's publishing what in my areas of interest. I've deleted the feeds I initially added and replaced them with half a dozen journal titles which I'll add to as I get time. By the way, I couldn't get into Feedster - seems they're reconstructing the site at the moment!

Back From Byron

Here I am back at work again after a lovely month away from blogs, wikis, RSSs etc. Two weeks in Byron Bay drove Learning 2.0 right out of my consciousness, to be replaced by long walks along the beach and lots of coffees, food and wine. But it's all over now and I am about to start wrestling with RSS feeds. (I didn't abandon Learning altogether, though - I've been teaching myself to use my new digital camera, upload and email photos etc. two of which grace this blog!)

Last Post - for the next month,anyway.

Hooray - holidays at last! No more blogging from me for the next four and a bit weeks - I'm off on leave which will include 12 days in Byron Bay where I'll leave blogs and wikis far behind. I'll be back on 12th November when I"ll start to wrestle with RSS feeds!