Thing 43 -- Online TV and Video

Oh, boy, time for the aliens to turn my brain to pudding. I found the episode of Chuck I had missed and added it to my queue on Hulu. Still have to find time to watch it. Did watch a few things—Harry Potter trailer, outtakes from Krod Mandoon, mainly clips that are not easy to watch on the regular TV. This Thing has numerous possibilities for wasting time. (I love it.)

The drawback to watching videos on my home computer is that the screen isn’t large. The longest online thing I have watched to date was about 45 minutes. (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is now available on Hulu. If you are a Buffy fan and have not seen this yet, look it up.) Even in full screen mode, it isn’t as comfortable and curling up in front of the TV. Until I can hook the computer and the TV together, online will not be my first choice for viewing. On the other hand, when viewing over the Internet becomes more comfortable, online TV may do the same thing to the DVD industry that iTunes has done to the CD industry.

Thing 41 -- Mashup Your Life

If more of my life was online, this Thing might be useful, but so far I still live most of my life in the real world. Only a few of my friends are even on FaceBook. I signed up for LifeStream and found it less useful than my NetVibes page (which I will continue to use.) Why would anyone want to broadcast their entire online activity to the world anyway? This Thing is downright scary. (Don’t look for me, I made the site private. I only wish I could delete it.) I guess I just don’t get some of this (and I don’t think I ever will.)

Thing 46 -- WebJunction Minnesota

I was impressed with the calendar of events on Web Junction—it included the MALL spring conference as well as the More Things on a Stick deadline. This is pretty complete. The pop-up window showing what the event is about was also slick.

I would have to say that the courses and training opportunities (including through the calendar of events) are the most immediately valuable part of Web Junction. The discussion groups could also be valuable because of the national reach of the membership. I admit I haven’t used it much although it seems as if every time I turn around there is another reference to Web Junction somewhere in the library news. Looking for “friends” I found the same people from FaceBook and the Law Librarians Ning. Web Junction needs to distinguish itself among the other networking sites in order to prosper, but it seems to be on the right track.

Thing 45 -- Cloud Computing

Personally, I’ve been cloud computing ever since I set up my first Yahoo Mail account. Anyone who uses more than one computer during the day can understand the convenience of being able to check your e-mail from anywhere. It would also be nice to be able to work on any app from anywhere with just a cheap notebook computer, using the cloud for most of the processing and memory. I have noticed during this session of 23 Things, however, that several sites did not work well due apparently to overloaded servers. This does not bode well for using any critical app from the cloud, much less an operating system. At the rate things change in the computer world, however, it may not take long for technology to catch up to aspiration. In the meantime, I am more concerned with privacy and security issues. If companies that handle credit card information are not using adequate security features, how far can we trust the free versions of cloud software? So far, photos are the major thing after e-mail that I have used cloud computing for. I even back up at home.

Let’s get back to libraries here for a minute. Ours, as part of a larger organization, has its own type of “cloud” in the organization’s network. (Would this be a “fog” because it is closer to the ground?) We use SharePoint for our calendar and have document- sharing capability as well. We are investigating SharePoint’s wiki capabilities with an eye toward transferring our PBWorks wikis to it. The advantages of using network applications are security and backup. Of course if the network goes down we don’t have access, but we wouldn’t have access to the cloud, either.

Also of interest to libraries is how cloud computing will affect our public access PCs. Our library has a limited number of public PCs and our policies limit their use to legal research. We offer word processing only on a non-networked PC, which functions basically as an emergency typewriter. This way, users can’t monopolize the computers writing their briefs. But what happens when the user’s document is in the cloud? We do offer WiFi, but that won’t get you our premium subscription services. On one occasion, we had a patron camped at one of the public PCs with his laptop beside him. The future is complicated.

Thing 42 -- Music 2.0

I have been meaning to connect to Radio Heartland, now I did it. I also created a Pandora account and set up classical and rock-and-roll stations. I do enjoy listening to music, but I am not one of those people who can concentrate while listening to anything that has words (much less pledge drives.)

Here is a radio station for the space geeks out there—WMMB. My home town radio station is the only one that still live-broadcasts every shot from Cape Canaveral. It played big band music when I was a kid and let the high school band take it over for a day as a fund-raiser. We sold the ads for that day and kept the revenue. The extroverts also enjoyed being DJs for a day.

Thing 38—Screencasting

I registered for ScreenToaster (don’t want to download software right now) and pressed record. It said it was recording but nothing happened. Thinking it might be our network security, I tried it from home. There it just hung up, not able to download, so I tried it again from work early in the morning. Bingo. That is the trouble with some of these Internet sites—they are too popular and get overloaded. Once I got it working, however, it was pretty easy to use. Since it was a tour of the Web site, I chose full screen format. Here is the result.

This is a technology that I can see our library using. We have an active e-mail reference practice and screencasts would make a nice supplementary resource. All I need now is a microphone.

Thing 40 – Mashups

One thing I love about my neighborhood is its walkability, so I had to check its score on the Walk Score site. It earned 72 out of 100; not bad. I was very impressed with how many local businesses, parks, libraries, etc. were listed.

Even though it was after lunchtime, I had to try the wheel of food. There are not many places to eat that you can walk to around where I work. This was confirmed by LunchBox. That is why many of us own cool lunchboxes.

Looking for mashups I discovered that the Dilbert comic strip lets you write your own punchlines. See http://www.dilbert.com/mashups/ . And here is a guy who does it regularly: http://mydilbertmashups.blogspot.com/ . Sort of fits in with our Thing 36.

As someone who likes to travel, I wanted to try travelr. Darn, it requires a download; something I’d prefer not to do and my IT Dept. agrees. So I decided to try Bubblr instead. I thought it would be fun to turn our tour into a comic strip. To my annoyance, I wasn’t able to access the Library’s photostream, either by username or by tags. Very frustrating. Bubblr doesn’t seem to be able to handle more than two words. Rather than giving up, I made this instead.

As much fun as these mashup tools are, my special library doesn’t deal in a very visual subject matter. The profession tends to be rather stuffy, too, so there is not too much call for visuals or flights of fancy in our day-to-day operations.