Week 8, number 19.

I have some sweet sun burn on my back and it's itchy and I think I'm going to go crazy.

But back to the task at hand, I looked at Twitter for this exercise. I got it from the winners list, from the Social Networking Mainstays category.

It is cool, but would be better if people I knew were on it, and if I had all day to sit at my computer and type notes to people. I could just as easily ring people though, unless they're on the other side of the world.

It's ok though.

Number 18 - interesting

I did get it to publish to my blog, which was great, but it looked ridiculous, so i don't know if that's really a useful tool. It was excessively spaced out so I had to fix it once it got here. Slightly defeats the purpose doesn't it?

Perhaps you're not meant to space it out like normal when you type it into Zoho. I guess that with practice it would become more useful.

Surely it's lunchtime by now...

Week something - 7 I think?

Number 18 - Online productivity tools.

Zoho is good. Although I'm mighty impatient and I'm not great at waiting for it to load all the time, which takes ages by the way.

It also took me roughly 20 minutes to work out how to post this to my blog, which may seem stupid, but it wasn't imediately clear to me. Smart.

This would be useful if you had really fast internet

Now lets see if I can get this to my blog......

3 months later...# 17

Ok so I kinda just put this down for 3 months, when the chance of me finishing in time to win the camera was gone I gave up. That is the power of incentives.

But having seen the snazzy certificates, and being in need of a memory stick, I've decided to continue on my quest to web 2.0 knowledge.

So, back to the task at hand, Social Networking. I haven't done the actual activities on this, as I already have a facebook page, and I used to have a bebo page, and I think I'm pretty much up with the play here.

I love Facebook, or facey as we affectionately call it, virtually everyone I've ever met is on facey. Heaps of school friends I've not seen for years randomly appeared out of the woodwork, and even people that I'd forgotten. Now that is out of control. I can never go on it though as I don't have a computer at home. DUMB!

Since I'm doing this at work I can't look at any of the suggested sites, and we only have a couple of computers so I'm probably not going to steal them from the public. But consider it learned.

I also think that it's a great environment for places like libraries, or bands, or anything that's needing publicity really, especially anything focussed toward youth. You can put in loads of good things that people can participate in and enjoy, quizzes, polls, photos, etc.

Onward.

# 16 Library 2.0 & WEb 2.0 - 7 to go!

I don't know when I started counting off the tasks. I'm sure that it signifies something, probably not anything positive though so I'll get on with the task at hand.

I found 'Away from the “icebergs”' the most interesting of the perspectives in the OCLC Newsletter. What Rick Anderson said about library collection usage falling, and about the libraries' monopoly power in the information marketplace was fascinating. It will be interesting to see how the libraries of the future will function and to see what exactly will be in them...

To week 7 and beyond.

Technorati Tagging #15 - 8 to go

I pretty much hate Technorati. I can't work it, i may just be completely stupid, no need to agree, but I can't figure it out which annoys me, because I can figure most things out.

So I'm considering #15 (Week 6) Getting not-so-technical with Technorati done because I've tried really hard but I just can't make it happen.

The end.

Week 6 - Delicious

Delicious is really neat. I set up my own account, they're not very exciting as bookmarks go, most of them are work related, but here is the link anyway http://delicious.com/raggamuffin83. It's quite a good tool, with the tags, it makes it easier to search.

You can also find loads of other sites using the tags, ones that other people have tagged, which could be useful if you're looking for a pile of sites on anything in particular.

Mangere East Saturday Madness

Wow so I came to Mangere East for some quiet Web 2.0 learning on a Saturday morning, to get away from the distractions of work, but wow, it's like a day care. Where are these kids parents? I mean, it's choice that they love the library, but they're out of control, and I can guarantee that if they behaved this way at home they'd be getting a clip round the ears from mother and father!

I've developed a new respect for the library staff. They work crazily hard to put up with 9 year olds with attitudes like they're 16.

Anywho, the point of this blog... I just had a play in the sand box and posted some favourite things between being distracted by kids shouting PEOW PEOW ZHOO ZHOO GOOSH E-E-E-E-E-E-E YESS!!!!! which are apparently part of how you play computer games.

So... week 5 eh?

Wikis are neat, although I have problems with them in that I don't trust that any old joe bloggs is going to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what he's writing in there is true.

The opinion ones are quite good, such as the book lovers wiki, because that is opinion and it's meant to be, whereas I could go in and make up anything about anything and pretend that it's true. Then some poor unsuspecting person from the other side of the world might be doing a project about whatever I wrote about and fail because they believe the garbage that I said. Get it?

I'm going to make an excursion to Mangere East Library on the weekend, it's ma local, and use one of their learn.net computers so I can get ahead. oooooo tricky tricky!!! Actually it's probably not my local, but i like it.... a lot.

Functional age..

So my functional age is 29.25. I'm only 24. It's not too bad, but I'd be happier if my functional age was 18. I think I should start running. Yea nah wow right, I see that one happening never.

Technology related rant.. #11... what the...?

Pretty much everything I've blogged about so far has been technology related. I pretty much thought that was the point..

My favourite technological thing at the moment (and for the last year) has been my cell phone. When I started at Manukau Libraries my car stereo got ripped off in the car park (nah wow thanks guys - it was a good one too) so now I have nothing to listen to music on when I drive. My cell phone has taken up the challenge, and it plays music to me while I drive. I can download any of the songs I want, I can even hook it up to the radio in my house and hear them really loudly if I want, but it's just great. My first cell phone was about the size of a hole punch and had buttons on it like frisbees, and all you could do was ring from it. Now i have this tiny wee thing that does everything but bath the baby! It also takes really good photos. That's technology for you!

I'm off to get my wellness check done now. Wooha.

10 down, 13 to go...

Well I've developed a love for the colour picker.. the link is http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/. It's really amazing what photos you can get of different coloured things. My favourite ones are the natural things that are these amazing colours, some of the green shades bring up great photos of trees, ferns etc. and the bright pinks, reds and yellows find photos of flowers and heaps of other cool stuff. It's just so great that these bright colours occur naturally in the world around us. Nah wow, and I mean wow.

The montager one is cool too, but I couldn't make it work properly, and I just got mad in the end and did something else. I wanted to do it with one of my photos, but it wouldn't let me and it took ages to load. Dumb, that's what that is.

I was going to create a trading card, but then i didn't know what to put on it, then I was going to create a movie poster, but the same problem came up, plus I already went crazy in week 3 with the whole ID card etc. so I figured that I'd cracked this one. If I ever need to do this again I'm fairly sure I'll be able to find it.

Flickr photo Thursday madness!!

So it's the Thursday of week 4 already and I've only just started the activities, jeepers, I'd better get my act together. Darn actual work getting in the way of my blogging!!!!!!

I don't know if we have a digital camera here, I'm sure we do but I can't be bothered looking for it, plus there's not too much exciting stuff to photograph here, plus I'm slightly tied to my desk, SO I've decided to choose a photo on Flicker and blog about it. The link to the photo is http://www.flickr.com/photos/23231538@N06/2553534575/in/photostream/ and it's a photo of my main man Stevie Wonder which belongs to someone called slitobac and was uploaded in June this year.

I've chosen this photo because I booked my tickets for the stevie concert this morning, well, my sister booked them and I'm paying her back in interest free installments aaaahahaha, the bank of Elizabeth is open for business! It's on Thursday October 30th at Vector and, as you may have noticed, I'm more than a little excited. Look at all his band gear in the photo, one day I'm going to own a mean set up like that. Well I hope to anywho.

Check out my sweet Rollyo

Wow, nah wow, I love learning.

I'm so glad I've finally reached the end of week 3. I know that week 2 is meant to be harder than the rest, but I found week 3 really quite time consuming, not difficult as such, but harder to get through on the time management front.

Also, Rollyo confused the heck out of me so I'm glad that's over with. I'm still not entirely sure that I've conquered it, and I can't work out how to use my rollyo from the actual rollyo site, but I did manage to get it onto my blog and it seems to work ok from there. It's quite a neat tool though, even though I can't work it properly, you don't have to search using my searchrolls, you can just search for anything on the web, you just have to choose the right option in the drop down box.


Cheeeoice, all done by Thursday.

Library thing...

I don't have much to say about Library Thing other than I need to learn to read. I struggled to think of 5 books I've read recently so I used some texts from uni that I love more than life itself. Actually, I'm not a fan of the History of Western Music, but the Blatter orchestration book is amazing. Here's a link to my library http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=raggamuffin83 I hope it works. Also it annoyed me slightly because it's quite american but that's to be expected I guess. Like the Harry Potter book 1, the sorcerers stone? I'm sorry...what? Last time I read it, it was the philosophers stone. Although that was rather a long time ago now, maybe I'm just going insane...

Just randomly, we had a good computer game when I was a child called the sorcerer, at least I think that's what it was called. It had something to do with sorcerers anyway.

ID cards...

The ID card generator thing is really awesome too hahaha. You can do lots of fun stuff with it. http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/badge.php is the link.

I really wanted to try the word one on the generator blog but it wouldn't work on my dumb computer. I didn't try and work out why, I thought it was just easier to give up and try something else. That's the attitude!!

Like how I combined the magnigraph picture and the ID badge generators? Nah wow, that's ace.

This is ACE.

This one I like... the magnigraph one. It's Chris Martin from Coldplay if any of you were wondering... This is such a neat effect for photos of yourself to. I can't get enough of it. Go, do your own, here's the link http://www.magnigraph.com/. The only thing to note is that it will just say 'Rendering' for ages but you need to click on a colour (red, blue or black) on the top left of the page or you just end up waiting for ages and nothing happens.

Week 2 continues.....choice.

"Week 2" is tough, yet that sense of achievement you get at the end of it makes it all worth while.. truly. I've heard (well I read it on the learning thing like everyone else probably has) that it's the most difficult of all of the training weeks so now it should be smooth sailing... Yay!!!

#5 took me a few goes, after conquering #4 I couldn't bear to look at #5 until today. I've found that it really does pay to read all of the things on the learning page and not just pretend you're already a Web 2.0 champion who knows what they're doing. Once I did that, my complex about the difficulty of it all left me and I raced through... well I got there anyway. Raced is probably not the correct term.

As search tools go, I didn't mind Topix, it was relatively user friendly. Syndic8 was more budget than a whole bag of budget, it looked like I created it, basically is was a joke, not great at all. Technorati was choice, i even 'claimed' my blog on there, there was some sort of link I could apparently put here to add it to your technorati favourites but that all got too technical for me and I need some lunch as my brain is starting to stop. I may follow that up at a later date.

hmmm, what's for lunch today....

RSS - yea nah, wow.

Well it's been a learning curve alright, but I still love it, almost more than life itself. I have loads of bloglines set up.... check out all my choice feeds... is that the correct terminology??? You probably get the idea anyway.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/raggamuffin83

It took me about a hundred hours to find out how to get that link so you all better be looking at it! When I say a hundred... I mean a hundred. Turns out you need to make sure your profile allows sharing as is stipulated in the first paragraph of the Blogroll Wizard, it even has a handy link to your profile. But if you have the reading comprehension levels of an 8 year old, as I appear to, then you too will spend a hundred hours thinking over how there must be some easy way to find it... It's like I'm a genius.

Now that I've worked it out I feel like I imagine Sir Ed might have felt after he "knocked the bastard off" - It's like I've "knocked the blogroll off" - what a sense of achievement.

I'm not doing this again until next week - as much as I love it, I think I'm blogged out for the next few days...

Learning 2.0 - nah, wow

When I say wow, I mean wow. This is pretty much new to me, I'm working it out though and I think I love it. Already. Yes, day one, love at first sight.

I am however finding it strange, this new relationship I have with the rest of the world. Anyone could read this.. and when I say anyone... i mean anyone. Nah.... wow.

I must go and register my blog so I can win prizes...