newsreader extras

Well, maybe it's me but I couldn't get much out of any of the feed search tools. I looked at feedster, topix.net, Syndic8.com and Technorati and couldn't find good feeds on the two topics I was looking for. I found it easier just to go to the sites that I already visit and check for a feed icon. I realize that my topics might have been the problem. I was interested to see if any one was doing anything on basket making, but as I realized there are many ways to search for that topic ( basketry, basket-making, basket weaving, etc) and I wasn't getting any good hits, or maybe people into basket making aren't into computers. I also looked for feeds having to do with news from central New Jersey where I am from, but that may have been to narrow of a topic, I got news feeds from the New Jersey papers but it was all of NJ and I don't want to look through that much stuff every day. If you were really into the newsreader thing and you were interested in things that people blog about you might find these tools useful, but for a casual user they could be frustrating.

I am looking forward to next week and learning about image generators, librarything(BTW so cool) and Rollyo(what ever that is).

Have a great holiday weekend everyone!

bloglines

Hi all,

Well I have just made my bloglines account public at http://www.bloglines.com/public/jglibrarian .
It was so easy, all this tech stuff is much easier than I thought it would be.
If you are interested in finding out what interests me check it out.

bloglines

Okay, I admit I skipped ahead and learned about bloglines. This is a great service! I no longer have to go to 10 different websites a day, they come to me. I can now have my cartoons, news about New Jersey and keep up with some of my co-workers blog with simple clicks instead of retyping every url and waiting for the sites to load. What a time saver. I wish I knew about this sooner. I can't wait to get back to it and add more!

Ahhhhh

More Flickr fun at motivator

Twitter

What is the point of twitter? I just was out on the web wandering around all this new technology and came upon this site which claims it is a social networking site. It just appears to be random people text messaging random thoughts as the go through their day. Why do we need this in the world?

technology coolness

How cool is this?!! If only I could make the tiles smaller.


P.S. I got them smaller so they fit on one line. Thanks to Library Lady!

Musings on technology

What interests me about technology?

That is this weeks question. What a difficult question. Interest, according to the 4th edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary means "state of of curiosity or concern about or attention to something".

I don't find I have much curiosity when it comes to technology. I do feel a sense of accomplishment when I finally figure something out. But am I interested/curious in it? Not really.

But for my job it is a necessity that I know about various technologies and how to work with them. As I said before I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and not enough to fix what I screw up. Knock on wood, so far I haven't managed to mess anything up to bad. And this blog thing seems to be going pretty well, so far.

But in the spirit of learning I have played around with flickr and some other sites and found that it was pretty fun once you get the hang of it. I particularly enjoyed playing with spell with flickr and also the flickr color picker.

I was also able to down load a book, but I'll talk about that for one of my other challenges. I also looked at some library related blogs in preparation for next week.

Doughboy in HP, NJ

In keeping with my homage to my home state. This doughboy is a well known statue in my home town.

Uploaded from sheenachi's flicker page on 9/25/06

http://flickr.com/photos/sheenachi/

things that make you go hmmm?

Did you ever wonder why the word

blog


is not in the blogger spell check dictionary?


Just a thought.

7 habits

The seven strategies to life long learning are interesting concepts to think about. They seem so obvious when you think about them and for the most part we should already be incorporating them into our daily lives. With a little tweeking and a little shifting of attitude these all should be attainable.

For me, however, I believe that the hardest concept to accomplish will be having confidence as a competent effective learner. It is hard for me, a person with little formal computer training, but a lot of "in the trenches" computer learning, to believe that I can do some of the things that are asked of you in the Learning 2.0 experience. Will I do it right, will my blog make sense, will people get my sense of humor? I sometimes feel that I have enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to fix my exploratory goofs, so I don't explore. This will make me explore.

Apparently, what will be the easiest for me to do will be to teach or mentor others. At my branch we had difficulty logging on to the podcasts from the staff computers. IT came yesterday and fixed the problem on one of the machines. I sent out an email this morning to the rest of the staff letting them know that it wasn't them, but that the computers were having problems with logging on. I also told the staff to use the computer that now has the needed "stuff" and to ask me if they needed help with anything. While, I am by no means an "expert", two heads are better than one sometimes. I have already been approached by a few staff members with questions about the program and I hope more jump on the bandwagon with me.

Keep learning!

Learning 2.0 week 2

MY FIRST BLOG!!!!!

How exciting! I am really looking forward to this experience. It is forcing me to learn and try things that I have wanted to do but for one reason or another I haven't done yet. Mostly the reason is laziness but some of the reason is lack of time or not having a reason except curiosity to explore new technology. I know these are all excuses or roadblocks to learning that I must overcome.

Oh, I now have something to add to my learning contract, an obstacle. Yeah!!!!

Now I just need to figure out what I want to learn, besides blogging and tagging and wikis. I guess I could use "I will learn how to use emerging technology to enhance my work as well as social life" for my contract accomplishment.

Well I gotta go to a service desk now. I'll post more
later