Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Second life

Well, I created a Second life account: I'm KathyLynn Heliosense. I created my avatar and poked around a bit, and I guess I don't get it. Um, how am I supposed to find things? Walking around got boring after a while, and flying was faster but still seemed pointless. I've heard about an information island, but didn't know how to even start looking for it. I have seen an archived author interview on Second life, which was interesting. I guess it's great if you know the layout of where things are and can find interesting places quickly. Otherwise, it seems like a time-eater. Why would I spend time there? I didn't figure that out.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Online Applications and Tools

This week's assignment was to explore the available application webtools such as spreadsheets, documents, presentations, calendar, chat, and so forth. The advantage to them is that a) they're free, b) they're online so a person can access their documents, spreadsheets, etc from any web-accessible computer and c) they're shareable so they're ideal for group projects. Recently I did several school visits where I attempted to use a Powerpoint presentation. Unfortunately my version was incompatible with the computers in the schools, so I had to punt. Having my presentation available online would mean that I had both a backup and didn't have to worry about compatibility issues. I can see, however, that whatever computer I used for my presentation would have to access the web.

I explored Google Docs and Zoho.com. Both offer the standard suite of applications: documents, spreadsheets, and "slide" presentations. Since I had a recently created presentation, I wondered if I could transfer it to either of these. Google docs was disappointing in that I couldn't upload my presentation directly. I also couldn't copy slides and paste them into my Google presentation. It didn't recognize my .tif files when I tried to insert a picture, but it did recognise the .jpg file. It also didn't like the fact that one picture I tried to insert was big. What Google did offer was basic presentation tools, which it did well.

Zoho.com offers a wider array of applications in addition to the standard suite, such as document management services, invoice tools (5 invoices for free), chat, wiki, webconferencing, and a database creation tool ($25 for 5 users). Obviously, they charge for some of these additional cool tools whereas Google docs was all free. When I tried out the presentation application, I was able to upload my file, but only after I changed the file format out of Windows Vista. It also had problems with pictures.

Both of these applications are wonderful ideas in the library setting where many of our patrons don't have access to their own computers. They will be able to save their stuff without having to buy or deal with disks or thumb drives. The downside is that they may not know about them, or have problems uploading pre-existing documents to the sites.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Search Engines: comparison

This assignment really reminded me of a class assignment in the Information School. At least I don't have to write a 5-page paper on it! I was especially interested in the 2 meta search engines of www.dogpile.com and www.mamma.com, as I didn't have as much experience with them as with the other search engines. I searched for my name in both as the test. I had(somewhat) recently searched on my name in Google, and since I've graduated last year, it pulled up fewer results by far.

My results for the 2 meta search engines? I much prefer www.dogpile.com to www.mamma.com. Both sites pulled up 3 pages of results, and both sites listed which search engines they retrieved the links from. Both sites gave many more results than Google did alone.

But in spite of mamma.com boasting that it gives "intelligent" results, it gave links that only seemed to have "Kathy" in them as well as links that had "Smargiassi" in them. Even when I tried to force it to have an "AND" in the search so it would pull up only those sites with both terms, it appeared to use the "OR" boolean search. That was very annoying.

Dogpile.com on the other hand, gave 3 pages of relevant results. It even pulled up a site, webjunction.com, that had posted a literature pathfinder that I developed as a student. I didn't know that they had that document, but at least they cited me as its author. I was very pleased with the results it came up with. My only caveat is that dogpile is slower than mamma, but it isn't slow enough to be annoying and not worth the better results.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Podcasts

I started off this exploration of podcasts by going to Podcast Alley. When I 1st decided on a particular podcast to try out, it took me to a place where I could download a podcast feed, which seems to be like an RSS feed for audio. Since I don't have an MP3 player, and don't plan on downloading enough podcasts for me to need a program to manage them all, I went on without downloading a program. I still hadn't listened to one from this exploration, though.

Then I found that I could copy a link to a podcasting site from my Google reader. Cool! I found one that sounded library-related, loaded it into my reader, and found that all it really was, was a blog. Delete.

The next one I found ended up being really interesting. It was an audiobook about a time-traveling librarian being published in serial form by Podiobooks. I could listen to it straight through my reader, and actually sounded interesting enough that if I did have an MP3 player, I would be interested in downloading it on a regular basis to listen to where ever I happened to be.

Finally, I found a library in Sunnyvale, CA that does podcasts of many of its programs, including a puppet performance of "Peter and the wolf", several business research programs, and a bi-lingual Russian/English storytime. I could listen to the straight audio podcasts from the Reader itself, but they also offered videos, where I had to click through to the site to get. From there I could also access an audio-only version.

If Sno-Isle were to think about doing regular podcasts of its programs, we would need to invest in recording equipment, and librarians in the system would need to be willing to get, setup, and run the equipment for the programs they wanted to post. Considering the resistance to mere blogging in our branch alone, I would anticipate even more resistance to this extra effort. If someone wanted to champion an effort in this area, they should investigate how much traffic a site such as Sunnyvale's gets. I know that we already do podcasts of children's librarians reading picture books, and if we already get lots of traffic it would be a good place to gradually expand our offerings to events.