#23 Is this really the end? Or just the beginning ...

Well, a big thankyou to PLCMC and YPRL for offering this learning "thing". I've met my "Challenge" and learned heaps about what the internet now has to offer and how it's being used - very differently from the days I first started searching and browsing many years ago now. Web 2.0 is a whole world I hardly new existed and I now see the purpose for having "space" and sharing it. Most of what I saw was shared by people a lot younger than me, but I can see how we should be creating a much more interactive website for our own library.

One thing I did keep noticing, was that most of these tools were very American but then so was the World Wide Web originally. I hope to see a lot more Australian content in the future.

Probably my favourite things were Zoho Writer, Image Generators and Library Thing.
They were tools I have never used before and had lots of fun. Again thankyou for offering me the opportunity to participate in life long learning.

#22 Audiobooks (or "The end is in sight ")

We have a subscription to Netlibrary for ebooks available from the Yarra Plenty catalogue, but unfortunately eAudiobooks aren't included at the moment so I couldn't listen to anything. I hope we get this feature in the future!

I've been to World eBook Fair to look at the eaudiobooks there. The site is very easy to use. There is a choice of human voice and computer voice books to listen to. They open in Media Player. I listened to The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Shakespeare's Sonnet #29 both read by humans with thick American accents - ghastly! I then tried Jungle Tales of Tarzan read by a computer voice - I'm not sure which was scarier!!!

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

I had a look at podcasts for my Web 2.0 Thing. This time I've looked at Yahoo podcasts. Again, there isn't much Australian content. I did a search on Nancy Pearl - the buzz person at the moment for librarians. I found a public radio program - KUOW 94.9 where she does regular book reviews. I've added this feed to my Bloglines account.

YouTube

Well, I found a lot of rubbish on YouTube, but it is a sharing space for anyone to add video clips. I did find some fun stuff and had difficulty adding the clip I wanted to display from the BBC series "The IT Crowd". There was an error in the tag for the HTML. I tried several times, and finally settled on the clip in my post below. Hope you find it mildly amusing.

#20 You too can YouTube

#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I was amazed to find out there are between 300 and 500 Web2.0 tools so far on the internet. I have realised most of them are in Beta, so I wonder how many will actually stay around. I found this amazing podcast in ODEO from Geek News Central. Just listening to the sound of it made me laugh! It's sponsored by godaddy.com a website building site.

I had a look at some of the tools from the Web 2.0 Awards site. Some of them we have already looked at on our discovery (or My Challenge) so I decided to look at a few different ones. There's lots of music stuff, but I decided to look at podcasts. Podcasts could be added to our libray website if they were of appropriate content. Most of the ones I saw were very American!

#18 Web-based Apps: They're not just for desktops

Zoho was a bit of fun. Again, another "space" where you can create documents from the web instead of your PC and access them from anywhere. Great idea for those who don't alway use the same PC. Check out my blog under this one.

Zoho

So this is Christmas
And what have you done       
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

#17 Playing around with PBWiki

It's interesting to read about fav books, restaurants and music from the other side of the world. I was hesitant to add to this wiki, but I have added my blog to the Fav Blogs page. Under the Aussie blogs, of course!

#16 So what’s in a wiki?

I came across Wikipedia some years ago while doing a search for a borrower on the information desk. I remember being amazed at the entries I found, because they didn't appear to be serious. I was looking for authoritive information and wasn't really impressed with what I found and haven't really used it ever since. I never thought to look for current information like who the 12 finalists for American Idol were as suggested in The Age article on Saturday 2nd December Know-alls.
After reading more about wikis from the links on the PLMC blog I now understand more about what a Wiki is about and realise their potential for their use in libraries. I think they would work really well as suggested for communicating about a particular topic instead of sending fifty million emails backwards and forwards. I also think the wiki at Princeton Public Library is a great way for us to make a Reader's Advisory space that anyone can contribute to.

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

I remember reading about the notion that libraries of the future have been around for awhile now. Architecturally they have changed in their design and don't have walls lined with books. They have had "spaces" for people and computers, books and magazines have been interspersed throughout the building. Library2.0 is like an extension of those"spaces" being available online.
Wendy Schultz's article To a temporary place in time...
makes an interesting point though " people will still need experienced tour guides" and "People will collect librarians rather than books—the ability not just to organise, but also to annotate and compare books and other information sources, from a variety of useful perspectives".