Cats of the world

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Week 9: 21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

The problem with having podcasts organised into directories, which are classes of information, imposes the site creators definition of how information should be organised onto the user. I couldn't download items in Podcast.net...something to do with running an activeX control. I have much better luck with postcastalley.com

Yahoo podcasts has tag clouds so (providing you know what they represent) you can find relevant and the most popular tags. But it too has categories and I couldn't simply search for 'cats'. I'd have to go through a category and sites (relevant or not) that have those tags. A pretty annoying way to search.

I found trying to add an RSS feed on bloglines extremely difficult and time wasting.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Week 9: You too can YouTube

You have got to see some of the videos on YouTube they are hilarious. Go to the search button and enter 'cats' or alternatively just click the arrow on this picture.


This was very easy to do. I had expected that cutting and pasting the link would be difficult and would have to be done several times. So I'm very convinced about how easy it is.

While this feature might have some use in the library the obvious factor that we would need to address would be someone acting as content advisor making sure nothing offensive ended up on the site. This application could be used on our Intranet perhaps in local history and homework help. Latrobe university has something similar for use with tutorials.

Week 8 : Discovering Web 2.0 tools

This week is looking at the Web 2.0 awards. There's so many categories and so much to choose from.

I decided to look at the Wiki category because I think this is the most obvious application we could use to draw in greater borrower interaction with the library.

PBWiki comes across as being straight forward without the assumption of huge masses of knowledge about the Internet (good for those of our borrowers who don't have this knowledge and feel intimidated by it). The tour was very good and displayed the features in a easy to read style (but without explanation of some jargon such as RSS). I see that Yarra Plenty's summer reading camp Wiki has been created with PBWiki so it must be good and its advanced features was used in the week 17 exercise. It also has a word wizard with features such as conversion of PDF docs to Word but most of these features you have to subscribe to(which means, of course, that you have to pay - what happened to the notion that Wikis would mean equality for all to contribute to the Internet?)

It was awarded quite high on usability but average on interface and design. It has a forum for questions and answers on tagging and while quite helpful on the technical aspect of this it offers nothing on the matter of controlled versus uncontrolled vocabularies let alone other issues such as synonym control, hierarchy, etc. While this is not really the place to debate the pros and cons of the two different vocabularies I think these issues should be made clear for Wiki creators/users at the point of creation so that we can attempt to addres the tagging 'problem'.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Week 8 : Online Applications & Tools

This week we play around with Zoho Writer.

Interesting but... The notion of sharing and being able to alter the one document has been done before. Yes it has all sorts of features like exporting and adding hyperlinks and it could be used in communication between staff and the borrower but I find Wikis more exciting and friendly for that purpose. Did anyone else have the trouble I've had with username/password access and confirmation sent to their email address? That was very frustrating and I think the average borrower would avoid it like the plague.

The danger here might be in overloading people with too much new technology just because its there and we already know our older patrons don't like what we have already.

Week 7 : Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki.

This was fairly straight forward except for the fact that I couldnt get the link for my blog to align with the other entries already on the list. However after I played around with it for a while I got it right. Yee haa.

Week 7 : Wikis

Security and accuracy of information remains as important in Wikis as it does in an OPAC. An article in the Saturday Age (December 2) claimed that Wikipaedia has site/content managers checking up on potential ligitous and offensive material. The libraries referred to in this exercise as having Wikis must have people controlling what content is being added by their borrowers.

I like the idea of using the Wiki, such as in the New Orleans example, to publicise recent events. This might help to publicise a Yarra Plenty Wiki and stimulate borrower interest. Having links on the Wiki to library 2.0 and the type of learning programmes such as we are working on now would help people know what this is all about and the ability to communicate with staff who have specific interests on their blogs might create further interaction between staff and borrowers.

Week 6 : Library/Web 2.0

Well where to start…

There is much debate on blogs and the Internet in general on the nature of Library 2.0. What I personally have found interesting is the debate about tags and subject headings (check out catalogablog). Could we add tags to our OPACs for instance. Perhaps with a filtering agent (human or technical) that could arrange hierarchy and synonym control. The problem with allowing users to make their own tags is the subjective nature of it all. Descriptive words for one person have a different meaning for another. I don’t think complete freedom in searching a library catalogue is a possibility. We would need to have in place some means of guiding the searcher to the ‘correct’ search terms used in the catalogue. Othewise we could end up with a catalogue that only a minority(the technology savvy?) could use.

Week 6 : Technorati

Searching for ‘Learning 2.0’ in ‘blog posts’ and ‘tags’ brought up material that was not very relevant, presumably it is searching like a search engine and looking for instances of the terms in the text of the blogs. Searching in ‘blog directory’ was much more successful although it still found items not relevant to the search that had the word ‘learning’ in it.
Technorati has a ‘Top tags for the hour’ which,, as of December 7, included Pearl Harbour, Christmas, shopping, Britney Spears, quite predictable in itself, but also youtube, mp3, ipod and firefox betraying the technology savvy nature of much of its audience. Do I find any of the popular blog, searches and tags interesting or surprising? Depressingly the answer is no for the site is full of the usual nonsense that I would expect to find on the Internet.

Week 6 : Blogging

This week we look at Del.icio.us.

I had a look at ‘Youth Tech- MySpace handouts’ which had a range of positive and negative comments about MySpace over issues such as access to pornography. The site ‘Youth Tech’ covers a range of issues such as ‘Gaming in Libraries’ using both categories, implying the use of a taxonomy perhaps as well as tags.

Could Del.icio.us be used for research purposes? The idea of bookmarking specific subjects with a range of different links and having easy access via the desktop is attractive. However there remains the same problem of authenticity and relevance that you find using Wikipaedia which could put some people off using it. A further problem remains the use of tags instead of subject headings in these tools (check out the debates on folksomonies and taxonomies on the Net). So I can’t see that delicious would have much application in research and public libraries.