#23 (week 9)

I certainly feel that I've done something... Actually, I'm feeling pretty jaded. I was away on leave from early October till the end of November, and so have been trying to cram my 2.0 discovery journey into a short amount of time. I'm not sure that this has been the best approach, but I'm glad I have gone through the steps - and even happier that I'm finished!

I feel that I have learned a lot more about things that I wanted to know about, and more than I really wanted to know about some things - but none of it has been wasted time. And that is not something I've said about most training programmes or courses I've been through or attended.

There is a lot I will explore in more depth over the coming weeks, as this time of year is typically a lot less pressured. It's the time when I sort files, tidy up around the place (physically and metaphorically speaking), make plans and plot and scheme... Checking out new ways of thinking and doing and finding out what is out there and what others are already well up with the play on is appropriate, and I think I am more aware not only of what sorts of things to explore, but where to focus my exploring energies.

And of course, far more importantly, I will feel a lot less mystified when overhearing conversations involving people under the age of 15. Or participating in conversations (verbal or electronic) with said under 15 age group. I might even feel less of a old fogie numb brain when talking to my nieces and nephews - there's gotta be hope, right...?

#22 (week 9)

I've used netlibrary before - and it worked a lot better then than it did for me this evening. Without going into it, I'll be checking out the way it's loading for me with the Digital team... most bizarre... But seriously, I really am familiar with netlibrary, ebooks etc the way they are supposed to be. Don't care for them much myself - I prefer the paper version usually.

But the new stuff coming with downloadable audio books - that will be interesting. I've been a book-out-loud fan for years, and I'll be really interested to see what happens with Overdrive. I'm looking forward to trying it out for myself ('cause I'll have a snazzy new MP3 player to listen to my downloaded books on, while on the bus to and from work...), but also seeing whether a range of customers pick it up, or just a small techie group.

ebooks were going to be all the range, and in fact they seem to be of interest to only a small proportion of our audience as far as I've noticed. But the greater portability of the audio books - is there anyone but me that *doesn't* have an MP3 player humming away on my bus each day? Not likely - may see them bringing a whole different kind of audience in...?

#21 (WEEK 9)

Ah, well... Podcasts are not unknown to me in a wider world context - but they are not to be in this little Auckland City corner of the smaller world. I am not permitted to access these little gems from within AC's firewall.

I did cruise through some podcast sites, checked out the kinds of stuff on offer... and I can honestly say that I don't really feel that I'm missing out on much.

When I get home, I'll switch on that ancient technology (the CD player) and listen up to some paid for music *without* pictures...and I think I'll be alright.

#20 (week 9)

OK, this is fairly addictive stuff...

I'm vaguely horrified at how many things that I thought of were available, to say the least. A sign that the web is where all the baby boomers and us boom followers have gone...

I searched in vain for a 60s or 70s tv show that did not have at least two clips loaded. Mind you, the proportion of what's on youtube that encompasses is miniscule, but still.

Sigh. Favourite episodes of Bewitched, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (OK, I was young, and therefore my Richard Dean Anderson addiction is completely understandable). And most importantly, one of my all time favourite episodes of (the real) Star Trek - go on, don't tell me you've never seen or heard of *that* episode... The trouble with tribbles! So, here is one of my favourite scenes from this, one of the more vivid and long-lived memories from my childhood...





Super giggle, and sigh...

I don't know what I'd do exactly with YouTube in a library context, but clips of events, teasers of upcoming stuff, a tour of Central's mysterious stacks, a bookbinding demo, a look at some of our rare and great treasures, story-time of the week... it's all too addictive - I'm going to delete the link, and forget I ever saw it...

#19 (week 8)

Interestingly enough, I think this illustrated to me some of the major differences between what someone who needs internets sites vs someone who wants sites look for...

I checked out about a dozen award winners in several categories, and was struck with how little I liked the majority of them. Actually, that is why I checked so many out (the last half dozen or so I really just dipped into, homepage plus a few other pages only) - because the first ones I went to I thought were pretty awful. It's taken a while, but I felt I had to know if it was just one or two, or if I was really so out of touch with what apparently rates as top of the line for most people - or at least for the judges for these awards.

All the sites I looked at seemed to be visually cramped &/or crowded, excessively stuffed with rather unnecessary visual pollution or items which were good only for slowing down page access, like pictures, data-dense wallpaper, huge blocks of complex images... And quite a few of them were into noise pollution as well. The award site itself was a prime example of the sort of stuff I don't appreciate. Takes up to 30 seconds to load, and when I just now went back into it to see if the download speed had improved since an hour ago when I first looked, it took 45 seconds. That's just the first, main page. It would probably time out if I were on the dial up at home. And yes, lots of people do still have dial up - or what Telecom mis-names as broadband.

Which is not to say that the functionality of some was not attractive, where I was sufficiently motivated to wait around for pages to load. Which wasn't often. And I even visit some of them occasionally (biblio.com quite often, realtravel.com & reddit.com sometimes) so know what they do etc.

I guess the thing is, I use the internet to access information on behalf of others for large chunks of my day - and those others are paying for the service that I provide - or the services I access for them, most available via the internet. So I don't want bells and whistles, pretty pictures that tell me nothing and slow things down - I want clean, clear pages with quick navigation, access to a site map and effective site-search box, and the option of printing pages quickly and cleanly where required. Medal winners don't offer these (for my work) basics, in the main, if this site is any indication.

I think an ideal world would have a websites etc of all kinds with a kind of toggle mechanism - click here for the 'just the information' display, and click here for 'bells, whistles, fru-fru etc' display.

*That* would make for more happy campers...

#18 (week 8)

Sigh.

I think the real potential of, and potentially enjoying, the site was significantly reduced by internet access speed.

I have my own (work PC based) word/excel etc moderately customised, and would probably want to do quite a lot of customisation of the offered basic templates on Zoho to make it attractive to me to use on anything like a regular basis, but... The grind of the wheels working when any sort of formatting command was used makes me feel that middle of the afternoon is not a good time to try personalising my stuff on Zoho... I may dip back in early one morning, or late in the evening when the central city has emptied out and the internet speeds up.

I like the concept of the availability of the applications wherever one is, and emailing a link to zoho for all to access rather than emailing material, but I'm thinking about whether this would be a better, worse, or just different way to work with shared files, compared to using wiki-functionality, or inhouse, storing of files on a shared drive, with tracking turned on...

I did browse through other bits of the stuff about features, but didn't recognise things that I have used or immediately thought 'wow' about - so will take some time to work through what these things might offer me later on.

Hmm, stuff to ponder at some stage...

#17 (week 7)

OK, that was painless enough, and just like I remembered from previous journeys into wiki-dom.

I know more than perhaps I truly want to about the favourite aspects of my co-workers lives, and their choices re colour/font/etc with their blog address was also interesting... But communities, communities of interest...

#16 (week 7)

Well, wikis.

Been around a while, I've accessed them on many occasions, and even participated in a couple. They are a more comfortable fit for me [order-appreciator, comfortable-with-clear-structure, chaos-averse, control-freak...] and the ease of use and access is nice.

I still marvel though at the amount of time lots of people seem to have to devote to (indeed a more structured etc etc version of but still) their particular concerns [interests, passions, obsessions] and sharing them with the e-world.

Structured environments like libraries would, it seems to me, find more value in what wikis offer than the chat-fest, blog or bebo type of thing. Partly because it (IMHO) suits the intent of conveying quality information that is easy to read and access and navigate around it, with some editorial control to protect all users from Bad People's input, but also because (all? most?) libraries are associated with organisations which are concerned (obsessed?) with image, marketing, branding etc... Better fit with the structure of wikis than the more free-form gas-fests, or other media-format interaction options.

I particularly liked the book club / genealogists / community noticeboard sorts of wikis on the public library sites, and the research starting points on a university site I saw. Wider community involvement in libraries, but also increasing the awareness of public ownership of public libraries (and students working collectively and collaboratively to achieve positive educational outcomes...) that is so often lacking in the general populace in most towns and cities.

I still can't get to grips with the 'everyone has the internet' philosophy pretty much inherent in the articles and commentary etc I read relating to these tech etc things... Moves such as 'free' (ie no direct user charges) internet in public libraries do something towards addressing the real fact that huge numbers of people *don't* actually have readily available home or work internet access. But then there is the issue of the power and speed of connection required to achieve a satisfying experience, especially when one is new to such things, when first exploring the internet or trying out participation in blogs, wikis or whatever - or rather the widespread lack thereof, even among the computer enabled and comfortable.

Roll on the end of the Telecom stranglehold, maybe...

#15 (week six)

Thoughts on Web 2.0; quality, quantity, technology, money, true accessibility, real learning, sweeping statements, baby & bathwater...

Quality, quantity, technology I love the idea of technology and technological breakthroughs, and ways to lower barriers between people and between people and the information that they want/need/whatever. XML, for example, seems like a great tool advance to me, and it has opened the internet up to so many more people being able to do things in different ways. But why is there so much [expletive deleted] spouted about 'it's all out there' 'the web is the answer' 'the 2.0 way is all of us accessing everything' and the like? What there is to know is indefinably vast - and only the tiniest amount of it is readily and freely accessible to any significant proportion of [for now confining myself to the NZ] the population, and much of what is available is unvalidated or untested or undesirable. Yes, the web continues to grow, and 2.0 may well be a way to allow better or different access to more or different parts of that vastness, but I mean, really, some perspective - more/different is not necessarily better, it may just be more/different.

Money, true accessibility Why do none of the articles or commentators or bloggers or whatever talk about money? In many instances 'it' - whatever that may be for the individual - is not available unless you (or some large institution/corporation/organisation with which you are affiliated) are prepared to pay for it. It's not libraries locking up print journals and 'forcing' customers to emerge from whatever nest they are comfortably ensconced in and make an actual visit to a building somewhere that stops most of Joe Public from getting to the latest issue of Nature or Science or Whatever - the publishers (and by extension the writers etc) want to be paid for their intellectual content. Even where my library does provide electronic access to material, it isn't 'all' material. Firstly, because there is vastly more information not available electronically than is and, secondly, because huge amounts of material that is available electronically is gated based on money. Lots of money is required to access the information, and someone is required to pay. Taxes are real money, honest, even local taxes/rates. And I don't see people leaping up and down to pay more local or central government taxes (or students begging to pay more in fees) so more of us can access more peer-reviewed, validated - or whatever - content. I don't want my doctor doing his research via his blog before operating on me, (or mechanic/car, or pharmacist/prescription, or...) thanks all the same...

Sweeping statements I see versions of everywhere like 'At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play.' My preferred work environment is not the web, and many of my customers do not see the web as their preferred environment. Yes, reach out, move on, keep exploring opportunities and possibilities - but don't imply that books and real human interactions and personal connections are passe and no longer relevant. I feel the same way about advertisers of any other product that seem to want to pursue me into every avenue of my existence (speaking of sweeping statements) - I wish they wouldn't. Hmmm.

Real learning I think the heart of it is a phrase in the OCLC Web 2.0 newsletter. It somewhat caught my eye when I first read it, but after video-ing, further reading, linking and surfing etc, I went back to the newsletter to see if I understood it differently , as it were - and this phrase, the second time through, sprang out: "You and your mobile and nonmobile devices—PDA, MP3, laptop, cell phone, camera, PC, TV, etc.—are always online, connected to one another and to the Web."

Because I'm not always online, I don't want to be always online, and see it as unhealthy to be this way. The connectivity sensation is false. You aren't connecting to 'people, thoughts, ideas and experiences...' as one article put it. You are alone in front of an electronic device sending out remote electronic signals. I don't want to be remote, or rather disconnected from genuine human contact and interaction. And I don't think video conferencing or video phoning is much of a connection either. I want to have the be-online option available to all people, myself included, but I want neither my work nor home life absorbed by/into it.

Is being exposed to more data or taking in more unverified 'facts' enough? What about real learning, and learning to apply your critical faculties (and being helped to develop these, and see why you need them) to what you see/hear/read. I come across a lot of regurgitation of, for example, an essay/fact/etc 'picked up off the net...' that therefore 'must be accurate, because I found it online...'. I don't think this kind of thinking and/or level of understanding will lead to productive or valuable collaborative results on a library website. So yes, a place for it, but a more important, or prominent, or exposed, part of our offer should be authoritative, defensibly so.

I don't want the library to *not* become a part of the whatever web 2.0 is, and will become. I don't want us to lose touch with those for whom the e-connectivity is a core aspect of their lives and worlds, or fail to reach out to them with services and resource options that mean something to them and work for them.

I love books, book-y stuff, and (apart from a very few exceptions in a totally plutonic and intellectual way) love other book-y loving people. So I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For many people, probably for some time to come, a website is somewhere to check what time XYZ is open, or what events are on at LMN or how to get to ABC, or where GHI can be found, etc, etc.

I hope we can embrace both concepts & communities, paper/building/flesh-and-blood-person & virtual/e-world, & also embrace those that are a bit of these and other stuff, as it were... I think I like best the idea of web 2.0 as a platform to spring off from, rather than a way or means in itself. Federated searching of reliable sources of information does make me a little weak at the knees - I'm possibly still in touch with the geek-potential within me... Roll on web 4.0, where all things are everywhere for & too everyone, where 2.0 doesn't supplant 1.0, or 3.0 supplant 2.0...

#14 (week 6)

I spent a lot of time looking and playing, and I'm still unable to get away from my minimal to non-existent interest in blogs, and what people are raving on about on whatever e-channel they are using.

I understand the concept of tags and tag structure, and the search capacity it allows - but can't think of a reason for searching for blogs. I don't think I lack lateral thinking skills, or the capacity to expand my worldview or experience. I think I just don't want to read something in a blog - or even in a blog format.

I obviously don't lack prejudice either, because I don't see the blogosphere as offering reliable, authoritative, effectively organised information that I can rely on or use. I feel this way about the small or the large. If I need (or even want) to know what the definition of a word is, I'll go to the Oxford - accessing it on paper or electronically not being the issue - and if I want to research a topic I'll access databases of articles that include material from reputable peer reviewed journals.

If I'm just curious, I'll entertain myself on the web, and so won't look just for blog-disseminated material, but will search in a wider way, as it were.

I was actually quite dismayed by the kinds of things I saw on the posts I pulled up when I searched blogs on Technorati. It's not to say that people don't have interesting, worthwhile an accurate things to say, but rather the way that many postings or comments seemed to indicate no critical assessment or filter had been applied to the veracity or value or accuracy of the information etc under discussion.

Most interesting exercise in how a completely different from me sector of the world population live/act/think/behave/interact....

#13 (week 6)

OK, now I'm pretty much convinced that whatever 'social' aspects were originally in my personality makeup are either faded to virtual transparency (pun intended) or gone completely.

&/or I'm hidebound / rigid. Or so comfortable with the kind of searching that I spend so much time on that I'm firmly embedded in the metaphoric crack in the couch between the back and the cushions, and unable to get up and move to another seat...

I like the availability of a tool to enable me to access bookmarks from 'anywhere' a lot - and I will explore del.icio.us and diigo in some depth if/when I get a couple of spare internet-enabled hours - but I don't feel the love for the 'social annotation/bookmarking' concept. There's so much junk out there... I want to get to exactly where I need to be, and that's why I use appropriate powerful search engines or websites or catalogues or... The purpose that the social bookmarking thing (beyond bookmark transportability I mean) is best suited for is serendipitous or bored e-travel... And that's not usually how I do - or want to - spend my internet time.

Or is it because it doesn't appeal to me to use it in the 'social' way that I don't see its potential attraction...

I dunno...

#12 (week 5)

Not really my thing, I think...

Here's my toy search roll, http://rollyo.com/321321321/current_events-goss/

I do *a lot* of searching on all kinds of sites, for all kinds of work-related reasons... But the sites and the reasons are typically very different each of the 50+ times I search in a day. And then there is the fact that the majority of the sites I search all the time are member-only in some fashion, ie requiring log-ins/passwords, &/or specific search syntax, etc...

Still, interesting enough as a concept. In the specific, more annoying - I didn't like the layout of the site, not keen on the arrangement of the access points into other things, really don't like the cluttered results-returned page - and the advertising!!!

But, still, interesting enough as a concept. I wonder if someone will take it and run with it, and produce a cleaner, clearer version etc...

#11 (week 5)

Hah! Something I knew... that I kept meaning to go and check out in more depth... so now I have...

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/charlie2-0

Oh well. Still no time or access to actually catalogue the thousands of books, DVDs, CDs, videos etc that I have, but now I know that if I ever:

1) do have them all in one place (as opposed to stored with rellies, boxed up under the spare bed, and stacked over every flat surface, including most of the floor, of the study, as well as being crammed into an awful lot of shelves and drawers...) &

2) have a computer at home &

3) experience broadband as it's advertised (touted) to be in a home environment &

4) have the time &

5) have the energy

I can finally get started on the dream job of a lifetime. Yes, I am officially the traditional Librarian Geek (in contrast to the modern, e-concerned Librarian Geek) - (one of) my dream job(s) would be to create a catalogue of *my own* well loved and appreciated multi-format information holdings, and arrange and properly house it all.

Of course, as the traditional Librarian, I don't actually have an income big enough to allow me to invest in the size of building this would require. Because, naturally, the more space I have, the more I can fill - and so the less $ I have because I used it to acquire filling for all those glorious storage places - shelves, cabinets, corners, and more - so even retirement, which sorts the get-time&energy thing, wouldn't help...

Now I'm depressed...

#7 Week 3

Well, no reason to do these in order; I get bored, or follow a thread from something that I do find interesting only to end up somewhere completely different... Just as well we're all different.

The techno thing that I followed up today was skype, because it came up in conversation a couple of times recently and I had only the vaguest idea what it referred to.

I'm not sure how much less vague my understanding is, after having to click on almost all the hyperlinks in the various sites I accessed to learn about skype - since the terminology used to 'clarify' things was also outside of my scope in large part - but I think I like what I believe may be close to what it is.

For example, I was sort of aware of internet PC-PC phoning - but I hadn't consciously come across the term that apparently describes these, ie softphones. Too much, too much - my head hurt after a while. I'm a little worried about how much (if any) of this I'll retain...

And the nothing stays still thing. What little I did sort of know about the internet ph thing - well, things have come soooooo far. Really, brain hurt...

#10 - Week 5

Coo-er, another addictive time waster - there are so many... Which is not to say that I can't see the fun in this kind of play and manipulation, because I couldn't say that, having just spent what I only realized after the fact was half an hour of pootling about...

The number of sites that offer you free access to a million ways to do weird, whacky or just different things with just about any image or text or... basically with any kind of e-data. There are a lot of people out there with time on their hands, or these things aren't really free and the bill is in the mail... or both...?

Still, a true relief after the bloglines endless timeout debacles. As that got too much, I went and played with pictures, or with surfing to find out who else was going to offer me a way to play with pictures. Girding of the proverbial, ready for another battle with bloglines...

So, what did I end up saving? Another cat picture! Still, it should be noted that it's also another cat!

In the end, the images I saved here are the first two I played with, accessing a couple of different ways of image manipulation from: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/.

#8 & #9, week 4

Hmmm

I've learned a lot more about a lot of things related to RSS feeds.

I've also learned that technology (or is it access to technology at AC) is not my friend. Access to blogger & bloglines has been patchy at best today, and at worst, it has taken several minutes and several new net sessions to access either. I have been able to access each two or three pages times per session at most before it crashes again. Fortunately I have decided to rise above the technological torture, and pretend that it is just current net conditions rather than the bloglines website. Noooo, it's just bloglines...

This is my fifth attempt now to create the link to my RSS feeds on bloglines to post here due to the endless crashings out (technical term) so I **really** hope this works...

Why not - of course not... so I'll try again...

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Charlie2-0

Nope. I give up. No, wait... now it maps to the right page; I have 20+ feeds, but have marked all but a couple as private... honest...

That said, some basic stuff I looked for on bloglines that isn't there or isn't working makes me think I'll spend time checking out other (different? better? more compatible with AC firewall/telco conditions?) RSS options. One basic I look for is a setup to automatically email me at an interval I determing (once a day, odd days, weekly... whatever) summarizing new info availability for my feeds. There seemed to be some version of this at bloglines, but when I click on the link, there is no information on the page...? Joys of a beta site maybe?

Hmmm...

Flickr - #5 #6 - week 3

Glory be, I've been to Flickr and survived the experience.

Can't say it's for me, but I appreciate the concept a lot more than I did the vent concepts otherwise known as MySpace et al. I really like the have it stored somewhere else, and everyone go there to see it, vis a vis emailing huge amounts of data all over. Is this the electronic world's equivalent of the physical world's reduce-reuse-recyle behaviour writ large? Why yes, I think it is.

Curious though, how it's all made so easy... No nuts and bolts, everything happens in the background. Speaking of extensions of real world concepts into the e-world. I read a book the other day about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line (and a whole lot more, but...) and it struck me how little I know about the everyday things around me. What exactly is a sextant, how does it work, etc was how it started...

So today I ended up spending 40 minutes reading about the programming and technology concepts that led us to the kind of things taken so for granted by e-world savvy (ie not me) people - blogging, Flickr et al being a tiny portion of same. Fascinating, but.... 10 lifetimes wouldn't be enough to give a quick once over to knowing more about the interesting things I've *already* come across. The world's too big, too complex, too too, for a generalist...

The photomontage from flickr was the only one of the various bits and pieces on mashups that really caught my imagination, although I did enjoy learning what they were, where they came from (as it were!) and how they are used. I guess the intellectual component rather than the visual appeals...

Thing 4

Well, I hoped to have startling insights into new discoveries, new learning after spending a (slightly dazed) half hour looking at Bebo, MySpace and Facebook - but I can't say that I have.

I'm not sure whether it's an issue of format or content, but none of it did anything for me. It wasn't interesting or particularly not interesting, so much as boring. It seemed like a visual version of the junk mail that I spend time and energy elsewhere in my life trying to avoid.

In the same way that I rarely watch TV if I really want to see a TV programme or movie (I'll get it on DVD or video or do without) I can't imagine myself ever using this kind of medium if I ever want to communicate with anyone, or access anyone else's communications. If I had nothing else to do or if someone particularly asked me to check out something very important to them, maybe I’d visit... But probably not - all I see is visual and aural pollution, so why waste anyone's time.

Of course, this from the person who, by the nature of their work, accesses work tools etc for almost all of my working hours via the internet... In the same way that I have deliberately not got a computer at home in order to set a limit to the proportion of my life that I am 'electronically connected' , I don't want to participate even for the purposes of this exercise in the public electronic/internet 'social networking' world.

Great for those who enjoy it or find it useful or interesting, but not for me...