Thing 18 - Online Productivity Tools

It was fast and easy to create a Zoho Writer account and create a couple of small test documents. Zoho or Writely will be great tools for SJPL teams or committees who are working together to create a document or report. Web-based applications make any kind of collaborative document creation easy. Zoho has the same group editing feature as a wiki and allows all the collaborators to access the document from any PC . I managed to export my 'Grandmasparty' doc to my blog (see below). I had expected my Blogger account to open and be given the option of choosing where to place my Zoho doc. Instead, the Zoho doc was simply plopped in as the most recent blog post. Now I have to get more comfortable moving text and graphics around from within my blog.

btw ... Mike Sarhad has already created a fantastic Word Processing, Spreadsheets & More page in Web Links by Subject. When all the RAC computers are in use, Reference staff point SJSU students to the online applications page when they are forced to use Research computers that don't have Word or Excel loaded.

Grandmasparty

Party Planning

• Confirm reservation
• Send out maps
• Order cake
• Buy floweres
• Check on carpooling

Things 16 & 17 -- Wiki world

The SJCPL and Albany Co. PL wikis can serve as models for new SJPL wiki applications. Good first projects would be to reformat the Web Links by Subject web page to allow community input, or to create new service area, programming or library operations and procedures wikis built on staff input. There are many, many possibilities. At last week's KRU meeting Reference tiptoed into the wiki world by forming a 3-person team to plan how to convert our desk binder material into a wiki. A great feature of wikis is that they can be restricted or unrestricted. Just like blogs, you have to be sure that you don't post or publish secure information like passwords or account codes to a public wiki. Depending on how large your intended audience is, it can take some time and effort to restrict access.

I jumped into the Sandbox and added my favorite restaurant (Aqui) and my favorite theater location site (movies.com).

Thing 14 - Technorati

Technorati is a real time-eater. This morning at the Albrecht In-Service, Sandra said everyone should be able to complete Learning 2.0 in between 4 - 8 hours. Well, I just spent 2 hours wandering down the byways of Technorati and reading curiously interesting musings on topics ranging from the frivolous through the serious. I plugged 'Learning 2.0' into the search box, limiting the search to blog posts. Oops ... garbage appeared. Trying again with quotation marks created a better list of matches. The option of sorting further by relevance or authority was interesting, but I don't clearly see what the difference is.

Overall, I found Technorati to be unimpressive. Although I'm using Del.icio.us all the time now (all two weeks!) and love tagging and saving sites, I've learned that we all think differently and don't assign tags in the same way. It's fun to scan the Favorited and Popular blogs, but the Search feature generates a lot of irrelevant matches in my opinion.

Thing 13 - Del.icio.us

Only when I created my own del.icio.us account did I see the real power of tagging. Once I figured out that 'post to del.ici.us' link couldn't be added to our IE toolbar, it took a while to locate it under Favorites > Links > Post to del.icio.us. By leaving the Favorites window open in the left nav, I could easily select sites under interesting tags and post them to my del.icio.us account. Pretty soon I was developing an interesting word cloud of interesting topic-tags. And with a simple click, I can also delete articles that don't strike my fancy anymore. My major problem was booting myself out of del.icio.us if I clicked 'back' too many times.

I rapidly realized that I could cruise screen after screen of SJLibraryLearning2 entries, but that it was much easier to choose a tag from the right nav. I felt like an informational sheep because I was drawn to entries with the highest 'hit' counts ... and they usually were entries from well known, respected sources. Del.icio.us offers both public library customers and SJSU students a dynamic way of building a personalized database of web resources that is organized and 'speaks' to each person in the language/terms/tags/vocabulary that is most meaningful to themselves.

Thing 12 - Rollyo

Rollyo is somewhat similar to RSS feeds in that you select your favorite sources of information. In the case of RSS, you get any and all recent info posts from a site, whereas with Rollyo, you can specify and limit your retrieved data to the search terms of your choosing.

For this exercise I created an initial list of local and national websites for organizations in the fields of environmental protection and global warming . Try out my Rollyo Searchbox to the right.

Thing 11 - Web 2.0 Awards

I hoped to find fascinating possibilities in the Events category of Web 2.0 award winners. Instead, no clear winners were listed so I checked out the 5 Honorable Mentions sites. The first 2 were dead links. The 3rd option -- Eventful.com -- bills itself as the 'World's Largest Collection of Events.' My search for library events in the Learning, Education category turned up Tully Branch children's storytimes as well as SJSU's Job Fair Success Workshop. A nice feature is that you can sort events by date, venue, venue and distance ranges. The site has relatively little content and will have to work hard to beat Craigslist.org or Zvent.com for variety and sheer numbers of event listings.