Well, well down to Flickr. What to say about Flickr… I have an account. I have had one for the past several months. My account was required for a class in school. I used it to images automatically appear in my class blog. One might be wondering why I haven’t used that in my personal blog, well good question and my response- pure laziness. I would say lack of time because I never seem to have time to do the things I want to do, but it really doesn’t take that long to upload a photo to Flickr…

 Speaking of time I barely put any time into this blog, which is sad because it isn’t like I don’t have anything to say, but it seems like I don’t make time or have time to really say what I want. Sometimes I have something I really want to say, but when I get a chance to write the thought is lost. Some of my posts I notice are pretty lame, as if rushed and lacking in creative flow. Some of my postings seem like even have a thought is there and what I really wanted to say was left in the nether. I feel as if sometimes I am simply forcing myself to write, which is also sad because I originally set up this blog to let my thoughts have some freedom to roam. Anyhoo, I think I am clearly off on a tangent.

So back to Flicr… Yeah, I really like Flickr.  I have used it to post images and share with just my family, as well. You can easily set up the settings on your images to be public or just for your family and friends to see. If you set up your images for just freinds and family, you need to make sure you actually invite them so that they can actually see the images. Otherwise why set up your images for private viewing unless you just want to look at them yourself online and I don’t know print them, but that sounds kind of batty to me… Making an image public is a great way to not only share your images with the world, but necessary if you want Flickr to send the image to your own blog. This is a cool and easy way to upload images on the fly and have them appear in your blog.

Another cool thing about Flikr is that it is free. All you need to do is set up a Yahoo account. Which I guess might be cool for Yahoo as well because they get more subscribers to their services, like e-mail and all, which comes down to more people they can target for advertising. Okay, maybe I am being a bit cynical, but….

One last thing about Flikr before I drift back into the void. If you are worried about making images being public and losing your rights to the image, don’t be. You can set the your rights for the images and how those rights are viewed so that even if someone uses them you still retain all rights for the image.

Well, I think I have blabbed enough today. There is more I could say about Flikr, but I’ll let you explore for yourself some of the features I’ve mentioned as well as other features I didn’t go into like showing on a map where your image was taken.

Later.

I know, I know, I am moving slowly along with these 23 Things postings.  Basically all I need to do is e-mail Infopeople and set up a blog. Since, my blog has been around for a while setting up a blog was easy and I’ve e-mailed Infopeople, so I am on their blog roll. Well I may be moving at a snail’s pace, but I’ll get there. This is actually my second blog. I had a blog over a year ago that I posted to several times a week, but after getting a new hosting account I pulled it down and set up this one. My first was pretty rudimentary, no bells and whistles like Wordpress has, but it got the job done. This one is pretty easy to work with, but I find my time is less than before to dedicate to posting….

Blogging is pretty easy. You just go in and type whatever you want to and it will instantly appear on your blog. Setting up an account is pretty easy as well. There are numerous blogging services out there as well, most offered for free. Some of the most well known services include Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

Anyways, enough about that… onward ho!

Visited the City of Orange’s Main Public Library yesterday. Although, so far I still see the Cerritos Public Library as my favorite library, the City of Orange has a pretty amazing library. It is very efficient and well planned.

In the back they have a sorter that when books are returned will automatically sort the items into individual baskets for different areas of the library, such as fiction, YA or even to another branch in the city. When pages work on sorting and putting things away they can easily wheel the baskets to another work area or unload out of them onto carts to move around the library to put things back on the shelf. It is quite impressive to see this in action.

They are also using RFID tags on their items, something I’ve read in many Library journals, but haven’t come across personally yet. They have a number of self check-out machines and when checking out items you can see the RFID tags in use as the item information pops up on the screen without your having to physically scan a barcode or anything.

There are a number of other fascinating things in that library that seem to create a phenomenal library experience and appears to make the work tasks of employees flow efficiently. It is a beautiful library inside and out, so I highly recommend checking it out if you are in the vicinity such as stopping for lunch in the Circle where there are a couple great places to eat.

As mentioned in a previous post I am familiar with Web 2.0 and the “original 23 things” that the InfoPeople program is based off of from one of my Library and Information Science classes. A lot of what we need to do for this I have either done in school or I am familiar with from my own experiences outside of school and work, but there are some things on the list I have heard of, yet have no experience using. One good example of this is Del.icio.us, so I am excited to be learning a few new things.

I watched “Helene’s Infopeople webcast, Web 2.0: What Library Managers Need to Know” and found it quite interesting. I had watched a webcast at school from about what is Web 2.0 and thought that the Infopeople Webcast would simply be a rehash of what I saw in school, but was pleasantly surprised to find something new. One of the benefits of the Infopeople broadcast was that it was tailored more towards Web 2.0 tools as they relate to libraries or are being used by libraries, so it was fascinating to see some useful tools that are out there and are impacting libraries.

Came across an interesting site this weekend. It is the site for an artist, Hasan Elahi,  who the Feds wrongly assumed might be a terrorist. The guy had the brilliant idea of putting his whole life online. It is crazy, but pretty cool  He has a GPS device that constantly shows on his website where he currently is. He has a list of all of his purchases including where and the date. There are endless photos of places where he has gone including pictures of what he has eaten. Talk about courage. Completely exposing your life to the whole world. On the plus side, he hasn’t gone to jail since and he has good evidence about what he has been up to. Interestingly according to an interview I read his server shows hits from the Defense Department, so I guess the government is still watching him good thing he is living in the open. For the ultimate in living a life of transparency check out his website, trackingtransience.net.