Okay, it is finally here. The day I wrap this all up. No more 23 Things. It is over! Bring out the champagne and let’s celebrate! Or more likely for me, let out a big sigh of relief and head off to something else.

So what do I think of all this? Did I learn anything? Has it been mind opening? Life changing? Are these things I will use in my professional life? Personal life? Did I waste my time or that of anyone else who stumbled across my posts?

Well as for the latter that is up to the individual who came across my posts whether they were useful and served a purpose or just wasted a few minutes of their time. I can’t speak for others, but myself….

I think overall I learned a lot. Part of that I think was because of the serious effort I put in to learn many of these things. Some of them I was already familiar with and didn’t learn anything new, such as Google Docs, wikis, and Bloglines. Some I was familiar with, but built upon what I knew, such as Flickr, libraries enhanced with Web 2.0, social bookmarking, mashups, YouTube and Google Maps. While others I knew little or nothing about and learned a great deal about such as Rollyo, Twitter, LibraryThing, image generators, Technoratti, and del.icio.us. Some of these I may never use again, such as Technoratti, Rollyo or Twitter, but then again you never know I may come to use them at a later date and find that my understanding of them was a great benefit. Maybe I might be working with or helping someone who is interested in some of these services then my knowledge of them would be of great benefit. I think what I learned from many of these things it that they are a great benefit in enriching my activities outside of work and in what I do at work. Already I have come up with ideas just from playing with these tools and am working to implement some of these ideas within my branch.

I think also it is good to be aware of the technology out there and I encourage all library staff to take a look at some of the online resources that are out there and whether they may be of benefit to their work, people they know or even for themselves. These 23 Things I beleive are barely a fraction of the Web 2.0 tools out there and as technology and the times move forward I’m sure many more will come, and perhaps some of them will even replace some that are the current fashion. As information professionals we owe it to our profession to aware of the ever changing variety of information resources out there and how they are being used within our society. A couple of great finds to continue your Web 2.0 journey are TechCrunch (Michael Arrington’s impressive site covering the Internet and various Web 2.0 companies) and Learning 2.1.

Well, that is all for now… Boy, now I need to find something else to blab about…

Okay, down to the wire…

Podcasting, for those who don’t know is basically an audio file with RSS. This allows one to develop audio shows, on just about anything from informative podcasts, to news gathering, humor, interviews, poetry readings or whatever and then one can subscribe to these podcasts using an RSS feed reader. You can save an audio file in various formats, but saving it as an MP3 is best in order to allow the most users to access the broadcast using whatever multimedia player they have on their computer. You don’t need to subscribe to listen to a podcast, that is only a feature podcasts allow you to do. If you want to listen depending on what your multimedia software is, such as Windows Media Player, GOM (my favorite), Realplayer, or whatever else you might have, you can save it to your computer and open it to play the file. Some multimedia programs will let you automatically listen to the file if you simply click on the podcast.

I thought it was pretty hilarious that the link we were given to check out search services for podcasts was for Yahoo Podcasts, just happen to have a large message at the top of the screen that they were closing down the site effective October 31st. Apparently, a podcasting division must not have worked out for them. On the other hand their well known music service, Yahoo! Music Engine (aka Yahoo! Music Jukebox) apparently has a plugin to allow you to subscribe to podcasts. It would appear that they were using this to help develop their podcasting web directory. One thing I really liked about Yahoo’s Podcasting service was their clear explanation of not only how to subscribe to podcasts, but how to create your own podcasts. I felt this was one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen so far. (Note: I’ve created links to some of the things talked about on Yahoo’s Podcasting service, but once the site goes down these might not be effective anymore.)

In any case Yahoo isn’t the only place where you can go to find podcasts, there are plenty of other directories on the Internet, including podfeed.net, pluggd, or pod-planet to name a few. Of course, the monster of them all is Apple’s I-Tunes podcasting service, which helped make podcasting so common throughout the world.

Okay, who hasn’t heard of YouTube? The place is filled with all kinds of stuff, all kinds of videos have been uploaded there, stuff from around the world, so talk about going global!

Anyhoo, personally I am addicted to Taiwanese and Japanese dramas that you can find uploaded there. Some of them just make me laugh, so much like GTO. A great show I highly recommend you check out. Or if you are looking for something that will make you cry like a baby, even you big, tough guys, check out One Litre of Tears. 

What I am most amazed by is how there is an entire subculture that works to make these dramas available to the public. They literally spend their free time not just downloading and uploading them to YouTube, but translating them and subtitling them into English. The work some of these groups do is often phenomenally good. They also tend to give themselves or their team cute names or cool names depending on how you look at it.

YouTube has a lot of other functions built in besides just viewing videos, you can e-mail videos to your friends or paste your favorite video into a blog, website or your friends’ MySpace site. You can post comments to videos that are on the site. If you create an account not only can you upload your own videos, but you can subscribe to watch some videos that won’t be listed on the public end of the site or you can share videos you are watching at the same time with other users like your friends.

Other aspects of YouTube that are pretty cool is the Video Toolbox where they actually teach you how to make a good video for the internet. They have tricks about editing, lighting and other production tips.

If you have some technical chops behind you, then they have the API available for if you want to create your own mashup or plugin. Just check out their Developer Corner. Which for me personally, the great find being a YouTube plugin someone created for Wordpress. Now that is cool!

Other things YouTube is working on can be found in their TestTube area. Some cool finds are floating around here if you weren’t aware that YouTube was about more than just looking at stupid videos people have posted. Two that sound really promising here are Remixer and AudioSwap, one seems to be a way to edit your video and another allows you to use music from “officially licensed sources” in your video.

Yeah, YouTube is a lot of fun. Power to the people!

One final thought before I skedaddle. Apparently YouTube isn’t the only video uploading site out there, no I’m not talking GoogleVideo or anything like that. No, apparently there are numerous video uploading sites out there, but YouTube just happens to be the giant gorilla that everyone notices. I haven’t checked out many of these other sites, but I’m sure many of them have their good points.

Oh, and finally if you are looking for a lot of cool stuff that happens to be in the public domain and you might want to use it to make your own creations check out the Internet Archive.

Okay, Google Maps is it cool or what? Yeah, I got to hand it to them they’ve developed a pretty cool app, even though I prefer to get my driving directions from Mapquest. There is so much more to Google Maps than you realize at first.

I understand that they have gotten a few people unhappy with their feature that allows you to roam around some cities at street level, but personally I really enjoyed the experience and, hey, it is a public place that this is occurring in, you know? I took my online street level tour by using Google Maps to move around the streets of San Francisco. It was pretty easy to navigate down streets, make turns onto another street and even move into traffic to get a really interesting experience. Unfortunately, this isn’t available for all cities, so you have to kind of take a guess, whether the city you are interested has that feature. I took a gamble and, lucky for me San Francisco was a good guess. Tip think big…

Google Maps has a lot built in. The whole satellite image of the area you are looking at is pretty cool, although that feature is available with other map services out there.  One thing I really like is the way you can create a hybrid that places the names of the streets onto the satellite photo. One creepy thing was the fact that images of locations appear without any people in them. They remind me of a photo I saw in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Another great thing, which was in the news a while back, is how the API is available to create your own Mashups. Further, if you login you can see and use a lot of cool mashups that others have developed using the Google Maps API. My favorite was a nifty one that if you click a spot on the map would show you where you would wind up if you dug your way through the Earth. It is pretty cool and gives new life to the phrase, “Digging your way to China.”

Of course, other great features are how you can insert or create a link of a map you create and place it on your webpage or blog. I did this to place a map and picture of the library I work at in the sidebar. I had to do a lot of work to adjust the size, so it would appear decently in my sidebar, but after a week I decided it was time for the map to go. I could see a lot of great uses to this, such as explaining where an event is taking place and simply embedding a map in the web page showing the location of the place. Using a similar idea Google Maps lets you e-mail the map you have created to a particular e-mail account, I suppose in case you want to view it later  or send it to friends.

Google Maps is pretty easy to use and although you can type in an address to move in to a location, I found it pretty easy to simply zoom in and navigate using the map with nothing more than the mouse and the zoom in and out functions built into the map.

In any case, I think they have a great product and not only did I have a lot of fun playing around with it, but founnd that it can be a very useful tool to use for a variety of purposes. All right, I guess a babbled enough about Google Maps, too bad they don’t pay me after gushing over how cool they are. You know like a marketing fee or something. Nah, nevermind…

Okay, now here is something I am familiar with. Online productivity tools are largely touted as the end of many software giants, such as Microsoft, model of offering services from one’s desktop. This new model focusses on creating programs or tools that accessed from one’s Internet browser. This means no buying or downloading onto one’s own computer. Nope, access your account or file online and begin working. Of course, this means that you have to have access to a computer with the Internet accessible from it.

There are actually companies that offer a range of online productivity tools for businesses to use without having to purchase or download specific software. I believe the client pays a nominal sum to have this other company store their data or files and to upgrade and improve the services of that productivity tool. No more paying for IT support on staff, yikes!

Anyhoo, the big behemoth that all eyes are on happens to be Google. With their acquisition of Writely and renaming their online productivity service Google Docs they gave Microsoft a rude awakening of what the future might hold. Too bad Microsoft spent so much to get Vista out. Then again most likely, with the fact that online productivity tools being accessible online, the future will likely be a mix of desktop centered and online accessible tools and applications. Nevertheless, the desktop module will definitely not be the only way of looking at things anymore.

With such services available one doesn’t need to worry about upgrades, your computer crashing and losing it, having to store it on some device to transport it and even better, with many of these services you can even share your documents with others such as a group project, research team or a business team. One can upload a document and invite others to work on it. I used Google Docs and Writeboard in school to allow another individual to edit and further develop a story I developed and created a poem, where in true Web 2.0 fashion others could be invited in to make their own contributions to the poem. There are a number of other online productivity tools out there, check out this list I found online.

As I pointed out to a friend, what is great about this for libraries, especially if you get patrons like we do, is that when someone comes in to work on something they don’t have to worry about whether they brought a flash drive or whatever that library allows for storing docs, no, they can simply save it online and access it later if they need to. Further, figure about did they save it in the right file format or type to be opened on our computers just access and open it online and they are ready to go. They can work on it later, invite others, e-mail or even print it out all by simply going online and accessing their saved document.

Well that is it for now.

Okay, this was an easy one, although it took me a while to get a chance to do this. Once I got to the wiki I couldn’t help wanting to go through and correct the glaring errors others had in their entries, okay not that every entry had mistakes the majority of the entries were just fine. In any case I sat down and went through “helping out” the wiki, making it look better. You could definitely get a sense of community for everyone had a different way of writing about things. Thus, I know that there is a good chance that someone won’t like my changes or may even come along and “correct” my entry. That is the power of the crowd at work, things have the inherent potential to change.

As for adding an entry, something I should be familiar with doing since I have set up a blog in school before, well, it actually took me a few minutes to figure out what to do. Naturally once figured out, you realize, “oh, is that all? how simple!” After scrolling through the entries to see what 23 Things wasn’t listed, I then found myself with a good group of options and to think I was afraid I would be late to the party and would have to simply add to an entry already worked on. So, what to go with? In the end I wound up creating an entry for Image Generators and proceeded to write my lame explanation of what they are. Feel free to check out my entry if you want and edit it to your heart’s content.

Okay, wikis… What can I say…  Probably, the most famous is Wikipedia. Talk about a wiki that took off! Wikipedia has become so synonomous with the word wiki that often times if you mention the word wiki people think you are talking about Wikipedia. That is good for Wikipedia, but doesn’t get people necessarily behind the word wiki and what it is.

So, in case you are wondering what is a wiki?

Well, put simply a wiki is a web site or workflows program that allows anyone to add or edit a page, at least theoretically. It is possible for most wiki programs to change the settings, so that it is restricted to only certain users being able to make changes to the wiki. The overall spirit of web 2.0 though encourages keeping wikis open to any user being able to make changes to the wiki and Wikepedia does a remarkable job of doing just that. Naturally the thought that pops in most people’s mind is wont that mean a great deal of inaccurate information, vandalism or nonsense occuring? Truthfully, this does occur, although not as often as you would think, nevertheless the creators of Wikipedia and other wikis believe that by harnessing the collective effort of everyone, errors and vanadalism is most likely to be corrected rather quickly. You have to admire their optimism and flexibility in allowing some inaccuracy to produce a great deal of good.

Most of the examples I found of wikis being used in libraries included useful subject guides, FAQs or other useful resources. Some of the cooler ideas I saw were allowing the local community to add useful resources, a business resource guide with an Instant Messaging Meebo widget, so people could ask questions and links within the catalog. Wikis could, also, be used internally to ease workflow. I know of a couple local libraries doing that and in the process they have created a valuable resource for staff to use and alter to best fit the needs of that library.

For more on wikis in libraries check out the great resource, Five Weeks to a Social Library.

All right that is all for now! Ciao!

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 as much of the buzz on the Internet will show, these are the memes, the new trends, what everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon about. What is all this about? Is it a new trend? Has it been around for awhile? Is it just a new name for an old thing? Is all the hype really worth it?

Yeah, well I guess the answer to all these questions is that it depends on who you are speaking with. There are a few critics that say anything from this is nothing new to web 2.0 is the death of modern culture (check out Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur to get a perspective from this view).

Most in the technology circles, say that this is a way of explaining a variety of tools and philosophy that pushes for users having input. The idea of brining anyone in to have a say or to give one power to affect change on a website. Many of the most common tools include blogs, RSS feeds, social networking sites, open APIs, websites developed using AJAX and, of course, wikis. Actually to read through the literature about Web 2.0 you realize there are a number of core beliefs that run through it. Some of these beliefs include leveraging the resources of “the crowd” or essentially asking for the help of everyone, (crowd sourcing),  platforms based off of web browsers rather than reliant on programs downloaded to one’s desktop, openness (such as open APIs, Google Maps being a good example, open source programs, such as Apache, and honesty, which is a big trend in corporate philosophy right now and has spawned a couple of movements, such as The Cluetrain Manifesto), the importance of the longtail, the importance and huge availibility of data and the whole idea of tools allowing all users to add value to it. Supposedly, the entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly is credited with first coining the term. In any case he wrote a great article explaining the ideas behind web 2.0 and why they differ from how the internet use to predominately function.

It would seem that Library 2.0 would simply be extending the ideas from web 2.0 to that of the library setting, but the article I read seemed to state otherwise and that there was no clear consensus of what Library 2.0 is. He also seemed to imply that too many librarians are latching on to the “library meme” and that this isn’t necesarrily a good idea. He makes a good point about libraries being about more than just places of information, but instead being places that provide a rich set of resources providing for the local community, such as Reading Programs, children’s centers, community rooms, art, music or lecture presentations; services that provide a richer community experience. Nevertheless, Library 2.0 if designed to follow some of the philosophy of web 2.0 could mean another way of adding value to the services offered to the library’s community. When you consider many libraries have to fight for funding, than offering a richer user experience and providing more ways in which the user can be a part of and benefit from the library doesn’t seem to be a bad idea.

Okay, I finally found time to put in a few words about Technoratti. Essentially, it seems to me, to be a place where bloggers can post themselves, so that one could search through blogs for say a particular subject. You could do a search for something you are interested and see what the community of bloggers listed in Technoratti are saying about that subject. At least in theory that is how it seems to go. You can also find videos and images that have been placed in their directory.

Personally I found it difficult to wade through all the stuff to find what I was really looking for. I felt like I was at a thrift store or a place like TJMax or Marshalls wading through all kinds of stuff on the racks to find the few items of true magic.

For bloggers it is great because by adding a widget to your blog, you can show up in the Technoratti database. This could increase traffic to your blog and potentially increase the number of people reading your posts.

Other cool elements of Technoratti appear more in the back end as a bunch of cool stuff for developers. The API available from Technoratti means you could make some cool mashups if you have the skills and interests to do so. Don’t know if I’d ever have that ability, but shouldn’t sell myself short, who knows what I could do in the future.

The added bonus I think though is the fact that they list a dog as a member of their staff. How cool is that! Although, his job title isn’t probably highly sought after, I mean who wants to look through garbage…

Well, that is about all I got in me today.

Okay, I am getting a bit nervous… I am barely halfway done and only a month to go. I know I could speed through, but I kind of want to get a good feel for each one of these tasks and all, not that I’m likely to write a thoroughly informative post like can be found over at TechCrunch, you know?

So, like other friends have said social bookmarking has great potential. One nice thing is simply moving your “favorites” off the desktop and in to a browser. This is much more convenient allowing your favorite links to be accessible from any computer that has access to the internet. Many social bookmarking sites allow you to create folders, categories or attach keywords to aid in finding a particular bookmark you have saved.

One thing I was surprised to discover is that there are so many social bookmarking sites out there. As far as which one is the best or good features different sites have, I would have no idea at this point. I guess one would need to play around and discover for themselves which they like best.

As the name implies there is more to social bookmarking sites than simply having your favorite bookmarked sites available as you roam from computer to computer. These sites have a variety of functions allowing one to share their bookmarks with others, possibly make comments or rank them. Sharing your bookmarks might be useful to share with a club, a research group or coworkers. Ways of providing next level tools or other information for others in your particular group by having links to various sites. The ability to rank your bookmarks could be another way of letting your “group” know which bookmarks might be most useful for the group. Thus, social bookmarking sites could be a great way of creating resources that can help particular groups in accomplishing set tasks.

For checking out social bookmarking I signed up with del.icio.us. I found it very easy to set up and use. I used my favorite browser, Opera, and del.icio.us had a handy feature where I could simply drop the del.icio.us icon into the browser and afterwards every time I visit a site I was interested in adding to my del.icio.us account it is a cinch to add simply by clicking on the del.icio.us icon in the browser. I know it probably doesn’t make what I am saying until you actually sit down and try it. Since, I didn’t try setting up del.icio.us using another browser I don’t know how easy it might be, but can only assume it should be as easy.

Anyhoo, that is all I got to say for now. I have to start rolling on the rest of these 23 Things…