Thing #8 – Bloglines

Since I’m at home sick today I figured I should do something work related…  so of course I thought about the 23 Things we have to learn.  Thing #8 is an online tool called Bloglines, which is basically an online newsreader to help us keep track of the stuff we look at the most.  It’ll let me know when a site is updated so that I don’t waste time looking at websites only to find that they don’t have any new info on them.  This extra tool can be a wonderful thing, especially as my free time becomes less and less.  But then I worry that I’ll miss out on finding new, interesting webpages to look at.

One of the questions we were asked is “How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?”  People are always interested in the new stuff.  They want to know which books are new, when are the new movies coming in…  you get the idea.  If the library has a web page for new stuff (not just new non-fiction) the public might use RSS to keep track of this page.  It might increase circs and create a new excitement among our customers.

The library is also trying to keep its customers and employees informed about library news.  If we add a RSS feed, it would be easier to stay informed. 

To see what I’ve subscribed to, feel free to visit: http://www.bloglines.com/public/danieBOB.

Thing #6

To encourage us to learn as much about Flickr as possible, we have been asked to play with different programs that can be used with Flickr.  One of these is called Mappr, and another is the Mosaic Maker.  I played with both, and here’s what I found:

I decided that putting my vacation photos on Mappr would be the easiest and most common sense way to learn about it.  So that’s what I did.  I zoomed in as far as I could and put my pictures on the map.  It seemed like any other online mapping program, except that I could put pictures on there too.  That’s about as far as I got with it before I had to go handle a leaking faucet.

When I got back, I played with the Mosaic Maker.  I used the photos from Centerville and Irvington to test it out.  It seemed OK, but unless I had a special project I probably wouldn’t use it again.