23rd thing

My favorite is thing #10 Play around with an online image generator. creating an avatar, manipulating picture and exploring the various generator blogs etc.
The most useful would be the last two, ebook and audiobook.
This program is just what I was hoping it to be,a training that shows me a lot of the "things" available in and from the internet that I would never explore on my own. I have done the exercises back and forth at home and at work. the faster internet line at the library made a big difference in some of the exercises.
I would certainly participate in another similar discovery program if offered in the future.

#22 Learn about Audiobooks-part 2

Project Gutenberg is new to me and really fascinating for me. On the day I was reading about it, I spent so much time investigating the online book catalog. searching titles from English to French to Chinese that I forgot all about the audio books part. I was very happy to find many Chinese Classic titles and wished that this site existed when my children were learning Chinese years ago. The computer generated reading part of the audio books are also fun to listen too. It is also the easiest to download.

#22 Learn about Audiobooks

This is another topics that I really want to investigate. I like listening to audio books while commuting to work and I found playaways very handy at home doing house work or while cooking. The ability to find and transfer titles to my laptop or any portable audio player is very appealing to me. Two weeks ago, I started reading about this exercise at the library when I can. I prepare to actually do some downloading by bringing my laptop to work during the assigned training hour. Even with the faster internet at Davis, it took a lot longer than I wish. It took me another day at home to establish an Overdrive and NetLibrary account and download all the required applications to finally explore titles and check out. I am happy to report that I was successful in downloading both:
ebooks
-Super Rx by Steven Pratt
-the graphic novel Hamlet by Shakespeare
and audiobook
-Being Nikki by Meg Cabot
to play on my laptop. The ebooks are harder to read but will be useful for browsing nonfiction titles. I certainly will continue to search for audio books with both Overdrive and Netlibrary. With the set up I have at home, I will probably just download and play on my laptop since transferring any of these to CD or MP3 will take too much time.

#21 Discover some useful tools for locating podcasts

Podcasts and podcasting are very new to me. I really wanted to find out more about this, so I took some time printing out the related articles to read them slowly. I've also gone to some of the the podcast directories listed and see if I can find a podcast that are interesting to me. My conclusion is that podcasts are like blogs and internet postings. you really have to know what you are looking for. I am happy to find one (NPR) hat I like and will keep bookmarked on my laptop to go back to and listen and maybe after a while add the RSS feed to my Bloglines account to hear updated post.
This is a url for listening to yeast cell from 2004.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3859762

#20 Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow you to upload video

I always like to explore Youtube, the challenge for this exercise would be to embed a video in this post. Copying and pasting will get this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OFoWEtZ3ag

Embedding will get this;



I chose this video because the Kaola cubs are adorable but more important because the clip is very short.


Youtube is very handy for sharing short videos quickly if you don't mind lots of people viewing your videos. I find it most useful when learning something that needs to be presented visually like some instructions for craft making. One of my colleague learned to knit with youtube. My uncle watched some favorite old Cantonese opera clips that were posted by some fans somewhere. I first saw clips of the earthquake in China also on Youtube.

Thing #19 Web 2.0 Awards

Going down the list of all the award winners, I found some that are familiar. Some that I actually have used: Flickr, Picasa, kayak, Facebook, Monster, ifoodTV, Craigslist etc..., some that sounds very interesting. I decided to bookmark this list for later reference.
The site that I choose to re-investigate is Rollyo. This time I was successful in making the desired search roll. Back in Thing#9, I was not able to create the search roll that I wanted: a grouping of sites that offers FREE knitting or crochet patterns. I actually bookmarked these sites on my laptop to save time every time I liked to look for a particular type of project. Now, my search roll will allow me to do a single search in all my favorite sites.
Here it is
http://www.rollyo.com/search.html?q=scarf&sid=598487

I've also used http://www.kayak.com/ to compare/book hotel accommodations last September for our Hong Kong trip and found the site very useful.

As for any applications for use in a library setting, I can see some that are actually used now: Mangoes, Google doc just to cite two examples.

Things 18 part2

This is my attempt to use Googledoc to make a spreadsheet.
I find this easier to use then Zohowriter.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tK_wVBcz3BXJhHksNIqxN5g&single=true&gid=1&output=html