Harvest Moon

A picture is worth a 1000 words! Happy Halloween!

Tech Trek Catch-Up: Quests 6-9

Banned Books Trading Card, originally uploaded by my_book_house.

This my official Tech Trek Progress Log.
Quest 6: Part 1 - I am now, quite frankly, a Del.icio.us crazy, mad taggin' fool. I also have a Library Thing, with a badge posted in the sidebar. I think that key thing about using the Del.icio.us tags is not to use too many. I was using every possible tag for stuff at the start and now I think it might be better to just use fewer tags. For example, the tags "blog", "blogs", and "blogging" could be represented by any one of these tags and used consistently for greater effectiveness.
Part 2 - I have used Technorati and it is really interesting but I think for personal use, I like Mashable better. Technorati seems offer more in the way of information about other blogs/sites linking to yours and sites that are "hot". I tried Technorati with MySpace and it did not work. I couldn't get the MySpace page to link up with the Technorati account. Technorati worked well with Blogger. I guess I like Mashable better because I am more interested in a way to organize my social networking accounts than feedback on whether anyone is looking at them.
Quest 7: I am a Flickr nut. End of story. (See trading card above.)

Quest 8: Social networking is fun. I have a MySpace and now I have Facebook. MySpace is sort of like the mall or the fair where everyone is hanging out, people watching. Facebook is more personal and more about relationships with people you actually know. I like the freakiness and diversity of MySpace and friending other librarians, libraries, and authors. Facebook is good, too. I like the "message wall" and the minimalist design, which doesn't distract from the purpose of Facebook; connecting with people you know (or that know people you know).

Quest 9: I am in the process of creating an anime/manga wiki (with lots of help from Amanda Holling, at Main), CCPLotaku. Staff interested in anime and manga are welcome to join this wiki. Just send me an e-mail and I will send you the password. I am really not sure where I am going with this or where it will end up. Basically, I just want to learn more about manga, anime, and Japanese culture. The biggest thing about setting up the wiki has been the fact that the layout is different from other sites where I have accounts. The multiple pages of the wiki have been a little bit of a challenge and negotiating them has been the biggest thing that I have had to figure out. The fact that I selected an "educational" type wiki at first was also an issue. I had to write the PBwiki folks and get it changed by them. The PBwiki FAQs and forums are very helpful, though, and seem to answer a lot of common questions.

Blog Action Day

The earth is really important to me because it is my home. I share it with a lot of other folks. I think that last statement is the most important. The earth is something we share while we are here and then the sharing continues because, hopefully, we leave it in as good a shape as we found it, and ideally, better because we cared for it while we were here. Peace. : )

Not Missing Links: So Easy...

I gave this blog a make-over by ditching my sidebar links list in favor of a Del.icio.us tag cloud and a Mashable badge and by adding some AV widgets; a Dizzler player and a Youtube video player.

For info on how I downsized my widgets and other tech issues that I have tangled with, check out Mediatopia, my Library 2.0 blog.

Picture of Piltdown Man, famous "missing link" hoax.

My Del.ico.us Assortment of Info Morsels

I like the Del.ico.us concept and have had an account for some time but never used it, preferring to use my My.Yahoo page bookmark list to track websites that I like. This exercise was good for me because I think Del.ico.us offers some major advantages over the Yahoo page bookmark list and I will probably make much greater use of Del.ico.us.

1. Del.ico.us is easily sharable. I think this is a great resource for teachers who want to share sites with students.

2. Del.ico.us has the text box for descriptions about each site.

3. Use of tags on Del.ico.us allows for even more descriptions about selected sites.

4. Use of tags allows for targeted browsing of other Del.ico.us users' selections of sites labeled with the same tags, which makes for interesting, productive surfing.

I have to admit that I am a huge fan of tags and tag-surfing in general because it fits my nonlinear learning style. (I tag-surf LibraryThing ALOT!) Not everyone may be as comfortable with this kind of format depending on their learning style.

I think that use of tags underscores the need for information literacy because I always "read the label" before I consume information by checking the authority of the information source. If the source is sketchy then I pass it by as unreliable and move on to investigate the next interesting tidbit.

Click here to sample my Del.ico.us dish.

The lovely truffles shown in the picture at the head of this post are from Grocer's Daughter Chocolate's website.

I'm Down With OPP

I love using Flickr to connect with OPP (Other People's Pets). Some of my faves are Chmurka, a Polish hamster, who appears in the Flickr badge on my sidebar, Ah Dat, the Hong Kong pug, Fukusuke-Pon, the Japanese rabbit, and Leo, the Austrian kitty, whose photos appear in the katzenzungen (cat's tongues) pool. I think these pets are so cute and so much fun to look at and I never have to clean up virtual poo!

The Day the Music Died

I have been working on my MySpace page getting it all nice and festive for Halloween. Ms. Jennifer from WA (Thank you!!!!) told me about this cool music/social networking site, Project Playlist, and I tried it and I REALLY liked it. I went to town and made a really nice spooky playlist so I could get my Halloween groove on and BAM! I go to my MySpace page (9/27/07) and my Project Playlist tunes won't play. MELTDOWN!! cause I Googled "MySpace and Project Playlist" and found out that MySpace had blocked Project Playlist....in the past. Apparently the problem on 9/27/07 was something unrelated to MySpace. The problem has been fixed and my tunes are playing today (9/28/07).

The serendipitous fallout of my overheated Google search for answers led me to Mashable , a social networking site that allows you to organize your other social networking sites, your sites where you organize your social networking sites, blogs, etc, and more. Mashable calls it The Grid.

Interestingly enough when I first went to Mashable around 7 AM, after discovering that I was tuneless, I found a post dated April 07 that talked about the MySpace/Project Playlist blocking issue and advised Project Playlist fans to protest the blocking because when MySpace blocked YouTube, MySpacers complained and YouTube was no longer blocked. When I looked for this post again at work when I started drafting this post to rant about Big Bad MySpace blocking my music, the 4/07 Mashable post was gone and my broken Project Playlist widget was displaying a new message that the MySpace music would be back on soon! I must not have been the only one blaming MySpace for the problem.

Things happen fast on the web. So the end of my long and winding rant is that I ended up setting up a Mashable account and now have yet another social networking account! I also discovered Dizzler, another music widget site that I found on another librarian's MySpace, and am playing with that. Nice to be able to put my musical eggs in more than one basket!