Thing #23 - Summary

Wow, I finally made it! My journey through the wonderful world of 23 things has finally come to an end. My favorite discoveries were creating an avatar with Meez and also exploring YouTube. The thing I liked best about this program was that the reward is a new mp3 player that I have already been enjoying. I had heard about almost all of these web 2.0 services before this program and I really had a hard time finding time to do each of these exercises.

This will probably be my last blog posting because I don't enjoy writing, so I generally don't make time to write down my thoughts.

Thing #22 - Overdrive, NetLibrary, Project Gutenberg

I think that having audio books and e-books available online for download is a great idea and it really meets the needs of more and more people today who have ipods and mobile phones, and who want access to content where ever they are.

However, my experiences with Overdrive, NetLibrary, and Project Gutenberg was that the current materials that they have available are very limited. I understand that a major drawback of having material in electronic form is that it is easily copyable. I am anxious to see what new technology brings to solve this problem.

Thing #21 - Podcasts

Today, on my continued journey into the world of 23 Things I explored podcasts. I started listening to a technology podcast, but it was just to long for me to listen to the entire thing. I found that the best podcast search was Podcast.net because it listened the most information about each podcast. The Yahoo! podcast search just returned way to many results because it was searching each individual podcast entry instead of returning a podcast feed.

Thing #20 - YouTube

I think YouTube is a great service and it has become extremely popular. The piece that would be most useful to libraries is the method they use for streaming videos allows you to watch the video very quickly across the internet. I also like the comments feature as well as how easy it is to share the video. I discovered this video on YouTube and I think it is amazing! It is a bit long, but try watching the whole thing.

Thing #19 - Web 2.0 Awards

The site I picked to take a look at from the Web 2.0 Awards site was a site called CSS Beauty. I enjoyed taking a look at this site and seeing some creative ideas on how other web designers are developing eye catching web sites.

Thing #18 - Online Productivity Tools

Wow! I am simple amazed by these tools. As a programmer I truly understand how hard it is to make the web interactive, and these tools such as Google Docs are simply amazing. They have been able to really change the web into interactive environment allow a multitude of possibilities.

Thing #17 - Add a Wiki Entry

I've added a Wiki entry and I enjoyed how easy it was using the WYSIWYG editor.

Javascript Compressor

I stumbled across this site today which may be very useful for the new web site.

http://www.dev411.com/dojo/javascript_compressor/

It will help keep a fast load time on the new site even with the increased javascript usage.

Something else to take a look at:

http://rakaz.nl/item/make_your_pages_load_faster_by_combining_and_compressing_javascript_and_css_files

Thing #16 - Wikis

Wikis are a great tool to use for developing a collaborative knowledge base. A large scale example like Wikipedia is a great use of the wiki because a knowledge base of that size would take even a team of 100 people years to write. The problem with smaller scale wikis is that it makes it very easy for one user to accidentally delete something or post something incorrectly. In a large scale example you have tons of people constantly checking, verifying, and updating information, and small mistakes are quickly corrected.

An example that might work well in a library, is having a knowledge base of customer questions and answers. As long as there are a few people to oversee the wiki and can monitor the different wiki articles, I think this would be a great tool to allow staff to quickly and accurately help customers.

Thing #15 - Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

I definitely believe that Web 2.0 will continue to grow and be incorporated into more and more aspects of our web experience. There are certainly some sites that are fads, such as, sites like twitter and even myspace, but the overall concept of social networking is a good one. As new and improved technology comes along Web 2.0 sites will only improve and find new ways to allow their users to interact. People are not satisfied anymore with just being presented with information, they want to interact with it, give their own opinion, and read the thoughts and feelings of other "real people".

Thing #14 - Technorati

Technorati was something I have heard of referred to several times, but I never took the time to check it out. I really found the Technorati list of popular searches, blogs, and videos to be very interesting. It was neat to see that some of the top searches were directly related to most recent news events.

Most importantly it is a great way for me to stay up-to-date on the latest funny YouTube video.

Tags: [Technorati] [23 Things]

Thing #13 - Del.icio.us

I do think that del.icio.us is a good tool for people that use bookmarks a lot and a great way to share them. However, I found this 'thing' to be a bit boring and not as fun as some of the other 'things'. I rarely use bookmarks and normally if I am looking to find a site that I already know about, I just Google the name of the site. If I don't know what site I am looking for I just google the topic and find sites that I am looking for.

In fact, it is annoying that my Google results are getting cluttered by all these del.icio.us results when someone tags a site with a similar subject that I googled for, and it is normally a site that was already returned in my Google results!

Form Tools

I found a neat little form utility today while I was looking for some way to make it easier for me to create forms.

Form Tools

The only thing this was missing that I would have liked for the form I am currently working on is to be able to use relational tables

Thing #12 - Rollyo

As someone who does frequent google searches for help with php, mysql, and javascript programming I think Rollyo will be very helpful. I just finished setting up my own rollyo search for PHP Scripts, you can see it over on the right side of the screen.

I have only done a few searches so far, so I can not say how accurate the results are, but it is certainly something I will try the next time I am seeking programming advice.

Thing #11 - LibraryThing

Continuing onwards with my journey of 23 things...

Today I discovered LibraryThing.com and I think this is a great tool to allow book lovers to share their thoughts and feelings with other book lovers. Check out my LibraryThing catalog here.

Thing #10 - Creating Avatars

It was my first time playing around with Meez and I thought it was very neat. I loved all the free options available to create and customize your avatar. Check out my Meez avatar over on the right.

Thing #9 - Finding RSS Feeds

I found the most useful tool for finding RSS Feeds was actually just using the Bloglines Quick Pick tool. It had all of the RSS feeds that I was looking for and it even included some feeds that I didn't know about!

Thing #8 - Bloglines

Today in the wonderful world of 23 things I explored the services provided by bloglines.com. Although I was already familiar with RSS, it was a nice opportunity to explore this site. Click here to check out my very techie RSS feeds.

Thing #7 - Technology Related

New ASUS Eee PC $200
A new ultra affordable laptop is soon to be released from Asus and is meant to be competition to the One Laptop per Child initiative. The laptop is said to be fully equipped with ethernet, wifi, solid state hard drive, 900 mhz, 512mb ram, and 7inch lcd display. It will also come with a linux operating system!

To find out more information about this, click here.

Thing #6 - Flickr 3rd Party Tools

After looking around and exploring some of the 3rd party flickr tools, I thought that the Calendar, Trading Card, and Motivator tools were very neat. I played around with the Motivator tool and created my own image. Check it out!

Thing #5 - Exploring Flickr

I came across this neat optical illusion while exploring flickr!

Thing #3 - First Post

My first post into the scary and unknown world of the blog!