Digital NZ

There is just so much stuff out there. Without spending hours or days, even longer, reading it all I am just not going to ever be able to keep up with it all. Digital NZ is a fab concept but I wonder if it is going to fly. Hope so. Thinking out loud I think this right now (this could change)

1. I am very much out of my librarian roots and have almost forgotten how to do a search
2. In the last 3 years that I have been off the front line things have REALLY changed
3. The role of libraries and librarians to help individuals to navigate the Internet and the Web is very real and a great opportunity
4. I am guessing very few people really get how much stuff is there and to what depth and breadth. thinking about this, I think books and trad libraries also housed a lot of secret stuff but there is much much more now and you just can't see it.
5. I think I will have a look through a whole of places and things and then make a little cluster of sites and services that will most suit my needs and interests and really get to know them.
6. Don't like Stumbleupon at the moment. two reasons - I don't like the way it looks and I can't remember my bloody password. I will, however, pop back one day and have another go.
7. There are tonnes of forums out there with lots of interesting opinion that could be useful to people in places like councils and government. Is someone trawling around looking for stuff or do these forums sit there as a 12C talkback mechanism? Bit of a rhetorical question.
Tired

END!

Matapihi

Free falling in NZ2 space I floated into Matapihi www.matapihi.org.nz and spotted some recently aquired images. I know I should be exploring the rest of NZ but as a frequent visitor to the Christchurch Art Gallery I thought I would cruise in and see what they have sent to Matapihi and found this image.I LOVE IT! Here is the link to the description. LINK

Jane Arbuckle Zusters - I'd rather be swimming. Me too Jane, me too. I would buy this painting in a heart beat.

So back to how fabulous Matapihi is, making images like this and a zillion others including photos available to everyone is one of the purely delicious things about the internet.

Up in the clouds

It is always sunny above the clouds. I have really enjoyed being 'In the Cloud' and realise that I have been floating around in it for awhile without knowing it. I loved the discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing and as a business I guess you would have to think hard about how you would use a Cloud platform in your business. Advantages are huge but the big question mark would have to be about security and sustainability.

Google Docs, Zoho, Calendar - pretty basic but with some cool applications and uses. Poor jeremy was doing free interent testing in the room with me so now has to be a collaborator on one of my documents. I used my weekend to do list from Google Docs and dropped it in to my Google Calendar.

WorldCat is fantastsic but I dont have time right now to get involved. It reminds me of LibraryThing in some ways but I can see it is totally addictive for library heads. I bet Paul Sutherland loves it. Yet another log in to remember.

Discovered in Google reader that my 'blogs that I follow' from my two blogs were just sitting there waiting to be read in a list format. Very cool. I copied and pasted a recipe from one of my favourite blogs into wordle becasue it is so cool. Something I did the other day but forgot to save. I am totally connected to myself in every way. I can't get away from me. Not sure if that is good or bad. That is not a question, don't answer. Also found some old Picassa photos that I had forgotten I had saved. Think it is time to get out my broom and have a wee clean up in my cloud. There is a lot of random stuff floating around out there.

This post was written and saved in Google Docs and cut and paste into by blog....

Coffee time

Where did you get that?

trying to think of a network that I could set up as part of my task list I thought about shopping and that question I am always asking people. Where did you get that? It is all about shopping and sharing the love of shopping and bargain hunting. I would love it if lots of people joined and got into the spirit of my own social network. It is pretty and light and exciting, if you like shopping. Shopping of any kind. I am talking about clothes, jewellery, food, IT gizmos, shoes, houses, fancy sports gear, gadgets and every other thing under the sun. I have invited a few people but if you want to join in, leave a comment and join the fun.

Excuses to chat

Social networking ain't new and it is something people like me just fall upon with delight. I have a myspace (forgotten the password) and a Bebo (to check in on the step daughter -too dark for me) and facebook (the one I have stuck with and visit almost daily). However, for a chatty out going girl, I find myself giving very very little away about anything of significance. I like lurking and having a laugh, seeing my friends doing fun things and joining in the quizzes. I do not tell people what I am doing. Is that because I am afraid they will discover how very unexciting my life is, how not funny I am when sober or am I a secret squirrel? Not sure. Nothing will stop me from being part of the current networks and anything new and interesting that comes along but apologies for a faint and slightly dull presence. By all means be interesting and exciting yourselves and I love to read what everyone else is doing with their time. Thanks for that.

iGoogle, yes I do

Here is the screen shot of my iGoogle which I set up the other day when I was playing about. See, my addiction to clicking, typing and saving is just all consuming. I had totally forgotten that I had done this and when I went to do it as a part of my CCLlearn, here it was, awaiting me. I added the weather in Sweden because I am reading 'The girl who played with fire' and I added the lovely orange flowers. When time allows I will fiddle with it some more. I love that I do have on Google log on as every little diversion I have found just pops up. Phew.

Inspect my gadget

I am just going gadget crazy on this little blog, just for the fun of it, just because I can. However, there is a certain lack of finesse in the application. I hope to remedy this at some point in the process of my learning. I have added my LibraryThing gadget which I have recently neglected in favour of listing my recent titles on my other blog as a way of sounding a little bit more interesting with the upside being an electronic record of my pedestrian reading habits. Confused? I am. My mind is a jumble of passwords and log ons as a result of years of absuing myself by excitedly and randomly setting up and joining every bloody thing that came along. I am almost in log on and password rehab, don't go there. Plan your attack on the with Web 2.0 world and limit your addictions along with your passwords and log ons.

Wordle

Love it...want to use it all the time. Here is one I did for our learning. It is a section of the FMM contract document I have been working on today and is currently what my working world is all about. I am trying hard to get a Wordle picture on this post so I printed it then scanned it and ten tried to upload the scan but that didn't work. I knew that you cant save the Wordles anywhere other than the Wordle page. So, my attempts at doing that were a bit dismal. However, there might have been something I could do with the scan and changed it but I don't know how to do that. But here is the link to the Wordle so that you can have fun with it. Nic used it in the weekend and loved it too. All he did was write the alphabet which was a little dull for me and great for him.
www.wordle.com

Thinking about what to do next

Thinking about what to do next
Originally uploaded by sallyscape

This is a lovely photo of my darling little boy at Totaranui. He is so frantic and seldom still so, what a moment. My dad made this delicious little boat and everywhere we go people love it and take photos and want to talk about it. Wooden boats have that appeal and you feel that you are part of something special.

As an addition to this post, I forgot to say that I got this picture off my flickr page and that was the purpose of the exercise. I think it was a bit fiddly and you have to have all the right things installed and remember all your passwords but once done it has a lovely black boarder and is cute as a button.

Aaha

Right, now I know the value of RSS feeds. I went to the Radio NZ site and cut and paste the RSS feed Url into my Blogline list and then got the last 24 hours headlines. The value in this is that the headlines or additions to the website are gathered from all parts of the website and thus you don't have to surf around and try and remember what you saw last time. So for me, the value of an RSS feed is for website use as I think my blog management system suits me well at the moment. Hence, I am going to focus on website RSS feeds and podcasts and keep my blog system as it is. Good exercise though. Slowness of my computer and all the back and forward stuff is very time consuming but as long as no one wants anything this afternoon, we should be fine.

RSS feeds and learning

Well, I am doing the module on RSS feeds and feel pretty comfortable about what that is all about. However, I do have a question or a conundrum. I read about 50 blogs weekly, I have them listed in my favourites in a blog folder then within other folders under various subject headings - news, food, fashion, home and interior, nz, political etc. When I signed up to the bloglines and selected my feeds, I got a long list of sites and blogs to visit. What is the difference? Is it that things will only turn up on the list if there is an new post? Or do I need to organise my feeds into subject folders? I am wondering what the advantages are but will keep playing with it and see what comes up.

Second post of the day

Just updated this into the new Blogger which is actually not new but since I havent used this blog forever, it was out of date. the good thing about that is that I could add a blogroll widget without having to use HTML which is a great advance for the Sunday driver tech types like me.

Blogger v Wordpress - compare and contrast

This is my hidden blog that I have not posted on since October 2006. Instead of having a separate book blog I have combined book reviews in my normal blog. I am resurrecting this blog for the purposes of a learning plan I am working on through work. We could establish another blog to do this but the thought of trying to remember more names and passwords and setting up a new blog was all a bit much so I am using this old thing as my learning and sharing space. My rules about no work on home blog are temporarily suspended.

Anyway, the title of the this blog denotes the task and because I am a wee bit lazy and tend to skitter across the top of things I have done some research to find out what other people with more time on their hands have said on this topic and i will chip in with my thoughts as appropriate.

First up http://pulsed.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogger-wordpress-chart.html
Check this out and see how unbusy this person is. However, I have comments being a person who blogs on both hosts and I have set up blogs on both as well.
My primary blog host is Blogspot and there are things I like and am used to. The template changes and fun you can have with that. Instructions are straight forward and it is friendly
Wordpress has a very cool looking template but it is limited. Uploading photos on Blogspot is very bloody annoying as they always post to the top of your entry and you have to move them about but you can't cut and paste! I hate that. I often have to reload my pics because I did one too many 'backspace's. That feels very clunky and oldfashioned to me. I would like to be much more creative with my posts but I don't have so much time to experiment and you need to weigh up the writing against the techy things.

I like Wordpress' visitor stat information. You can check many more details as part of the programme but on Blogspot you have to load up a widget. I did this and chose a funky little thing called Feedjit which I have installed on my page and you can see where people have come from which also allows me to see my regular readers. It amazes me who pops in. With this you can also see a wee map of the world and zoom in on visitors. I don't think it keeps historical info so it is pretty instant and not stat driven. I did add some 'best of' widgets but got a bit bored with them.

I think your host is really a personal choice thing and a lot has to do with who your host is linked up to and where you store your Internet photos etc. Judging by others examples and discussions I am a pretty simple blogger, being a writer not a techy. It is fun to experiment with things and I have changed the look of my blog a lot over the years. I really like it as it is now.

I need to stop going on, as I think I have flanneled enough probably proving that I am a very superficial blogger. Oh yes, I love spell check on Blogspot and assume Wordpress has that, wish Twitter did. It is embarrassing.

There is also the argument about who owns Blogspot (Google) and Wordpress ...not sure but it is 'independent'. I don't care. It is about writing and connecting with people and nothing I say on my blog is of much interest. Another thing that does annoy me about blogger is that when you change your template, you lose all the widgets and other bits and bobs you have done to personalise it. I might have considered changingto Wordpress earlier but now I have a three year history I would lose my readership, such that it is.

Work uses Wordpress so I get to play with that a bit and home is blogger so it is fine. Again, it is personal choice.

Over and out