Feeding the Ambulance chaser within

RSS Feeds!

When I first saw this week's activities, I thought 5 feeds, how am I going to find 5!!!!. Well I have now subscribed to 25. RSS feeds are a great way to keep your finger on the pulse and find out what is happening up to the latest minute. I now check my bloglines regularly and go off on many tangents which of course lead to some very interesting learning.

I love seeing the Powerhouse picture of the day, and originally thought ABS for librarians, how dull. However it is really useful to finding out when the latest releases are available, instead of waiting for them to be sent out via mail to the library.

I think libraries could use RSS feeds to keep in touch with library and community events, book reviews/releases, and other related information and pop culture.

I actually added the RSS feed to this blog on the right hand side from the start. We have had RSS feeds from our library site since seeing Helene Blowers last year.

Photos, - to store, to share, to dream

Photo sharing communities are a great way to show off your pics, and to delve into other people's lives. I quite often use them to catch up with people (particularly with small children) and see what they have been doing without actually having to physically get together. I also find that I can peruse other's social lives without their direct knowledge, as some people post their every waking minute.

I like to dream of other places in both the past and future (and sometimes current time). Hence my attached image that is firmly planted in my mind this year.

This is such a great photo, it seems too unreal. Perhaps it has been photoshop'd, but the colours, the shadow and the clouds are brilliant.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be displaying in the post, even though it is in the HTML. I will come back to it and fix up later.

I have worked out that the user didn't allow his photo to be shared or downloaded from flicker, so I have just done a screen dump and added it to this post. Now you can see what my dreams are made of!

You can see the rest of his photos and the original by going to flickr from here.

biBLiOteGa

Blogs and Libraries

I think that blogs can be used with libraries and librarians for various reasons. All 4 examples shown in Week 2 are great ideas. I think we would be likely to have a blog for current events and news at our library.

My only issue would be that like other websites in general, if the blog is not kept up-to-date it would quickly become redundant and depreciate the value of the site/blog.

After searching technorati, I came across this great blog which I would love to keep going back to. Librarian Avengers is an ideal I think I aspire to. Perhaps I am kidding myself, but it is great to see hip, cool, young librarians out there on the web and blogging!

This halloween costume she talks about is funny as well...

To blog or not to blog

Learning 2.0 brings this question into my consciousness. Web 2.0 consumes much of my time at home and now also at work. (Well in a limited way, due to the organisational IT restrictions)
Do I want to spend more time writing about how I have been wasting or spending my day? Already I deprive myself of sleep catching up on missed TV on youtube (exactly as Stephen Fry perfectly surmised) or responding to all the notifications on my facebook profile.

But what better way to spread the message of how great the "The machine is us/ing us" video clip was, rather than repeating it 1/2 dozen times to colleagues or friends and family. Being part of producing a library website in the 1990s allowed me to be very familiar with HTML and the brilliant way it used this to demonstrate the point was very effective and also brought a smile to my face. I also loved the funky background music and the all over the place clicking and fast movement. What better way to communicate a message to someone from the "MTV generation"!

So, blogging can become my tool/box and quite frankly all of the other 6 1/2 habits merge into this learning experience. I think recounting all my learnings each week into a blog will also create a longer learning method for life.