johnofjack doing 23 Things

I tried several different sites for this one.

First I tried a Holiday Monster generator, which I liked until it insisted on adding a message, my name and email, and my friend’s name and email. I used @example.com, just to allow the form to validate (all emails to that domain are automatically discarded), but there was no way to link to the monster I had created.

Next I tried Google Images story generator, which simply flashed each word of my story on the screen in large grey block text. There were no images added to the story.

At a Halloween mask generator I tried “The Joker,” followed by Vladimir Putin, followed by Machiavelli. All of them resulted in a blank mask.

At The Jackson Pollock generator, I made a Jackson Pollock-style painting (which was easier than the physical versions, since it didn’t require any great strength in throwing globs of paint and getting them to make a huge splatter) but I couldn’t link to it.

Finally, the Knuckle Tattoo generator let me make an image and either save it or link to it. “Jam and Toast” didn’t fit without breaking up “toast”; I couldn’t think of anything witty, so I figured that (in the spirit of the original), I’d go with something menacing. Here it is:

Several people pointed out on this thing and on the last one that these image generators could be used for displays and for programs (depending on the type of program). So that’s all well and good provided you find one that actually lets you use what you’ve created.

Oh, these last few weeks….

Thing 6 left me a bit baffled about how it could be used in the library…. Most of the Flickr mashups struck me for their novelty value but not necessarily their usefulness (though I liked many of them).

Option C: a bit of both.

I’m a big fan of Flickr’s interesting photos from the last 7 days (in spite of its tendency to, after several reloads, threaten to reduce beauty to cliché: sunrises, snowy landscapes, raindrops in spiderwebs, cities at night, all vividly colored) and two of the ones featured were of raindrops.

“Across the Universe,” by Xarfa.

“Raindrops on playgrounds,” by Clodders.

===================

I’ve had a Flickr account for years for my personal photos, so the rest of this was easy for me.  Here’s a photo of a display that the department manager made for Obama’s inauguration:

I think the library could easily use Flickr to store and tag photos of displays and events, so it could serve as both a tool for staff research and a tool for publicity.

Flickr could also work as a tool for patron research, as in the Library of Congress project where they uploaded a number of photos and allowed the public to tag them and comment on them. (This is a big improvement for the LoC, which has kept most of its photos in a clumsy database which stores session information its URLs, making it impossible to link to an individual photo.) The ACLD already has plans to place its Heritage Collection online with Flickr.

Right now I use Flickr almost exclusively; when I was on Blogger I used Picasa but disliked the clumsy process for actually getting the pictures into a post so I ditched it in favor of Flickr. It’s possible that Picasa’s user interface has improved since then but I haven’t gone back to it.

I have few worries about sharing photos online, either in terms of privacy or in terms of intellectual property. Most of my photos–and especially the ones of friends and family–are private, for friends and family only. These photos aren’t visible to the public or to search engines. The rest of the photos are public and I’ve used the most lenient Creative Commons license for those that I can (it requires attribution, nothing more).

Today I searched on my screen name to see if any of the photos were being used anywhere, and it turns out that they are–different sites are using photos I’ve uploaded of statues, of Castle Neuschwanstein, of the odd construction of a German toilet, and of abandoned bikes all over campus. I think it’s great that people find the photos useful, and the Creative Commons licensing strikes me as much more in line with the original intention of copyright than what the copyright laws have devolved into.

Today it’s generally cost-prohibitive, if not impossible, to produce and legally distribute any sort of independent creative work engaging with other cultural works produced after 1923. This difficulty/impossibility strikes me as fundamentally at odds with the progress of the arts and sciences especially given the number and importance of historical developments since then (women in the U.S. had just been granted the right to vote; desegregation was 40 years down the road; almost all of the acknowledged film classics were filmed after 1923; blues and jazz were in their infancy; rock, R&B, and hip hop hadn’t yet been invented….) And I fear that I’ll never understand how continuing copyright protection after the author’s death serves as any inducement for that author to continue producing work.

At any rate, the assignment was to familiarize myself with Flickr and then to write about it … Mission Accomplished.

/swaggers off in a flight suit

RSS feeds and feedreaders are useful for their convenience: rather than checking dozens of sites to see if they have been updated, you can visit one place alone, where the updates are pulled and compiled automatically.

I’ve been using site feeds for years, and I think they offer a lot of possibility for libraries in keeping their users informed: site feeds could offer a running list of titles on order (this feature would be especially popular with music and DVDs), of announcements of upcoming events, or even job openings. I’m sure there are other possible uses as well which I haven’t considered.

I used Bloglines for this assignment, haven’t tried Google Reader, and used to use Thunderbird for both email and site feeds.

I tried my first search on Technorati, Google Blog Search, BlogPulse, and Bloglines.

Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by all four, most likely because of the search terms (”inauguration booklist”).

Technorati returned three results, all of them irrelevant.  Google Blog Search returned 3,737 results, and of the first 10 only one was relevant.  BlogPulse returned 13 results, but the vast majority appeared to be accidentally relevant: links to reviews of the children’s book If I Ran for President, on sites which seem almost certainly to be spam bolstered with scraped content.   Bloglines returned 18 results, most of which were also irrelevant, and only two of which might have been useful with a broader political context.

So I tried the search again, this time with a term that I thought would turn up more results: “graphic novel.”

Technorati performed better on this one, though one of the hits was for a post which simply had the two words in it, not together and not on comics, and the others were mostly for breaking news on casting in various movies (which, frankly, doesn’t interest me much). Google Blog Search did better yet, at least on its first page of results, and some of the blog posts linked were actually fascinating. I was also interested to see a post in Dutch in the first 10 results. The top hit on BlogPulse was for a site in German; another was in Italian. Most of them were relevant (and also interesting) though two just had the two words on the same page, not as the phrase. Bloglines’ results on this query were fairly spotty, returning one comment on a post, one forum post, and a very brief and uninformative post about Watchmen.

Of all of those, I don’t see any clear leader, though I’m unimpressed with the abundance of identical content on BlogPulse and won’t be using it much more.  Technorati’s focus on the “now” means it should be good for the kinds of search where you need to know what the most recent activity is and not so good for the kinds of search where you’re interested in meatier content.  If I continue with Google Blog Search and Bloglines it’s probably just because I’m already familiar with their service.

I typically have some desk time where I’m not helping patrons; I can use that spare time to work on drafting 23 Things posts until they’re ready to publish.

I’m fond of Web 2.0 tools, esp. Flickr and Youtube but also blogs and wikis, so I wanted to familiarize myself with more of the tools available.  It seemed like a good idea to take part in this program since it’s a structured instructional tool.

The internet has greatly affected how I spend time at home; I email family much more than I call them, and I comment on their posts and/or pictures much more often than I can afford to visit them.  Family communication and sharing have become much easier and cheaper since I’ve gotten reliable internet service.

My library is, sadly, well behind me in its use of Web 2.0 tools (our current site is rather crudely designed and user-hostile), but the site is undergoing a massive redesign and intereactive features will be a big part of the new version.  I find the planned updates exciting in spite of my concerns about the digital divide: the new features will make it much easier for patrons to provide feedback as well as to improve search results (user tagging will be added to the catalog and to one of our photo collections which will be posted online).

So this is my 23 things blog, set up.

This makes something like the tenth blog I’ve had now … the last time I tried LiveJournal they wanted to charge a yearly fee to allow customizable CSS; Blogger is surprisingly weak given that it’s owned by Google (its newer & faster layouts are all invalid XHTML, and a surprising amount of spam gets through); MySpace is a great place to go if you don’t get enough comments from spambots introducing themselves as “Sadie,” who’s “single and lonely”; and Facebook’s blogging tool is rather crude.

This one is using Wordpress, which impresses me more than all the other services I’ve tried for its Akismet plugin alone (it’s great at killing spam).

I’ll be interested to see what the other 22 things are….