Week Eight Mashups & API

My Mashups

Star Viewer is a YouTube / Google Sky Map constellation mashup. The videos on YouTube came from the Hubble and include info about the constellation. This is a very cool mashup.

Quick.as allows you to search the web as if the search bar were a command line. For example: “w Mashups” searches Wikipedia for the term “Mashups”. Two of the other commands I will use often are “gn” for Google News and “a” to search Amazon.

Rollyo

I had fun creating a Rollyo on Election08

I am sure I will use Gabe's Rollyo "librarianblogs" in the future to look for comments on technology and other library issues. Because some of the posting were a few years old I wasn't quite sure if the issues were still an issue. For example, the post on the Google Toolbar and privacy. Some of the other posts were opinions on philosophical issues related to privacy. Those were interesting but not essential--I have plenty of opinions of my own and I'm not sure how many people would care about them.

p.s Thanks to Shandra for her post on TouchGraph and her comment "If you missed it on the HubMed site, check out this cool tool for visually mapping web sites or books." This site is a keeper for sure.

I think the Blog will mainly be useful to me so I can go back and look for something I learned about in this class but might have forgotten.

Many thanks for this great class!

Week Seven Podcasting and Online Hosted Video

I found Odeo very easy to use. I signed up for NPR Science News Friday, the Obama podcast and Bob Edwards Weekend. I am interested in seeing if podcasts of our weekly CME programs might be something people would use so I need to do more investigation on creating podcasts. The short library orientation podcasts might be good for answering the common questions about hours, available services, etc.

YouTube is an amazing phenomenon allowing anyone to exercise their creativity. I really enjoyed the Galter library video and the clever use of Panic at the Disco music.

Having completed my assignment and exploration I decided to have fun with trying to embed a video. "I Have a Dream" by ABBA.

Week Six Photo Sharing

I used Google's Picasa because it worked well from both home and work. I also added photos to my Facebook page and heard from a friend who enjoyed seeing them. I added one photo and the URL for the Google Picasa album to this blog.

* Do you think that photo sharing services could be useful for you?
It makes it easy to share lots of photos without having to email them. So I think that is a really cool feature.

* What do you think about the Library of Congress flickr and social tagging experiment?
I didn't have time to thoroughly explore the experiment but it gave me an idea--see next question.

* What is next for photo sharing in your library?
I am interested in finding a way to share some of our archival photos so I'm going to experiment a little with that.

New Harmony Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/MaggieBandy/NewHarmony

Week Five Web Office Tools

I only had time to explore Google Docs. I think that it may have useful application for projects I want to do with the other librarians at Exempla. I am not sure I would want to use if for anything where security is an issue. I found that I preferred publishing my presentation to share it so that viewers didn't need to login to view it.

Update: I did the optional assignment of posting a document from Google Docs to my blog. It worked! I deleted it after seeing how it worked.

Week Four Social Bookmarking

I created a del.icio.us account and bookmarked nine pages on multimedia classroom design which was a recent search request. It was very helpful to see the sites other people had bookmarked. What I really like is that I can work at home or in the office and keep track of my work easily. I have been emailing links back and forth and this will work so much better.

Update: The person who got the del.icio.us posts was very pleased with this way of looking at the search results.

Week Three Social Networking

This was my very first experience with social networking so I think I was holding my breath during all the exercises! Facebook was especially fun because I found so many colleagues. I think that MLA committees and other units might find these tools useful, but I'm not sure they would be anymore useful than a blog.

Linkedin wasn't nearly as much fun as Facebook. It seemed like it was primarily for job seekers but I plan to explore it a little more.

I've thought about Facebook as an application for the hospital where I work as perhaps a way for people to find others with certain skills. Right now there is a database being developed for that purpose but I wonder if Facebook might be more fun?

The Denver Public Library MySpace was kind of creepy to me. Maybe if they had one for Boomers I might feel differently ; - )

Week Two Wiki's

Our hospital has multidisciplinary groups called clinical microsystems, so I decided to set up a wiki page that might be useful for knowledge sharing between the groups. I am currently working on a prototype for this purpose using an open source content management product called Joomla.

This was more challenging because I couldn't get an attachment to go where I wanted it to go! I suspect that with a little more practice I'll be able to set up the menu and subsequent documents the way I want to. I was able to set up a nice little page of links relating to some of the resources the microsystems might use.

I wish I had more time to work on this, but I am definitely learning!

Week One Blog

I decided to set up my new blog in Blogger because it looked so easy and I already was using Google for my reader. I'm excited about all the new things I can learn in the MLA Web 2.0 class! Setting up the blog was very easy, but doing the PubMed RSS was more challenging. I had to try several times before the reader could accept the feed. I read in David Rothman's blog that people had more luck with IE than Firefox, so I used that and tried to keep it fairly simple but useful. It finally worked! My PubMed RSS is on Sepsis, which is an important topic in our hospital.

For my feeds I added the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care and I have the usual suspects in librarians blogs (Krafty, etc). For fun I added the Huffington Post feed.