Thing 23: Relfections

I found learning about our 23 Things to be very enjoyable. The Things exposed me to a few new tools, tools I'd heard about but hadn't explored and taught me more about the tools I had been using.

I think 23 Things were just enough of a sampling; sometimes they seemed like too much. By the end I didn't want them to end - I enjoyed learning new things and being able to draw on the expertise of library staff when some of the Things were difficult.

Thank you 23 Things team, for doing such a great job of educating me about Web 2.0.

Thing 22: Best of Web 2.0

I took a look at several Web 2.0 winners I hadn't examined during the earlier part of our "23 Things".

Pandora is fun and a definite keeper. I liked Wufoo form builder too but I think I'd be more likely to use it from home, not work. I'm pretty good with the tools I have at work so it isn't necessary. It is nice to be able to use from home.

Audio ebooks

Honestly, I meant to finish the 23 things in September. I hate being this tardy. Part of me just didn't want the fun to end.

I've used audio ebooks before and haven't been that impressed with them. There isn't much of a selection for items that one can download for free. This might also be a result of the subject area I was interested in. I was looking for titles of books we were reading for book club. Ah well, reading a book is more satisfying than listening to it.

Podcasts

This was fun. I'm now subscribed to the Best of NPR, This week in Tech and Science Friday. I subscribed via RSS feeds, bloglines did't work with these feeds. This should be a lot of fun.

I also subscribed to our library's podcast page too. Very fun.

That's as far as I got with the exercise. I'm not going to create my own pod cast.

Hmmm, should be interesting to see how rapidly the memory on my PC fills up, apparently my subscription goes right to iTunes.

Youtube

I watched a few library clips.

Okay, as much as I like Mr. Bean I couldn't watch the whole thing. I found the episode of him accidentally marking up an illuminated manuscript far too disturbing.

I liked "Interval Library" watching compact shelving move. Who knows, someone may make a video of our compact shelving someday.

"Installing Ubuntu" was fun too.

Of course, I watched a few of these at home since I can't used sound on my work pc. (My pc is in the public area so sound is a no-no).

I liked the search interface for Dabble the best. MetaCafe, yahoo video etc. interface wasn't as streamlined. I prefered youtube and dabble's UI because it was simple and gave me a synopsis about each clip.

Firefox extensions

I tried to add Cruzcat to my search box and it turns out I already had it there. I can't figure out how to delete it. I'll keep working on that.

I don't recall when I added Cruzcat to the search box but I also added several other search engines, sites etc. at that time. As you can tell, I never use them. So no, they aren't very useful.

Zoho

I decided to explore Zoho since I've used Google docs. I wasn't that impressed with Google docs.

Zoho: I tried to import an excel file and found that file type isn't supported.

I felt unsure about providing my user name and password to my blog. I wasn't sure how secure the Zoho website is.

It worked fine exporting my test blog page from Zoho. I could see this would be an easier way to write a blog because the Zoho interface is a lot like using Word.

Update: I deleted my Zoho test blog post. I tried to edit the post so only a little of the text was posted but Blogger didn't like what I was doing with the html and told me there was an error. I didn't want to keep playing with it so I deleted the post.