Thing 40 Mashup the Web

This Thing gave me a headache. Not literally, but when I perused many of the links I became very aware of how little I know and how much I have to learn! I definitely need to come back to this Thing and keep browsing.

Lunchbox was of no use as far as I could see. I entered a couple of zip codes that I knew from memory but no information on restaurants was available for those areas. The Wheel of Food site was cute but not something I'd use very often as I don't eat out for lunch very often.

VisualHeadlines appeared to have no use at all. I expected to find photos for the current news but found no photos like that. The site appeared to have templates for those who want to make a headline for their site. I was confused as to what it's purpose was.

FlickrMemari was fun. It had memory games in three catagories: easy, medium and hard. I tried the easy one, of course. If you or your children have time for computer games this might be enjoyable once in awhile.

I bookmarked the Let Me Google That For You web site.

CrimeReports had no information for the two addresses in the two cities that I typed in. This is perhaps a fairly new site and needs more info to be really useful. I think I'd like to check from time to time on what is going on in my neighborhood or in my city. Even the address I put in for St. Paul did not bring up any information. Disappointing, but I'll try again at a later date. maybe it is too new yet to be effective.

WalkScore might be useful for someone moving across country to a new city and desiring to know the walk Score in neighborhoods they were considering living in.

bkKeeper tracks your reading and bookmarks your page for you. I don't see much use for this site. I checked out the books being read by the people who use this site and I see that we don't read the same type of literature. This site is someone's personal project. Apparently they wish to see how literature and technology can intersect.

LazyLibrary was OK. I expected a lot more books to be listed. It appears to be for those who want to read only books shorter than 200 pages and also want to buy books. The site is linked to Amazon.

BookTour is not very helpful and certainly not complete.

LibWorm is sort of a serach engine for library personnel. I spent quite a bit of time perusing the RSS feeds for Feed Catagories and Subjects. This I would think would be quite useful to those in the library profession. I registered for an account.

One other web site I made note of is: http://www.wolframalpha.com and I expect to check that out soon.

Thing 39 Digital Scrapbooks

This Thing is immensely interesting to me because of my teaching background and I have not finished looking through all the possibilities yet. I found numerous sites from which to obtain free images....something I could have used in recent years when I was teaching. I signed up as a user for Scrapbooks That Teach but it appears that this site is very new and is not established just yet.

BookLamp is another site that I checked into. It is also very new and not very complete yet. In the future, I hope it will be a source of ideas for books to read and possibly contacts with people who read the same type of books that I do. As a parent and teacher who has always cautioned young people about connecting with people on the internet they do not know personnally, I am a bit nervous about networking through the web but if I find the right group I will try it.

I continue to add books to my LibraryThing account as I catalog my own collection. It appears that I have many more books than I thought! The site keeps a running total and it will be interesting to see how many books I actually own. Adding tags is going to be a benefit to locating my sources when I am working on a project.

Thing 25 Blogger's Toolkit

I'd rather be exploring "Things" than blogging about it, but I did check out the toolkit and added some widgets and video feed to my blog. It was fairly easy. I changed the color and moved things around on the page just for fun and practice. The 20 usability tips for bloggers was also interesting. My position at the library system won't entail any blogging and I doubt that I would ever start a blog (other than this one) but I considered it a good experience to get to know the blogging world a bit.

This whole blogging experience has resulted in me noticing other people's blogs about various topics and I have checked out some of those blogs a time or two.

Thing 35 Shelfari

Today I checked out the Shelfari web site and entered some of the books I have read in recent months. I added reviews for some of them and rated them for other readers. I liked the fact that Shelfari makes suggestions for other books you might enjoy reading. This site also gives you the opportunity to read the reviews of others before you read a book. It was easy to "join" and use. I probably won't use Shelfari to catalog my books but simply to review some of the good ones I've enjoyed reading and to see what others say about a book that intrigues me.

Thing 27 Twitter

This Twitter thing seems to be the up and coming "thing" for the younger generation. I watched the video on Twitter and realized that I probably won't make use of Twitter unless my children get into using it. The presenter in the video spent 3-4 hours a day at Twitter! I haven't got that kind of time and I really value personal relationships.

Today, I read an article in our local newspaper about Twitter. (I hadn't even heard of it before starting "More Things" but now I hear it mentioned regularly.) The author of the article is of the mindset that mostly the very young use Twitter (under age 20). It is a place to express your moment to moment thoughts and young people like to do that. At my age, I don't feel the need to express every little thing I am doing during the day or every thought I have as the day wears on.

I wonder what these types of socializing will do to our young people over time? Will all the social graces and virtues be lost forever? It seems there is almost no personal commitment or personal contact. Sociologist, Karen Sternheimer says, "It allows people to maintain the most superficial of relationships without any kind of investment." Yikes!

Thing 35 Books 2.0

Books 2.0 has tools for connecting people who have the same interests in books. The first web site I checked out was LibraryThing.com which is a site where you can catalog your own book collection. I began cataloging and found it to be very easy. You can add tags to make recovery of your collection titles within catagories more easy. I am anxious to catalog my entire collection and then go hunting for individuals who have similar interests.

I am wondering how many individuals would take the time to catalog their personal collection. It seems a bit odd except for those of us who are "into" organizing our stuff. It is VERY EASY though. If I were in a large city, the LibraryThing Local could be a gateway to local bookstores, libraries, book signings, author readings or discussions.

Thing 33 Travel 2.0

Last night I spent some time checking out TripAdvisor.com and was able to find posts from other travelers who had been to Bora Bora and made recommendations. The downloadable guide to Bora Bora included their remarks as well as what to bring on the trip (i.e. an electric converter, water shoes to protect your feet from coral, and also a suggestion to change a small amount of money into the local currency and to do that at the airport at Papeete for the best exchange rate.) The web site guide also gave information on what to see and do as well as the best months weatherwise and economy-wise. TripAdvisor was easy to use.

Thing 33 Travel 2.0

Since I love to travel, these tools will be fun to learn to use. I checked out the TripAdvisor.com web site and besides being a place where you can book a trip, you can see pictures of the area & hotel room, as well as get links to things for sightseeing, etc. This first attempt at viewing this site did not seem to have traveler posts with advice but I know I have been to sites where this type of information is readily available. I will have to spend more time at this. Just for fun I checked out Bora Bora because some day when I'm rich and famous I would like to travel to the South Pacific islands for a month. I'd like to find the best time to travel there.

Thing 32 Google Maps

Today I made a map on Google maps pretending that I needed a map for guests who would be coming to my daughter's wedding. The markers were easy to place on the city map I brought up. I marked the church, our home, and several motels. This was easy to use and could be of value to anyone planning a meeting and wishing to give out-of-town guests or participants an easy map to follow. Now it is on to Thing 33!

P.S. I impressed my daughter and her friends this past weekend when I was able to bring up the sites of free WiFi in the Twin Cities by using Google Maps!

Thing 32 Google Maps and Mashups

This morning I spent a good deal of time browsing many of the possibilities on GoogleMaps and Mashups. Among other things, I checked for WiFi hotspots in Woodbury, MN where I am going this weekend. The site provided maps and addresses to the spots. It let me know which WiFi sites were free and which were not.

There are a miriad of things to do with GoogleMaps. You can:
Find a public restroom
Align your satellite dish properly
Track a US flight
Look up real time US airport status (great for travelers)
Calculate taxi fare in US and Canada
Find a world hostel
Find US mail box
Find a place to eat
Check time in a world location (great for keeping up with my 3 Air Force children)
Check weather anywhere worldwide
Beat traffic (right now is not a great time to be driving through the Twin Cities!)
Convert currency
Find location and elevation and most importantly
Find a LIBRARY!

Will I ever be able to go anywhere without my laptop? It gets more valuable all the time!

Thing 32 Weather Bonk map

Weather Bonk is a site that gives a daily weather report for a particular town or city, along with a map. I checked out the Twin Cities for this coming Friday since I will be down there. The data gives the high/low temperature expected for the day, the wind, the percentage of chance of rain, etc. This was an easy tool to use so I bookmarked it on Delicious. I am really liking Delicious for organizing my sites. I need to get some of my RSS feeds bookmarked to that site.

Thing 32 Google Maps and Mashups

Today I worked a bit on Google maps. They take awhile to load so its a slow process but it was interesting. I checked out where in the world there have been confirmed cases of the swine flu. It looks like there are 3 cases in Minnesota but it didn't appear that there was a marker on Cold Spring, MN so I don't know if that case was included.

I also played with the scanning device. Next time I will try to find a satellite view and a land view of some area. Maybe Calgary, AB since that is where we will be going on our vacation.

I also learned that Mashups are web applications that combine data from more than one source into an integrated tool. I'd like to check out that feature in the future with real estate listings.

Thing 11 Delicious

I reverted back to the original 23 Things because I seemed to be lacking some essential knowledge. Now that I've decided that I will learn all I can about a Thing and not move on to another until I get used to the new Thing, I feel less pressure. Delicious is going to be such an asset for me. I own a laptop, a desk model and I work on a computer at the library. Now I will be able to find any Web site that I have bookmarked no matter which computer I have saved it on! At a recent workshop I picked up some more useful reference Web sites to bookmark.

Thing 34 Online Answer Sites

What a find! Finally something that I can REALLY use often! I bookmarked several of these sites and can't wait to learn more about them. These are going to be well used by me.

Thing 11 Tagging

Yesterday, I added tags to some photos I uploaded to my Flickr account. This was pretty easy. I hope to have time soon to go back and request some photos by the tags I assigned to them. This site could be a great asset to organizing all the family photos as well as a means to share them with friends and family. As for library use, Flickr would be a good source to use to look for particular art work, photos, etc.

Additionally, color was added to my blog as well as a change in layout and font. A new widget was added called snow effect.

Thing 4 Flickr

Much of the weekend was spent on the computer checking out Flickr and how it works. I uploaded a few of my photos and found that the basic account only allows you to upload a few each month but that is enough to practice working with this tool. After uploading some photos, I added tags to them. I learned that "groups" refers to whether your pictures are private, public by invitation, or totally public on the web. Next, I'd like to see if I can get my photos to appear by catagory. I suspect that is what the various tags are for. I'm still at the stage of doing the preliminary Things from last season before I begin the new 2009 Things. On the #11 now.

Things 3 - 4 Getting Started

I've been working on setting up RSS feeds to my Google Reader account. sometimes when I click on the feeder icon, the feed I want to go to Google Reader ends up on an MSN list. Doesn't Google have a button on its toolbar to add feeds or to go directly to Google Reader?

I also tried adding a graphic in place of a picture of me on this blog and that seems to have worked. I'm anxious to actually begin the Things for this round. It seems I have been setting up a lot of accounts!

Thing 1 Creating A Blog

I've created a blog and was able to find where to write in it after closing the blog. I am a bit confused if this "registers" me for "More Things On A Stick" or not. Am I "in" the program? Since I am a new employee of a library system and was not involved in the first two rounds of "23 Things On A Stick", I am now going to attempt setting up accounts in RSS. I understand that those are Thing 3, Thing 4 and Thing 11. I have no idea what I am doing but here I go!