Week 11 – Social Bookmarking

Hi, all! We've now moved into the 2nd half of our 21 things exploration. I hope that you've been enjoying our journey so far...

Bookmarks, or Favorite lists, have come a long way since the early days of the Internet. One of the more interesting tools to help manage them is http://delicious.com – the most common site for "Social Bookmarking". Delicious manages three primary, and useful, activities – and all three can be used in conjunction, or individually.

The one that I started using allows you to save your bookmarks to an online location, so that you can use them on any Internet connected machine [and you probably won’t be doing a lot of browsing if you’re not connected to the Internet!]. To do this, all you have to do is go to: http://delicious.com and create an account. When you do that, one of the options you’ll have is to upload your local bookmark file to delicious. Then, when you’re logged in, you can use them, add to them, and etc. If you keep it updated, you can always have access to your bookmark file wherever you might be. I find this to be useful, and particularly if there are reference type sites that you want to have access to, but can’t always remember.

A second use of http://delicious.com is the ability to discover new sites and share them with others, or see what others have shared. One example: let’s say that you’re interested in modern art – you can do a search of popular bookmarks within Delicious that have been marked as being about modern art – that means that the most popular bookmarks in everyone’s collections will show up at the top. They won’t always be what you’re looking for, but it’s a great way to discover new sites that relate to your interests.

The third major use of Delicious is in sharing. I haven’t done any of this yet, but as we work through this week, we might find that it’s an interesting exercise. Briefly, you can choose to share your bookmark sets with other Delicious users, and they can share their sets with you. In library terms, it means that we could put together a delicious site that is a collection of our best and most useful Library related or Reference sites.

So, for this week, head on over to http://delicious.com if you haven’t tried it already, and create an account. Upload your own bookmarks, or choose to start from scratch. Add a few, delete a few, organize a few and give them tags if you’d like. In general, just look around and see if this would be a tool that is useful for you, or even for the Library.

Explore the Tags, and look into the popular section, to see if there are things in your areas of interest that you’ve been missing. One of the other things you can take a shot at is to go to the popular bookmarks section, and then choose to look at a randomly bookmarks site from the popular list. By selecting “Jump to a Random Bookmark” – but beware… not everything will be academic in nature…

Once you’ve spent a little time with http://delicious.com write a blog post in your own bogs about what you’ve found, what you liked [or didn’t] and if you think that this might have some work application.

See what you can discover!

jjs

Week 10 – just for fun

Hi All,
After thinking about the fact that it’s a short week, I thought that it would make more sense to find simple online toys – a pair of things that may be useful, but that are also uncomplicated and interesting. After looking around, and spending rather a lot of time trying to find things that amused me as well as seemed to have some utility, I settled on two:
The first is: http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/
I get a lot of questions about finding things [outside of work, of course] and many of them are fairly simple – Let Me Google That For You seems to be a useful tool to cover some of those things. The idea behind LMGTFY that you can build a complicated search in google [or a simple one], and simply send someone the link created on the site. It then reruns the search within their browser, like:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cardinals+playoff+%22north+central%22+site%3Ad3football.com
I’ve no idea how long this site will be around, as I can’t imagine that Google is delighted by it. You might find it interesting, though – and perhaps helpful around the holidays.

The second thing is something that I find sort of fascinating – perhaps you will, too, or perhaps you’ll decide that I’m vaguely mad – Wordle creates java-based, on the fly "word clouds". If you haven’t seen one of these, they’re quite interesting.
You can paste in some text [or the link to a blog feed] and the application will parse the words in it, finding the most common ones. Those are then displayed in varying sizes, with the most common words in the document or site being the largest. There are a lot of layout options, from font choices to colorways, adjustments for language, general layout and number of words to display. Some of the things that are returned are very nearly word art -
Please note, however, if you save it to the online gallery, they’ll be visible to anyone who uses the Wordle site. While I don’t think there are any copyright implications…

Here are some of the more interesting ones I built:
Text copied from a series of our web pages:



The Fall ’08 Ex Libris


The recently updated Library Disaster Plan [Thanks Belinda!]

and last, though surely not least: The entire 2nd book of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andros to Austria…

http://www.wordle.net/create

The biggest trick with Wordle is that you have to copy the image and paste it... though printing is also possible.

Have fun with these - if you have alternatives, by all means post them, and we'll give them a try!

jjs

Week 9, Part 2 - Fun with Language redux

I hope that everyone has been discovering new fun phrases to use [or that may make you cringe, depending]. We've got a good number of comments to the initial posting, so it's about time to post the translations or expansions of the acronyms for those who decided not to search all of them out -

Let's see if we were right about the familiar ones, and learn some new ones!
jjs

Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs