Thing #70 Free (&legal) mp3 downloads

On looking at the list of (free) download sites I decided to try spiralfrog - solely because I liked the name. Unfortunately spiralfrog doesn't download outside the US. I then tried Amazon which also doesn't download outside the US.

Hmmm. Next it was off to Stereogum where I was able to download a 'premature evaluation' copy of Franz Ferdinand's Tonight. Stereogum had a pretty good range (some bands even I'd heard of!) There was some Radiohead but I figured that was a gimme as Radiohead are known for releasing their music online. There was a Springsteen track, some Dandy warhols, and a few others that i'd heard, and heard of.

I initially had some problems downloading - I seemed to get caught in a loop that allowed me to play the tracks only - but it turned out that it was Quicktime causing the problems. Once I'd downloaded a newer version things went smoothly.

Stereogum was easy to use but I doubt that I would find much music there that I would want to download (my musical tastes run from show tunes to the 70s & 80s - with the occasional hi-fidelity or radiohead thrown in for street cred)

I generally use a combination of Limewire & Youtube for my *free* music downloads but for this exercise Franz Ferdinand's Tonight slots neatly into my ipod between West Side Story & Rod Stewart!

Thing #69: Feed my Inbox

I'm currently following 439 blogs using bloglines and receive between 200 & 300 updates a day.

With those statistics in mind I wasn't too sure about feed my inbox, but what the hey it is explore, discover, play, after all so I gave it a try.

On the feed my inbox home page you are asked to enter a website url and your email address.

Luckily HCPL Techincal Trainer had warned us in his post to enter the url of the rss feed and not the plain old home page url.

Once that is done you get a confirmation email from feed my inbox, and then updates from the website are emailed to you.

The feed arrives in your inbox as a standard email - with links as needed - (think email message version of usual bloglines update)

Given the number of updates I get each day I think I would prefer to have them sitting in bloglines waiting to be read rather than clogging up my inbox.

I could conceivably use it for sites that update only rarely - an email update would make sure I saw it and it wouldn't get lost among the bloglines.

However for the time being I'll stick with bloglines.

Thing #68: Filtering Flickr

1. FlickrCC

Keyword searches Flickr to bring up a patchwork window of pictures tagged with the search term. I searched for the term chocolate and this is what I ended up with...

All of the images are copyright with Creative Commons licensing, which encourages sharing. There is also an option to search commercial images as well.

2. Tag Galaxy

Now this one is a lot of fun though the documentation, as the author points out, is very basic. I started by searching for chocolate and when it brought up the matches I also got the option of refining my search by cakes, desserts, cream, cookies, etc...

This would be an awesome tool if it had the option of searching by creative commons attribution.
Here is my result for chocolate...

If, as I said, there was a search by cc option then this would quite likely be something I would use a lot. it would make a great display tool - all book covers by jane Austen for eg.

I also found tag galaxy more to my liking search wise although flickrcc had the major advantage of the creative commons search. I would probably use both of these again - as I can see work related potential in both of them.

Uploading the results to the blog

Basically I did a screen dump and then cropped them in paint (and one in picnik), saved them as jpgs and uploaded them that way.

There may well be an easier way - however this one worked for me...

Thing # 67 Stress savers

1. Dial a human. It's American (which is a shame as it would be good to know which buttons to push quickly to get a real person at the other end of the phone instead of a menu of numbers to select from.)




2. Custom Guide. This one's a keeper. It's a series of pdf quick (cheat sheet type) guides for Microsoft products for PC, and for Mac products. The sheets are not designed to be manuals but rather a reminder type (what does F4 do again - that sort of thing). If you work @ Boroondara think the 2 page tips & tricks guide we got when we changed to Outlook. I've already printed off the one for Evernote.
Suspect I'll be using this site again.


3. Where is your username registered? This had potential as I have *several* different user names on many different sites. You enter your user name and click cjeck and the site goes through and checks that user name on about 70 sites. I guess if your user name is truly unique then it would be more useful but I would use this more for fun than for anything else. I tried my most unique login name (which I have at gmail, yahoo, hotmail) and it was already taken on 51 of the 69 sites (and most of them were not me - so I guess it's not as unique as I thought!). I doubt I'll use this one again.


Of the three custom guide is certainly the most useful on a personal level and on a professional level. It's a site I'll certainly be recommending to our pc users (especially the novice users) as I think many of them would find it extrememly useful.

Definitely a site for the borrower toolkit.

Thing #66 Directory 2.0

I like the idea of customisable start pages which is basically what allmyfaves and 43marks are.

Previously I'd toyed with allmyfaves, netvibes, pageflakes, clutterme, and mysurfpad before deciding on mysurfpad.

What I liked about mysurfpad was the clean lines and the way I could customise to suit me. Having said that though I tend to have my 'must check' sites as home pages (tabs) in my browsers.

I've blogged previously about my own version of browser wars - when I log onto the web I open:

IE7: (home tabs - gmail, my website, yahoomail, hotmail, blog 1)

Firefox: (home tabs - bloglines, twitter, facebook, gmail, my website blog 2,)

Flock: (home tabs - my surfpad, gmail, blog 3, blog 4, webmail)

These are the websites I use regularly - and I have other favourite websites set up in mysurfpad so that I have minimal clicking to get to where I want to go.

I'd looked at allmyfaves previously - I didn't really like it as it didn't suit my style of working. It seemed way too cluttered to my eye and I found it quite busy & distracting. I would/could use it for one-off search categories although it is very US based (which could be good or bad depending). I'm sure it did everything I would want it too but I just didn't take to it (personal taste I guess).

43marks was new to me but after looking at it for this exercise I think I will stick with mysurfpad.

43marks is basically lists of bookmarks that you can customise - I didn't mind the look and feel of it and might have been tempted to use it had I not already found mysurfpad.

Sites I haven't used before.

Under shopping I had a look at shopzilla which is a US based shopping comparison site - having seen a Halloween party today I looked at Halloween costumes - couldn't decide between wonder woman or catwoman.

Under dating I looked at plenty of fish - before I even needed to register it had produced a list of men (and women) either in Australia or looking for Australians to meet.

I think maybe a novice user might find this extremely useful mainly because of the exisiting categories which give a very good indication of the sorts of lists you can create/personalise.

Once again I have nothing against 43marks - I just didn't like it enough to switch to it instead of mysurfpad.

Thing 65 - It's hard to think about anything else

I was curious about exactly why the US was teetering on the brink of depression and why (or how) the US economy had got itself into this position.

I started with the msnbc timeline - reasonably good but it did seem to assume some knowledge that i didn't have.

I then moved onto how stuff works - this was an excellent explanation of mortgage backed securities - how they work and what happens when home loans are defaulted on in record numbers. It also helped me understand the msnbc timeline a little better.

I finished up with kiplinger.com's 15 things you need to know about the panic of 2008.

Of the three - I found how stuff works to be the most useful for a non-us reader - I understood it all a lot better after that. (and some of the stuff I heard on the business news this morning suddenly makes a lot more sense.)

Thing 64. One Hit Wonders

Site:CopyPasteCharacter.com

What I thought: Could be useful as it's basically a stencil like sheet of characters (think wingdings or webdings) that you can copy and paste into a document. I can't think of a time in the recent that I would have used it if I'd known it existed (except perhaps the £ symbol for the requests module at work?)

Site:Kuku Klok

What I thought: I probably wouldn't use this one - my pc is in a different room and I suspect that I would sleep thru kuku klok as the alarm I chose (slayer guitar) was loud but probably not loud enough. I'll stick with talking clock and mobile phone alarm!

Site:Stormpulse

What I thought: Not being in a hurricane threat area I probably wouldn't use this although it was interesting to track the progress of hurricane Ike (the only active one at this particular moment). It gives you details such as the current location of Ike's centre, wind speed, pressure, & movememt. Like I said - interesting but probably not useful for me.

Site:Pixadus

What I thought: I was interested in this one as Gitte & I are currently 'working' on an online photos demo for early October. Pixadus is basically social rankings for photos - you opt for + or - for photos and they move up and down the rankings accordingly. I searched for Paris and found some ace photos (I voted for one fo them just to see what would happen). I think I'd use this site to search for photos but probably wouldn't get around to posting any of mine to it.

Site:Fake Name Generator

What I thought: Gotta admit this one was fun! I entered a name set of American and country Australia asnd this was what I got. (When I changed the name set to England/Wales I was Sienna L Patel!). can't imagine why I would use it (especially while I am not being evil) but it was fun to play with.

*****************************************

Your Randomly Generated Identity

---

Gender:	random male female		Name set:	American Chinese Danish England/Wales Finnish French German Hispanic Hungarian Italian Japanese Polish Slovenian Swedish
Save:			Country:	Australia Austria Belgium Canada Cyprus (English) Cyprus (Greek) Denmark Finland France Germany Hungary Iceland Italy Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States

These name sets apply to this country: American

---

Janet T. Laney
89 Creedon Street
Gowanbrae VIC 3043

Website: Babblevee.com
It looks like Babblevee.com is available! Click here to register it!

Email Address: JanetTLaney@mormoncoffee.com
This is a real email address. Click here to use it!

Phone: (03) 9605 2415
Mother's maiden name: Smith
Birthday: March 10, 1950

Visa: 4916 7608 6275 8186
Expires: 2/2010

UPS Tracking Number: 1Z V69 W36 43 5845 674 4

************************************************

Site: PicApp

What I thought: Okay this one I liked (and actually signed up for) - it searches photos such as Getty Images (eg editorial or creative). i searched for gymnastics beijing olympics and found some awesome photos that i hadn't seen anywhere else. I expect to make a lot of use of this one.

Two blogs that I read religiously (for web & library stuff)

What i learned today

Nicole Engard's blog about "Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries."

I find lots of interesting sites via her blog and it keeps me learning, and thinking about some of these sites could be useful to me both at home and at work.

Swiss Army Librarian

Brian Herzog's blog about 'the hitchhikers guide to fear and loathing at a public library reference desk' is another that leads me to all sorts of interesting sites and ideas - his post about using firefox on public library pcs is almost a' bible' to me - I so want to do this where I work.

There are a lot of other blogs that I more than skim read ( I'm following 380-something blogs on a wide range of topics) but these 2 are 2 of the best imho (and for my purposes) as they frequently inspire and seldom disappoint.

Thing #63. Foxit reader

I don't like downloading stuff onto my laptop - mainly cos the hard drive is almost full and the replacement twice-the-capacity hard drive is sitting on my desk staring at me as i type this (Note to self: must install new hd)

I've downloaded foxit reader onto my usb drive of portable apps (aka as the surfboard if you are rifling thru my usb drives for any reason)

I suspect this could be another useful tool if I need to fill in a PDF form online.

Once again I tried the US Postal Service- online job application and found foxit a little more 'tapsister friendly' than pdf escape when filling in the form. It's hard to pinpoint why I preferred foxit - I think it's probably just a 'personality' thing, no real reason just personal preference.

I did wonder whether zamzar (my favourite conversion tool) would be useful for these online pdf forms?

(wanders off to upload us post office job app to zamzar...)

Thing 62. PDF Escape

This could be a very useful little program. I couldn't think of a site that I'd accessed recently that I'd use it on so I followed Mary's example and used the employment form from the US Postal Service.

I also followed Mary's advice and registered with PDF escape from the getgo.

I found PDF escape easy to use, although I did get a little annoyed by having to 'insert text' for each line I wanted to enter info into.

Mind you if it had been a real job application I would have been obsessively resizing text boxes and the like.

I'll have to try and remember this one for when I do come across pdf forms that can't be filled in online.

#61 Facebook & libraries

I've done the whole search for library on fb previously and friended and fan'd several - some because I'm interested in them- they're located close by, I work for them, I went to uni there etc, others I follow to get a feel for how they are using fb to promote their library service.

Our ILS vendor is, I think, almost ready to 'unleash' a fb application to search our catalogue which I think would be great.

The libraries that to me have the most effective fb presence are those that have a catalogue search widget/application rather than just a link on their page.

In the realms of fantasy (or way outside my programming league) I'd love to see library patrons being able to do most everything from our facebook page (think library elf meets e-resources).

I'd like to be able to do things such as renew my books from the fb page - the catalogue search app is a good start but how about being able to join online via fb?

Something to think about?

#60. Facebook

I was watching tv yesterday morning (breakfast tv - I feel so ashamed) and the 'Today' show was 'interviewing' a technology guy who was basically saying that fb was on the decline - that the number of people signing up was decreasing, the number of regularly active accounts was decreasing, and so on.

I found that interesting as a couple of days ago I read a blog post that said that there were more applications currently being written for bebo than any other SNS.

I think Facebook and other SNS sites are great for libraries - it gives us a presence where our users (and potential users) may be, it enables us to publicise and promote our events to a wider audience, and it enhances our virtual library.

I've been on fb for a while now - I'm not the most active of participants, but I do check it most days, and I like to experiment with different applications.

I only wish more staff would get involved with the online tools available and see them as an opportunity, not a threat.

#59 Authors on the web

I have used Authors on the Web previously and whilst can be a useful resource I seldom use it anymore.

One of my most visited websites is Fantastic Fiction which answers pretty much all my book related queries such as series order, forthcoming books by favourite authors, and the like.

Authors on the web seems to be very US author based.

For example I searched authors on the web for 2 of my favourite British authors (Danuta Reah, Hilary Norman). Neither of them were listed. On FF I got a list of their books in series order and a link to their homepage/s.

AoTW is a useful website but for me I find FF to be more useful at home and at work.

#58 Being green

Last month I blogged on the library ning about a list of green resources that I'd come across on the virtual hosting blog.

As I worked my way thru the (mainly American focused) list I came across one little gem of a program that I blogged about here.

One resource I really, really, did like - I've downloaded it and use it at home all the time - is greenprint.

When you click on print a document you get the normal print screen but with greenprint as the printer.

It then displays the document in a print preview format with what it thinks is unnecessary pages highlighted in red (you know when you're not paying attention and you print something and the last page is just an ad?)

If you want the page printed you just 'unhighlight' it and the document prints in the usual way. You can also remove logos, banner ads etc before printing.

If you don't need a hard copy of a document you can save it as a pdf.

There is a free version of greenprint or a pay version. I use the free version at home and find it quite useful.
It also keeps track of the money you've saved (in ink, paper, energy, terms) by using greenprint to stop printing the extra pages/logos.

If you're the type of person who always looks at print preview before printing then you may not need this but for the rest of us it is useful.

#57. Feeding my addiction - Tastespotting.

Sandy via Jamie warns us not to visit Tastespotting if we are hungry - so true.

Much as recipe sites/blogs/whatever are not my cup of tea (or should that be homemade biscuit), how can you not like a site where the first picture is of homemade marshmallows with 100s & 1000s on top?

I added the widget fairly easily to my blog, the hardest part was finding the widget to add.

I used my standard cookery search terms - corned silverside and chocolate mousse (separately, not together) and found several photographic recipes for each. (and as a result I am now seriously hungry).

I much preferred Tastespotting to I'm cooked (Thing 50) as I like to look at the pretty piccies of the food rather than the video. In fact I've already looked up several recipes that I plan to cook in the future.

I like that the site's not just about the recipes, there are blogs from people, some about food, some about recipes.

#56. Smilebox

I'd downloaded Smilebox a while ago, played around with it a little, and then went back to Picnik.

Whilst I quite liked Smilebox I didn't want to shell out US$5 per month for the added features. (the main added feature I wanted to use was to add my own itunes music to my photos)

It has a lot of useful feaures, especially in the 'paid' version but I think the main thing against using it in a work situation (apart from the $) is that you need to download it.

We are not really able to download stuff onto our computers at work so this limits Smilebox's usability and usefulness.

At home I'm happy with Animoto, picnik, etc for all my photo fancifying needs although some of the design templates in smilebox are really cute...

#55. Slideshare

I first encountered slideshare at the Beyond the Hype conference where one of the presenters mentioned that her presentation was freely available on slideshare.

I checked it out (both the presentation, and the site) and discovered a wealth of relevant (to me) presentations that I could view and/or download.

There are a lot of web 2.0, and library, presentations available there which means that you can almost see it as a sort of defacto way of tailoring a conference (or should that be unconference) to suit your own personal needs or interests.

I found it a useful creative commons site for storing and sharing online presentations.

#54. Bookjetty

I'd heard of Bookjetty but never looked at it until, at VALA, Polyxena went to a presentation by Schubert Foo and came away really interested in this application.

She told me about it and, like her, I could see the potential for public libraries.

So, of course, I checked it out and, of course, I joined up.

At the time there were only a few melbourne libraries on bookjetty - it has really come into its own since more libraries have added their catalogues to it.

From a library point of view the more libraries that are available to be searched the more valuable it will be as a tool. Being able to access multiple libraries with one search is a definite plus.

#53. LitLovers

It feels kind of weird posting this seeing as I submitted the 'thing'.

However I've completed the first lit course (which deals with formula romance fiction)

It consists of a 'lecture' (15 slides), readings, a study guide and a quiz.

once you've submitted your answers to the quiz (there are seven multiple choice, and a couple of free response questions), it is 'marked' instantaneously and then there is a link to print your certificate.

There doesn't seem to be a pass/fail type option so if you're serious about literature then you probably won't get a lot out of it.

However if you're getting back into lit. or have never read for discussion previously, you may find this a bit interesting.

#52. Clipmarks

Polyxena and Annabel have been singing the praises of Clipmarks for some time and I signed up a couple of weeks ago to see what all the fuss was about!

It's a little gem of a tool - instead of saving (as I am prone to do) the urls to thousands of blogposts in bloglines I can save the posts themselves, or parts of them, in clipmarks.

Depending on my mood the clips can be:

• private (only seen by me when logged in),
• my network (can be seen on my Facebook, myspace, blog, etc.) pages
• public (viewable by anyone)

I still like bloglines and use it a fair bit but I am gradually replacing the saving of posts with clipmarks.

I can see great potential for clipmarks if I could clip things directly to Zoho or Buzzword (that would be soooooo useful)

#51. Libraries and the social web

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about libraries and how they can use 2.0 & 2.1 applications.

This is partly because I took myself off to Brisbane to the Beyond the Hype symposium (which I have blogged about here), and partly because I got to go to some sessions at the VALA conference in Melbourne (2 as part of a shared registration, and 2 because other staff members were ill).

So far our Library Service has:
*a web page (connected to the Council web page)
*a Facebook page
* our catalogue is available on Bookjetty;

we are working on:
* a myspace page
* a bebo page (if I can just get the bl***** logo to skin)

We are also running the Library 2.1 program through a ning, as well as a Local History ning.

In the setup for staff to play and learn on category:
* we have a blog
* a ning

Independently staff are working on:
* wikis (for Local history and library in general)
* suprglu (blog aggregator)

Hopefully we will have a blog for the public to access up and running in the next couple of weeks.

Scarily of the 25 social networking tools list I have accounts on all but 3 of them.

I like to try the different tools and then use the one that I like the most, that suits the way I work etc.

So mnay tools, so little time...