pooh to the bear

Playing with the flickr image generators at fd's flickr toys. It's fun, kind of, but this exercise doesn't grab me as much as the earlier ones so far, at least not with the tools I've played with so far. Though I wish I'd known about the 'create your own polaroid' tool earlier on, when I was painstakingly putting together the fake polaroids for the website in Photoshop. Haven't been able to find anything particularly grand by way of other sites, yet - just a lot of free and shareware, ads and sites to make barcodes.

Ok, just found an interesting site that doesn't need a download and is quite fun to play with: Viscosity. You get a selection of brushes to push around something that looks a bit like origami paper, and can change the palette and opacity to try different effects. Here's what I made:

putting the toys away

Just started to browse through the new blogs cropping up as the course is about to start, and I love the way Top Cat's feeds on Bloglines are tucked away in folders... appeals to the inner tidyness freak in me. Much nicer than a scatter of feeds all the way down the page. Also liked the idea of adding coursemates' blogs, too.

All of the image/text generator sites seem to work okay on the Learn.nets. I'd like to have a hunt around to see what else is out there.

I might just be putting off doing the dishes, but I've been thinking that I should be using this course as more than just an opportunity to find stuff that I think is fun. It's probably time to start applying some of these ideas to work stuff, too.

What I thought was, I could use the GROW method we got taught in the library leadership workshop a couple of weeks back, to determine an actual goal for the course, what I'd like to get out of this, in an overview sense. It's too easy to get caught up in the tools themselves, and the wonderful tangents they throw up, and forget part of what I'm here for.

The 'G' of GROW stands for Goal: what do I want to achieve? I want to identify how I can use these tools to serve our customers, to give them a better customer experience, to add value to what's on offer for them. I want to assess if there's something here we can use to enrich what we offer through the website.

Because I was thinking about RSS today, and putting together a couple of thoughts: 1) are databases and link lists our best and/or only way of offering people online information? At the moment, our online information falls into three categories, roughly; content we have written ourselves (with limited resourcing), content we buy from vendors, such as databases, and content we link to, mostly in the form of pages with lists of links (often left without being updated for some time).
2) RSS feed collections, such as with Bloglines or Netvibes, are free and simple to build up, given some canniness with selection principles and a good knowledge of our customers (both of which librarians have aplenty), and someone else in effect does ALL THE WORK of keeping them up-to-date. What about if we had something like a page on the website with feeds from all the NZ newspapers that offer such a service, for example? A page you could point people at that would be the online version of a nice newspaper reading room for local news? Once set up, it maintains itself!

I think we need to have a good look at how we can use that librarianly skill of selection to pick some useful stuff out of this mess of web content and offer a portal to it on our site. And I probably need to do some digging into how other libraries might be doing such a thing, and how it could work.

Another thing I was thinking today - as a library user myself, if I can put together a single webpage that delivers a selection of recipes from great sites to my desktop on a daily basis... I might not choose to travel to a library to borrow cookbooks.

technorati

Just snuck around WebMarshal by looking into Technorati a bit more on my staff pc - no problems there. In fact, I've found that so far I've been blocked more on the Learn.nets than I have on the staffside, which is weird. Might need to investigate that.

Decided I wanted some feeds of recipes to add to my Bloglines page, so I searched for 'recipes' on Technorati and then on the results page, clicked on the Blog tab to see all of the listed blogs which have 'recipes' as a tag. THOUSANDS of results but even on the first page there were a couple that looked really good. I could then take a look at the blogs, and if I liked what I saw, add their RSS feeds to Bloglines.

Very simple, very satisfying to use all round. One of the cooking sites I went to, Epicurious, had several feeds; one for new recipes, one for quick, nutritious recipes, and one for each of the forums, which was cool.

feeding bloglines

I'm just working through the list of sites that will provide rss feeds for Bloglines. No luck with Feedster on the Learn.net, though it doesn't seem to be blocked; just doesn't load.

When I went into Topix, it already knew I was in Auckland, and offered up an RSS newsfeed of Auckland-focussed stories at the top of the page; I've added this in to Bloglines. The stories seem to be a bit more involved with policy, research and technology than the stories on a local news site like Stuff or NZ Herald, for example. Not sure if it's something I would want to look at regularly as a feed.

Looking through the site a bit more, news is categorised by 'topics', each with it's own feed - these go down to the level of detail of, say, an individual TV show, but could be as broad as 'Reality TV', 'Smoking' or 'Sri Lanka'. There were so many lists that I found it a bit unwieldy to browse for a topic that might catch my eye. I think the site would be easier to use if you knew what topic you were looking for, and could then use it as a discovery tool to find some feeds of interest.

Say, for example, I wanted more movie reviews on my Bloglines site. I could search for a review of a particular movie on Topix, then find a review I liked, and trace it back to it's source blog or website, then add the RSS feed from that site to my Bloglines account.

Syndic8 is currently blocked on the Learn.net - will report this and get it unblocked.

Technorati is not blocked. Searching Technorati, is, however. I can't look up anything on the site except what it wants to show me. Back to Datacom for this one.