Tagging

To me, tagging has use, but not to the extent that it's currently touted as having. Or maybe I should qualify that I mean that for my life personally. Let's start with delicious, which is where I did first see tagging as an option. Back then, the main idea behind the site was just having an online place for your bookmarked websites so that you could access them from any computer. Still useful, although in no way replaces bookmarks the normal way. And since I'm such a big user of those, then the tagging is irrelevant to me. I use folders instead. The organization behind the tagging is there. what I don't really subscribe to is the sharing of tags. Apparently a big part of delicious now that I'm missing out on. Oh well.
For me, tagging became useful with Shelfari. Once you get a whole bunch of books, it's helpful to be able to organize them. The way that you can do this in Shelfari is only with tagging, as far as I know. So I tag my books when it's convenient for me. I don't do it for anyone else to use.
The other site I use tags with is blogging. This blog will be tagged for any reader to have access to my plethora of knowledge- or opinions. I know this can be useful because I know of blogs that I need to be able to search. OK, I haven't done this yet. Not sure if it'll work. I need to look for trailers on Naomi Bates' blog, and if I can search and go right to a blog entry for that book, it'll save time. NOw if the tags don't allow that to happen, then I'll be frustrated and know that we have a long way to go.
I see the use of tagging photos- especially in a site like Flickr so you can find pics that fit your need quickly. The real reason it works here is cause you can't just search the "whole text". Without text assigned to it, how can you make a match with a search? That must be why Google Images is so darn popular. Too bad the kids don't realize the copyright issues at stake there.
So that leads me into my philosopy on the whole thing. It's like keyword searching in the library. Extremely useful cause it saves time and allows those less educated to be more successful. Why not? Yeah, semantics need to get worked out. Us experts don't need to be the ones doing it. Power to the people! An analogy to consider: is a site or object without tags like a book without an index?

I've joined Twitworld- I mean Twitter

HALFWAY DONE!!!! OMG! Gosh, I'm so much more comfortable blogging than tweeting. I'd really prefer to call it twitting cause it just sounds so darn funny. If you want to check me out, follow me, whatever, then I'm @lionslib or something like that. I spent the majority of my time tonight on Twitter finding people to follow. The sky's the limit seems like. Not sure the last time I heard about Twitter- maybe when I saw my kids' school district marquee advertising that we could follow them on Twitter. So I am following them. And of course, the school district I work for. That only seems fair, right. I do like the idea of keeping up with someone or getting news in small snippets- it fits my theory of there is just too much information out there and I must seriously limit what i allow into my overpacked brain. But what was more fun was looking for authors online. Don't know why but I knew Scott Westerfeld would be there and I was not disappointed. A-mus-ing. Stephenie Meyer- if you can figure out which is the real one, will you let me know? Hmmm my judgement of Twitter's place in my life is postponed until further exploration can be done.....

IM

If you'd like to chat, contact me on yahoo messenger. My name is rockettlibrarian.
Now I'll go ahead and make a few comments about IMing.
#1 Web 2.0? IMing has been around for like 13 years! What??!!
#2 I have a phone with text messaging and email- why do I need to IM?
#3 Another inconvenience is that you have to be logged in at the same time.
#4 The abbreviations are cool, but I don't know many. I'd like to learn more of them.
OK, that's it for now.

ning

Ok, I can see how Ning might have more appeal than facebook because of the capability to personalize things. But the ads! Some were a little racy. And the search results too- I thought I'd look for a swing dancing community- oops found some other kinds of dance too! Ultimately, I don't see the use in joining a group like that unless you are trying to get in touch with people you used to hand out with or looking for tips on where to go dancing. I'm not anymore :) Another search I tried was library. Again, nothing I'd spend time doing. The one I saw that was most promising was for Dallas Chrysalis. This is a religious organization that I once was very active with but have lost touch with. So I thought what a great way to get back in touch with everyone and get a heads up on current events they are planning. DENIED! It was an invitation only group! Now what. rrrrgh.

more on facebook

Oh I can get so lost in facebook. But honestly I think my first impression of it still sticks-it's mainly a time drainer. Joining groups- as directed- has lead to this one main concern: why do I always have to "allow access" for these groups/applications/organizations/whatever to all my photos, info, friends, etc? I don't think that is always necessary and it's like this huge red flag every time. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, that is most likely why my district doesn't allow us to use facebook but blocks it. They said it causes problems to your computer. Which is one reason I didn't spend much time with it. I don't have much of a change of opinion about it thus far. Nonetheless, I joined ALA, six degrees of separation, and We can 10,000,000 Christians on the Internet. The last two wanted me to send out invitations to friends to complete joining, but I didn't. I also accepted several invitations from friends for Causes- now that seems like a more worthy use of Facebook. Oh, and a scrapbooking interest group. That looks promising as I think you can fancy up your photos. Despite about 90 minutes of this, I STILL have 94 requests to deal with....... Do they find out when you "ignore" your invitations and whatnot?

facebook

Oh, Thing 8- so easy! I love you! I wish you were all this easy!! In fact, it was so easy, I did it last summer! My husband just recently started his account, though, and he's been using it more than me. I, oddly, had no issues whatsoever with providing all my info- probably because I sought out facebook first and I knew it was it was viewable only to chosen friends. I am happy to announce that I have 123 friends (ok they call them connections and what I'm doing is bragging). I have even denied requests of people that I think are just friend surfing and don't really know me. What I've used Facebook for: finding friends- especially from high school, email/messaging, posting photos and to kill time. I have periodically been distracted by little games or applications- like trying to steal Twilight characters from my friends. It is truly a new and bizarre world. My one real insightful comment here is that it really has to be way cooler than myspace. EVERYONE gets in trouble with myspace. I never hear that about facebook. So must be true, huh? I will definitely enjoy Thing 9 and getting to know some of the lesser used aspects of facebook. Oh yeah- it was and still is blocked at my work/school.

Thing 6

Oh woe is me! I am only on thing 6. 23 seems SO far away.......
Ok, I'm done with my drama queen moment. As I plug along, I found this one really easy because I was already following a few blogs and I already had my accounts all set up, so it was pretty well a done deal once I went to the link. Easy peasy. I added all my buddies NT 23 blogs. And I added the reader to my iGoogle page. DID YOU? This session is really beefing up my iGoogle. Now if you're reading this, then you probably like me and you should add my other blog to your reader so you can keep up with what I read. And I just did a book trailer that I posted there. The URL is:
http://mybrainistoofull.blogspot.com/
Now, what I'm not sold on yet is all this tagging and seeing what other people like, but I'm keeping an open mind. That's just me trying to limit the amount of info coming into my brain- cause if you didn't already know, it's too full.

Disney mosaic

Disney mosaic,
originally uploaded by Rockett6.

Here is a mosaic picture I made of our recent trip to Disney World. It took me hours!! Literally! I was using Big Huge Labs and I had a number of problems. But I hung in there and here is my finished product. There was definitely a lot of slowness on the Internet's part last night. Might be this whole program.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Image Generators

This was an interesting exercise. I like the potential here. I definitely see this as a way to spice up my orientations....
One thing I've noticed with making photo modifications using these free programs is that you really have to deal with a lot of advertising. Although annoying, I will deal with it for a free program. And also because I get so frustrated with the continual need to update your software or get new programs altogether. That is absolutely inexcusable so I think Web 2.0 is a huge improvement in that sense.

Part 2

Ok, I was just checking on that first one to see if it really posted like I thought it would. I'm not real sure I experiences the full capability of mashups tonight. But I did like what I tried and I will definitely try it more. It wasn't quite what I expected. I thought it would be more creative really. Hard to explain. Two I played with are things I didn't post cause I was kind of disappointed. One was the spell with images mashup. I could only save the html of it. I wasn't sure how that'd show up in my blog. I made it for use with my book club anyway, so I'll have a chance to use that again later. My other experiment was the caption on a picture. I liked the idea cause I've had a specific need for that when doing my booktalks. But it was not at all what I expected. It was really intended to be used for speech bubbles! That's not cool. Or not what I wanted anyway. I made one, but it's not that impressive, so not posted. Thus, you have learned of tonight's endeavors.

Thing 4

Flickr mashups
attempt 1
This is my son in a Warhol picture.