Del.icio.us

What this lesson really taught me is that I'd better watch myself or I'm going to throw my computer on the floor and stomp on it. The videos took about as long to load as it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and playing them was pure torture. I really greatly prefer words on a page or screen.

That said, the major benefit of Del.icio.us that I can see is the ability to get to your bookmarks from any computer (especially useful at work, since bookmarks on office computers here commonly vanish). I don't believe I'd use it for research, though maybe that's just because I'm not used to it, and I'm not really interested in what other people have bookmarked. In short, it's something I'll probably not use, but it's good to know what it is--for scintillating cocktail party conversation and all that, you know.

Locating Feeds and Blogs

I experimented with the feed locators that were mentioned. Clicking on the link to Feedster gave me (numerous times) the error message, "The page cannot be displayed," so needless to say I didn't locate many feeds there. I thought Topix.net and Technorati were good for locating news feeds, but they weren't terribly helpful in locating blogs relating to libraries and librarians, which is what I was searching for. Syndic8 seemed to me the most difficult to use.

All in all, I had the best luck finding library-related blogs utilizing Bloglines' search tool and just looking through their list of the day's favorites and the top 1,000, though admittedly my enthusiasm didn't carry me through to #1,000.

The most interesting blog my searching turned up? This had to be one called "The Society for Librarians Who Say ************." (I'm deleting the expletive, but you get the picture--it's something of a maverick librarians' blog.)

jgburns@coj.net

RSS Feeds

This lesson seemed like it had a split personality. (Of course, I'll entertain the suggestion that it's me who has the split personality.) On the one hand RSS feeds seem like an excellent thing and easy to understand. But, on the other, I felt that while I was swimming on a peaceful sea there were undertows that constantly threatened to swamp me. I don't know--it just seemed like there was too much "stuff" to navigate through, and the fact that my work computer has been performing like a cut-rate dialup connection and my workroom printer has been out of toner for a few days and I haven't been able to print out any cheat sheets hasn't helped matters any.

Kvetching aside, I think that RSS feeds and aggregators are really excellent tools. If a person visits several Web sites on pretty much a daily basis, what better way to save time than to have feeds from those sites all organized in one place. I will probably quit some of the feeds I set up just for practice, but there are others I'll keep and more that I'll add, both of sites I visit often and sites listed in Bloglines.

As for RSS use in libraries, I've already found several dealing with books and libraries that could offer helpful advice, and libraries are all about organization--and so are RSS feeds. I'm glad I was introduced to them (despite the everpresent fear of drowning).

My feeds can be seen at: http://www.bloglines.com/public/jimgeebee@yahoo.com.
jgburns@coj.net

Technology

For this I Googled "best new technology" and settled on an article called "Some of the Best New Technology is Simple." Yes, it was the word "simple" that attracted me.

The article discussed 10 new pieces of technology, including an electric toothbrush that utilizes 8 microbrushes operating at 810 strokes per minute to enable you to brush both your top and bottom teeth at the same time (while massaging your gums).

The thing most pertinent to us at the library, though, is a DVD called the Total Hi-Def disc. Previously, people who bought HD-DVD players could not play Blu-ray discs, and those who bought Blu-ray players couldn't play HD-DVD. In the Total Hi-Def disc Warner Brothers offers a two-sided disc--two 0.6-millimeter discs, one HD-DVD and one Blu-ray--bonded together so the viewer can play one side if they have a Blu-ray player or the other if they have an HD-DVD player. Convenience like this could lead us to offering HD-DVD/Blu-ray DVDs before long.

jgburns@coj.net

Flickr Image

So many photos, so little time. It's hard to pick a favorite and even harder to tell why, because that's the point of a picture--it's worth a hundred words. That said, I picked a photo appearing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimsk/2617151420/In it, a cat sits on a wall with a monument in the background. What drew me was the contrast between the cat--soft and alive and timeless--and the monument--hard and nonbreathing and intensely modern.

Flickr Fun

For my mashup I was tempted to pick Wiki Crimes, where Internet users can report crimes in their area by placing pins on a GoogleMaps-based map. Just think how Jacksonville would bristle with multicolored (color coded by type of crime) pins!

However, that had nothing to do with Flickr, so I decided on Montagr (http://www.deviousgelatin.com/montager/image.php). In it, you can type in a search term and have a montage of all Flickr images of that term created for you (it defaulted to "face" when I went to the site, then I chose "cat" afer getting a screenful of human faces, and voila, a screenful of cats appeared. If you were of an artistic bent, I'm sure this would come in handy. Otherwise, it looks like a good activity to while away the time on those days when you feel you really should get a life but don't have the energy.

Champagne Across the Bow

This is the launching of the good blog JimBee's. May the seas be calm and the moonlight bright as we sail off into Blogdom. Just stick your thumbs out, and I'll be glad to take you aboard.