Puppies = happiness

Ok, so at some point I'll start working on this blog again. Until then, I'm just head over heels for my new dachshund puppy, Trixie.

Time Flies

Since the Learning 2.0 effort ended, I haven't had a reason to blog. However, I'm thinking I just need to practice. I'd like to learn the various functionality and brag about my blog savvy to my kids. Not that they will be impressed or anything. Here are a few things I want to learn:

1. How to post pictures inside my blog.
2. How to link a YouTube video to my blog post.
3. How to send a post from my phone.
   
4. Oh, I'm sure there's more...

Some of the less technical things I want to figure out include: why bother to blog anyway? can blogging achieve a purpose (that I care about)? and can it be done "for pennies a day" i.e. less than 10 minutes. So I'll be pondering what I want my blog to morph into over the next few days... And maybe, just maybe I'll start posting again.

YouTube and NetLibrary

Honestly, I won't be spending gobs of time on YouTube. You probably won't find any videos of me there either. I know you are really disappointed to hear that, right? I did find a few music videos that were interesting and of course the occasional news spoof is good for a laugh, but I guess I'm too serious minded to spend much time on the site. NetLibrary is another story though. I spent entirely too much time trying to register to use this site. I remember about a two years ago looking through the offerings and not seeing anything I wanted. At that time I didn't have an MP3 player either. Evidently, my account expired and I couldn't get back in. East Baton Rouge Parish Library had just canceled the service, Acsension Parish Library requires account activation at the library onsite. So for now, I haven't been successful in testing downloading an e-book from NetLibrary.

Remember me?

So blogs are supposed to be fresh, nearly daily updates filled with newsy items of things going on around us. If that is true, then I've failed as a blogger. So what?! I'll just reboot and start again. Here are some of the cool things our group checked out since I wrote last:

1. Yes, we discussed Flickr and Picasa. We learned that some of us are gifted with a camera and that I should leave picture taking to my 11 year old aspiring photographer. I also learned that Google has a screen saver that works with your My Photos or with your Flickr or Picasa albums (or the latest coolest RSS on Picasa). Find it at www. pack.google.com and just select the stuff you want.
2. And yes, we discussed RSS feeds. Each of the folks in our group had different experiences locating content and using different readers. One person even set up a ticker to scroll across their desktop. That was cool in theory, but I am too ADD for that to work for me long term! For practice I set up several RSS feeds inside a Yahoo mail account. That does me little good, since that isn't an email account that I view often. My preferred source for the information is my iGoogle portal page. Even though the feed info is limited, it is enough to catch my attention and draw me to click for details. I've set up several news services and blogs inside a specific tab that I check at least daily.
3. LibraryThing - Ok, so maybe this is like Facebook and Myspace for bookjunkies, but do we really need that? Sorry. I just haven't jumped into the social networking pool yet.
4. Rollyo - Interesting, and as a result of using it I found Kayak.com whick in turn led me to xjet.com where I found great prices on non-stop flights to my mom's for the summer, so I guess it's all good. Seriously though, I think I would rather explore the Google Custom Search Engine. http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0705_01.html
5. SurveyMonkey - Since it was play week, we decided to monkey around a bit. Need a quick speaker evalution or customer survey? This is useful even at the "free" level. With an active imagination, some planning and a few bucks a month it becomes a pretty powerful survey and analysis tool.
6. Other technology that is on the verge of creepy:

Microsoft Surface (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html)

Google Streets (http://news.com.com/Google+Maps+takes+it+to+the+streets/2100-1038_3-6187254.html?tag=item)

Catching up with RSS

So I'm a bit behind the gang. Other than a brief intro to RSS a couple of months ago with having a verse of the day hit my Gmail account, I haven't really had any exposure to the real deal. So yesterday while checking my Yahoo account I noticed that it listed a folder called "All RSS Feeds" and I thought I'd check it out. Sure enough it allowed you to choose any sort of content you wanted. I selected New York Times and CNET among a few others. Immediately, I found a terrific article on a topic that Tom Sands had asked my to research earlier that day! Wow! Talk about luck. So I can certainly see that with a little tweaking to choose appropriate subject matter and providers that this can be very helpful to me.

I also learned how to put the CNET RSS on my Google portal page, but it only shows the headlines for the top 4 stories. It is not as robust as using the reader in the Yahoo mail folder. So I will continue to experiment until I find what works best for me. I look forward to meeting with the rest of the team to share in your experiences as well.

Oh, and the cool thing I found yesterday? "Googling state government documents" a story about using Google in state government document delivery.


http://news.com.com/Googling+state+government+documents/2100-1038_3-6180002.html?tag=sas.email

Relevance of Learning?

We all knew it would happen. Someone was bound to ask, "What does this learning thing you guys are doing have to do with your work at DEQ?" Well, it happened to me yesterday. I offered a very thin response of it helps us all become more familiar with technology in general, and you never know how you may be able to use a technology once you've learned it. I gave the Flickr example - which was batted down with "DEQ has its own photo gallery." Maybe so, but that really isn't the point. Learning in a supportive, collaborative environment is, to me, ALWAYS a positive thing. And so, I resolve to not only work harder on the lessons we undertake together, but to also think about how they relate to my world (in all my environments, play on DEQ tag line intended!). Because I really do believe that there are many areas where what we discover - planned and unplanned has value to my work life.

1. Blogs - Learning more about what Blogs are and how they are used is valuable in itself. What better way to do that than to create your own? And, just last week we discussed the value of including blogs in our search strategies when looking for certain types of information. We tested out using Google to specifically search Blogs.
2. Flickr - I've just started to investigate this, but I've seen it used as an example of faceted classification in records management articles. The fact that photos are "tagged" is worth spending time learning about. This is the specific angle that I plan to investigate as I interact with the site. In fact, knowing about other technologies helps bring continuous improvements to our own (such as the DEQ gallery... i.e. what is our tagging schema?)

So, y'all - I'd love to hear your thoughts as we move forward in this learning experience. I know that we are only at the beginning and there are many more new technologies to experience. I am looking forward to expanding my mind and having a bit of fun while we learn. And heck, if we come up with ideas to improve processes at work isn't that lagniappe?

Photo Success

Well I got a photo on the page, but I really don't remember how I got to the page where that became an option! I really need a cup of coffee!!