EnCompassCulture (Round 2, Week 6)

EnCompassCulture is not an interesting but just another site for book lovers to explore. I feel it is useful for reader's advisory purposes; you may choose reading your next books by reading Book reviews or select books by the author you have not read before by reading the Author's interviews. And for the library staff who are really enjoying quizzes, they are lots of questions you can answer to test your book knowledge. I would only promote the site to the customers who love books and have plenty of time kill.

SlideShare (Round 2, Week 5)

SlideShare is easy to use although it's a bit slow to download. It is a good tool for people who would like to share their presentation with other people and useful if you want to get some idea from other people's presentation.
For library use, we may put the presentations about 'How to ' things on SlideShare for staff or customers to learn or share.

TasteSpotting ( Round 2, Week 4)

http://www.visionsofsugarplum.com/2008/10/browned-butter-scotch-toffee-blondies.html

The reason why I am choosing this recipe/image is because I love slice so much, every time when I see any nice one, I can't stop salivating.
It's an interesting website, easy to use, if you only want to browse the image/recipe, you don't need to sign in. Even though it has nothing to do with the books, but will benefit to customers who enjoy cooking, we can not only see the image/recipe, but also other people's comments about it and sometime very interesting story about it.
I think people who love food like me will enjoy TasteSpotting.

FeedMybox (Round 2, Week 3)

FeedMybox is a very easy tool to use for anyone who follows his (or her) favorite blogs or websites, and wants notification of any new posts or content, all you need to have is your email address, just sign up and use.

I subscribed Manukua Library and Auckland Library when I first signed in, after that, I received our Manukau Library's updated 'Top 5 Goodies' every day. I may use it in the future if I find a really good blog which I would like to follow.

PicApp (Round 2, Week 2)

German shepherd dog and tiger are my most favourite creatures in the world!
I have a German shepherd dog but I don't think I would ever afford to have a tiger.

The good things I find the PicApp are:
1. No hassle to sign up.
2. Easy to use, just search the pictures you want and copy and paste.

The downside is:
1. Slow (and I can only see the first page for some reason, when I tried to click 'Next', nothing happened).
2. Not plenty of pictures to choose from.

I don't think I would use it again, I would rather to use some other website.

Box.net (Round 2, Week 1)

Since we started the web 2.0 training, Box.net is the first thing I tried to use even before I totality understood it and now I feel it is so convenient.
As part of our Chinese book selecting process, the book shops send us very big lists of the book titles to choose from and also we have to add some other titles we may want to order from them. Because we have to do it individually from each different branch, the person who is in charge with it has to combine the lists from each of us. Think of there are 10 Excel forms which each has 10 pages, what a time waste. Fortunately, now we have Box.net, and also we can do it at anywhere, not even using email (My brain has difficulty to remember people's email address).

Facebook - playing nicely with others(Week 6)

Facebook is very popular and it helps you connect with friends and family and to keep in touch. It can help the library promote events to library users easily and to a broad audience. There is a lot in the site so it is a bit hard to navigate in the beginning, but you get used to it. All the basic functions are easy to use though. I probably wouldn't use facebook because it is not a good platform for proper communication, only for saying hi and keeping your friends up to date with your life. Customers would be able to chat with friends and family on facebook if they made one, so for some people this may be useful or fun. If the library had a facebook page, it would be good to promote to customers as they can be notified of special events and it reminds them to visit the library and make use of the facilities.

Music File and MP3 (Week Five)

I visited cnet download.com for free mp3s. It was easy to use the website since all the genres were listed on the left hand side in a clear easy to find spot. Clicking gives a list of subgenres and then you can see the most popular songs or search for what you want. It is very user friendly and anyone who is used to computers will not have problem using it.

Some other sites i know are 1ting.com and last.fm .

Goodreads (Week Four)

After navigating Goodreads, I came back to Reading and Reviews under our Manukau Library’s Website. I found they are very much alike in some ways; our Reading and Reviews can be called ‘Mini Goodreads’. So I think people who are using our library’s web site will definitely enjoy Goodreads, it is such a good world wide social networking for book lovers.

Twitter (Week Three)

It took a little bit longer than Zamzar to understand and use. But once had it clear in my mind, I found it more interesting.
You choose what you follow, then follow what you choose, make it more open at beginning, and adjust your Twitter Following at any time. It is a most fast and convenient way to spread information once your Twitter net is builds. It is good platform of receiving (rather than sanding) information.
The downside I found so far is there is no any filter function, after a while you may end up getting too much junk.

Zamzar (Week Two)

This is the most succinct website we have ever had since we started the web 2.0 training.
Simple as 123, free, no sign up, without downloading software, the only thing you need is an e-mail address, you can convert file to whatever format you want. Next time when customers have any problems to open file from their own USB drive because of formatting, we can try Zamzar!
Sounds too good?
Want more? you have to pay if
Ø File is big
Ø You want to storage you file more than 24 hours
Ø You want fast conversions

Back to my blog (Week One)

After about a year since the last post, I nearly forget about everything. Finally I am back to my blog!
I am asking myself what things have I learned from it and what I can learn from the new things except spending hours and hours on it. Hope I would find more answers after I finish the new Web 2.0 training.

last one

It has been very interesting working through all of this, and I have learned about a lot of things available on the web which I was not aware of before.
There are many tools available, many of which I was not aware of before. Many seem like they could be very useful, or at least fun.

In particular, Wikis and Video sharing, both with user generated content seem to have had a large impact on modern society. It's fun, interesting and informative, which happens to also be what libraries strive to achieve as well.

E-books

Ebooks sound like a very good idea, as it offers books to people who dont have access to the library, or people whose local libraries do not have books they would like.
It is also free, easily transferrable, compact, and convenient.

Project Gutenburg has a lot of famous texts free of charge, which I did not expect. Of course, most recent novels are copyrighted so are not available.

The downside of E-books is that the process of reading so many pages on a computer screen or similar device tires the eyes and makes it difficult to read large sections at a time. Printing it out would use a lot of paper and ink, as well as printing time, which makes it more worthwhile to just borrow/buy the actual book in my opinion.

E-books do have potential though, but I prefer ink on paper

Podcasts

The podcast website took a while to load, but once I finally got on, I looked around at what was available.

Podcasts come in all sorts and it is interesting to listen to them. They could be very useful if you are busy and want to catch up with news or want to learn about something of interest to you. You just have to download the podcast and listen on the go on an mp3.

It is also useful as you can suscribe and get updated when more news comes up.

#20

I actually wrote about youtube before on the last post, so this time I will just talk about a video I watched.

I watched Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's got talent. I choose this because I saw a link to it on a news website. It's been so popular, it's had nearly 50million views!
I enjoyed it very much as it is like a cinderella story, but in real life.

#19

I chose Youtube as the site out of the list of winners.

Youtube has a large number of user contributed videos on almost every topic imagineable. A lot of news agencies like BBC and TVNZ have their own youtube 'channel' too where they upload videos of their news.

It's very useful if you're looking for a specific topic to watch, but it's hard to sift the rubbish from the good stuff sometimes, and if you dont have a specific idea in mind, it's difficult to find interesting videos sometimes.

The downside of having individuals freely upload videos is that more often than not, the videos are unprofessional, poor quality, and a waste of time. On the upside though, a lot of talented people have created lots of wonderful videos for everyone to watch.

The library could utilize youtube to host videos on things like how to use the library's facilities.

Zoho Writer

It's a very good clone of microsoft word, and has a lot of the features you would normally use. It feels natural and doesn't lag either, so thumbs up.
One problem with web documents is that often, it doesn't print out well. After trying the print function on zoho, I'm really impressed as it sets it out like a word document would.

One downside is that it's all online, so if you're not connected to the internet, you won't have access to it unless you've saved a .html page of it - but who does that?
It also means increased reliance on the internet, which makes me a little uneasy - isn't it just as easy to save your word documents and upload them?

Overall, it's a neat site, and it must've taken a lot of effort to make, but I'd rather stick to my copy of word.

technorati

Another internet search engine for search blog competing with Google and Yahoo.

YouTube

Saw some funny things from this web. My son said to me:"Mum, If you want to be famous, you can put some silly things about youself on it." Okey, I am ready if you don't mind to have a famous mum.