Week 8, Thing 18 - Onlne_Productivity - Zoho works for me

Updated July 12, 2007. I made the original post below on May 31. Google Docs seemed to work for me where Zoho Writer didn't. Since then I've tried them both again and Zoho seems to work very well. I think I was having an odd Internet connection problem at the time and pinned the odd behavior on Zoho. I received a very nice and interested comment from the Zoho staff and that encouraged me to give it another try. I wanted to take a moment to issue this retraction since I have had good luck with Zoho since that original post.
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I haven't had the best of luck with Zoho Writer. I had some luck with the document but I had some weird formatting problems that I couldn't solve. I had to delete the document and start over. I had similar hitches with some of the other online tools. Still, this seems like a very handy feature. It's VERY handy to be able to get to the files from anywhere - an alternative to moving documents around on a flash drive or sending them by email. I'm going to give this some more time - although not right now, there's too much else to do! I'm going to try to post this document to my blog to see if I can figure out how it works.

[Cool, it worked. Even the colors and the font formatting came through the way I had entered it. That's handy.]

Week 7, Thing 17 - Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki

Well, that was fun. I've used wiki's but haven't ever edited one. I created my own wiki while I was at (bluffingwildly.pbwiki.com)it but didn't have any info to post yet! While I was entering my blog name to the list, I edited the instructions on the page that tell you how to post a link. I hope that helps. We'll see. This might be the first time lots of us have posted a link on anything so it might make folks nervous.

Week 7, Thing 16 - Wikis

Well, I learned from this. When reading about this sort of thing, you always try to apply it to your current situation first. I am thinking that a wiki might be a tool for our library's intranet. It takes a lot of management and would be great if it were really self-editing. However, I'm concerned about outdated information. Adding the content is easy. Maintaining it is a chore when you know what you have. I wonder how we'd manage it if content were arriving from all directions.

Off topic - New Colors

OK, I was working on a spreadsheet to track expenditures on historical photographs and needed a break. I used the Palette Generator on fk's flickr toys to create a palette of new colors from a photo. Here's the photo and the palette they gave me...

I picked colors from the palette and pasted the codes into the Blogger settings. It was good to see that they had a 'return to template defaults' button in case I really messed it up.

Week 6, Thing 15 - Perspectives on Library 2.0

Loved the "Machine is Us/ing us" video. It was well composed and enjoyably fast paced. The OCLC newsletter was interesting. It gave a good progression from concepts to potential practice. My favorite part about the Wikipedia article was the concept that Library 2.0 requores "radical trust." We'll need to give up absolute control over resources. For those of us who came up in the Library 0.0 world, that's not easy to do! Important, though.

Week 6, Thing 14 - Technorati

I've launched into Technorati. Since I don't read any blogs at the moment, it's going to take some time for me to build a list of favorites on this site. I did take the tour listed in the 23 things blog and it is dawning on me that my old 'mental model' of how to get information is outmoded. I've been looking to journal articles and see now that they're usually behind the curve of what's really going on. Now I'm going to need to look toward blogs for this. It's a little daunting to think of the bazillion sources of information that are out there. Tools like this do make it easier to manage and make it a bit less overwhelming.
mdlearn2 - Maryland Learning 2.0

Week 6, Thing 13 - del.icio.us

OK, I've done a lot of this stuff so far and it has been fun and potentially useful. I can tell that del.icio.us is going to be really handy. This is something that's easy to begin to use. I'm in the basics now. Although I've already found a kindred spirit or two just by checking shared tags. Pretty cool. By the way, I'm http://del.icio.us/bluffingwildly.

Week 5, Thing 12 - Rollyo

OK, I tried Rollyo. The hardest part about this was picking a search subject. I chose Maryland gardening. My search roll searches these sites:

• University of Maryland Home and Garden Information Center
• Mason-Dixon Chapter of the Maryland Rhododendron Society
• Maryland Native Plant Society
• Carroll Gardens Nurseries
• Behnke Nurseries
• Maryland Aquatic Nurseries

Try it!

Select...Maryland GardeningSearch The Web

Week 5, Thing 11 - LibraryThing

Yippee, I had a jump on this one. I had started a LibraryThing page a while ago. You can see mine by going to: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jimd.

Week 5, Thing 10 - Image Generators

This took much longer than I thought. I kept playing with different choices. You could spend hours on this. I finally used the Dollar Bill Generator to make this picture of my cat, Sam. It was a snap.

Week 4, Thing 9 - RSS feeds

Subscribing to feeds was a little more complex. A lot of the feeds that interested me required separate registration. I might do that at some point but I'm registering a lot for things on this program so I'll hold off on that.

Finding feeds using the search tools was OK but I found it more useful to go to sites that I read and search them for the term "RSS". Lots of them have feeds. I set up several news feeds. I also subscribed to some library staff picks and recommended web sites lists. This should be interesting.

Week 4, Thing 8 - RSS on Bloglines

Setting this up was easier than anything else so far. Just an email address and password. Password management is becoming an issue, though!

Week 3, Thing 7 - Interesting technology: GPS

We're supposed to write something about anything technology related that interests us. This week a friend of mine was working in D.C. and I went down to see him. We decided to go to dinner at some restaurant downtown that was new to both of us. Driving in D.C. always mystifies me. However, he had a Magellan GPS gizmo that was fascinating. We just entered the destination address, it knew where we were, what route to take, and it guided us the whole way. No brains required. I want one of those babies!

Week 3, Thing 6 - Flickr 3rd Party Sites

I played with fd's flickr toys for a long time. Hard to stop. I made a movie poster for my friend Sue. You can see it in my list of Flickr photos (see previous post).

Week 3, Thing 5 - Flickr-a-go-go

All right. I spent a little time with Flickr this afternoon. I'm registered as a user and uploaded a few photos. My ID on Flickr is also bluffingwildly. It seemed handy to be consistent if possible. I posted some photos of the chandelier I had hanging in my office at the holidays. You can see my photos by going to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8206248@N08/ (I hope.)

Week 2, Thing 4 - Registering and tracking

All registered. If you're here you've already found this blog but just in case here's my blog address: http://bluffingwildly.blogspot.com. Cool, huh?

Week 2, Thing 3 - Blog all set up

This doesn't seem to be coming in order but I'm going through the program step by step. I set up the blog OK, when some free time drops out of the sky I'll customize this and do something with my profile. Until then, this will work just fine.

Week 1, Thing 2 - My 7 and 1/2 things observations

All in all, I don't think I do too badly with this. For me, I think the easiest thing is # 7.5 - Play. I seem to be good at that and it does help move forward. The hardest one for me is #4 - Have confidence.... Sometimes I perceive assignments as if they're much more difficult or complex than they really are and that can keep me from getting started. Once I'm on a roll, though, things usually go well. I think of that line from Mary Poppins when they're getting ready to clean up the room - "Well begun is half done!"

Week 1, Thing 1 - BluffingWildly

OK, I finally landed on an address for my blog that wasn't already taken. I picked BluffingWildly because, to me, that's what all this learning is about. You can't worry about looking stupid or making mistakes. Just plow forward like you know what you're doing, keep an open mind, ask some questions and it will all come together! Here goes....