Final blog

The idea behind the 23 things is a good one - getting people to have a look at new technology or new twists on existing technology is a necessary. The program was designed for public libraries and as such, slanted the applications for the new software towards personal or recreational use, whereas my take on it is to look at whether or how it will be useful in my work on a day to day basis.
Of the applications that I have seen, the one which might have some potential inside our organisation is the wiki (obviously) , maybe youtube type videos, RSS feeds and possibly federated search applications like Rollyo for use by individual officers who like to research and have found some good sites.

The time taken with 23 Things is prodigious, but then over years of study, I found that it was always the same. Any form of study always takes sizeable slabs of dedicated time. It is the other competing things happening at the same time that generate angst. If a major research library or institution ever puts out a "23 Things" with examples and ideas focussed on research, it would be very beneficial.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks proved to be a disappointment, not because of any fault of audiobooks themselves, but because the link to them did not go where it was supposed to. I was unable to register. I am doing this on the last Friday of the program, so we might have been cut off or terminated early. Whatever the reason, I have not had the opportunity to have a listen to them or to look at the techniques used in locating and downloading them. I can no doubt read about them later without too much trouble.

podcasts

Podcasts are pretty straight forward and have been around for a good while. They are a commonly used as a way of time shifting by radio stations such as the BBC and Radio National here in Australia. Having seachable directories of podcasts such as Yahoo and the others provide is a very useful feature for my own personal use - I can find Billy Connelly or Gore Vidal or whoever with a simple search. They are easy to use and with MP3 players or Ipods are extremely portable. The technology might have a use in our organisation for training purposes.

Youtube

I have seen Youtube before - my kids have been keen users for some time. I have looked at a variety of clips, but have chosen one of the US president to include with my blog. These clips (Youtube rather than George Bush) could be used for training packages or for experts to provide considered opinions on topics that might be useful to the rest of an organisation and which can easily be accessed from anywhere - saving people doing so many roadshows.

If you want to catch George's show, the link is:

Learning 2.0 awards Googlemaps

I had a look at Googlemaps as a category winner on Learning 2.0 and frankly it is an exceptionally good piece of kit. A terrific feature for our guys is its ability to provide directions from point "a" to point "b" anywhere in the world (or at least places that have roads). It provides a paper based gps system. It also locates businesses and provides well marked road maps. It is a very useful site.

So what about Zoho

Zoho is an interesting piece of work and it has one great advantage over Bill Gates' creation - it is free!! From looking at the word processing and spreadsheet applications it seems to do everything that Microsoft can do and with a little practice, I am sure that I can use it just as inexpertly as I use the existing costly alternative. I am somewhat puzzled by how people make money out of this.

HL Menken

For every complex problem there is a simple solution - and it is alway wrong

Wikis

Wikis seem to be quite straight forward and immediate applications for them spring to mind. They would seem to be quite a useful tool for co-ordinating research or group projects and probably quite a lot of other things to boot.

Library 2.0

I have heard similar claims to those made by the Library 2.0 guest list previously. The first time was in Library 1972.0 when some big claims were being made for libraries in shoe boxes (every thing was going to be on micro fiche) and for the provision of materials in many different but new formats (tapes, slides or the then new videotape). It reflects a desire to democratise information with, I suppose, the implicit belief that one of the great inequities in the world will thereby be removed.
I also suspect that it reflects the response of libraries to the threat that technology has for a long time posed to the library world. Not unnaturally, the response to this places libraries at the centre of this possible new world. There are a few contentious statements in the Library 2.0 "readings" - Rick Anderson's assertion that there are no longer "hard to get" items so there is no need to keep collections is a bit hard to swallow. Print runs these days are over in nanosceonds and one day Rick should try getting a copy of an old government report from the Web. It is a big claim.

Like previous "new waves" bits of it will be adopted, but probably not in the way that the current propagandists expect, and those bits will probably not be the ones which currently seem most likely. As ever a major problem for organisations such as ours is that, there is a lot of info out there and there are terrific tools for finding it, but unfortunately most of it is ephemeral and the bits that our organisation really does need cost a lot of money and are locked up in specialised databases. The extent to which one can be interactive, democratic and provide everything to everyone is very much limited by the size of the budget and the restrictions in the supplier's agreement.

Take on Technorati
Technorati looks like a useful tool if it could be used in-house and if "blogs" or something similar were the modus operandi for communicating info inside our organisation. As it stands in cyberland at the minute, Technorati enables the location and aggregation of similar blogs (or at least blogs with similar tags) , but the validity and reliability of the essentially subjective content is anybody's guess. As with a lot of things on the net, it is dazzling technology with mindless content - the same sort of unsatisfying effect that you get when you shell out a fortune for a big plasma screen television and use it to watch free to air T.V.

Rollyo

Rollyo could well be a very useful tool for searching groups of selected free to air sites. It has an obvious problem that it cannot deal with subscription sites due to password problems and so its usefulness is somewhat diminished. Have a look at Rollyo at http://www.rollyo.com/dashboard.html.

Latest member of the fleet at Icarus Airlines

This was done with a generator that allows you to create your own airline. The address for the generator is :http://www.redkid.net/generator/plane/

Not sure that I ever will own an airline or use generators but I suppose its a bit of fun.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are intuitively useful pieces of kit and used carefully can provide useful timely info, especially if one is involved in putting together a newsletter. Whilst the boosters for newsfeeds cite the ease of use and the fact that one no longer needs to go to sites and check e-mail etc, unless the feeds are carefully chosen, one still ends up with a few nuggets that have to be extracted from a lot of dross.
The feed finding tools are good but time consuming (lots of hits if you search for a common topic) and prone to leading one astray in pursuit of items that might be of interest but which are not necessarily work related.
Overall a good system but requiring careful selection and disciplined application. More useful than my friend Flickr.

Flickr has its uses

Having done a tutorial or two on Flickr, I am firmly of the view that it would have been an extremely useful tool to have 20 years ago, which was the last time I was last asked for a photo on a professional basis.
I'm afraid photography is not my thing, either at home or at work, but the technology is impressive. I am more into the written word rather than images. That said, it stands to reason that the people who created Flickr would be just the opposite, and that observation is born out by their grasp of spelling!

Tough , resilient but pretty flower

This is the flower of one of the toughest, fastest spreading plants I have ever come across. It is a creeper and was growing in my back yard over an area of about 10 metres.

Last year I used the best part of a litre of Roundup trying to kill it and thought that I had succeeded, until I noticed a whole lot of new buds coming up after the recent rains.

Flower Power

Thing #3: Learning habits

Words are not adequate to express what I feel at this moment...