It's over!

...or is it?

If there is anything I've learned doing the CPL Web 2.0, it's that we live in a very fluid world. Who knows what the future will bring. Maybe Google will be the largest company in the world two years from now, or maybe it will have gone bankrupt. Maybe a billion people will be on facebook in a couple years, or maybe it will have been wiped you by something newer.

I do know I have enjoyed dipping my toes into the 2.0 waters, and I particularly like having this wee corner of cyberspace to jot my thoughts down. Perhaps I will continue to do so.

Thanks CPL team!

Web 2.0: Twitter

I must confess I have not given much thought at all to Twitter. Having lived 98% of my life in a world without social media, I am too accustomed to gathering my information a much slower pace.


I see how Twitter is a great promotional tool - an effective way for a popular organizations (musical groups, sports teams, cults..) to keep thier followers whipped up in a frenzy. I imagine Miley Cyrus frequently sends out tweets like "Are you coming to my Concert tonight? Remember to buy a T-shirt!" I also see how kids can use Twitter to text all thier friends at once - very efficient.

There may be very practical uses for Twitter. Maybe everyone could follow a local emergency alert service on Twitter, so if a tornado was heading to their town, everyone would get a tweet warning them. I'm sure something like that will happen in the future.

Ahh, Nature!

Three weeks ago we discovered that Robins had built a nest in the tree beside our mailbox. A week later, five little blue eggs appeared. We have been using the back door ever since.

This morning we had our first two hatchlings. These fellows were just a couple hours old when this picture was taken.

News Flash: J.G.Farrell wins the Booker Prize thirty years after his death!

Sort of...

Back in 1970, the folks who handed out the Booker Prize made changes to their eligibility requirements, which resulted in several books not being nominated for the prestigious award. Yesterday, in an attempt to address this unfortunate occurrence, it was announced that J. G. Farrell's 1970 novel Troubles was the winner of "The Lost Booker Prize". Farrell, who died in 1979, was lucky enough to have won the proper Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, which was the second in a trilogy that started with Troubles.

It's a good thing to see Troubles get the recognition it deserves. I read it a few years ago and loved it - it is a fantastic novel about the British losing control of Ireland. I think it is entirely possible that Farrell's Booker win for Krishnapur was partially due to the "sympathy vote" because Troubles got shafted.

Sadly, Troubles is not in the CPL catalog but perhaps with this new recognition a copy or two may make it on to our shelves. If you just can't wait (and you really shouldn't), the wise folks at NYRB (New York Review Books) re-issued this novel a few years back - you should be able to order your very own copy on-line or through your favourite book seller.

Web 2.0: LibraryThing

I had never heard of LibraryThing, but as a book lover I'm very interested in social network sites that focus on books. I am currently an avid user of GoodReads (www.goodreads.com), which is quite similar. GoodReads seems to be a more popular site; you are likely to find many more reviews of any given book there than on LibraryThing. The drawback might be that because it is so popular, the quality of the reviews tend to be a little less intelligent than they might be on the slightly more highbrow LibraryThing. I like the "discussions" feature on LibraryThing - something GoodReads does not have.

I did a little test, which I'm afraid LibraryThing did not pass. I searched for "Cigar Box Banjo", by Paul Quarrington. This book came out last week. I read it on the weekend and was going to post a review on LibraryThing - only LibraryThing did not have a record of it yet. I noticed that in the "Awards and Honors" section about the author it listed his winning the Matt Cohen Prize, but made no mention of the more prestigious Governor General's Award or the Stephen Leacock Medal that Quarrington had won. I tried to amend this, but LibraryThing wouldn't let me log back in! Ack!

So for now I'll stick to Goodreads, but will re-visit LibraryThing from time to time to see how it improves.

Web 2.0: Online Productivity Tools

Google Docs will destroy the Microsoft office suite of programs. It's just a matter of time.


Once upon a time most people kept all their money hidden somewhere in their homes. They were distrustful of banks and thought that slick educated people would cheat them out of their hard earned cash. It took several generations before a majority of the people figured out that it was easier and safer to keep your money in a bank rather than under your mattress.

Eventually people will figure out that web-based documents are easier to access and share than those residing on the hard-drive of a single computer, and they're probably safer too! If you have a pc connected to the internet, it can be hacked into much more easily than the those servers at Google can be, but where you are really at risk is if your hard-drive gets toasted, or if your computer is damaged in a fire, then your files are all gone too. It is expensive and time consuming to make back-ups of all your files - and then you have to store them someplace safe (preferably at a different location), and its a pain in the bum to migrate them every time you change computers or operating systems. Better just to store them on Google's computers and access them through the internet.

I have been an avid user of Google Docs for a couple of years.

Today, thanks to CPL 2.0, I discovered the Google Calendar. I am a very disorganized person, and I am very excited about the potential this has to organize my entire life on one calendar that I can access from anywhere!

(Two days later): Google Calendar is so cool! I put in a doctor's appt., and I entered the address so I wouldn't have to look it up again later. The calendar automatically gave me a map to my appointment! how cool is this?

Web 2.0: Flickr and YouTube

Quality, entertainment value, and usefulness of the sites.

I think that like the internet itself, these sites contain needles of very useful content buried in haystacks of goofiness. There are some really great tutorials on YouTube for learning how to do all sorts of things. A few months back I had to teach the Introduction to Excel module and I found some very good tutorials on YouTube. If you having difficulty with any kind of computer program, you can probably find a tutorial on YouTube to help you out. I don't use YouTube as entertainment much, and of the quality of the video is sometimes pretty bad, but there are some very good instructional videos in there.

Flicker. Well, the quality of the pictures I see on Flickr are consistently excellent- much less a haystack of goofiness than YouTube. I think Flickr has done an excellent job at attracting high quality users to its site. I find it very useful when I need a picture for a blog- I can usually find suitable pictures quickly, and searching "The Commons" lets me find pictures I can use without fear of copyright violation.

Web 2.0: RSS

A word of warning: While I have been Little Miss Sunshine so far in Web 2.0, today I have my grouchy pants on!

I was successful in setting up RSS feeds. I waited fquite a while to get my confirmation e-mail back from bloglines, which was odd. Tried- many times- and finally gave up on setting up a blog on the site. The process for setting up a blog was confusing and frustrating! Blogger was a lot easier. Spent some time surfing my feeds and was a little underwhelmed...if that's a word. I can see how it's great for someone who follows dozens of blogs, but for an average person like me it's no big deal.

I understand the concept of RSS, and I am glad for the exercise in playing around with Bloglines, but the question I have is why do I have to create a user profile in yet another website just to get something that seems to be a pretty simple piece of computer programming? Is it really that tough to just save your favourite blogs in your web browsers "favourites" tab? Sure you would actually have to visit the sites from time to time to see if they've been updated, but if we can find two hours a day to spend on facebook, I think we can waste a second or two seeing if a blog has been updated. I guess it would be a different story for someone who follows a great many blogs.

Whether you find it useful or not, I predict that sites like Bloglines are doomed. Why? Because creating a list of favourite sites and getting feeds whenever they are updated is something that could be built right into your web-browser! And if someone like me has figured that out then you can bet the big brains at Microsoft or FireFox are going to roll that out sometime in the next 15 minutes, and we'll all have one less password to remember.

Web 2.0: Google- The Way of the Future

As far as I am concerned, Google is well positioned to dominate the internet.

I was introduced to GoogleDocs over a year ago. For some reason my new computer did not come with a usable word processing program and I desperately needed one. A friend showed me GoogleDocs, and I was amazed. Now I can store any document I want to the Google server, access it from any computer with an internet connection, and I don't worry about losing it if my hard-drive gets fried. When I teach the Web 2.0 class at the CPL, I try to take a minute to show people GoogleDocs- for people who work on the same document at work and at home, it makes much more sense than moving things around on flash-drives all the time.

I checked out the "labs" and I am very intrigued by Aardvark. Aardvark is a service where you can ask any question you want, and a real live person will get back to you within minutes. I tried it out by asking a pop music question - I had to open the chat window in my Gmail to converse with the person who worked on my question, and I got my answer in about 30 seconds. My first reaction was "Holy &*@! this is going to put all reference librarians out of work!" But when I calmed down I realized that Aardvark is to AAQ what Wikipedia is to World Book. It's fast and easy to use, but you wonder about the veracity of the information, I also found the "chatting" in my IM was confusing- but I'm sure with practice I'll become more adept. One must admit it is an amazing service! Maybe I'll mention it in the next 2.0 class I teach!

Ah, Music!

I used to really be into music in my youth but somewhere along the way I lost touch with what was new and exciting on the music scene. As I age, I find myself less adventurous in my musical explorations, listening to the same old cd's I've heard hundreds of times before rather than trying something new.

No more! The CPL offers a fantastic selection of cd's, including tons of stuff that's new and interesting. I decided to start checking out cd's, but I gave myself one rule to prevent me from just listening to Abby Road for the the seven-hundredth time: I had to listen to artists I had never even heard of before.

Over the past month I have checked out well over one hundred cd's. A majority just didn't resonate with me, but I have discovered a few artists that I really like. Here are a few of my finds:

• Todd Snider is a singer-songwriter who reminds me of Warren Zevon, John Prine and Tom Waits. By that I mean he writes brilliant, witty songs in a voice that sounds like bicycle crashing into a garbage can. If that craft of song writing matters more to you than blandly flawless singing, then check him out.
  
• This might be cheating a bit, because even though I had never heard of The Apples in Stereo before, they remind me so much of the pop music I loved as a kid that it's not exactly expanding my musical horizons to listen to them. Still, it's good to see that people out there are still trying to craft the perfect pop song. As long as they try, I'm willing to listen.
  
• Apparently I was the only person on the planet who did not know Eels, but now I'm in with the rest of you. I won't say anything because you know more than I do. Why didn't you tell me sooner?

I'd recommend you check these cd's out on your library card and give 'em a spin (as we used to say). Or better yet, wander in to the cd stacks and discover a gem of your own.

Web 2.0: Social Networking

Q: Facebook - useful or a time-waster?

A: For me, I'd say useful- as long as you view entertainment as having a use. It has also allowed me to stay in touch with friends and family more easily, which is fantastic as I have family in Montreal, Boston, Cold Lake and Vancouver Island. I have one brother who is very hard to get a hold of, but I can always leave a note on his facebook page and know he will check it every week or so. For many of my friends "facebook me" has replaced "email me"- it's easy to forget or lose an email address, but as long has you have internet access you can send messages to any of your facebook friends.

Last November I participated in a fundraiser - Facebook let me send one blanket email to all of my friends, it made it easy to raise money for a good cause.

I think facebook rocks.

Web 2.0: Wikipedia

Boy I'm glad we did this exercise. Before today I thought Wikipedia had something to do with witches on the internet. Ha ha! But seriously, this was a lot of fun.

Like a few others, I took a look at the Wikipedia entry for the Calgary Public Library. I couldn't see any glaring mistakes to correct, but I thought it was a little skimpy on the history of the CPL. I thought at least a mention of our first "C.E.O.", Alexander Calhoun was in order, so I added a couple of sentences about his appointment. I'm not sure I cited my source correctly- it came from an article in a book. Do I cite the article first or the book first?

Really fun! If knowledge is power, then being able to contribute to this large database of knowledge puts the power in everyone's hands.

Let's use it for good, not evil.

2.0 - Advantages and Disadvantages of the "Delicious" method.

Anyone looking for an example of how advantageous the Delicious method of organizing websites is, need look no further than this weeks lesson. Our instructors used Delicious to create a list of all the different blogs each of us have created, making it very easy for all of us to see the blogs of our co-workers. Other advantages of Delicious include the ability to instantly search a subject and see which sites are most "popular" - in the sense that they are most frequently bookmarked. Popularity, however, is no guarantee of quality. The advantage of using the CPL's own delicious sites is that these have been chosen by experienced staff, and you can feel fairly comfortable that the information contained on these sites reliable.

Disadvantages? Well, a common complaint I hear (and share) is that the site is not "user friendly". Most people do not have a instinctive feel for the "bundle" method of organizing. Many people prefer a more "visual" method, like the old Best Websites, where a few simple icons represented general subject areas. Having even a few visual cues are like little life rafts in the sea of information - safe places we can swim back to and catch our breath - and without them many people feel like they are drowning. Looking at bookmarks created by someone else always means that you are at the mercy of their way of organizing information. If your mind doesn't work the same way, you might be frustrated. However, there is nothing preventing any of us from creating our own bookmarks, organizing them in a way that makes sense to us!

Books, books, books....

I love books.

A great site where you can share your passion for books is www.goodreads.com . Here, you can create lists of your favourite (or least favourite) books, write reviews, take book quizes, and see what books other people are raving about. The fact that you can create content makes it very 2.0, so it is in keeping with what we are learning through the CPL. I have found out about many cool books from this site!

2.0: A question posed and answered

Q: What do you hope to learn from Web 2.0?

A: I hope I can learn to show other people that internet is not just a place to get information, but a place where they can let their own thoughts and opinions be known! I am looking forward to learning more about creating content and sharing what I learn with others.