Quest 7 - PhotoSharing - My Name in Pictures

Well, you've probably heard "You ought to be in pictures" - at least my name can be!

Quest 7 - PhotoSharing - Flickr

I created a free Flickr account to explore after I looked at the Magical Feature Tour. I appreciated the security alert, letting unsuspecting users know that there are phishing scams out there.

I uploaded some digital pictures to my new account. I think one of the pictures was too large (very high resolution) and it was unable to load on the first two tries.

This is one of the pix that I uploaded to Flickr (taken right after the new sign was installed at the branch)

This could very useful in sharing pix with family and friends, and could also be a good way to archive pix in the event of various natural disasters - many people have lost their family photographs in fires and floods.

Quest 6 - Part 2 - Technorati

Searching "library 2.0" in the suggested ways yielded results that were not surprising.

Keyword - searched using AND operator and yielded 4,734 results.
Exact phrase - 1,068 results
At least one of the words - 289,934 (the OR operator expands the search, but results not really useful)
NONE - why? No reason to search for NONE of the words in this case

Tag search yielded 495 posts and a list of related topics
Blog search - 449 posts (with authority indicating # of blogs linking to a website within the last 6 months)

The different results confirm that how you search for something still matters.

Quest 6 - Part 1 - Del.icio.us

I viewed both videos. The YouTube presentation by Liz Davis was much better and gave an excellent overview of Del.icio.us. I liked the explanation of the advantages of using this. Being able to have favorites available from any computer you happen to be using is a real plus. I know there are times when I've been at the Reference Desk and I know I have a favorite on my computer, but I can't remember the web site.

Being able to build a shared reading list also has lots of possibilities. I could imagine a committee working on a project using this to post links so that everyone on the committee would be able to access them.

I looked at Online Reference - Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and explored some of the links for who had saved this link, and found another CCPL staff member among those listed.

Quest 4 - RSS and Newsreaders

This addresses one of my concerns about technology. I love technology, but with so many different places to look for new posts, I thought I would have to maintain a long list of favorites... and what if I'm not at my computer? So, this solves that problem.

I included several CCPL blogs in my bloglines for easy reference - view them (and others) at:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/mtpcindy

Quest 3 - Instant Messaging

Well, I've engaged in my first instant messaging session. It was easy and fun and I see why people like it - you don't have to wait for someone to go into their email and respond.

It also seemed more conversational than email.

Quest Two - Creating a Blog

Using blogger to create a blog was fairly easy - now it's a matter of playing with it and seeing what happens. Certainly for this quest using a blog to keep track of progress and completion makes sense.