Sunday is the new Wednesday - Last Things

The internet is evolving fast, and we go with it, whether we want to or not. I would hope that we would want to - we have far more efficient and effective technologies for finding and delivering information than we had even a short time ago. We offer many more options and routes, our main problem is ensuring quality. We need to be sure that our "digital natives" are taking the best routes for them. The tools we use are more intuitive, and both the tools that we purchase and those that we create will go on being influenced by the kind of features that gaming and virtual worlds develop. People who think libraries are just as they used to be really haven't been paying attention.

So, the 23 things are done, and Wednesday Kamala will go and join the Catapult at the bar - a good quality sparkling shiraz, I think.

U streaming

The Thing 21 demo got a bit derailed because we didn't have Flash 10 on the lab machines. Kathryn showed us how it works on her laptop so I now at least have some appreciation of what U stream can do. As this sort of application becomes more refined it may have some use for help queries.

YouTube

You can find almost anything on YouTube - what to choose?

So just for fun, here's Yakko's geography lesson - a little out of date now, but one of the best things the Animaniacs did.

Twittering (or tweeting)

I can see Twitter might be useful coming through your phone (if you're prepared to pay for it), not much help on your computer. By the time you see anything, the immediacy is past and you just waste time looking at it. I think it's mainly for kids who care about what their friends are doing every five minutes.

I am, however, dutifully tweeting and I'll keep it up as required.

Facebook - Things 16 and 17

I've joined Facebook and acquired some friends (some more unlikely than others). I've also joined the group for wanting the supermarket picture back in the library, which seems a worthy cause.

Flickering and other things

I find I've got ahead of myself and did the image upload thing a couple of posts ago. So here's one with a bit more manipulating (courtesy Photoscape and Picasa) - a souvenir of part of the California trip:




I've joined Flickr - I wouldn't use it on a regular basis because I've got my photo folder structure well organised but I can see it's usefulness for sharing some pictures with family and friends e.g weddings etc.

As for the image generators: I've got a bit tired of looking through them and most of the offerings seem to me to be not very exciting and another occasion for time-wasting. I'd rather play with my own pictures. I found one I liked, but it hasn't been working for the last two days. So here's a warning instead:



Easystreet

Delicious and other searches (11 & 12)

I hadn't looked at my Delicious account for a while - it disappeared when I switched to Firefox 3 and I hadn't got around to loading the new add-on. Which tells you that it wasn't vital. I can see its usefulness, but I have a nicely organised set of bookmarks at home, and another at work, and there isn't much relation between them. My most frequently accessed sites stay in Firefox tabs, or the dropdown - the history is retained long enough to keep the usual stuff.
I'm not a big fan of the tag - been a librarian too long - if it's not keywords which I can refine as I go, then I'll have a controlled list, thank you. Apart from the more obvious, some people tag things very strangely.

Social Bookmarks

Search results below:
(Gave up trying to make Connotea work, which is why it's not there - threw in Google Scholar for interest)
Searched the two terms shown - popular v. more precise and results as expected given the different sources. Used the basic search offered as default for each. The Delicious result underlines the need to think carefully if relying on tags.
Kartoo is interesting and might repay a bit more exploration (these are just the basic figures, but images, headings etc add value)

Search engine	avian influenza	bird flu
Delicious	923	4465
CitULike	501	501
Murdoch catalogue	30	11
UQ catalogue	39	12
Google	2,710,000	5,280,000
Google Scholar	42,200	25,000
Zuula	2,500,000+ (for main search engines)	5,000,000+ (weird result for Yahoo)
Kartoo	307,000	1,410,000