Web-based Productivity Applications

The Zoho Writer is user friendly and set up very much like Word for Windows. So far, I have tried 30 boxes and made a to do list for today. Zoho planner seems to be intended more for appointment reminders and business purposes and it is not as user friendly in my opinion as 30 boxes. I looked at most of the Zoho sights and really liked the idea of collaborating as presented in the Zoho show section. The teenager who was away from home visiting family and had a deadline for a competition was able to get help from her Dad online using a web-based service like Zoho. I decided to try the post option and was able to send this blog entry from the Zoho Writer. Since I am a non-techie, this was quite an accomplisment for me! I look forward to trying more of the web-based productivity applications in the future.

Son of Tech Trek Playhouse! Quest 10

I visited all of the websites listed for this quest. The Twit Netcast Network would not perform on my work computer. I had lots of laughs on Unshelved and sent one of the strips to a couple of people. The Wayback Machine was fascinating. I read an old French fairy tale, Blondine and enjoyed looking at the illustrations for an old children's book, Abroad. Artpad was fun, but will require lots of practice for the uninitiated like me. I created an evite on Evite, but it would not send for some reason, I will try again. Slideroll will be so helpful in sending photos of family for genealogy! I can't wait to get a show together! Dogster and catster are for the real animal lovers and it is good that they have an outlet. 43 things was too much of a list for me and I regularly write lists--I guess I am too private to share my lists. I found lots of interesting sites on The Generator Blog--one particularly helpful was the Clutterdiet--tips on keeping down clutter--the bane of my existence! One sentence really does put one in the frame of Hemingway--short, brief prose.

Tech Trek Playhouse

This quest is out of chronological order, but I did want to blog it. I visited all of the sites for the quest. I really found Trip Advisor to be very helpful. My daughter now lives in Lyon, France and we plan to visit her there in the spring. It was fun being able to get a virtual tour of Lyon and see possible sites to tour. After three attempts, I was able to create a trading card. The free trading card option does not let you edit the photo and the top of my head kept getting cropped. I did finally succeed!

Wikis

This quest was particularly intriguing to me. In reading the various Discovery Resources, I found that the City of Rochester in New York has its own very comprehensive wiki named ROCWIKI. My husband has family on his mother's side in Rochester. I looked at the family history link and discovered a link to Mt. Hope Cemetery where lots of his relatives are buried. There was a way to search for famous people who are buried there such as Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass as well as a list of the famous, but one can search for less famous folks too. I will be returning to the Rocwici. I have used Wikipedia for reference question information, but I had not explored other wikis until now. The Library Success: A best practices wiki was very useful. I found a number of sites that gave valuable information about search methods and deciding what resources to use in answering a reference question. This wiki will be most helpful in training new employees who work the information desk. When I visited the 2007 SCLA Annual Conference Wiki, I was pleased to find pictures of Dorchester Branch activities in the listing for locations that had Flickr accounts and I got to see Cynthia Bledsoe's trading card! I had just finished creating my own trading card and posting it on this blog. I did find that the free trading card does not offer editing options, so it took 3 attempts to get a trading card that did not cut off my head! I think that wikis are a useful tool for libraries and librarians as well.

Social Networking Sites

I visited all of the recommended social networking sites. I found Bebo more tasteful than MySpace in its presentation and tone. On MySpace I decided to search under one of my hobbies, crochet. There were two sites with live videos that linked to websites: www.craftmastery.com which had a concise clip of how to crochet a picot edging which would be very helpful for anyone learning to do that stitch; and www.hookedoncrochet.com which gave an interesting brief history of crochet, however the narrator consistently mispronounced the word "crochet" as "croquet"--somewhat disconcerting. When I visited the actual website it just linked you to many other crochet sites, mostly commercial in nature. I listened to one of the comedy routines, but found it rather amateur. In the music category, I listened to one very poor vocalist and a rather good group called Ween that played a song, la cucaracha as a drawn version of a cockroach skittered across the screen. I found that the profiles had more information than I wanted to know about the people in a public forum setting. Linkedin seemed to be a very useful site for making potential employment contacts or learning about the company staff prior to a job interview. I was interested in the profile of the Facebook engineer staff itself and the forward thinking approach they had to the technical aspects of the site.