8 is Grrrrreat!

And thus I end this wonderful 8in08 joruney...

I will be honest... I am ashamedly too familiar with a few of these socially based web sites. With Shelfari and Goodreeds in particular, they are truly fantastic ways to find other read alikes or just other great reviews from other book nerds. And it is fun too! I already had a the Goodreads of course, but for the sake of this exercise I added a Shelfari. I will also use the Shelfari to track our Book Club books for the library. I "friended" Kym on this as well.

And I finally broke down and made the facebook for the first time. I also friended Kym on this. I just hope it doesn't suck me in...

Exercise Lucky #7 : Tis the Season

So I am playing around with some wiki's per Exercise #7. I have played on Wikipedia, as we all have, but became intrigued by Kym's suggestion to look at http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page. I ALWAYS want to know how to do random stuff. I usually ask my co-workers, and they are quite handy. I google and all, but I found this site interesting because of the searching capabilities.

I started out by checking out the categories. "Food & Entertaining" is on my mind, having just hosted my first full-on Thanksgiving in my home, so I click on this. "Holiday Cooking" is the next subcategory and that's right up my alley so I click that on that too. Thanksgiving? Christmas? Sure! "How do you carve a turkey?" Yeah! I need to know that! (Actually, I needed to know that YESTERDAY...) "How do you make traditional eggnog?" Heck, I'll give that a try too. How do you brine a turkey? Add so on and so on. This was fun because not only could I use the search window to search for Eggnog specifically, but I could try searching the categories for some other related suggestions as well. I didn't bother with the "How to cook with cranberries" suggestion. I prefer the good old fashioned slice it while it still looks like a can cranberry log method. So I kept searching through these great holiday "how to's" when I came across how to celebrate non-traditional holidays. Thinking of my Jewish in-laws and their Hanukkah traditions, I came across the following link:

http://www.wikihow.com/Celebrate-Festivus

...Which sorta shows you just how silly wiki's can sometimes be. They even post made-up holidays that don't actually exist in the real world, however entertaining the prospect may be.

Attack of the Pod people (Exercise #6)

I completed Exercise #6. I took a look at the Nancy Pearl podcast through NPR. They have interesting stuff on NPR. And I do so enjoy Nancy Pearl. Several of my coworkers are still shocked and appalled that I don't listen to any of the NPR shows on a daily basis, but lets be honest. I have a short commute to work and I am tired int he morning so I need loud music to get me going. And if we are talking a long ride to and from school, I am not going to be listening to NPR. I am going to again be blasting music to keep me away at 10:00pm drivng 50 minutes home, or I am going to be listening to something from the Twilight series on Audio. Either way, I don't see the podcasts as useful to me personally, but it a great option to bring up wtih patrons if they perhaps wanted to hear a certain book review or political commentator that they had missed and need us to track it down for them.

Speaking of the Twilight series on audio...I did download Twilight to my PC through the emedia collection. It is frustrating as an Ipod user to see that there are not many MP3's available of recent titles. You have your choice of classics, but the newer stuff is a little tougher to come by. Still, emedia is very cool and I intend to download more MP3's for the idpo as they become available.

Feed Me! (Or Exercise #5)

And no...It isn't just that I am hungry and thinking about the chocolate chip cookies sitting in the office...

I have been looking into the RSS Feeds. It sounds kind of cool. Sort of saves me some time. To be honest there aren't any web sites that I REALLY need to be updated on constantly, but if there were a breaking news story, I can see how subscribing to CNN.com might be very helpful!

And I will be honest...I signed up for CNN...which is a good, reputable source. However, I also have to admit that I signed up for Fark.com. It is such a bizarre, silly site. This is one of my husband's favorite sites and I find a lot of humor in it as well. Perhaps he will want to subscribe to the feed also.

GoodReads confusion!

So I have had my GoodReads account. However, working on our books discussions here, I have been keeping up with my list better, looking at other reviews of some titles we consider. It is fun to be able to put a notch in your belt, and then think someone else may find some use in your review as well. However, while trying to "sign in" to my GoodReads account the other day, I was tricked!

There is a separate log-in from the normal sign in that is easy to misinterpret. It asks for your email address, which is your log in name for GoodReads anyway. It asked for my password like always, only it was asking for my EMAIL password, not my log-in password. For some STUPID reason, I wasn't thinking and just typed in the information. Bam! Suddenly I was experiencing a new feature of the site I hadn't stumbled upon before. I could see if friends of mine already had GoodReads accounts, and invite them to be friends. I wasn't sure WHY this was happening. Then I quickly realized, that an email was sent to everyone in my address book, inviting them to be my friend on GoodReads. OOPS. My husband was a little confused, but obliged. Since I used my home email address, it went to mostly people I know. However, I am afraid it also went out to old job prospects from like 7 years ago, not to mention family members, professors, teachers, and anyone who randomly had been added to my contacts list from over the maybe past 8 years. I am annoyed! I wouldn't normally just give out my friends' email addresses to random online sites. Nor would I try to get everyone I know to sign up for a book review site. Beware of the secret trap of GoodReads! I let myself fall right into it.

Adventures in blogging...

Something funny I thought was worth mentioning...My first ever post on this blog was about the book I was currently reading for our Talk it Up Book Club here at work. I was reading "The Ha-Ha" and although it isn't too lurid, I mentioned the word "dirty" a couple of times, ind describing my feelings towards the book's content. I immediately got tagged as a suspected "spamblog" and got an email freezing my blog until they could review my account. "How strange?" I thought. I had only just started our exercises! Upon talking with Kym however, she thinks it may have been my use of the word "dirty" that got me tagged as a possible spammer! So apparently, the free speech to review any topic or book may prove fatal for bloggers! (Well, temporarily fatal, as I am now back up and running with no problem.)

My cat is pop art!

Check out the fun image generator I found on the Generator Blog! Shasta McNasty is famous!

Play Day!! (Otherwise known as Exercise #4)

So I have been working on Exercise #4 for awhile now because it is such a long and involved exercise. Rollyo was really cool. I made a "Suzie's Travel Sites" search engine and a "Suzie's Recipe's" search engine. I can see how this would be helpful for us on the reference desk particularly if we make a rollyo with links such as FantasticFiction and Amazon. I took a look at the Webjunction website and got some new ideas for Reader's Advisory sites. Goodreads.com can be helpful, much like Amazon.com, in finding lots of reviews of a particular title. I have already been using my GoodReads page for awhile and you can get more reviews at once than you can on Amazon. It is also a great organization tool!

Pandora of course is incredibly fun, but since I don't want to play loud music at the reference desk, this is something I will play with more at home. I typically end up with songs I already know and like playing on my "John Mayer Radio" but occasionally get introduced to something new. I also recently made a "Contemporary Folk" station as well. I actually have dabbled in Pandora before (Thank you Eric) and it really is a fun toy!

I agree with most everyone's posts that the image generators are SO fun but I am failing to see how they will help us at the reference desk. They are tension breakers, stress relievers and all around just funny. I am not sure how I will work their use into my normal reference services on a day to day basis. My personal favorites were the Chuck Norris random facts, the insult generator and the Bart Simpson blackboard...

http://www.milinkito.com/swf/bart.php?texto=I+will+not+jello+mold+erics+stapler

More Tagging...

I completed Exercise #3 and have reviewed a few different web sites that use the tag cloud. This tagging cloud is is one of the main reasons why I use to love Fiction Connections. Fiction Connection use to be a databse we could use through CLEVENET. They had some very nice tagging clouds that were easy to use with really specific tags if you were searching for subject specific fiction. Unfortunately, I think that Fiction Connection is now only accessible to people with Cleveland Library Cards, so we can't access the web site here in Medina anymore. So I am done with exercise #3!

Mashups and Tagging

Mashups are still a little confusing to me. I have read a few other blogs about them, but I am failing to see the appeal. Are mashups most commonly maps? I did a google image search for "dachshunds" AND "mashups" but just found strange, very STRANGE photos of people who photoshopped their own pictures. Maybe I need to still play with this. Anyone have any tips for this or how to find a good example of a mashup? I understand the bookmobile page, but again, that is a map.

However, I HAVE learned quite a bit about the tagging and was able to tag all of my Flickr photos! It was sort of pointless because they all have the same star in almost every photo...

I can use Flickr!

I just officially uploaded some of my favorite pictures on to my brand new Flickr account. Flickr is sort of new to me. I don't know how to tag yet, but would like to. I made an account with pictures of my cat, Shasta McNasty and of course, everyone's favorite wiener dog, Ginger. Here is a picture that is rare. My cat, in a rare moment of cuteness and friendliness, is cuddling me even though the dog is in the same chair. There is nothing better then cuddling up during a blizzard with BOTH pets AND a good book.

Check out my Flickr account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26325874@N06/

And you thought YOUR hands were full...

With so many changes going on around us all, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the little things. Talk about being overwhelmed! I found this cute photo after creating my Flickr account and searching for pictures of dachshunds in their database. I think this picture of a mama doxie helps to put things into perspective. Just look at that face! Her eyes say it all...

Suzie's First Blog!

Hooray! It is my first blog on my brand-new library blog. How exciting. Anybody read any good books lately? Any suggestions? I am currently reading "The Ha-Ha" by Dave King. It is a very interesting book, but I am not loving it. I find it a little dull. And a little dirty too! It is a little thought provoking, and interesting, but it is moving too slow for my liking.