RSS Feeds

After a long delay of starting this one I have finally conquered RSS feeds. This is one of the weeks that I was really keen to learn. I am always seeing the little RSS feed logo but I was never sure how to use it. For some reason everytime I started reading the directions for this week I would get distracted or something would happen and I'd have to stop. I swear I have read the 23 things page on RSS feeds at least 10 times. Well I have finally done it and subscribed to some blogs and different pages. When my husband complains why I am always on the computer I shall blame 23 things. In theory this should have meant that I would spend less time on the computer as I can just check pages I normally check seperately all at the same time. But alas I have now found some new blogs and pages to check out so I think it will take me more time. There is always a catch! I found some from the list when I joined it came up with a page of Today's Top 50 subscriptions. I signed up with quite a few from this list including Rotten Tomatoes which has movie reviews. Librarians must be getting into this or maybe there are quite a few of us doing 23 things because Librarians' Internet Index and The Shifted Librarian both made the Top 50. I found a few more Library related signed up for Librarians.net and Library stuff. Great I also subscribed to Unshelved which is a Library comic strip I'm actually on their email list but this might be easier. Maybe if they update the 23 things they might include twitter for this week as it seems to adopt a RSS feed approach. You 'follow' different people or groups and you are updated when they post something. Twitter seems to be the latest craze that everyone is talking about. I am just getting the hang of it. If you want to see my tweets or see which celebs I'm following here I amhttp://twitter.com/leanie78

P.S Just noticed you can RSS feed tweets, twits, twitters whatever they are called! I can't keep up with the Lingo I must be getting old.

P.P.S Hopefully nobody noticed that I accidently posted this on the wrong blog. Well I guess you'll know now anyway. It must be because I'm getting old that I'm having trouble with my eyesight and didn't notice that I posted to the 23 things blog.

Technology

Yesterday I realised just how much we rely on the internet. Unfortunately we started our Saturday by discovering that we had no internet connection at Mawson Lakes (or any of the other campuses). We could browse our University pages but could not access anything outside. I sat wondering what I could do as I could not answer any of the queries from patrons sent through QuestionPoint because we could not access the website. It also put a stop to the research I was going to do for a patron using the databases as we could not access them. I went to demonstrate to a student how to access an ebook woops that's right no internet. At first students were coming up to the desk to enquire about the internet problem and you could just see the look of fear in their eyes (we let people know as they walked in after that). That is a bit unfair all the students were really good and took the bad news very well. We did have further problems as the calls started coming in to let us know that from outside the Uni you could not access any Uni websites. These students were a little bit more frantic. Thank goodness for the IT guys who came to the rescue and by about 3pm we had our internet back hooray. This problem has started me thinking about how much students (and the rest of us) rely on the internet to find information. I found some great articles on this subject (yes I found them online) one called '"Of Course it’s True; I Saw it on the Internet!” Critical thinking in the internet era' by Leah Graham and P. Takis Metaxas it was quite interesting and discusses how many students use the internet as their primary method of researching. Anyway I have now realised how much I take my internet access for granted; I will be giving my modem a kiss goodnight from now on to keep in its goodbooks.

Fun exploring Flickr

I enjoyed browsing around Flickr it looks like a great way of sharing pictures with family and friends. I had heard of it before but I didn't realise how much you could do using the site. I was very interested to learn of all the different editing features available. I think I will have to sign up and have a play with some of my own pictures. I thought I would try and search for home and I found an aerial picture of Ardrossan (on the Yorke Peninsula) which someone has tagged Tiddy Widdy Beach in. It looks so small from the air. Although we do only have about 5 streets in total so I guess we are a bit small. I think I have added the picture to my blog we'll see if it works.

I had a look at some of the mashup sites some are really cool! I liked the mosaic one Flickr Montager where you can select a picture and it will do a mosaic of the picture using lots of little pictures. Although I'm not sure what you could use it for I guess it's just a bit of fun.

P.S I couldn't get the aerial picture to work but if you would like to have a look here it is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonefabre/3068296244/

Goodness I didn't realise how hard it would be to come up with a name for my Blog. I thought about calling it Vashta Nerada which is a monster ( invisible "piranhas of the air" who hide in the shadows) in an episode of Doctor Who which is set in a Library. The Library has a copy of every book ever written and takes up an entire planet. Imagine how many Librarians they would need there. I think they would need a few reshelvers too! Instead I thought I would go for something a bit easier to remember and still with a Doctor Who theme. In Doctor Who Bad Wolf signals the the return of those nasty Daleks and the end of the Universe. Perhaps this is the same way some people feel about web 2.0. Personally I think change can be good and if web 2.0 has the potential to show us more ways of making information and the library more accessible to patrons I'm all for it. Yes I am a bit of a nerd! Although I must admit I still prefer to read a book with paper pages than one on a screen.