Thing 4, Photosharing, Picasa

Last Friday I took some photos
of the SAMMIE, Plum Creek,
Pioneerland "teen coop"; librarians
who are working on a collaborative,
cooperative project to better serve
our teen patrons.

We met at the Redwood Falls
MN public library. Redwood
has a designated "teen" area
and teen programing in their library.

I uploaded some of the
photos to a Picasa album.
Here's the embedded result:

Thing 3, RSS Depth-charge

Blogger recently added the option for
"My Blog List" which I have taken
advantage of. I tried a SpringWidget
for a little while on this blog, but it
wasn't as user-friendly as the blog
list option. One of the blogs I have
subscribed to has a "blog roll" too,
but the author has his private. Mine
is public.

One's blog can be the repository for RSS,
bookmarks and links, organized just like
you want, tagged and marked.

T'is a customized desktop and browser and a
librarian's dream-toy? An organizer's play land?

THING 2 What is Library 2.0?

Regarding Library 2.0, a link to a Stephen Abram
podcast on the topic was added in the right-hand
column Friday.

On Saturday one of my librarian friends mentioned
that she thought her newly posted blog for the 23
things exercise was already less static than her
library's web page. She was only at Thing 3!
It is fun to hear others tout the benefits of this
exercise.

My boss called several times this week to get
a little help with posting and making her avatar.
She was concerned that she would be "spitting
nails" soon, but I think it went well for her. It
is, of course, time consuming.

In conversation recently it was
mentioned to me that young people's
concepts of privacy might be quite
different than a librarian's.

We have policies in place to protect
the privacy of our patrons that some
who use Web 2.0 all the time might
consider "over-protective". Although
the privacy of our 2.0 users is under
their control (if they read the options
in fine print), we may need to point out
the "how-to".

Once we learn these things, there is no going back.
I wonder what percentage of businesses use
private wikis or MS Live office or Google docs
and such to communicate? Since we can communicate
with multiple people at once, these tools could be more
efficient, as long as folks are good at written communication.

Recently, our teenager said he was kinda sick of
MySpace and Facebook. It will be interesting to see
whether the "been there, done that" attitude shows
up as a phenomenon with other teens. Not sure
how one gauges what is fad and what is here for
the duration.

Thing 1, Refresh, UPDATED, again

Since a new session of 23 things is starting
and I have volunteered to be a coach... I think
it would be a good time to revisit the things from
1 to 23. Perhaps do ALL of the challenge exercises
listed at the end of each "thing".

I wonder what it takes to have a more
sophisticated avatar? Maybe a little animation?
Librarian Jan P has a great one from Meez.



I made this banner when I first started 23 things
and finally figured out how to add it to the blog.
It got sorta fuzzy, but it is a wave on
the beach of "23 things on a stick".


I am wishing I could animate the heading.
This lady has some instructions for doing just that.

Today I added Feed Burner for statistics.
Now, I notice that all the time I spent getting
the orange RSS on the side was re-inventing
the wheel. That symbol would have been
added automatically had I used Feed Burner
in the first session of 23 things.

Small Discoveries

1) If you open an archived entry on
Blogger/Blogspot and click on the title, it
will send you to the person's most recent entry.

2) Through trial and error I have experimented
with font color by replacing existing parts
of code with other color codes.

Want bright purple font in your template? Click on the
"edit html" tabs in your blog template and look for
stuff that indicates color and replace it with
other code from this link.