Summary

Summary time!

This was a fun challenge. I enjoy blogging and it is a great way to start a discussion on anything you want. It could be a way to talk with family and friends on a regular basis or it could be a great way to "vent" about something to the world and get input from others.

Google docs and spreadsheets was the hardest for me to set up and I'm not sure if I would use it personally. Depends on the nature of the document I guess and if needed, I could use it in the workplace.

I enjoyed YouTube the most because of the awesome content that you can find. Forget the political banter from the Democrats, give me funny TV shows anyday! I am going to explore this further to find things I haven't seen in a long time.

All of these tools are beneficial to PVLD. We already use blogs for communication and Flickr to post photos from various events. I think the staff who opted to do this challenge will continue to go back and test these 2.0s more and more. I think staff who didn't want to do this or didn't have time to do this should try to explore some of the tasks. They will be surprised by what they find.

Task #10 Explore MySpace.com

Here is the link to the myspace page I created. I invited my friend "stretchtherabbit" to join my friends list.

http://www.myspace.com/stretchtherabbit

Myspace is so popular because people can share things with their friends and possibly make new friends too.

Some people may want to make up other details about himself/herself just for fun. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. Young internet surfers need to be careful of people they meet on Myspace because they could be getting into a world of trouble with someone whose intentions aren't always good.

Myspace is OK but I probably won't use it again. It's not something that I have the time to spend on.

Task #9 Explore Google Docs & Spreadsheets

I signed up for Google docs & spreadsheets as "stretchtherabbit" again.

This is the first time I've ever used Google docs and spreadsheets and it looks pretty useful. Say you're a student and you writing a shared paper with a group. You wouldn't even have to meet with your group members to work on the paper. Everyone could work from their own location on their own computer and edit the paper as needed.

This could be very useful in the library if a group of staff needed to work on a project together. Instead of emailing back and forth and asking "what do you think of this?" or "how does the wording sound?" and attaching the document, everyone could view it and makes comments and/or changes.

Task #5 Explore Flickr

OK, so I explored Flickr and had to open yet another email account with Yahoo. I probably won't use Flickr to post all my photos since we have plenty of disk space on our laptop at home.

Here's another cute one of Stretch resting (what he usually does) and you'll have to click the link since the photo doesn't want to come up.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7356062@N08/417152998/

Task #8-Explore Youtube.com

Youtube is great! Thinking back on old TV shows and sketches from Saturday Night Live, I was able to find some stuff I haven't seen in a long time.

Here is a "Family Guy" sketch that is a spoof of a strange internet phenomenon. I didn't get it the first time I saw it until I looked up the original sketch. It's called "Peanut Butter Jelly Time."



Here's the original one.



I think people love Youtube because they can post their own videos and be creative about it. PVLD could put a public service announcement about the library on Youtube.

Task #7-Explore Wikipedia

Again, I am "stretchtherabbit" on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was easy to get into and edit. Almost too easy to edit. It's important to know what kind of information you might be getting in your Wikipedia entries because anyone could make up anything if they wanted to!

In the blog, I updated the number of items held as of March 1 from 256,000 to 381,000+. The other number must have come from an old statistic so I called up the holdings file to correct that.

Task #6-Instant messaging

I chose the screen name "stretchtherabbit" to receive an IM. It's pretty easy to set up an account but I had a hard time trying to figure out how to set up a buddy list and add PVLD2007 to that list. There should be a help tab somewhere on the screen to ask questions.

Here is the messgae from PVLD2007:

stretchtherabbit (04:44:25 pm): Hello PVLD2007
(04:44:25 pm)pvld2007 is no longer signed on.

I think I set up an IM account a long time ago on MSN because my friend in Costa Rica asked if I would do that so we could chat. But we never chatted. Come to think of it, we haven't emailed in a while either.............