Shelfari

A friend of mine was using Shelfari instead of Library Thing. No limits, as far as I can tell, on how many books you can add! Pretty cool. And you can see my shelf of what I'm reading now on the left side of my blog here. I'm trying to decide if I can use this somehow on our library website. Hmmmm...

Froggy finds Thing #23 liberating

Hah! I finished! I seriously didn't think I'd get through all 23 things. Now that I'm done, I wish there was more. I will definitely make it a higher priority to keep up on new technology.

I already blogged a bit about my experience in my last post. I will say that my favorite things were Flickr, Digg, and Facebook. I had no idea how many of my friends were out there on Facebook! What fun. I actually found several old buddies from high school and college that I've lost touch with over the years. Great stuff.

Here's hoping this is just the beginning and not truly the end!

Froggy finds Thing #22 inspiring

I have to keep this up, huh. Well, I guess.

First of all, I'm going to find out who else in my library has finished the program so that we can chat about everything. I have to say I learned a lot. As part of my resolution to continue, I'll work towards actually using many of the tools that I did find useful. It's a bit overwhelming to put it all together. And I have to confess that I kept at it with Bloglines and like it more now. That was one of the things that I just struggled with, and complained about, in my blog. After I kept with it, it wasn't so bad.

I had originally thought I might turn this blog into a children's reading blog for grades 3 - 8 to talk about all the books that I'm reading for the Maud Hart Lovelace Award nominees. But since I have to keep going with this one, I guess I'll just have to create another blog. Or just use LibraryThing. Something to discuss with my supervisor for a fun task. I've hit babble now. Will stop.

Froggy finds Thing #21 a little bit of old, a little bit of new

I'm sitting at home with a crummy cold in front of the tv with nothing to watch, so thought I'd play around more with the 23 things. Yes, I have a book sitting next to me too, but my eyes hurt. And my head hurts. I'm not sure how looking at a screen is any different than looking at pages in a book, but it doesn't seem to hurt as much.

Thing #21: I read the two articles, which seem to validate what we're hoping to learn by doing the 23 things. Get out there in the webspace as a library or librarian and make it work for us. Sounds good to me. I joined the 23 things ning, put my picture up with my cutesy little girl when she just turned a year old. And posted a comment on a couple of co-worker's pages. Hi Louise and Pam!

I looked at some of the other sites that were listed. I'm gonna have to find a scrapbooking network out there somewhere one of these days. I had joined WebJunction a while ago. One of my colleagues is always sending out articles from the site. It must be a great way to share information. They've just undergone a total revamp of their website. I need to set aside some time to explore all the changes.

That means, Thing #21 = done!

Froggy finds Thing #20. Yep. I found it.

I actually appreciate that MySpace and Facebook are part of the 23 things. This is another one where my husband's whole family is involved in this kind of sport. I did check out Hennepin county's MySpace site. They're always on top of the web world. I heard that they have a whole department devoted to their website and web work. If only we had that at our library.

I signed up for a Facebook account. I'm not telling what I signed up under, though, because I'm actually going to use it for "real". It turns out that lots of friends and family have already signed up! This is another thing that could turn out to be addicting.

Froggy finds Thing #19 good for her MP3 player

Podcasts are lots of fun, and I haven't played with them as much as I would like. I have a really great MP3 player that was gifted to me by my techie husband who may have been planning to give me a present that would last me my entire life. I definitely don't plan on upgrading any time soon. I went to MPR and subscribed to their How's the Family podcast. I listened to the podcast called Families are Consuming MORE! I agree. You can see the list of recent podcasts for this show here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/hows_the_family/.

I can see using my MP3 player a lot more to listen to podcasts, where I haven't used it for that in the past. I see there's a lot out there that's library-related also. My husband was just telling me the other day about a podcast that the creators of Digg have out there. I might have to go check that out. First, I'll have to check back with him to see what it was about... Can't go too overboard, here.

I also checked out Gcast. I have nothing to create a podcast about at this point. And I don't want to put anything out there and waste space and time. We're thinking about posting a class by podcast on our staff wiki in the future. I'll consider using this site to do that.

Froggy finds Thing #18 already done!

Yay! The other night, I was reading Little Loon and Papa by Toni Buzzeo to my 2-year-old daughter. It has loon sounds in the text that you're supposed to make. Honestly, I'm from Oklahoma. We don't have loons. I've heard the loon song, but couldn't replicate. Anyway, my daughter couldn't sleep, for whatever reason 2-year-olds can't sleep, and insisted on being downstairs with me in the den. I was on the computer (probably working on my 23 things) and thought it would be fun to find out what a loon really sounds like. So on to YouTube to show my little girl what a real loon looks and sounds like.

This is one of the videos that we found:


There were more that had better video of the loons. My daughter thought this was so great! And what a cool way to bring a fiction book to life for a little girl. It was very easy to find more like this one. In fact, we moved on to moose videos, and beavers, and so on with all the animals featured in the book. So fun! And it seemed to calm my daughter down so that she finally decided to go to bed, you know, so that we could read the book one more time...or two or three times...maybe more.