Thing 10 - tagging and bookmarks

I have chosen not to call this Thing "delicious". This is because, delicious is sooooo not the only website of it's kind. Personally, I LOVE StumbleUpon. What is this glorious website tool of which you speak, Katy? Well, StumbleUpon is basically the greatest. It is very similar to delicious in that it keeps you bookmarks and allow you to tag them and has a toolbar feature like delicious does. But the really great thing about StumbleUpon is that with the toolbar comes a button to "Stumble". This button is both magnificent and addictive. I have found both totally random sites and amazingly useful sites with this magic button. Seriously, people, try it.

Okay, but delicious and tagging. It's alright, I suppose. I am all about having your bookmarks wherever you go. Also, I have done some tagging with facebook photos. That is neat because with facebook tags, when you click on "photos of Katy" it pulls up all the photos in which I have been tagged, including photos other people have taken. Fancy that. You can of course untag yourself, if you wish.

On the Alachua County Public Library website, there is a page of "Great Links!" It would be neat to have these websites on delicious or another bookmark/tagging site, because a link could have more than one tag, as a number of these fit under more than one category. That's my two cents for now.

Thing 9 - slideshow

Holy crap...internet explorer just screwed up and lost all of my post - I'm not retyping it, you'll just have to trust that I did it... I really freaking want to move on!!

Thing 8 - communication

1. Okay, I have been using AIM for years, litterally. First, I want to say that AIM does not require you to download anything, unlike what it says on the 23 Things @ NEFLIN blog. You can use AIM Express which lets you used AIM through just the internet, without downloading the AIM package. Now that I've gotten that off my chest.... You know how I have been bashing a lot of the Things, but I promised there would be some that I love? This is one of them. I used to love it more, but I really haven't been using it as much as I used to - I'm not really sure why, though. Anyway, it was pretty awesome back in high school and it's still great. I also like to use Facebook chat, which is relatively new, but it sometimes has glitches, so it can get annoying. I must admit, I have never used Ask A Librarian, but I think that it is a great tool.

2. Ahh, text messaging. I admitted to Heather that I don't text and she said that I'm probably the only person under 30 who doesn't. This is probably true. I like the idea of texting in its basic sense, like to text someone and ask if they want to get dinner later and not inturrupt them at that moment, but there a some kids like my brother who are just like constantly texting and I just don't get it. Seriously people text all through class, sometimes even just across the room (I'm not kidding). Okay, but anyway...I think that a cool way to use text messaging in libraries would be to have, say, teens sign up to receive texts (with the permission of their parents, of course, who are probably the ones paying the cell phone bill) about events that are happening later that day. This would probably really increase the attendance to young adult programming since a lot of people just forget about an event that they were meaning to go to. This is made easier by the ability to send mass texts and there are some websites that allow you to send a text message for free.

3. Web conferencing. I have taken a few classes online, but none of them have really used web conferencing-like tools. However, I know that there are some offered at UF that do (math classes and such). Also, I think that I end up taking some classes that would require web conferencing when I start grad school. A lot, if not all, of FSU's web-based library science classes (almost all of them are web-based, in fact) are structured so that all of the class meets online at a certain time (usually in the evening). These may or may not include video, but it would probably include an open chatroom for class discussion.

Challenges: Sooooo, I think the word "twitter" sounds dirty. I also think that it is mildly stalker-ly and probably gives one the opportunity to offer up more information than anyone would want to know (not like when you sign up it asks a lot of stuff, more like, I can't imagine anyone wanting to know what I do every moment of the day, so I'm not going to waste my time posting it). Also, Facebook offers a twitter-like thing in the form of one's status, which I sometimes use.

Thing 7 - online image generators

I don't really think that online image generators need their own Thing. It seems that they could just go along with mashups - I'm rather critical, though. Also, I think that it would be much easier to call these applications something along the lines of "image templates" or something. So, from the image generators given, I didn't get what ToonDoo was about at all, but I did like The Generator Blog and ImageChef. Big Huge Labs was on the mashups Thing, but that one was a bit annoying. Okay, that's all for this Thing - I am rather behind so this is a short one.

from ImageChef

Thing 6 - mashups

So, because this is related to flickr, I was already not crazy about it. To be honest, I had no idea what a mashup was before this. I think the word "mashup" for these applications seems misleading. I don't know what I thought it would be, but it certainly was not what mashups really are...if that makes any sense to anyone other than me. It seems to me that it is just a name for a bunch of neat applications you can use to do creative things with your flickr photos. I think some of them are lame, though there are definitely people who would use them. I like the flickr color pickr, but I don't know for what you would use it. I thought that the calendar creator would be cool, but I have changed my mind. It is frustrating and has very few options. Okay, I think I really like the wallpaper-maker. I like to get creative with my desktop wallpapers - I usually like to put a great yarn photo up, but it is sometimes hard to find a good one that is big enough.

Anyway, I started this post a few days ago and I no longer know if I had a point. I spelled my name with spell with flickr - ta-da!