#22 eBooks unfavourites

I did not feel relaxed after this experience - though Mr Gutenberg's collection looked impressive enough at first. Having studied a lot of literature in my original university degree, I thought I would listen to one of my favourite Shakespearean sonnets (no. 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds) . I am sure Jane Aker (reader) loves her Shakespeare but if I had listened all the way through, she would have killed him for me. To my ears, it was truly awful! Persevered further with another sonnet (different human voice) and with Coleridge's Kubla Khan with same sorry outcome.

I feel enormously grateful that I am sighted and that this is not my only avenue of access to some of this material. If Gutenberg audio was the only way to get to listen to that work of Charles Dickens you could get hold of in no other way, then OK - but the tones, the misplaced inflections etc of the few things I listened to wouldn't encourage me to back here for any other reason. I recognise how beneficial having this large number of audio-book collections online might be for the blind and vision-impaired, but neither the human nor the computer voices were for me.

Good initiative, but for me, I can really only imagine you'd need to have no other way at all to access some of these books . . .

#21 Grumpy old women and podcasts

Yes, well - we looked at Yahoo podcasts and as instructed looked for book reviews. Found Nancy Pearl on National Public Radio but wasn't really in the mood to listen what she had to say. Then found The Wellspring program - episode 44 said it was about Eckhart Tolle's The New Earth, but after listening for 5 minutes and learning that spiders probably began spinning their webs 136 million years ago, I realised there was some kind of dodgy link between the audio and the description so decided that was enough. That web's been around a lot longer than this web.

ABC's Life Matters seemed to offer more, particularly the program called Grumpy Old Women. Here I could take a test to determine via a checklist of behaviours if I was one; the famous "not found" message appeared and I decided that in any case, I didn't need the checklist at all. Feel quite confident that I have reached the GOW status.

#20 YouTube

George and I had some fun looking at YouTube - clips of favourite singers, stuff from TV (Black Books)and this terrific trawl across time - Pachelbel as you've never heard it before. Some sobering stuff too - I tried searches like "Burma" and "uprising", "John Howard", "Kevin Rudd". Found much more than I expected to, but I realise now I shouldn't have been surprised - uploading any kind of file now seems to be so easy. This site alone will provide masses of material for someone's sociology thesis.

And all good dogs digg, don't they?

Well, George was overcome to discover she could go Digg-ing . . . so we did and we added another top web 2.0 thing to our blog. We aren't sure what we'll do with it or if the Digg-ing will be worth it, but we thought . . . this is after all a sandbox, and there's stuff there in spades.

#19 . . . that's number one nine explore (encore encore encore)

Oh no, here we go exploring again! Now the Olympics of Web 2.0 - the top threes (gold, silver, bronze) of every conceivable web 2.0 category.

But wow, we bow . . . bookmarking category, top dog is ma.gnolia. George and I (remember George?) just have to give many wags of tail to any site that can direct us to this one. The essence of life's choices encapsulated in a flowchart. Simple uncomplicated chaps with simple uncomplicated needs . . . Maslow knew what was what. (And it's perfectly upfront in Dogboy's profile - food is good!)

Looked at the top of the pops in a few categories - Flickr again, Rollyo again, Facebook etc. Looked at the Ning thing (another place for creating groups?) , the Xing thing (have no need to discover deals, employees, colleagues using a six degrees of separation principle, though I guess if I wanted to find someone I used to work in New York with . . .? but I guess that's the point?) and a thing called Swivel, which seemed to be a site where bits of data were brought together. For example, I could see in graph form how many people had died on Mt Everest in the last 50 or so years. Not sure when you would want that but from a library perspective, you never know, there could be useful stuff here. . .

But why is Biblio Web 2.0? Where's the mixing/mashing, social networking, "being where the users are" bit? Isn't it just another webpage or is there something fundamental I still don't get here?

#18 word processing and so on

A quick look at the Zoho options suggests that it has potential - created a short document in Zoho Writer, then pasted it back into Word to see if formatting was retained well. It seemed to have many of the useful options for working with a document that you find in Word so I can see how useful it would be in a library (like ours) that doesn't offer proprietary office software. Hopefully assist with managing user disbelief eg "You mean you don't offer Word!!??" The multiple templates could be of use to some I guess - certainly there've been over 1000 downloads of something (can't recall which - maybe the resume) though in the end for the entire English-speaking, web-accessing population, I guess that's probably not much?

I could see that I could use the Zoho productivity suite to create a spreadsheet, a presentation, to get organised, create a wiki, manage a project, build a database. A taste of Bill Gates plus the wiki option - and given that there are plugins for Word and Excel, you have to like it - a flexible, convenient, interoperable kinda package.

#16 Learning about wikis & #17 Sandbox

I remember about 18 months ago when attitudes to the original Mr Wiki (Jimmy W and his Wikipedia) were quite negative because every ordinary Tom, Dick or Harry could add and edit. Well, obviously people out there voted with their feet or fingers or whatever - it is now one of the top 20 most-visited sites and I think most of us recognise it is really useful as a first stop. Jimmy Wales's original vision of everyone on the planet being able to get access to the sum of the world's knowledge was actually the essence of Web 2.0's inclusivity (is that a word?), participation and collaboration and I think it is a great vision. One of the good things I found in my explorations was this Online Community report which has a short list of good tips on when the wisdom of the collective might work best.

I did find another one that was briefly fun for a quick squizz - lots of "How To" articles. How to : pick a lock, fix a scratched CD, get a job with the UN, , kiss (!), be a gothic Lolita, call in sick when you just want a day off !!! (And there's another 25, 034 after these - but it does have a search engine attached). And the best advice of all was a spot of dog wisdom. . . (Yes, Saturday was slow)

I had also previously come across the Library Success wiki and found it very useful - at the time, it was great to check out what was happening in digital reference. And we have a training wiki now here at SLV, thanks to Mark = great application.

The sandbox thing? I dutifully checked it out but freaked when I saw that I had to give yet another username and password so I haven't added my blog to the list. I could see that I could, but it didn't mean I needed to - and I'm absolutely sure it wouldn't add a single jot to anybody's meaningful experience of this learning exercise. As for the other toys in the sandbox, I'd rather talk to someone about their favourite film or their favourite music and I'd certainly rather have a face-to-face stoush about dogs being superior to cats (meerkats are fine), than to bother adding my comments online.

BTW I discovered a good site while checking wikis out - well-written, simple outline for newbies like me at Geekgirls.