Week 10 - The End

My favorite exercises through the course of the program was learning about some of the applications that I never had heard of. Facebook, YouTube, and Wiki's are all familiar to me, but I'd never heard of Meez before. Learning about Zoho and the Overdrive applications was also fun. It was a very good idea for all the employees to become familiar with some newer technology available on the internet.

Week 9 - Downloadable Media

There were plenty of items I found interesting on our Overdrive. It's great that you can burn the media onto CDs to use them later on. It was slightly confusing at first and some people may have trouble figuring out the system, but once you get the hang of it it becomes slightly easier.

The biggest problem I had was the long loading times. I have a cable connection at my house and even with that it took too much time for it to load. If someone doesn't have a good internet connection then it may cause plenty of headaches.

Project Playlist

That playlist you see at the top of my blog came from a website titled Project Playlist. All you have to do is go to that site and search for the title of the song or artist you're looking for and add it to your own playlist. It's a pretty cool feature to add to your blog. I did edit the HTML code of my playlist to get rid of some of the clutter that the regular playlist shows when you post it, but for the most part you'll get something similar to what I have

Week 9 Podcasts

For anyone that owns an iPod or any other MP3 player, subscribing to podcasts is a must. You can listen to podcasts on almost any subject imaginable. You can focus on one subject in particular or you can subscribe to a podcast with a more general view of things. Of the 3 podcast directories, I liked the Yahoo one the best. I could find podcasts on subjects I am interested in easier through their search engine rather than by Podcastnet or Podcastalley. All 3 are very useful however.

Week 9 - Discover YouTube

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last year and a half, chances are you've heard of YouTube. Type in "Eric Clapton" and you will come across the legendary musician playing his hit "Cocaine" at a concert from a few years back



or perhaps you want to hear "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme song played on ukulele's. Well type it in and you'll find this amazing rendition



It's amazing to see how such a simple concept of sharing videos on the web has taken off like a bottle rocket, but it's not hard to see how it's become so popular

Week 8 - Web Based Applications

Zoho was pretty neat. I prefer to use Microsoft Office, but the features on Zoho were pretty similar. I may have to try a more advanced spreadsheet on Zoho to determine whether I prefer that or Excel, but Zoho definately could come in handy.

Week 8 Social Networking

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I do use Facebook and Myspace. I use it more as a way to keep in touch with friends however rather use it as an online journal. I previously had a Xanga page when Xanga was all the rage in high school, and I did use that to throw my thoughts out on a page, but I've moved past that. Both Myspace and Facebook are very addicting, especially to my generation (high schoolers and college students) and we have to be careful in how we use them because they can get you in trouble in various ways (incriminating photographs, if employers see things they don't like in yours, etc...). If you be careful in how you use it though, they can be fun.

Red Sox!!

The Red Sox are the 2007 World Series Champions!!

Week 7 - Technology

Technology is absolutely wonderful. I have grown up with computers, video games, etc... so naturally it plays a larger role than it may in others. Facebook and Myspace are some of the more recent booms in computer technology. While there are other social networking sites, these two are the largest. I myself have both a Facebook and Myspace accout and use them frequently. While they do come under some fire from time to time, I think that if someone uses them in a mature fashion, then they face very little risk in getting in any sort of trouble from having an account. For example, on either of these websites, users are allowed to posts pictures. Many times, users will post pictures of themselves in a rather immature manner. I have no problems with this seeing as I am a young, college student who is not immune to having some fun (no matter how childish the act may seem) myself, but I do use some caution in deciding what to put up on my accounts. I don't put anything up that could possibly land me in hot water. I use my best judgment to allow me to express myself while also keeping it relatively mature.

One of the biggest downfalls to both Myspace and Facebook can come at your own expense. It is a fact that some employers will go looking for the Facebook and Myspace accounts of someone they are going to or have just interviewed. So as an example, let us say John Smith interviewed for his first job after graduating. He went to a prestigious school, did well in all his classes, finished relatively high in his graduation class, and seems like a potential good employee for Company X. Well, if Company X finds photos of John Smith drinking away at a dorm party while he was still in school, or if he says that he enjoys "Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll" as his interests, this greatly reduces the chances of him getting the job he applied for. And while you would hope that the company and the people doing the interviews will remember what it's like to be young, it is best to use wise judgment.

As a whole, I enjoy Myspace and Facebook. I've found friends that I lost contact with and in my generations technology driven world, it helps me keep in touch with both friends near and far. I think it's positives outweigh it's negatives

Week 7 - Wiki's

As a student, Wikipedia is a must for almost any subject in which I have to do some research. While anybody can edit it and you cannot always trust the source, it is a great starting point that often times will provide some links to sources that you can trust fully.

Another wiki page that is not known by many people is Citizendium. It is very similar to wikipedia, except that the names of the editors of each page are shown and it's goal is to be much more reliable than Wikipedia because in many cases, the editors are experts in their particular field (for example, if you wanted to read about Geology, then a geologist will have edited the page and it will also show his or her name).

I like the HCPL wiki because it allows us to see what are some of the favorite foods, movies, tv shows, books, etc...from people of various libraries. However, much like almost any other wiki page these types of things do have their downfalls. If I wanted to cause some trouble, I could very easily edit someone's original post on any of the HCPL wiki pages. Wiki's are wonderful, but the public has to be knowledgeable about both the pros and cons of this wonderful tool.

Week 6 - Library 2.0

I found the concept of Library 2.0 to be interesting. There is no doubt in my mind that libraries, just like any other profession in our technology driven world, are going to be more technology based. With the expanding use of technology, I think libraries are going to be much more user based, and with that, they will become much more user friendly and user oriented. So the tasks of the library will not minimize, but they will change. The more technology advances to improve libraries, the more people will be able to figure much of what they need to know on their own rather than relying on a librarian to help.

Week 6 Technorati

I found Technorati useful if you are looking for specific blogs. While I prefer the Icerocket search engine to search for blogs, I found Technorati to be a helpful tool. I do think IceRocket does a better job of finding more in depth blogs than Technorait however. Both are good tools to use though

Week 6 Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us was a very useful tool to look at my bookmarks on any computer. It's also neat that you can add tags to help other people find what they are looking for. Using general or slang words to search for bookmarks also helps.

Week 5 - LibraryThing

I really liked the LibraryThing. It's a good resource if you ever wanted to look up a book that you can't remember the title of, and because you can look at people with similar reading tastes, you may find a book that you will be interested in later.

Week 5 - image generator

I created a Meez which was a lot of fun. There were so many different options, you could play around with it for hours until you find one that you like






I chose the spacesuit to represent the city of Houston. We are space city after all. I then added a sombrero and the taco truck background because of my culture. The horse just makes it look...funny

Week 4 Bloglines and Newsfeeds

I thought it was neat to look through bloglines and just other various websites in general to save them as an RSS. I'd never used this feature before, but it's very useful. I can search through my favorite news items even if I am using seperate computers which makes the RSS feeds helpful. It also lets me check on my friends and iHCPL co-workers blogs instead of relying on my memory to find out whose they are.



The bloglines website, while it was helpful, took a while to find my way around. Perhaps it's because there are so many options, but the layout of the site made it somewhat difficult to get my bearings and figure out how to do everything. It can be a useful site for RSS feeds, but it takes a little while to get adjusted.

They were as big as my head

For serious. They were!

My creation

mountain

mountain
Originally uploaded by Sam_Sonite

It's a mountain

It works

Yay