Item # 23 - Everything has an end (proverb)

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties". - The Advancement of learning (1605) by Francis Bacon.

This quotation, in my opinion, is very relevant to us, today' s learners.We started this journey with doubts, we knew so little, we worried so much. And then we became more interested, involved, fascinated and willing to go on. Each week was a new discovery - Bloglines and Flickr, RSSs and Wikkis, Delicious and Librarythings. All of them - the great new tools - to experiment and to learn, to share with friends and colleagues. This learning period was about self-discovery, friendship and support. Without my colleagues and their enthusiasm the end result would be much more difficult to achieve. I am very grateful for this opportunity, it is great to work in an industry that transforms so rapidly and develops on so many different levels.

Item # 22 - Audiobooks

Paper books, audiobooks, eaudiobooks - the world is definitely changing. Not long time ago our library introduced a new collection - Talking Books on Cds. Customers loved them and we were proud to offer this new great collection. At the same time, in the article form "The Bookseller" magazine, Sept.14, 2007 you can read about the Japanese schoolgirl with the "customised ketai" - "a tiny slender supercomputer with a miniature screen" that turns mobile phone into a portable library". Students download books, comics and read them on a way to school. When asked about the paper books - the answer is - "paper books are uncool".
Will everything be on-line in a future? How ebooks will change the publishing industry, libraries, bookstores, education? Technology advancing with the new portable devices, there is talk about the electronic paper, some libraries overseas offer to download books from their websites, with the termination of a loan period, publishers sell ebooks off its websited. Is there a common standard for the ebooks that will state on a market or the variety of e-readers and compatable formats only makes it even more confusing. Future will tell.

Item # 21 - Podcasts

Podcasts may be great, useful and educational, but I had a very quick look on podcast.net and did not find any of interest for me, personally. I searched for 'Rumi' poetry under the Art, Poetry - no luck. Went into the ' Mind, Body 'under the Alternative medicine and found some strange pieces of speech. Maybe I have to come back and listen again.

Definitely, podcasts have a great potential for use in the libraries. We all have very practical experience with them during our Learning 2.0 studies. I can foresee the podcasts instructions on how to use the print station, how to check the catalogue, how to reserve an item . There are many different uses for them for promoting new programs. We have a number of customers, who are visually impaired. They 'll welcome audio instructions for many different aspects of the service.

Item #20 -YouTube

Finally, I had a chance to check the YouTube. The site is blocked at my library and it took me some time to get access to it somewhere else. Yes it is great, addictive and can take hours. I am not sure how we can use it at the library today, may be as some kind of promotion material. Definitely there are a lot of people who know what they want to get from YouTube.
An interesting article was published at The Age on Thursday, October 25. The title of it was "PM down the YouTube". The author, digital marketer, Julian Cole talks about an ignorance of netiquette and importance of understanding respect for community, while putting information and commenting on it on YouTube
Yes it is another great social network web site. I am confused with the copyright issues as well. For example, if I want to make a link to my blog, is it permissible or not. Anyway I linked to Sopranos Mad TV http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFYN8loUboA

Item # 19 - discovering web 2.0 tools

Looking through the Web 2.0 awards for 2007 I was glad to see some of my favourites such as Librarything under "Books" and Blogline under the "Blog guides". Ma.gnolia.com is very similar to De.licio.us. I searched for the "Library 2.0' bookmarks and found a lot of good links to look at. For example an interesting article by David Lee King under the title "Am I a 2.0 librarian and the Library 2.0 Spectrum" (http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/08/01/am-i-a-20-librarian-and-the-library-20-spectrum).



What was amazing that when I checked the http://www.eventful.com/ - the world largest collection of events - I really found the information of an event in a city where I was born in a country that does not have a high percentage of Internet use at all. I bypassed the 'Cocktail builder' but became curious about the 'One sentence' http://www.onesentence.org/ that promises the whole story in one sentence. I was going to look for health tools and recognised some 'old friends' such as PBWiki and Zoho. Overall it was a joyful journey.

Item # 18 -on-line word processor

I'd experimented a little with Zoho Writer and was very impressed by the options available in this program. The idea that you can create, share and edit many different types of documents without downloading the program onto your desktop is new for me. Even if I don't use Microsoft Word or Excel everyday in my work, I definitely will learn more from Zoho and other on-line word processors for my future use. I checked different parts of Zoho, such as Zoho meetings, Zohoshow, ZohoWiki, Zohoplanner. It is a lot of things to take in. I liked the idea of templates for resumes, cover letters, accident reports, invitaions and many other things. As far as I understood it is even possible to create documents in different languages. I tried to create a document in Zohoshow and made a number of slides that look like Power Point slides.
http://show.zoho.com/public/yarnspinner/Learning%202.0

Item #17 - playing with PBWiki

I added my blog to the list of favourites and had a little play in a Sandbox. I checked the Favourites books, movies,websites and restaurants but did not edit or add any entries. Our library does not have any wikis and I started my own one on the PBWiki but did not put enough effort into it yet. I need to think who I want to invite to edit and add on my wiki and what is the purpose of all of it.
I see a future potential in the concept of 'wiki" and look forward for using it in my working environment.

Item#16 - Wiki

Wiki is another new concept for me. It is all about collaboration, community and contribution. At the same time the main objection is trust, security and ethics. Anyone can contribute, edit and create. There are a lot of interesting possibilities that can involve wikis: community guides, study groups, on-line tutorials, book discussions, management and planning collaboration and many more. Thanks to this new open-source, open-access technology everything becomes more transparent and democratic, brings to the process more opinions, feed backs and comments. It may change organizational culture, ways of communication between management and staff, information sharing and the education process.

Some people already write their Bachelor's thesis on the subject of wikis. Some libraries open wiki's based Ideas box, where staff can log in and discuss new ideas in on-line environment. We can find different projects on-line that involve wikis. For example, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/ project is aimed at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.

Item #15 - Library 2.0, Web 2.0

It was 1997 and I went for my first Train the Trainer course to introduce Internet classes into our library service. I did not know the difference between the 'Internet browser' and the "World Wide Web". 10 years later and after teaching numerous classes I found myself at the next level of ignorance. I practically had no knowledge about the new open-platform, social, interactive, mobile network named Web 2.0. Is it my personal disaster or I am one of many in my profession who discovered that what was straightforward and structured became fluid and multifaceted? Do you know that "... blogging burnout can be a more serious problem than having blogger' s block" or soon "...you can carry a library in your pocket". How tech-savvy do I need to be to cope with all of it? What could I learn from my son and what I can teach him myself, where is my limit or does it all depend on my intellectual curiosity? There is such a variety in the integration of Library 2.0 services into different libraries. Some libraries already offer RSS as the real-time, cheaper way to communicate, many others have a number of blogs on their web site, where customers can comment, participate, write reviews about books they borrowed. There are bloggers' book clubs, pod casts on libraries websites, some libraries incorporate instant messaging to communicate with the customers. And what's about these on-line discussions about the future of the industry on the amazing library-related blogs like Shifted librarian or Librarian.net? It is all very interesting, exciting and confusing. We are definitely in a time of transition and we are all together shaping and changing and moving into the future. What is important for me personally is not to be intimidated, to find what will work for me and what not and to be ready to learn more.

Item # 14 - Technorati

As far as I understand the Technorati is a search service. It searches for blogs, posts and tags. Honestly I did not get a clear picture of how to use it. I found my blog on Technorati because it was created on Blogger and because I know my blog's name. I did not tag any posts on my blog that's why I could not search for my posts by tags. Finally, I checked the Advance search. It was easy to search under the Blog directory - less results and they are more straight forward, while general search gives thousands of hits. I used Feedster for blog searches before and like it better. I am sure that I'll come back and experiment more but at the moment I aready have my favourite services such as Bloglines, Delicious, Librarything and not enough time to check on them as often as I wish. The virtual social network grows and eats up the time. There are more things under the sky to learn.

Item #13 - del.icio.us

Delicious is as good as it sounds. Simple, inviting, addictive, asking me to come back. To join was easy, to add my bookmarks was no problem, to check other people's bookmarks was really delicious. If I thought myself original in my choices of interest, I found that at least 15 people added the same favourites to their accounts at the same time as me. I checked on their selection and found a lot of good places to visit later. To tag a bookmark is fun and made you think why you're interested in this specific web site. Ofcourse, I search for "books" tag and already have a list of some new titles to read or to suggest for the collection. The more I learn the more things I want to explore. I don't know how to incorporate all these new activities into my everyday life, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to learn all of it.

Item # 12 - Rollyo

I now understand how to install Rollyo search icon on my blog. It took me only3 attempts to do it. First I had to register and than I had to make my searchroll public. It means that other people can edit my searchroll and add more sites. I found out that Rollyo is a young new service, was born only in 2005 and not many people know about it. I still need to understand more, for example, how many different searchrolls I can create and is it possible to search only by specific searchroll or by combination of them. I see good potential for using this customized search for the Reference enquires. One of my colleagues created a searchroll based on quality reference websites and I can see how a group of us can contribute to this 'Reference' search tool.

Item # 11 - All about Librarything

The Librarything is an amazing idea. I discovered this service a couple of month ago and use it constantly at my job. Even without cataloguing my own books, I used this database for advising the customers, suggesting new books for the library collection and finding books for myself. I see a lot of potential for integrating this service into my everyday job. In the future I plan to add more books to my account, join the groups, forums, talks and a blog.
You can see my selection of books from the Librarything on this link: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/yarnspinner

Item #10 - online Image Generator

One of my favourite images from the Image Generator.org (http://www.imagegenerator.org/

You can choose from neraly 50 templates and create your message in different languages.

Item # 9 - Finding feeds

OK! Some of my favourite web sites don't have RSS function. After searching on Feedster and Technocrati, I came across some interesting blogs and added them to my Bloglines account.
One of them is "Infoscience". This blog has a weekly post - Carnival of the Infoscience. The posts relate to the topics of the library world and modern technology, and give us a new perspective to the discussion on Internet and Libraries 2.0. You can see the link to Infosicence under my list of feeds - item #8 on my blog.
Another interesting blog that I added to my feedreader is "Library Geek Woes". This blog is about the future of the libraries, new technology, library blogging and reinventing the library in the Internte era.
And finally - "The shifted Librarian", quite well-known blog, by Jenny Levine. You can read about her in the 'Library Journal' , 3/5/2003. Her goal is -" ... to help us librarians to become as technologically adept as our user". The blog is about the 'information shifting', of making it more portable and how the change is affecting the libraries.
I came across a lot of interesting posts an articles and became overwhelmed by the amount of information available. Now it is important to know where to stop.

Item # 8 - RSS

http://www.bloglines.com/public/yarnspinner.
Hurray, here is a link to my feeds.
The idea about the RSS is great, but when I started to add the feeds to the Bloglines, it was too many to read on a regular basis. I like the word "aggregator". To use Bloglines was easy, it is web-based and quite user- friendly. There are more aggregators on a market, but I am quite happy to know how to use one or two. I want to keep an eye on my colleagues' blogs and I subscribed to the blogs from other libraries as well. I need at least one Health and Wellness feed, some News updated and I subscribed to Recent Australian publications as well. The most difficult part was to create a link. It took a mutual effort between 3-4 colleagues to work out how to share the bloglets (feeds) and make them public.

Item # 7 - a post about anything technology related

Today I want to mention a book that may be very useful to many of us. It is the"Dispatches from blogistan: a travel guide for a modern blogger" by Suzanne Stefanac. The book claims to define every technical aspect of blogging. The writer is a technology journalist who demystifies blogging.

Item #6 - my trading card

My creation
Originally uploaded by optimusyarnspinner

Optimus Yarn Spinner from Zamonia is a little dinosaur with an ambition to become a prominent writer. He is one of the characters from "The city of dreaming books" by Walter Moers.

more photos Flickr

Portugal, Sintra
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13871407@N08/1415691531/

#5 Discover Flickr

Here is my first download from Flickr. The link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/13871407@N08/1410343221/
I created a slideshow of my latest photos on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13871407@N08/show/

Flickr is a very interesting service with a lot of things to experiment with. It is difficult not to spend too much time trying different activities. I am sure that I'll go back and try more options on it in my free time.

Franz Kafka, Prague

IMG_0866
Originally uploaded by optimusyarnspinner

A famous sculpture in the centre of Prague.

Second week

Hello, fellow blogmates!

Here I am in a new blogland and what a different world it is.

Everyone is someone else, everyone has a say, anyone can see it and comment.

IS it really a new social revolution?

At the moment I'm learning a new ""blogabulary".

I've already found words such as: blogpeople, blogpost, blogging thoughts, blogging rhymes, weblog madness, blogging your life away and mindblogging.

If you know a good word for a "blogabulary', please comment.

First week

Ok! What do I expect from all of it? My philosophy is going to be..... experiment, learn, share and enjoy.