Team Talk – Google Accounts

The Team Talk exercise went really well. Claire and I coordinated our talks so that mine lead directly into hers which worked brilliantly as a way to turn two very short workshops into one considerably more substantial one. My Team Talk was about creating a Google Account and Claire’s talk was about using Google Docs. By doing my talk first everyone in the group was able to have a Google Account up and running ready to get straight into working with Google Docs for Claire’s talk.

Because I signed up to Gmail years ago and therefore already had a Google account of my own it was a very useful learning exercise for myself as well as the group to work through the steps for creating a Google account with people who hadn’t done so before. This really helped to clarify the process (and Google’s account structure) for me so that I now feel a lot more confident in my ability to work through it with customers. One really important point that this exercise demonstrated is how much confusion can be saved by taking the time to read the screen carefully and not making assumptions about what should happen next.

NZ 2.0

NZ Government and Web 2.0

Reading through the list of New Zealand Government uses of Web 2.0 I was very encouraged by the range of initiatives both internally and publicly. It was particuarly interesting to read about some of the ways in which Web 2.0 tools are being used to try and generate more public participation in Government e.g. The Police Act Wiki. The National Library’s use of Flickr is something else that stood out. I think there could be some significant benefits from libraries and other archives making their resources available via 3rd party online sources that many people are already using in other ways. The content that libraries can provide can greatly enrich these resources and libraries can benefit by increasing the variety of ways through which people can find and engage with library content. It was also good to see a balance between enthusiam and caution in the NZ Government’s use of Web 2.0 particulary around issues of trancparency and blurring the boundaries of government.

Local Government and Web 2.0

In the short amount of time I have spent looking the use of Web 2.0 by Local Governments in NZ seems far less encouraging but I admitedly haven’t had time to search for much. I was surprised to see that CCC doesn’t even offer the kinds of minimal but potentially very informative RSS subscriptions that Auckland and Wellington City Councils provide. RSS seems like a really easy way for Local Govt to be much more proactive about delivering important news and information to the public.

Local govts could also provide a lot more online space for public discussion of policy and plans etc. While discussion forums can easily devolve into flamewars and talkback style ranting it would still be good to see more effort being made by local govts to use Web 2.0 to facilitate increased public discussion of policy etc. It will be very interesting to see if Web 2.0 tools eventually lead to more particpatory forms of democracy by opening up a greater range of spaces for public discussion and debate.

The Audio Foundation http://audiofoundation.org.nz/

The Audio Foundation is a great example of a pre-Web 2.0 social network that started as a mailing list and just this week opened a physical library at the Film Archive in Auckland. The social networking facilitated by the AF mailing list has had a huge impact on the sound art and experimental music community in NZ and the website lets members create a profile and upload mp3s of their work as well as providing RSS feeds for event announcements and a podcast of all the audio on the site.

FLOSS Manuals http://en.flossmanuals.net/about

FLOSS Manuals is an almost entirely Web 2.0 project for the collaborative writing and translation of simple manuals for a variety of free opensource software applications. It is run by NZ expat Adam Hyde and involves a number of contributors in NZ, the Farsi version is coordinated here in ChCh. The project uses a wiki so that manuals can easily be written collaboratively and they have also done a lot of work exploring print-on-demand. FLOSS manuals produce the official manuals for the One Laptop Per Child program.

NZ GLAMS

It was really interesting looking at sites like NZMuseums and Kiwi Research Information Services. These sites are great for providing a single access point into the comibined resources of some of New Zealand’s most significant cultural and research institutions. This greatly increases the accessibilty of huge body of knowledge and information. I suspect we might see more and more developments like this as the internet matures and more initiatives are made to simplify access to the ever increasing amount of content online  and to bridge the gap between institutional/organisational/business networks and the public internet.

Social Networking

Myspace

I actually just signed up to Myspace about a month or so before the CCLlearn programme started so this is a good opportunity for me to reflect on that experience. It’s something that I had been avoiding for years but as my activities as a musician have developed and with shows coming up in the United States later this year I finally decided that I really needed to start using Myspace to promote and network my music. I’d let my actual website become hopelessly out of date and I needed somewhere to point people to if they are interested in my work so it seemed easier to start a myspace page than to completely overhaul my old site and I figured that the networking opportunities could be worthwhile. It was really easy to setup and customise my account and upload audio clips and embed video. I was quite active at trying to friend people for the first couple of weeks but since then I haven’t done much with it besides updating upcoming show details. The best part about having done it is that I have managed to contact people I wouldn’t have otherwise and I now have a show coming up soon with one of my alltime favourite local bands, The Renderers, directly as result of contacting them via Myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/willettsadam

CCL Learn Facilitators Ning Group

Not much action here yet but Ning seems like a useful tool for creating small, project-specific social networks to help collaborative work so I think it will good having this group in place as we move forward with CCL Learn.

montager

I really like this mashup http://www.deviousgelatin.com/montager/ . It’s a bit cheesy but it’s actually a very powerful way of delivering search results for images because of the way that it allows you to quickly survey hundreds of related images all together. I’ll definitely have to look for more tools like this that use a visual method for displaying search results. I encounter school children at the library asking for help trying to find images as often as books and written information and tools like montager could be very useful in these situations.

New noise synth

New noise synth, originally uploaded by crayxax.

Very cute little homemade synth. Check out the mp3s too.

RSS

This exercise left me feeling a bit silly for not having started using RSS feeds years ago. It’s really great to be able to have so much of the content I view online brought together in one place and faster to navigate to. Though I do have to admit that having become very excited about RSS when I first tried it out a few days ago I haven’t really taken much advantage of them since. I’ve found that using RSS feeds in Live Bookmarks in Firefox is a very different experience from using something like Google Reader. With Live Bookmarks they’re like a really fast and powerful navigational tool that I find really useful while Google Reader is more like skim reading a whole lot of different websites simultaneously which is also very useful but I can’t see myself taking advantage of it quite as much.

Libraries can take great advantage of RSS continuing to build on the services we are already providing by communicating information about collections and services to customers. We could also use it the other way around by creating, for example, subject specific pages on the CCL website that bring together lots of related RSS feeds in one place that customers and staff could use as reference and research tools.

gadgets and widgets part 2

I wasted a lot of time unsuccesfully trying to add google gadgets to my blog but had a better time mucking around with igoogle. Initially I found it a bit unconvincing because of the overwhelming volume of really useless seeming gadgets. However, after spending a while searching I managed to find some good gadgets that come from sites I already read or led me to places that I hadn’t previously known about but will continue to check now. I even stumble across this article http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/offer-a-digital-helping-hand/ that’s very relevant to this project.

gadgets and widgets

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a sceptic when it comes to gadgets and widgets and that little of what I have read so far for this module has changed my mind. Maybe it’s just that I’m so used to doing things the long way but I really don’t see the need to clutter up my browser or desktop with stripped down versions of things that I can get to within a few clicks anyway. If I want to read the news I’ll just visit a news site and if I want to know about the weather I’ll go to the met service website. Maybe it depends on the kind of content and the way that I use that content though because I use the embedded google search bar in browsers all the time and I would definitely use a library catalogue widget that worked in a similar way. I guess that suggests that I like the idea of gadgets and widgets for helping me search for content but I find them a lot less compelling for engaging with content that I would primarily browse.

One area where gadgets and widgets start to seem really useful is where they actually add significant new functionality rather than just providing a different entry point to something that’s already there. The information organising widgets on the Texas Libraries website are great examples of this. A widget like Zotero that helps you write and manage your bibliography while you are searching catalogues, databases and the internet seems incredibly powerful. It would be great if we could add widgets like this to the browsers on all the public PCs at CCL because our catalogue and website would immediately become more powerful research tools.

I’m here at last

Well, after a frantic week moving house I’ve finally managed to get online and start this blog. It’s all been a lot more straightforward than I had anticipated (apart from the obvious fact that trying to get anything done while moving house is pretty much impossible). So far I’m really enjoying this online self-learning. It’s been really great for gently motivating me do stuff that I should have done years ago like starting this blog.