Thanks for the Opportunity to Spend Work Time On This

That was a fun list to work through. It amazes me how many opportunities for interaction with other people and computers are available through the Internet now. And there are many more than just these 19; pipes.yahoo.com is a great example of Web 2.0 functionality.

Fun and Games

Online games are extremely fun and even helpful sometimes. Yahoo used to have one where words would scroll across the screen from the right to the left, and you had to type them before they scrolled off the screen to the left. They went faster and faster and you could customize the speed and the complexity of the lexicon. So it was really fun and a great way to get in some typing practice. I've also played their pool game (8 ball) quite a bit because it reproduces the physics of a pool table very well. But I would always resize the game so the chat client at the bottom wouldn't show because of a few verbal abusers who didn't like losing.

 

I think that electronic gaming in general is a good thing for people, as it improves hand-eye coordination, troubleshooting and problemsolving skills and can be a needed source of relaxation. But like anything in life, it can definitely be abused.

Planet Google Earth

Few online things have made me as happy as Google maps. Using it in conjunction with other information sources can be extremely revealing. For instance, I was able to find a plug-in for it that shows only a shaded relief. Using this view I was able to locate a specific type of geologic formation in Skagit county that could not be seen from the air in any other way, due to the various forms of ground cover. And checking out the ground view in cities I've never been to is fascinating. I can't wait for it to develop to the next level of detail and interactivity.

Real Virtuality

I joined Second Life when it was pretty new, but still had quite a few thousand members.

 

Every time I'd zap into it, some jerk in a dune buggy would run me over before I could get away from him. After that happened a few more times, I decided to bag it.

 

A few years later I logged in again, and the landing pad had changed so that wasn't possible any more. However, I soon hit a wrong key and ended up flying way up high above everything; and every time I logged in, I started out way up in the sky, and couldn't figure out how to land. I emailed their tech support but the answer back was just a link to their forums. So I decided to bag it. I wasn't really that much into it anyway - I love the exploration aspect of it, but the avatar/fake personality aspect of it just did not appeal to me.

 

Lately an online friend of mine was invited to write up a description for an area in the Entropia Universe. And he connects to the Internets through a phone line, so cannot even visit Entropia himself. He asked me to create an account and check it out. I just haven't done it yet because... there's just nothing about it that thrills me. Which perplexes me, because I am so happy about the rise of the Web. I think what bugs me is that it's kinda like The Sims - spending time out of my real life to live a virtual life just seems like a waste.

Online Apps - the Last Laugh

When the subject of online apps was first broached, Microsoft recoiled with revulsion, assuring their user base that such as nasty idea would never be secure or operate reasonably. Fortunately they were way wrong, as Google and others have proven. In fact, I've completely switched all of my personal word processing and spreadsheet work over to Google docs, because it allows me to make progress on them from my laptop, my mom's pc, and the public workstations when I'm on a lunch break.

While it's true that the Google word processor doesn't have near the functionality that MS Word offers, it's pretty much sufficient for my needs. And I've still got Office 2000 on my desktop at home in case I ever need it.

About ten years ago a pc maker came out with a machine that had no hard drive - they ran Linux from a memory chip. At that time the concept of online apps hadn't been realized and the terminal approach to personal pc use didn't bloom. I think it's time to try those again!

Searching for a Reason

Yup I'll admit I use Google first. But that's because what I'm looking for usually ends up on the first page of the search results. I think the reasons to use other search engines are valid, but how often will a person use search engines when they're doing in-depth research? Maybe at the beginning of their work, to get a rough handle on 1. if there's anything on the web at all about the topic, or 2. if there's a lot, is it an overwhelming amount of material - meaning maybe the topic needs to be narrowed. This is extremely shabby reasoning, I know, but so often when i'm looking up stuff on the Internets I'm not really concerned with proper research protocols - I just want to get an overview fast. Practically any search engine will do for that.

 

Does anybody still use the Yahoo directory? or the one at Dmoz.org? I still do when I want to just review a large mass of websites on the same topic. Thank goodness directories have not gone extinct. Of course, nothing goes extinct on the Web anymore does it? Only in the 'real world'.

Outstanding Podcasting

Back when podcasting was called "online listening streams" I used to download shows from Art Bell's Dreamland and listen to them while working around the house. I had to burn them to a CD as the iPod and other like devices hadn't been invented yet. For this assignment I found a cool podcast from Wazzu about finding and evaluating information on historical geology but it was a bit dry. Still it was a little more "down to earth" than some of that crazy stuff Art Bell used to propagate through the airwaves and over the Internets.

Inline Homage Renovators

These are great - that's how I created the image for this blog!

Unerodable Downloadables

Did you notice anything you liked, didn't like?
The amount of material available is amazing. I didn't realize so many rights-holders would be willing to let people burn copies of their work.

How was the selection of titles on the topics you browsed?
It was excellent; the number of classical titles far exceeded my meager awareness of what's been composed. Would Wolfgang von be happy about it? I dunno.

Were your favorite authors available in the collection?
Yep.

Did anything surprise you about this service?
Not really. I just think it's pretty slick.

Somewhat Delicious

Del.icio.us is a great implementation of a bookmarking site but I wish they'd use their screen real estate better. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to compress a person's bookmarks yet. The tag column is pretty compact. Reminds me of back when Netscape first arrived on the Internet (I think 1993) and someone immediately set up a utility where you could add your comments to a website you visited, then anyone else who installed that same Netscape plug-in would be able to view all the comments and add their own. I had a Hotmail account then before it was acquired by Bill. What an outrageous idea!! But then some mega-corporation complained that people might see something negative about them, so the idea got canned!

Weaving a Wiki Basket

I can see good things and not-so-good things about wikis. It's definitely advantageous to enable a group to post directly to a website, without them having to learn any code or formatting their content (although they can gain more control over their presentation if they do learn how to do those.) However the downside is that anyone can edit any else's postings.

For example, I'm building a website devoted to the writer Talbot Mundy. One of my collaborators, Brian Taves, is Mundy's premier biographer. Yet everytime he goes into Wikipedia to update the article about Mundy there, someone else goes after him and removes all his edits, replacing his excellent biography with their insipid, inaccurate tripe. Poor Brian did this three times then finally gave up. So I'll probably remove the link to the Wikipedia article on Mundy from the website, because it just isn't good information.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were researching something on the web and she noticed me going to Wikipedia, and asked "are you using Wikipedia?"

"Sure," I replied. "Why not?"

She looked at me with that intriguing expression which combines nausea, disgust, and a kind of intellectual disbelief. "Because it's not reliable, that's why."

We proceeded to have an extensive dialog in which she pointed out that there is no way to know if the information in Wikipedia is reliable, without cross-checking it against known-to-be-reliable sources. And if you're going to cross-check it, you might as well skip Wikipedia and just use the reliable source.

At first I resisted her argument, because I had visited Wikipedia hundreds of times, and felt I had received good, accurate information there. Then I realized that I didn't know the information I'd gotten there was accurate; I'd been just presuming it was. Or was at least accurate enough for my uses. But how good is "accurate enough"?

For instance, suppose you want to know Eric Clapton's birthdate. You could go to Wikipedia and get it there. But what if it was off by a day? No biggie - unless you're a Clapton fanatic and want to celebrate the day. If you get the day wrong, and someone catches you celebrating Clapton's birthday on that day, and they know for sure the actual birth day, you'll look like a fool! It won't be the end of the world, but it might be a bit vexing. And of course it wouldn't be too hard to conjure up other situations where one might trust information from Wikipedia and end up in some real hot water because of it.

So it really comes down to how much good information matters. If I want to know where Clapton was born, and Wikipedia lists Birmingham, but it was actually London, does it really matter to me? Depends on what I plan to do with that information. It could be that I just want to know if it was a city in the U.K., so either of those answers would be correct. But in reality, there can only be one correct answer to the question. So if I can't know for sure the person who wrote the Wikipedia article had their facts straight, how much should I care?

To be honest, I haven't used Wikipedia since my wife pointed out the potential for inaccuracy there. Kinda creeps me out now.

Posting a Texting While Motorcycle Riding Video Thingy

Really I was going to answer the questions about online video but then I found this video that just made me chuckle.

I was a beta-tester for Joost and it's gone mainstream now - anybody can download it - but I don't watch it much. It works great and there's an amazing variety of stuff to watch. My problem is that just sitting watching a screen bores me immensely. After about ten minutes the restless legs kick in and I just can't stand it anymore!! But if I get to actually interact with what's on the screen - typing, reading, making changes; now that keeps me jazzed on it. Is it a blood-sugar problem or what?

Why Isn't It Called YourSpace?

Back when MySpace first hit the web, I signed up and created a dazzling display. Then I grew disgusted with what seemed like the mostly-voyeuristic ambiance, so I deleted my account. Then many of my nieces and nephews and my two sons found it, and begged me to join them. So I signed up again and created another visually-bombastic presentation. Then weeks and months went by and none of them posted comments on my page or answered my emails or my chat invites. So I canned it. Then my author-friend Al Attanasio emailed me saying "can you help me set up a Myspace?" So I trudged on back to it yet again and set up a page for him, which he then grew tired of, and asked me to delete it...

I do believe these kinds of websites can be useful and perhaps even entertaining. But in order to be useful, say for networking with others in the same profession, one would have to invest a substantial amount of time very cautiously, to avoid becoming an easy target for stalking, identity theft, or a number of other unpleasant outcomes. And the kind of entertainment found on MySpace (IMHO), is mostly based on a wildly-extroverted presentation style, rather than a structure promoting good communication.

The best uses of these sites arises out of how well they support niche activities, for instance promoting music. But if I were going to post a video of any kind, I'd do it on Metacafe so I could at least earn some income from it. MySpace appears to me to be more of a site for idle dabblers. Disabuse me of my erroneous preconceptions if I'm wrong about this!

The Merest Flickr

I'm so used to hosting images on my own domains it doesn't occur to me to use photo sharing sites like Flickr very often.

But a fellow rockhound in NSW wanted to see some of my Glendonite crystals and has a Flickr account, so I went in and set up a photo stream there with a few examples from my collection.

So far nobody's emailed me there so apparently Glendonite isn't a real hot search term on Flickr (big shock).

Sound of Musics

Last.fm is one of the best music sites I've used so far. Always been a weird-FM radio fanatic (no static at all!).



In fact I relied on 107.7 The End to supply me with new artists on a regular basis until they fired Dick Rossette, one of the best DJ's I've ever glued my ears too. At least I got to download the theme song for his game show to use as a ringtone on my Dragon RAZR (which is now broken and Motorola wants $75 to fix it) before he got canned.

But online music sites and streaming radio stations are great for finding new artists to groove to - as long as a broadband internet connection is handy.

#5 RSS Feeds

RSS feeds save me a lot of time wasted browsing news sources looking for what interests me. It's also a handy way to get alerts when something is posted related to some of the more esoteric (meaning "exceptionally obscure") things I'm interested in. Libraries can take advantage of this technology by making the content that is updated often on their websites available as syndicated feeds to whoever would want to be notified about any changes. I've had a Bloglines account for about a year but haven't logged on to it often enough to really use it; basically because I'm always inundated with information and don't have much desire to increase the levels even more.

It's Just Word Hunger

Having been informed that I've indulged in an inappropriate amount of fun-having in this blog, I shall now direct my efforts to something directly related to my work, and my blog theme -- words! Words cascading all around us in a maelstromic, frenzied whirlwind of excessive wordage, words dumping down on our heads and shooting up our sleeves; words growing on trees, words like molecules of water, flowing past by the zillions. How many words would that be exactly? According to some scholarly research I found doing a Google search (so I'm confident it's accurate and don't have to check), the average printed page in a hardback book contains 250 words; and the average hardback book contains 300 pages. My exhaustive research into the average number of books on a shelving cart (consisting of counting how many books there were on a cart shelf nearby) revealed the average number of books on one shelf to be 30. Good enough for my verbage-addled brain! Since our shelving carts now hold about 2.5 full shelves of stuff ("stuff" being a technical term referring to any materials placed upon said shelving cart), a rather circuitous round of cross-multiplying, discarding everything to the right of the decimal, and a liberal sprinkling of salt over my left shoulder produces the figure of 187,500 words per cart. A typical day here sees at least 15 carts moving their sinuous path through the OAK Circ department and out into the bibliographic hinterlands where famished patrons lurk, waiting to pounce on the fresh word-meat. But how many words do we supply their daily hunger? At a rate of 15 carts per day, that's somewhere around 2,812,500, give or take a few hundred thousand. And of course, that's just the ones encased in paper, on metal carts with wheels -- a rough average. What about all the words cascading out of all the mouths within our library's walls? And all the computer monitors, glowing softly throughout the day. And all the signs on all the walls... There's a digital sign out in the lobby that runs 24/7, spewing words into the eyeballs of anyone foolish enough to gaze in its direction; and when the building is empty, and only the echoes remain, still the words come cascading out in fountains of tumbling verbage, piling invisibly on the floor in drifts and masses...What? Oh, time to get back to work. But wait, I was working! Really!

4th Lesson IM

I started using IM back when Windows was still in the 3.1 stage and the web browser with the most functionality was Lynx (which is still a very good way to access the Internet because it doesn't deal with images or most formatting, thus making the process way faster). One of the reference techs and I used to send messages to each other's computers, but it was a very clunky system, really just a command line interface. Lately I've been using Trillian because it can access all the chat protocols at once, but its interface is still kind of a pain.

Great Article about Oak Harbor Library

Mary Campbell made a presentation to the Oak Harbor city council about library services, and Paul Boring did a good job writing it up in the newspaper.

Here's the link: http://www.whidbeynewstimes.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=84&cat=23&id=1166990&more=0

Progress Chart

Step 3: Found the progress chart and updating it.

Okay here's my blog for the SIL 20 for 2.0 learning project. I've been blogging for a few years so was able to use some images and links from some of my other blogs to bolster this one up a bit. The header I created on my lunch break using an online image editor. Then I saved it to the desktop on the public pc, then uploaded it to a free image hosting service. The paper background I had on a few of my other websites so just used an URL reference for that.

I am perpetually amazed by the power of the Internet and the Web to enable regular folks like me to do things that used to be available only to certain limited groups of people. I've always wanted to be a book publisher, and can now do so from the comfort of my own home - without ever doing any binding, storing of copies, or fulfilling orders. Online services like Lulu.com do all that for me.

Thanks to email I've made friends all over the world; people I've never had actual face time with, but consider among my closest compadres. I've been able to make my research about the rare mineral form Glendonite available to other researchers and collectors in locations all over the globe - Australia, Japan, Denmark, Russia... it's astounding!

I can't promise I'll come up with any content to post here that would be relevant to my position with Sno-Isle, but if I do, I hope you'll read it and post a comment or two. I truly admire Sno-Isle for recognizing the importance of these new technologies, and allowing work time to develop an appreciation for them.

For me, the Internet is all about enabling people to communicate and collaborate with each other. I think it's easily as important as the discovery of fire, the wheel, yogurt, beer, and the fact that the world is flat. Isn't it?