Thing 4.2: more flickr

I just added a picture from my flickr page to the sidebar. It took a while to figure out where to put the HTML code, but it seems to be working OK. I'm finding this a little frustrating. I've tried to attach one of my flickr pictures to this blog post using the add image link and inserting the HTML code to link back to flickr and I get 2 copies of the picture plus some misc junk. Aargh! OK, I just tried to put the HTML right in the post using the "Edit Html" tab. That seems to work. So, here's our "Happy Birthday" cake for the summer reading display:

Lunch

Lunch
Originally uploaded by Pieter Dirkx

I was exploring "interestingness" on flickr and found this fun food foto ("Look what's cookin" you know is our summer reading theme) so I'm trying the "blog this" feature to see what happens.

That worked a lot better than trying to add the photo from Blogger. I'm a little concerned about copyright, but wouldn't it not let me do this if there were restrictions? I will try something with my own pictures next.

Thing 4 - Photosharing with Flickr

Wow, it's amazing what you can find on Flickr. I've been looking though some old photos recently and thought I might search for Nesna, my mother's birthplace in Norway. It's a very small town so I didn't think much would come up, but I got 187 results. It's still a small result set (there are over 600,000 results if you just put in Norway), but I am amazed that Norwegian photographers are using Flickr. I guess I shouldn't be, everything on the web is so international now. The thing is, they are all such beautiful pictures. Most likely they are all professional photos and not the tourist snapshots that I might get if I searched Oslo, for example. Still, I feel like any of my pictures would pale next to the stuff here on Flickr. But here's the really cool part: One of those photographers has a link on his profile to genealogy site of the region and I found my grandfather listed!

OK, so here's one of the pictures I found on his Flickr page. I am very confused as to how to attach Flickr photos that aren't mine. It worked to just copy the image location (Thanks, Sarah) but the rules say we should have a link back to Flickr and the HTML code is not there if it's not your picture. Anyway to give credit: This is "Tomma seen from Nesna" copied from Frode's pix on Flickr. I will experiment more with other ways to add pictures.

Thing 3 - RSS feeds

I signed up for Google Reader on advice from a friend since we already had to sign up for a Google account. No point in adding to the myriad of accounts, logins and passwords. Overall I think RSS feeds are really cool. At first I was thinking this would be just one more thing to check besides my email. It does have advantages, though, like separating these things out from your regular email. Once you find some interesting blogs it's great to get the new posts as they are published. The main problem is that it can get overwhelming very quickly. The news sites are the worst. I signed up for the news package they have and even after deleting a couple of the less interesting sites I seem to be getting hundreds of posts a day. When I continue to use this for real for the library I think the news sites will have to go, or at least I won't try to read them all. This could be a mega time waster if you let it!

I added some other DPL blogs right from the reader and that was pretty easy. I think it's pretty easy to add feeds from anywhere, really. I found some others after coming across different articles and thought it would be interesting to read more from that blog. I added Common Craft because I really liked that video. I couldn't get the CNET video to work. We have so few computers with sound around here, but maybe I could try it out on a different computer. I also added Libodyssey even though he hasn't posted anything new lately, and iLibrarian which has a lot of posts about Library 2.0 with links to other sites. There are some real practical tips about things I still don't know much about yet and some that could be useful to me now if I had the time to read them. I also added the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator for fun. It's a site I found last year and had added the feed to the bookmarks toolbar on one of our computers. That's another easy way to keep track of things and you don't even have to sign up for a feed reader. I'm sure I'll find lots more to add in future.

Thing 2: What is Library 2.0

I have tried to make time here and there to read the blogs and articles for this "Thing" As they say, it must be something you choose to do. With so many other tasks piling up you have to just do it. This could be and endless job. One thing leads to another and there are links and links to click on sending you into an infinite number of possible readings. From the comments on John Blyberg's blog entry I found not a comment, but a link to another blog that mentions his article (I ought to figure out how that works) Anyway, this blog is called Libodyssey and the article is "Library 2.o, or why I'm not running off to join the cult just yet" and gives many different views on the topic. I guess in many ways it's just a label and what we really need to do is serve our patrons the best we can. I'd like to learn more web tools and see if they will help me do that. I use the internet a lot for ordering books. I've used BookLetters to create booklists for the library (another thing I'd like to have more time for) however, I have not contributed to any of our library's blogs. I look forward to learning some new things. Enough of the articles, let's get down to business!