I just have to brag that this must be a real blog now. Not only did the Zoho people sort of stalk me to comment on my blog post about their pretty awesome resources, but now I've gotten a scam-spam comment. That must make it a real blog, 'cause it's showin' up on someone's radar.
I especially like how the spam pretends to know me, but the best part is...if you're making good money working from home, why are you running off to the airport? Do not follow the link! I would just dump the comment, but in case anyone can benefit from the warning I'll leave it. People who are more social than I am may have trouble remembering just who they've met, thus the pretending to know me part. See--there's safety in limiting your contact with the outside world.
I also just had to point out that the evil M-pire's hostile bid to grab up a certain internet biggee that starts with a Ya and ends in hoo has had the imperial march running through my head all week (that's the music that plays when Darth Vadar walks in...pretty much the look out here comes the big bad guy music). The rebel forces will have to have an uprising. Where's Obi Wan when you need him (OK, I know he's dead, but that hasn't stopped cameos and ghostly advice in the past--maybe he could pop into Yahoodquarters with some wisdom about The Force).
On that hopeful note, back in the hole.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Halle-freakin'-lujah...and nanny, nanny, boo, boo
Done, da-done, done, done..... I finished my homework and I am SOOOOO 2.0. OK, so now I am free to post whatever and have no inspiration at all.
2.0 was good as a learning process. A whole bunch of it I will never use again--in fact at some point soon I will be deleting a few of those accounts that I had to create--but some of it will stay with me.
Blogging is kinda fun and I've been encouraged to keep doing it, but don't hold your breath waiting for posts. I did promise a couple people (hey, my friends think I'm funny--and I don't just mean looking) that if I win the laptop, then I'll keep blogging. (This is an open invitation to pull strings for the winner if you really want to keep reading my mind-dumps into the computer.)
I'll leave my delicious account so that I can have portable bookmarks (sorry, 'favorites' for the evil M-pire types...I miss Netscape). Podcasts may get more use once I get my 'prize' and figure out how to use the dingdang gadget. I'll probably keep my RSS reader too, but I think I'll be cleaning out what I'm subscribed to after the party. The 'sites for students' stuff could come in handy at some point, so I'll try to keep track of my password.
Flickr, LibraryThing, YouTube and Wikis will probably have occasional visits from me for reference purposes. I could care less about Facebook, and Twitter will be dropped like a hot potato. And, of course, last but not least...Sharepoint will obviously become part of my work life.
So there's my summary of life in 2.0-land. I'm glad I know more about what's out there...and I'm really glad I can OPT OUT of most of it and continue on with my happy, non-social-networked, low-tech life. Thank goodness for free will and continuing on oblivious to 'what the kids are doing these days'.
No promises of how often, but posting again is not totally out of the question. For now, though, I'm back to my cozy hole.
2.0 was good as a learning process. A whole bunch of it I will never use again--in fact at some point soon I will be deleting a few of those accounts that I had to create--but some of it will stay with me.
Blogging is kinda fun and I've been encouraged to keep doing it, but don't hold your breath waiting for posts. I did promise a couple people (hey, my friends think I'm funny--and I don't just mean looking) that if I win the laptop, then I'll keep blogging. (This is an open invitation to pull strings for the winner if you really want to keep reading my mind-dumps into the computer.)
I'll leave my delicious account so that I can have portable bookmarks (sorry, 'favorites' for the evil M-pire types...I miss Netscape). Podcasts may get more use once I get my 'prize' and figure out how to use the dingdang gadget. I'll probably keep my RSS reader too, but I think I'll be cleaning out what I'm subscribed to after the party. The 'sites for students' stuff could come in handy at some point, so I'll try to keep track of my password.
Flickr, LibraryThing, YouTube and Wikis will probably have occasional visits from me for reference purposes. I could care less about Facebook, and Twitter will be dropped like a hot potato. And, of course, last but not least...Sharepoint will obviously become part of my work life.
So there's my summary of life in 2.0-land. I'm glad I know more about what's out there...and I'm really glad I can OPT OUT of most of it and continue on with my happy, non-social-networked, low-tech life. Thank goodness for free will and continuing on oblivious to 'what the kids are doing these days'.
No promises of how often, but posting again is not totally out of the question. For now, though, I'm back to my cozy hole.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
blog review--bad title came from zoho file name, better title: 2.0 for people who are sick of social networking
Finally, something I can rave instead of rant about. I mean, I truly haven't hated everything--RSS and del.icio.us are quite handy and podcasts are good to listen to when I have no audiobook--but this really makes sense to me for students and other folks. What, you may ask is she actually impressed by? Why Zoho, of course.
I am in fact typing this is Zoho Writer at this moment and anticipate figuring out how to post it directly to the blog with little trouble. I think I would be almost as thrilled by OpenOffice (which I have actually heard of--years ago, being so 2.0 myself--as a casual follower/appreciator of the open source movement), except for the whole need to download issue.
Since I didn't have the ability or wherewithal to download I proceeded to zoho.com, signed my big, bad, fake self up and plunged in.
Unfortunately, right after that paragraph I had typed several more things but then lost touch with zoho and clicked a button I shouldn't have while Explorer was doing the spinning wheel 'please come back' with zoho. The good news is that zoho did manage to hold onto that much of what I wrote, so it's got some kind of internal backup/draft saving thing going on. I'm still paranoid enough that I would definitely practice and preach further back up--hard drive, thumb drive, disc, printed hard copy, carved stone tablet (a bit heavy but the technology doesn't need upgrading or tech support)--some sort of back up, I'm not paranoid enough to need all of those listed.
I do think this so solves the many problems encountered when completing or attempting to turn in papers--ink runs out, attachment goes wrong, file incompatibility, platform incompatibility (mac vs the evil M-pire), having to run with disc to computer lab to try to print only to find out disc is trashed--if it were online you just log on (provided zoho writer isn't on furlough). There are offline capabilities that I haven't tried and I'm sure you could paste stuff in from another word processing program to save online time.
Here's a picture of some early December storm damage just to test my image importing.
Yep, this works. It still has all the downsides of needing internet and needing it to stay stable but if those hold it's pretty good. Non-students could use it for resumes and personal or professional writing. If the other applications are as easy as the writer any reasonably computer-literate person will have no trouble working with it. For someone like me who has to use borrowed technology to get anything accomplished online it might be handy. If you put something up into it, anytime you can get access to a computer (say, at the library, for instance) there it is.
I don't even mind that if you look at the sharing options one could be so bold as to use those dirty words SOCIAL NETWORKING (OK, I mind a little but I'm trying to pretend...maybe I just see the anti-social possibilities clearly enough that I can stand it--plus that's not the entire point of it anyway).
One funny note--zoho's spell check considers zoho OK, but errors OpenOffice...competition? Not that I always behave the way spell check tells me to.
So, now to flop this onto the blog and be one step closer to completion...then back in the hole.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Following, being followed...the following was brought to you by...
I have twittered. I can't say I'm all atwitter about it, not tweet on it, but now out of punny ways to say it.
Our saga begins with the usual joys of our technological world...not getting access to the sight. The fact that they have a cutesy little page that keeps trying to do your command suggests to me that it was not personal, things get slow there. This is probably a sign of how popular twittering is, but...not encouraging.
Eventually I got in, set myself up, tweeted, started stalking...er...following people, got kitsaplibrary to follow me (hacking is easy when they give you the password :)), and got out with minimal scarring. My username is udweller and I left it public if you want to stalk me...not that I promise to say anything profound.
Finding people to follow was annoying because I kept getting the cutesy screen (as opposed to the blue screen of death of M-word fame) and even a different cutesy error screen. I did get results eventually and found some knitters and spinners for following. BUT, I also noticed that a lot of the ones that popped up from my searches had last messages from months ago--one of the messages being that the person was abandoning twitter for facebook and where to find her there. This may be proof that people who are into what I'm into also don't necessarily want to spend their time updating everyone that they are bored at work (as one of the tweets in the public stream did--gee I wonder if their employer twitters?).
I hadn't heard of twitter before 2.0 and I can't say I'm surprised, now that I know what it is. As someone who doesn't have a cell phone, I'm definitely not the target audience here. I can't think of many less pleasant activities than being constantly updated about the least little thing, much less having any urge to constantly update others...it seems awful. I like my peace and quiet. I like to accomplish things without interruptions, at least some of the time.
Reading the info about how it worked made me feel like a crotchety old woman (these damn kids today, with there twittering and tweeting...hey, you kids get off my lawn). I just don't relate to the desire for hyper-stimulation.
The guy in the 12 minute guide actually said something to the effect of...even though studies show constant interruptions cause your IQ to drop, who cares, it's fun. It made me think maybe he'd dropped all the points he had to spare.
The Big Juicy guide had some interesting thoughts on marketing, but I'm one of those who are highly advertising averse (pity the telemarketer that catches me at the wrong moment) so any of this 'building a relationship with the customer' is annoying to me. For the 'kids' who are 'into this sort of thing' it might be 'just the ticket' (I swear, I'm not 112 year old, I just feel that way). If the 'library web presence' were desirable book review/recommendations (140 characters would have to be a pretty concise review) some people would probably really appreciate the heads up. Then again, they may really only want to know that their friend is going to hang out at the mall or what they ate for lunch, etc. It seems like it could be a lot to maintain if it were super-frequent, but if there were a quickie title recommendation every few days it could work for readers advisory and/or event announcements.
As for me, I predict (OK, I know) that I'll experiment with this a bit more for the duration of 2.0 and then its bye bye birdie (one last play on words, then I'll quit my grousing--hee,hee).
So tweets to the tweet I'm unplugging and flying for the hole.
Our saga begins with the usual joys of our technological world...not getting access to the sight. The fact that they have a cutesy little page that keeps trying to do your command suggests to me that it was not personal, things get slow there. This is probably a sign of how popular twittering is, but...not encouraging.
Eventually I got in, set myself up, tweeted, started stalking...er...following people, got kitsaplibrary to follow me (hacking is easy when they give you the password :)), and got out with minimal scarring. My username is udweller and I left it public if you want to stalk me...not that I promise to say anything profound.
Finding people to follow was annoying because I kept getting the cutesy screen (as opposed to the blue screen of death of M-word fame) and even a different cutesy error screen. I did get results eventually and found some knitters and spinners for following. BUT, I also noticed that a lot of the ones that popped up from my searches had last messages from months ago--one of the messages being that the person was abandoning twitter for facebook and where to find her there. This may be proof that people who are into what I'm into also don't necessarily want to spend their time updating everyone that they are bored at work (as one of the tweets in the public stream did--gee I wonder if their employer twitters?).
I hadn't heard of twitter before 2.0 and I can't say I'm surprised, now that I know what it is. As someone who doesn't have a cell phone, I'm definitely not the target audience here. I can't think of many less pleasant activities than being constantly updated about the least little thing, much less having any urge to constantly update others...it seems awful. I like my peace and quiet. I like to accomplish things without interruptions, at least some of the time.
Reading the info about how it worked made me feel like a crotchety old woman (these damn kids today, with there twittering and tweeting...hey, you kids get off my lawn). I just don't relate to the desire for hyper-stimulation.
The guy in the 12 minute guide actually said something to the effect of...even though studies show constant interruptions cause your IQ to drop, who cares, it's fun. It made me think maybe he'd dropped all the points he had to spare.
The Big Juicy guide had some interesting thoughts on marketing, but I'm one of those who are highly advertising averse (pity the telemarketer that catches me at the wrong moment
As for me, I predict (OK, I know) that I'll experiment with this a bit more for the duration of 2.0 and then its bye bye birdie (one last play on words, then I'll quit my grousing--hee,hee).
So tweets to the tweet I'm unplugging and flying for the hole.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Call me antisocial, or just don't call me...
OK, I am fully aware that I am a bit antisocial (not in a scary serial killer way, just more of a loner/homebody...maybe I'm the Lone Ranger...whatever). I'm not big on socializing for its own sake.
I have friends, I spend time with them--TA DA. I'm not a socialite party-girl, attender of gala events, frequenter of any 'scene', member of a bunch of clubs, hipster, scenester, 'one to watch', or any of that. Needless to say (but I'm gonna) this attitude tends to carry over to my opinion of social networking online. So, for me... I AIN'T interested. But the homework is not about me....
The tour of facebook was actually more plain than I expected for such a popular thing...pretty boring actually. I'm glad to see they have some control for privacy, but the stuff in the news sure suggests not everyone is using it. I guess the popular part comes once you get farther in. I'm curious, but not curious enough to create another online thing (fine--Profile--I know the terminology) which I would have to make up a bunch of lies to remain anonymous and then it would be floating cybertrash that I would abandon after glancing around a bit--I don't want a t-shirt that bad.
The Farkas article was very interesting. I think she raised good points and I really hope that if KRL is going to try facebook for the public it follows the non-lame approach...I do wonder who's going to have the time to do it all. I again dwell on the whole question of if there is really a need or if it's just fun to play with the new toys (which I was pleased to see Farkas raise in her piece as well--even though she's very into the techie stuff, thus proving in a way that I'm not just being a pouty luddite).
I'm not sure what we would be trying to do on facebook as an organization. It brings up some of the questions about communication raised by/in today's training. The question was brought up that there are still internal communication issues. To me this seems to be creating a barrier for communication externally as well. I wonder if the insulated bubble is really being pulled back or not. I see/hear things in the community that make me think we (or some of we) on the inside really don't know what kind of place they/we live and who else we're sharing it with. I love where I live, but I KNOW that many people who also live here love it for entirely different and sometimes opposite reasons and if I want to live here they are part of the deal. It's what makes for a community--diversity is in ideas and attitudes as much, if not more than in race/ethnicity/income/education/background/heritage.
I think a lot of corporate buzzwords have been circulating around lately, so I'm putting my vote in again for my favorite--TRANSPARENCY. Let's be open and honest with each other. Let's not fall into Us vs. Them traps. Certainly the only way the 'team' is going to come through any crisis and move forward is together--which requires communicating and being supportive. People who feel that things are dictated from above in secret meetings have trouble getting behind the message. Plus, the message has been dished out in a bit of a hodge-podge so people aren't going to get behind what they just plain don't get (comprende?).
Whoa...got on a bit of a soapbox there...but it's the truth (my version, of course), so I'll leave it as is--somebody has to start with something in communicating....I'm for my hole.
I have friends, I spend time with them--TA DA. I'm not a socialite party-girl, attender of gala events, frequenter of any 'scene', member of a bunch of clubs, hipster, scenester, 'one to watch', or any of that. Needless to say (but I'm gonna) this attitude tends to carry over to my opinion of social networking online. So, for me... I AIN'T interested. But the homework is not about me....
The tour of facebook was actually more plain than I expected for such a popular thing...pretty boring actually. I'm glad to see they have some control for privacy, but the stuff in the news sure suggests not everyone is using it. I guess the popular part comes once you get farther in. I'm curious, but not curious enough to create another online thing (fine--Profile--I know the terminology) which I would have to make up a bunch of lies to remain anonymous and then it would be floating cybertrash that I would abandon after glancing around a bit--I don't want a t-shirt that bad.
The Farkas article was very interesting. I think she raised good points and I really hope that if KRL is going to try facebook for the public it follows the non-lame approach...I do wonder who's going to have the time to do it all. I again dwell on the whole question of if there is really a need or if it's just fun to play with the new toys (which I was pleased to see Farkas raise in her piece as well--even though she's very into the techie stuff, thus proving in a way that I'm not just being a pouty luddite).
I'm not sure what we would be trying to do on facebook as an organization. It brings up some of the questions about communication raised by/in today's training. The question was brought up that there are still internal communication issues. To me this seems to be creating a barrier for communication externally as well. I wonder if the insulated bubble is really being pulled back or not. I see/hear things in the community that make me think we (or some of we) on the inside really don't know what kind of place they/we live and who else we're sharing it with. I love where I live, but I KNOW that many people who also live here love it for entirely different and sometimes opposite reasons and if I want to live here they are part of the deal. It's what makes for a community--diversity is in ideas and attitudes as much, if not more than in race/ethnicity/income/education/background/heritage.
I think a lot of corporate buzzwords have been circulating around lately, so I'm putting my vote in again for my favorite--TRANSPARENCY. Let's be open and honest with each other. Let's not fall into Us vs. Them traps. Certainly the only way the 'team' is going to come through any crisis and move forward is together--which requires communicating and being supportive. People who feel that things are dictated from above in secret meetings have trouble getting behind the message. Plus, the message has been dished out in a bit of a hodge-podge so people aren't going to get behind what they just plain don't get (comprende?).
Whoa...got on a bit of a soapbox there...but it's the truth (my version, of course), so I'll leave it as is--somebody has to start with something in communicating....I'm for my hole.
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