Ah...Love...

Listen carefully to this b--eeee--utiful love song...

and now for something completely different

Just watch it...very educational...

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.

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.

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.

wicked wiki week two

Despite currently suffering from CCC (Christmas Cookie Coma) and a bit of general hum-buggedness (you know that's a word, really should be anyway) I did my homework. It DIDN'T help the mood issues, but I'm now recovered enough to report back--the swearing has subsided to a dull roar now.

So I went into the Technical Services page and added the info that we are not IT--since periodically that is forgotten and we get phone calls/emails about computer problems. I also linked to the staff web page, the TS portion of the staff page network (or labyrinth or whatever), and to the wiki page I created about spine label formats called (creatively enough) spine label formats.

This created page was the bane of my morning. These wiki pages are great to just add paragraphs or lists, but for stuff that needs careful formatting--it BITES BIG ROCKS. See, the thing is that spine labels have a stack of information in a specific way. So to give information about how things need to look--they need to look that way.

So here's how it went: copy out of Word file; go into editing page and paste; look at wiki page; swearing starts--OK, I'll skip the blow-by-blow (since "swearing starts" would end up being frequently inserted). Basically, it looked awful. I tried to see if I could get the sidebar off this page (help was not helpful; web search info gave me code, but it didn't work--it seems that the more you pay to do the wiki, the better editing capabilities you have).

Once I resigned myself to the sidebar I commenced editing manually to make it look good. This was incredibly frustrating because the edit mode and read mode look absolutely different. I tried to put screenshot here, but can't seem to get that to work. You'll either have to just believe me or go look and compare the pretty and the really weird (edit mode) on the wiki page.

Basically I just think this is probably not the place for this. I got it done but it was frustrating and could easily be screwed up by anyone. It's not the kind of thing that needs a bunch of people screwing around with it. On the page I did also upload and attach a file version that you can click on and a Word document will show the info for printing or whatever purposes. I also put a link back to the TS page just for handiness.

I think the concept of the wiki is fine and will work for some things--stuff that needs more revising, but like all tools...use the right tool for the job. My brain is a bit fried from fighting with it so I'm having some trouble imagining exact uses beyond what I mentioned last time (events calendars and such). I do still have the lingering mistrust for how easily it can be abused--I realize it's supposed to be self-policing, but how often are people going to have to monitor it and how much time will it take/waste vs. the other ways we have of disseminating information? I'm a bit concerned that some of this is progress for its own sake. Rather than the technology meeting an existing need, are we attempting to find a use for some of this stuff just because it's neat? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we need to do it (I bring up the fashions of several decades as proof...oh, and stuff like cloning fits too).

On that pleasant note (the cloning) I'm back to my hole.

wiki, wiki, try to make some info sticky

Well, after last week's chaos (floods and jury duty in the same week...who'd a thunk it--I was keeping my eyes peeled for locusts by Friday, let me tell you) I look forward to a boring (hopefully), normal (well, on a relative scale), regular work week.

So, back in the groove and ready to get wiki (I'm sure there's got to be a dance for this, perhaps if we search on YouTube).

Viewed screencast (check)--good basic info; well-narrated by Jeannie; one complaint--I hate web pages that are too wide so you have to scroll back and forth all the time, this is a general problem but the screencast was too tall to all be seen at once too--so, WHINE.

OK, step 2 looking at Stevens County wiki--I liked the idea of the events calendars being wiki-able, that way groups can post there stuff without going through some type of 'coordinator', and some of the stuff that happens there looks like fun (not actually driving 8 hours fun, but, you know, virtually fun). Also checked out the Book Lust wiki (because Nancy Pearl rocks, duh) I did notice that no matter how many people can post on a wiki, somebody still needs to update the fact that Book Crush has been published...not to be published in April 2007 (unless the breach in the time-space continuum got me again). Through that wiki I ended up on a page reviewing a biography of Mary Shelley, which could have led me to many other things--but I resisted the suck of the Internet and used my back button.

So, then it's off to the fancy new KRL wiki (I have to admit, I like the word--plus it rhymes with a lot, we could make a great Dr. Seuss parody...but I digress). Looked around, messed with stuff. I thought I'd leave fixing spelling errors to those people who get all squirmy and freaked out by that stuff (you know who you are...there might be a support group, but I'm not absolutely sure) and be silly. I added a picture of the Taj Mahal as the fake branch's building and linked the Peter Pan reference to the Wikipedia page on him (the character, I do know he's not real--Tinkerbell is real [clap, clap, clap]) in case people didn't catch it right off.

And here I am blogging about the whole wiki thang. I can see where a wiki might be useful for some of the stuff we currently have on the staff web page and the transfer file. That seems the most likely use in-house. For the public side: events calendars, general area information, suggestions about places to go, etc. have potential. My big concern is the whole 'horse by committee' problem (punchline--camel)...accuracy is maintained with a lot of diligence...who's going to do that part? Plus, of course we have that old friend Paranoia tapping on my shoulder asking just what the people without the best intentions (can we say SALMON) might do if they got going. Anyway, I see wiki potential in both good and bad directions. Being a cynical optimist (basically, I hope for the best but ain't all that shocked when a certain bodily refuse hits a certain air-circulating device) I hope we can find a good use for getting wiki (really, it sounds like there should be a dance) AND I hope we can avoid the camel humps.

Hope everyone has dried out. I'm for my hole.