Week 11 - eBooks & aBooks

Well this wasn't particularly hard but time consuming. Every time I looked I came across something interesting and would get distracted; start reading or listening then whoosh. Guest that's why I am not a librarian, I would be like a chocaholic trying to sell chocolate.
I found an interesting recipe book and started to reformat it, install a full index, highlight the tips etc this is still a work in progress, but you can see the listing in my LibraryThing. (had to stop as I was spending all my time doing this and not my homework). This also highlighted another reason why I am learning so much more from this course that I have been able to on my personal explorations.

Another thing I noticed and it annoyed me, was to discover that most of the sites did NOT have much more than an alpha list. My wish would be to have eBooks accessible as a search-able catalogue available to LibraryThing. In fact why aren't they just in the library catalogues like every other book? After-all they are just another format that doesn't take up shelf space (nor collect dust).
The intention would be to have the entry as a hot link and thus available for immediate recall when I needed access to it again. (I think a majority of books will end up this way before long, especially "text" books).

Audiobooks (why aren't they called aBooks?) was a bit of a revelation; another one of the shocks to my once neat and tidy picture of the world. For some reason I still had audiobooks pictured as cassettes. That they have evolved onto the web & MP3 etc had not entered my consciousness; another time consuming distraction. Plan is to investigate this further and burn a CD (my player will play MP3 CD's which makes it a lot easier).

Once the readers develop to a similar quality (contract & brightness & Full colour) to "real" books (will we then have a catagory call rBooks?) I think they will really take off.

Current tech articles indicate that this need is well understood (google has released an A4 better contrast Kindle in the last few weeks) and much better units are in the labs.

Looking forward to a bright exciting future.

2009 Winner | The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2009 Winner | The Buckminster Fuller Challenge: "the Buckminster Fuller Challenge"

Week 9 Wikis

n interesting subject. I have (like anyone else who searches the web) used Wikipedia and always found it useful. I have been aware of the concept and thought in passing of areas that could gain value from its use.

I found the NZ goverment post extra interesting. Maybe there is a guide here for how Mr Rudd can address some of the negative feedback from his 2020 gabfest. (I also found the New Zealand Police Act Wiki link is broken and should be -
http://www.policeact.govt.nz/wiki/ )

However, I have never seriously looked at implementing one. I was fascinated to find, as I dug into the subject and viewed many Wiki's, that I clearly considered reliable and accurate, that my mindset was "this would not work". I seemed to have lots of worries that fundamentally boiled down to - the effort of keeping it accurate would be too large. This despite the many references I found that highlighted the many tools that were in place to make the job easy, plus the evidence in front of my eyes that it works.
Slowly, I realised that I was thinking more of putting up a subject that I considered I knew about and allowing others to edit it. I realised this is more what a blog is about. Thus week one got a little clearer.

As I thought about it a little more I realised that the value of a Wiki arises from the pooling of knowledge & information in areas where knowledge & information is diverse and fragmented; where no one individual has the total picture.

So synergy is at its core.
In these circumstances the effort involved in keeping the integrity of the production is rewarded (and balanced) by the value gained.

I would expect also that to retain value there will need to be a defined process for resolving conflicts. In some fields, especially where knowledge is still evolving, there will be bodies of thought that are opposed to each other. A clear, well understood mechanism for managing this must be in place as by definition they cannot yet be resolved. A quick search showed that there has actually been a conference & set of papers on this. (but not being a librarian I wasn't able to get to the details)

"He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia
Source	Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems archive Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems

ROLLYO
This was less than the expected experience.
My expectation was that it would search the websites I specified and only those. I tried it with a very restricted base so I would be able to check its results. I choose my blog and it couldn't even find it, let alone something in my blog. Okay so a blog is not technically a web site so back to the drawing board.

So then I searched my personal web site and found I couldn't get it to just search my web site it insisted on adding the rest of the web and I could find out how to get rid of it. Anyway, it did find it and returned the entries I expected. Here it is

http://rollyo.com/ibpservice/ibpservice/

give it a try.
Another thing I found annoying was that it gave no indication of the number of hits. the reason for this is that when I search for something common it is handy to know if I have only a few pages of hits; then I will look at them all to find the obscure ones. If I have 30 pages then 1 pages is sufficient before I tighten the search criteria.
And I could not find a way to have it start in a new tag.

New Virtual World

Flickr is generating a new virtual world
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn17017-maps-in-flickr-photos

Week 8: Delicious

Loved this. I have not been a great collector of Favourites as having too many defeats the purpose of quick easy access. When I am chasing a topic I often print sites as I expect to have trouble relocating them. (then cannot find the hardcopy anyway). I expect this tool to minimise the printing.
Delicious seems to be a tool to enable the eating of cake and keeping it.
Noticed (Margaret) that there is a button that enables the resorting of the web sites to a variety of sequences including Alpha.
Found this explaination very helpful in explaining the concept & value of the various components http://tinyurl.com/d3kj24
Had a quick look at Digg and didn't much like the philosophy. Furl however I Want to explore as it seems to address a few issues I have found with web sites not being the same when I return to them (and its not just my memory).
Still searching for a content bookmarker!

Week 7 - iGoogle

I enjoyed this weeks exercise. After an initial bit of circling around the concept Dorothy pointed me at the web site to read the instructions (Well I am a male). Once the process was clearer, away I went. With the previous experience of setting up a blog the process was clearer and much quicker and it enables a lot more flexibility in position (size is still predetermined tho). The fundamental difference being - a blog is an evolving discourse but the iGoogle page is a more static display of reference material. The blogger site however seems more mature with more tools and cleaner process.
Love the ability to pull together a number of the items we have experimented with over the previous weeks especially the multiple email services and subscription feeds. I suspect it is a more suitable vehicle for displaying the types of things I have been building on my Blog.
Next step work out if I can share it with the world?

Week 6 Googling

I use Google a lot and have used docs and the spreadsheet program so this week has been a bit easier (I am getting an early start cause of Easter). However, there is a lot more available then I realised.
I added the Google Map Street View of my local cafe to my Blog by creating a Zoho doc and pasting the pic & Web link in (the web Link doesn't seem to be live).
I Searched with Google books and found an obscure Australian publication (it didn't have the cover which is on my Library Thing account).
So now for some study of all the different aspects I haven't looked at yet.
An issues I find challenging is there is just too much of this stuff and its hard to find until you know of it. But even then as there is more and more it gets too much to keep linked and sorted (internally); so maybe there is a role for librarians to have these maps and effective paths mapped out for people (along the lines of this course!).
Microsoft labs is working on a product called Silverlight that is intended to enable a more knowledge oriented accessing of information and I assume this will eventually extend to applications. (The photosynth and deepzoom sites I have on my Blog are subsets of this work. Check it out http://silverlight.net/world/ ). This would mean all the books papers and quotes etc referred to in a text would be visually linked with cross reference, relationship and relativity connections. This would facilitate an exploration of the details behind many of the things we read.
I think we are in for some interesting times.